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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.
