Carrying on from the previous post, I'm now back from the Venice trip. Some photos have been posted on my Zurich Daily Photo blog but the aim of this post is to give my impressions of using the 24mm Elmarit.

In the previous post I envisaged using it as a "standard" lens on the M8, and indeed I shot with this configuration a great deal of the time. However I also used the lens on the M3 with the 24mm finder. I came to three major conclusions, each of which was pretty unambiguous in my opinion.

• It's a superb lens - no doubt about it. I'm not just talking about objective things like sharpness and lack of distortion - these are well documented on various reviews, such as Erwin Puts site. It produces, in my subjective view, a special kind of image. You can point it straight into the light, or in any kind of challenging lighting situation and it doesn't have any problems. Highlights, even distant ones, are rendered beautifully in night shots
• It doesn't match the M8 very well in my opinion. Not because of image quality, but because of handling. It's too bulky in my view for a standard lens in the Leica tradition of compactness and unobtrusiveness. When shooting street photography I like to pop the camera in my jacket pocket, and especially with the lens hood this is often impractical. And for all this bulkiness, you are only using the cropped area of the lens's imaging circle. It also requires the largest brightlines in the M8 viewfinder, and I found these difficult to use effectively, often having to squint in the viewfinder. This coupled with the relatively large area of view blocked by lens/hood diminish the rangefinders advantage in my opinion. I'm going to get myself a 28mm Elmarit for the M8. I think that will be perfect.
• Although I like the M cameras and lenses matched to their viewfinders (M3/50mm, M4/35mm etc) I found the 24mm to be a much happier match than I expected when mounted on the M3 in conjunction with the 24mm finder. My complaints about bulkiness still apply, but in this configuration you have access to true wide angle images. For me a nice revelation after being tied in to the 35/50mm lenses for so long. You also get great image quality across the entire frame. Using a separate finder for focusing and framing is not a big issue with the generous DOF available - most of the time I didn't even use the rangefinder. I can see myself using it almost exclusively with film Leicas to take advantage of the full possibilities of the lens.

The bottom line? The M8 will be married to a 28mm as a standard lens (almost certainly the Elmarit ASPH). The M4 and M3 will continue to be used mainly with the 35mm and 50mm Summicrons respectively. The 24mm will be reserved for occasions when the subject warrants it, and probably only on the film cameras