LEICA

Some of the most beautiful lens ever designed. They do really have a touch of magic especially on skin tones! 

Along my Leica M9  which are absolutly astonishing, I also own several Leica lenses. Thoses are definitly amongs the best lenses ever produced and have a very unique feeling. 

My favorite and absolute go-to lens is the 50mm summicron IV from 1971, and I also very often use the 90mm summicron.

I Also own a full set of   Leica-R lenses.

The LEICA-R  were a set of lenses entirely hand made and manufactured by LEITZ in Germany or by ELCAN in Canada. They were mounted to fit the mid 60's Leicaflex SLR body camera. Technically they have more glass elements than the famous M serie for rangefinder camera which gives them more complex design possibilities and thus the ability to handle light effectively better than any other LEICA lens!

But the real magic behind the LEICA-R  is that they used the same glass elements that PANAVISION used in their cinema lenses!

 Here's what Walter Mandler, the genius behind the invention of the aspherical designs, said about these lenses :

 "The Leica-R lenses are for sure the best lenses Leica could ever produce!"

- W. Mandler

Mandler had this statement back in the 90's and it's true that LEICA lenses did had a lot of improvement ever since, especially on their coatings and the aspherical and apochromatic designs. Nonetheless the LEICA-R are amongst the best lens of all time!

My set is from mid 70's to late 80's with matching coatings and they all have been modified to fit cinema camera such as the ARRI Alexa and RED cameras, with complete follow focus gears and standard 77mm filter thread.  

Here is the set I own:

- 19mm f/2.8 Elmarit
- 24mm f/2.8 Elmarit
- 28mm f/2.8 Elmarit
- 35mm f/2 Summicron
- 50mm f/2 Summicron
- 50mm f/2 M mounted
- 90mm f/2 Summicron
- 90mm f/2 M mounted
- 135mm f/2.8 Elmarit
- 180mm f/2.8 Elmarit

Click to visit my LEICA page

NIKKOR

Nikkor is the lens division of the famous japanese manufacturer NIKON (formally known as Nippon-Kogaku until the late 1960's due to a lawsuit between Zeiss Ikon and Nikon who tend to both use the "ikon" prefix..) Anyway...

back in the 50's the photography industry standard was the Kodak 24x36mm format and in this domain the Rolls Royce was the Leica M3 (understand every pro photographer had a M3! Nikon such as almost every other companies like Voigtlander, Canon, Zeiss Ikon or Rollei were far behind either in term of quality but even in term of reliability, which is more critical for photo-journalists!

And that is were in 1957 Nippon-Kogaku found  it's way by develloping a very, very robust and reliable 35mm camera : the Nikon SP. But more than anything else what changed Nikon destiny is the 1959 Nikon "F System".

The Nikon F was revolutionnary on many points because it combined all the bests options in one SLR body.

During the next decade in the 1960's, the Nikon F-system was the system of choice for any photo-reporter, especially those covering the Vietnam war. Even the NASA used the F-system to record the lauch of the Gemini and Apollo rockets (just stop and think about it the NASA an american governement agency using some equipement made in Japan who got defeated 15 years earlier, and against which the USA sent two nuclear bombs!! That's how good the F-system was!

"The Nikon F completely eclipsed everything else in its time! Professionals switched from the Leica M's (and everything else) to Nikon F's in legions, and to this day Leica has never recovered."

- CameraQuest.com

 Nippon-Kogaku quickly felt the need to develop some high end lenses to fit on this camera! The Japanese firm position was clear: they had to make lens as good as the germans were doing! (understand here as good as Leica and Zeiss). 

Nikon then spent alot in R&D to create its own optical designs and introduced some very innovative technologies and components (like the use of radioactive Thorium for the coating on some very high end lenses, or the Rear-focusing CRC designs that are now very commons on high quality lenses. Well it all comes from that era! In a few years Nikon came out with some astonishing lenses to fit this body, built as rock and ready to rock in the most difficult conditions (think about Vietnam War!)

Some of them being so good they were later adapted  by Stanley Kubrick for The Shining to be mounted on the Arriflex camera and used as Cine-Telephoto lenses.

I own two sets of vintage Nikkors the "Pre-AI" (all from 1969 to 1973) and the AI-S (1977 to late 80's)
 unless specified the lenses below are pre-AI

-  24mm f/2.8 pre-AI
- 28mm f/2.8 AI-S
-  35mm f/1.4 Thorium
-  50mm f/1.4 pre-AI
- 55mm f/1.2 pre-AI
- 55mm f/2.8 AI-S Macro
- 85mm f/1.8 pre-AI
- 105mm f/2.5 AI-S
- 200mm f/4 pre-AI

I also own some more mordern Nikkor's such as

- 20-35mm f/2.8 AF-D with Aspherical glass

- 60mm f/2.8 AF-S Macro with Aspherical

- 70-210mm 3.5/5.6 AF-D

Click to visit my NIKKOR page.

CARL ZEISS

Carl Zeiss is one of the most important manufacturer of optical instruments in  history (along with LEICA as far as photography is concerned). 

Either it is for the Cinema industry, still photography, medical or scientific instruments, ZEISS had always produced the finest glass possible and are pioneers in the optical design, innovating with optical formulas such a Planar, Tessar and Sonnar that have been used for more than 100 years and are still copied by many today.

After World War II, the Carl Zeiss company got divided in two different entities CARL ZEISS JENA (aka Jenoptik) for the Eastern part of Germany and the countries behind the iron curtain, while CARL ZEISS OBERKOCHEN (aka Opton) had their factory transfered to the western side of the wall for the european and american markets. 

The division of the company is a very important event in the history of ZEISS because from 1947 until the re-union of the two companies in the 90's there were two companies selling lenses under similar names with similar optical formulas but nevertheless with a lot of differences! (and that makes thoses lenses very particular and very, very, interesting!)

Carl Zeiss lenses were amongst the finest ever made. They equiped every camera ever produced including HASSEBLAD and ROLLEI medium format and were the favorite of many DOP for shooting movies when equiped on cinema camera (against dedicated Cine-Lenses such as Cookes, Bauch & Lomb Super Baltars, Angenieux, that are often ten times more expensive!.

The Carl Zeiss medium format lenses were chosen by NASA to fly into space for the Gemini and Apollo programs. And when NASA wanted to have a very fast lens to take pictures of the far side of the moon who did they come to see? Yeah you got it right : Carl Zeiss Oberkochen to design the famous 50mm Planar f/0,75 that was later used by Stanley Kubrick! 

Aesthetically there's a huge difference between LEICA and CARL ZEISS lenses that we could sum-up as:

"Leica lenses are designed to make the world more beautiful, while Zeiss lenses are designed to make it appear as it is"

I personally own two very different Zeiss Lenses:

- Zeiss-Opton Tessar 80mm f/2.8 

made in 1953 in west germany at 2200 copies and intended to be mounted on the Hasseblad 1600F medium format camera. 

- Carl Zeiss Jena "Biotar" 58mm f/2

My copy was made in 1958 to be mounted on Exakta cameras. It has aperture "presets". This is probably the best lens ever produced by the eastern division of Carl Zeiss (Jena)



Click to visit my CARL ZEISS page