Vintage

This Beautiful Leica 35mm f1.4 Has a Hard to Find Lens Hood

Chris Gampat
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08/06/2021
3 Mins read
Blue Moon Rare Camera Story Leica 35mm f1.45

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Once you’ve drunk from the fountain of Oskar Barnack, it’s hard to turn back. I myself own a few wonderful Leica items, and my main camera is arguably a Leica these days. But you don’t need to do the deep dive for the camera. In fact, the safest way into the world is to develop a love for their lenses. The Rare Camera store right now has a great Leica 35mm f1.4 in M-mount in for sale. It comes with a special lens hood that lets you put a lens cap right over it. But at the same time, this is also one of my personal favorite lenses for the Leica camera system.

Welcome to the Rare Camera Store: a joint initiative of The Phoblographer and the wonderful folks at Blue Moon Camera. We work to bring you some of the coolest and rarest items for a great price.

No matter what camera you mount this to, it’s going to give you magical image quality. You can attach this Leica 35mm f1.4 to older Leica M bodies or use it with an adapter to put it on a few different digital bodies. And of course, you can put it on any modern Leica M camera body without an adapter.

According to the listing on Blue Moon Camera:

This Leica 35mm f1.4 ASPH Summilux-M Mount Lens (serial number 3636603) is a wide angle, ultra-fast aspherical prime lens made by Leica Germany. It is designed for use with M mount rangefinder cameras such as the Leica M2, M3, M4, M5, M6, and M7 as well as digital Leica M bodies. This lens is not 6-bit coded. 

This lens is in excellent cosmetic and optical condition.  It comes with original box, Leica leather case, hard-to-find Leica 12588  A49 clip-on lens hood with hood cap, back cap, manual, and guarantee card. 

The lens hood is the really cool part. Finding a Leica 35mm f1.4 ASPH with a lens hood is pretty difficult to do on eBay. What’s more, the $4,000 price is very close to what you’ll find on eBay without the lens hood. We reviewed this lens a while back. And according to our review:

“The colors from this lens are wonderful. When I look at the image quality, this lens delivers something about how it renders certain tones that remind me of the Leica M9. So if you want something close to that look, consider this lens. Again, we tested the Leica 35mm f1.4 Summilux ASPH on the Leica SL2s.”

Some of our favorite images with this lens came from using it with the Leica M9, though. So we encourage you to check out our review. But if you feel it isn’t for you, we’ve got a guide on the Leica 35mm lenses.

Considering that we’re so big into analog cameras, though, it wouldn’t be like us to not talk about film here. So here are a few film emulsions we recommend using with the Leica 35mm f1.4:

  • Kodak Portra 800: This film has the most beautiful classic look to it. Portra 400 and 160 were updated using a new Kodak VISION formula. But Portra 800 didn’t get it.
  • Kodak T-Max 400: T-Max 400 is the sharpest black and white film in my opinion, even more so than Acros 100. It’s beautiful partially because of the T-grain structure.
  • Fujifilm Superia: These are some of the best films available for everyday documentary stuff.

Go snag this lens as soon as you can.

blue moon blue moon camera leica leica 35mm leica 35mm f1.4 leica 35mm f1.4 asph Leica camera lens hood rare camera store review
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.