In a world addicted to 35mm and 50mm platitudes, the Contax G90 stands like Emily Dickinson’s solitary dash—an outlier whispering “I dwell in possibility.” This 90mm titanium sparrow (265g) defies physics: smaller than a whiskey tumbler, sharper than a Manhattan winter wind. Priced at 220–220–250 (2025 USD), it’s the working poet’s telephoto—no cultish aura, just silent brilliance.
Design: Stealth Sonata
Barrel Minimalism: Brushed titanium colder than a Vermont lake in November. The retractable hood clicks like a Zippo lighter—urban ASMR for street shooters.
Focus Ballet: Contax G2’s autofocus hums like a Tesla coil, nailing distance while Leica users squint. “Where Leica’s 90mm demands a philosopher’s patience, this lens channels Kerouac—fast, hungry, unafraid to blur.”
A viewfinder is not a tool. It is a confession. A whispered pact between the eye and the infinite. Long before cameras stole the world’s shadows, painters framed their truths with bare hands—carving rectangles of meaning from the chaos. The Leica SBLOO 35mm is heir to that ancient heresy. It does not capture light. It curates it.
Hold it to your eye, and you become a thief of horizons.
The Geometry of Longing
The SBLOO is a reverse Galilean telescope—four lenses in five groups, folded into a chrome-plated labyrinth. Light enters, bends, surrenders. Inside, mirrors conspire to concentrate the world into a bright, unforgiving rectangle.
Brightness: Not illumination, but revelation. The SBLOO’s frame glows like a gas station sign on a midnight highway—a beacon for the lost.
Eye Relief: 8mm. A distance as precise as a sigh. Press too close, and the edges blur. Pull back, and the frame becomes a memory.
This is not a viewfinder. It is a threshold.
A Catalog of Ghosts
Leica’s viewfinders are named like old jazz standards—cryptic, haunted, heavy with history.
Focal Length
Name
Personality
21mm
SBKOO
The anarchist, swallowing streets whole
28mm
SLOOZ
The wanderer, hungry for skies
35mm
SBLOO
The poet, balancing chaos and order
50mm
SBOOI
The monk, austere and unyielding
90mm
SGVOO
The sniper, isolating souls
135mm
SHOOC
The astronomer, mapping distant griefs
The SBLOO is the 35mm—a focal length that sees as humans do, if humans could see without desire.
The Ritual of Exclusion
To use the SBLOO is to perform surgery on reality.
Raise the viewfinder. Feel its cold weight against your brow—a stethoscope for the visible world.
Frame. The brightlines cut the scene like scalpels. A child’s laughter becomes a quadrant. A cloud, a diagonal.
Breathe. The 8mm gap between glass and eye lets the outside world bleed in—a reminder: You are still here. This is not a dream.
A Warning: The SBLOO does not lie. It shows you what you ignore—the homeless man outside the frame, the crack in the pavement, the love affair dissolving in the periphery.
The Myth of Objectivity
Leica’s engineers will tell you about coatings, refractive indices, anti-glare magic. Ignore them. The SBLOO is not optics. It is alchemy.
Its brilliance comes from absence. No electronics. No LEDs. Just polished glass and borrowed light. To look through it is to understand: Photography is not about recording. It is about betrayal. You betray the world by choosing what to exile from the frame.
Epilogue: The Viewfinder as Time Machine
In an age of screens, the SBLOO is a relic. A rebellion.
Attach it to a digital Leica, and something shifts. The live view dies. The world reverts to its analog truth—grainy, fleeting, alive. For a moment, you are Oskar Barnack in 1914, Henri Cartier-Bresson in 1932, Robert Frank in 1955.
The SBLOO whispers: “To see is to choose. To choose is to lose. Now go—lose beautifully.”
Technical Notes (for those who still crave facts):
Type: Reverse Galilean, 35mm brightline
Magnification: 0.4x
Compatibility: Screwmount and M bodies (adapters weep quietly)
Price: $450 (or three sleepless nights in Marseille)
The Leica SOFORT arrives like a postcard from a stranger—unexpected, cryptic, bearing the smudged fingerprints of time. It is not a camera. It is a provocation, wrapped in red leather and German pragmatism. “SOFORT” means “immediately,” but nothing about this machine feels hurried. To hold it is to hold a paradox: a Leica that laughs at permanence, a Fuji wearing a Savile Row suit.
The Anatomy of Ephemera
Body
Material: Plastic, but the kind that whispers “I could have been Bakelite.” Red, white, or black—colors borrowed from a Tarkovsky film.
Weight: 307g. Light enough to forget, heavy enough to remind you: Every photo is a farewell.
Design: Squares and circles in a lover’s quarrel. This is not Fuji’s kawaii flirtation; it’s Bauhaus austerity with a cigarette burn.
Lens
Focal Adjustment: A ring at the base, two zones: 0.6m-3m (intimacy), 3m-∞ (escape). Manual focus? No. Mindful focus. To turn the ring is to negotiate with distance, like a truck driver shifting gears on the Autobahn at dusk.
Sharpness: Startling. The lens—Leica-designed, Fuji-born—slices light with Teutonic precision. Polaroid’s soft nostalgia? Nein.
The Viewfinder: A Window to a Parallel World
The SOFORT’s viewfinder is a cathedral. Bright, uncluttered, a rectangle of pure possibility. Fuji’s Instax Mini 90 offers a peephole; Leica offers a portal. To peer through it is to remember: Photography isn’t about capturing reality. It’s about framing your loneliness and calling it art.
Technical Note:
Parallax Correction: None. Your mistakes are your own.
Film: The Alchemy of Impermanence
Film Type
Leica’s Soul
Fuji’s Body
Saturation
High, like blood on snow
Pastel, like faded denim
Contrast
Low, forgiving shadows
Harsh, a teenager’s first heartbreak
Price
$1.20 per shot (a prayer)
$0.80 per shot (a grocery receipt)
Leica’s Secret: Their film—rebranded Fuji—develops warmer. Is it chemistry? Or the placebo effect of a red dot?
The Ritual
Load the film. Feel the cartridge click, a sound like a bullet chambering.
Choose your distance. 0.6m for lovers, ∞ for runaways.
Press the shutter. The motor groans, ejecting a blank rectangle—a Schrödinger’s photo. Wait 90 seconds. Pray.
A Warning: The SOFORT doesn’t do “spontaneous.” It does delayed urgency. Every shot is a Russian roulette of light and regret.
The Ghost of M
Leica claims this is pedagogy—a gateway drug to M cameras. They’re not wrong. The SOFORT’s manual zone focus is a haiku version of the M’s rangefinder. Use it, and you’ll start craving the click-hiss of a film advance lever.
But here’s the truth: The SOFORT isn’t training wheels. It’s a memento mori for the digital age. Each photo decays. Each fade is a whisper: “You too will vanish.”
Who Buys This?
Not You, if you photograph birthdays.
You, if you’ve ever stolen a glance at a stranger on a train and wondered what god they curse.
Epilogue: The Eternal Instant
Wim Wenders once wrote: “Every film is a letter to someone who no longer exists.”
The SOFORT understands. Its photos are letters addressed to ghosts—written in silver halide, sealed with light.
Technical Specs (for the restless):
Lens: 60mm f/12.7 (Leica-designed, Fuji-built)
Focus Zones: 0.6m-3m / 3m-∞
Exposure Control: Auto, with a grudging nod to manual override
A camera is not a tool. It is a wound—a deliberate incision into time. The Leica I Model C (1930) knows this. It arrives not as an answer, but as a question carved in nickel and obsidian. Hold it, and you hold a blade forged in the smithy of Oskar Barnack’s rebellion: “Why must cameras be grand? Why not let them bleed into the shadows?”
This is not a machine for the obedient. It is for those who wear their loneliness like a tailored coat.
The Anatomy of Silence
Body
Material: Black lacquer, hand-mixed and now extinct—a pigment so deep it swallows light like a midnight ocean.
Weight: 380g. Not heavy, but dense with the gravity of firsts—the first Leica to detach its eye (lens), the first to let light carve its own path.
Shutter: Cloth curtain, still alive after a century. Adjust it, and it purrs like a wolf on a frayed leash.
Lens
Mount: Threaded, like a secret handshake. Early sets (I-III) were monogamous—body and lens serial numbers married, their brass vows etched into metal. Later, Leica let them divorce. Look for the “0” mark—a scar from lovers reunited.
Options: Nickel-plated Elmar 50mm f/3.5 (a dagger), Hektor 135mm f/4.5 (a spear). Chrome came later, but nickel whispers: “I am not here to shine. I am here to outlast you.”
In a world obsessed with 50mm orthodoxy, the Contax G45 arrives as a 45mm heretic—a focal length as deliberate as a sculptor’s finest chisel. While others chase symmetry, Zeiss engineers carved this optical anomaly: a brass-core lens sheathed in titanium, weighing less than a sparrow’s sigh (198g). Priced at 420(new,1996)or420(new,1996)or380–$420 (2025 USD for mint copies), it defies both physics and financial logic.
By Douglas Adams’ long-lost cousin who majored in camera geekery
Introduction: The Camera That Defies Logic (And Gravity)
Imagine if a toaster, a spy gadget, and a Stradivarius violin had a baby. That’s the Rollei 35. It’s smaller than your smartphone, heavier than your regrets about buying film in 2024, and somehow still the most charming mechanical contraption this side of the Milky Way.
TL;DR for ADHD Humans:
Size: Fits in a jeans pocket (if you ignore the fact that it weighs like a brick of nostalgia).
Vibe: “I’m not a Leica, but I’ll steal your soul anyway.”
(A review woven like leaves rustling in a spring breeze—delicate yet precise)
The Quiet Rebel in a Screaming World
While smartphone cameras shout about computational miracles, the Contax TVS III enters the room like a librarian silencing a nightclub—polite, unassuming, yet radiating authority. This titanium-clad time capsule (1999–2002) weighs less than a barista’s latte art obsession (390g) and costs less than a designer phone case (450–450–550 in 2025 USD). In an era of planned obsolescence, it asks: “What if a camera could outlive its own relevance?”
Design: Porsche’s Forgotten Sketchbook
Titanium Seduction: Not Leica’s brass-and-leather nostalgia, but a stealth fighter’s elegance. The matte finish feels like a poet’s favorite drafting pencil—cool to the touch, warm in the hand.
Lens Ballet: The motorized bridge cover unfolds smoother than a Swiss watch’s second hand, revealing a zoom lens sharper than a diplomat’s retort.
Ergonomic Whisper: Fits a palm like a river stone worn smooth by centuries—no sharp edges, only intention.
Optical Alchemy
Zeiss’ Final Bow The 28–56mm Vario-Sonnar lens doesn’t just capture light—it curates it. At f/3.5–6.5, it renders colors like autumn leaves preserved in resin: vibrant yet restrained. Skin tones glow like parchment under library lamps, skies hold their blue without turning cartoonish.
Stealth Mode The shutter clicks quieter than a chess master’s calculated move, leaving only the purr of film advance as evidence. Street photographers will feel like ghosts—present yet invisible.
In an era where pixels multiply like dandelion seeds, the Contax G2 drifts into view like a maple leaf preserved in a vintage book—fragile, poetic, and stubbornly beautiful. Priced between 600–600–1,200 (2024 USD), this titanium-clad relic is the antique pocket watch of film cameras: intricate, undervalued, and ticking with analog grace. Think of it as the quiet companion you’d find in a forgotten library, whispering stories of a time when light was measured in silver halide, not megapixels.
Body: Brushed metal and matte finishes—cold as a Bavarian winter morning, yet balanced like a Zen rock garden. Fits in a coat pocket like a folded love letter.
Lens: Carl Zeiss glass, sharper than a samurai’s blade and warmer than a hearth—28mm f/2.8 to 90mm f/2.8, each a stanza in an optical poem.
The Weight of Intent
Dense enough to feel purposeful, light enough to forget you’re carrying it—a paradox wrapped in Japanese-German engineering.
Optical Alchemy: Time Travel in a Frame
Aspect
Contax G2
Fujifilm X-Pro3
Focus Speed
A falcon diving for prey
A commuter missing their train
Bokeh
Van Gogh’s Starry Night
A spreadsheet gradient
Soul
🖋️🖋️🖋️🖋️🖋️
💻
Autofocus: Snaps to clarity like a novelist finding the perfect word—startlingly fast for a ’90s relic.
Manual Focus: A hidden dial for purists, turning focus into a meditative ritual.
The “Three Truths”
Film’s Ephemeral Dance: Burns through rolls like pages in a diary—each frame a fleeting confession.
Flaws as Features: LCD counters bleed ink like aging calligraphy; plastic grips shed skin like a snake—wabi-sabi in motion.
Chinese Proverb Footnote:“榫卯相合” (“Mortise and tenon joinery”) A nod to how this camera interlocks analog craftsmanship with digital curiosity, like ancient woodwork defying time.
Film vs Digital: A Garden in Two Seasons
Film Romance: On Kodak Portra 400, it’s Hemingway in Paris—grainy, raw, and drenched in golden-hour longing.
Digital Age: Fuji’s X-Pro3 feels like a ChatGPT sonnet—polished but sterile, missing the coffee stains and dog-eared corners.
Who Needs This Camera?
✓ Analog Archivists: Who believe imperfection is the soul of art ✓ Minimalist Poets: Seeking “less tech, more texture” ✓ Contrarians: Who’d choose a typewriter over a touchscreen
Avoid If: You crave autofocus speed, hate quirks, or think “vintage” means “obsolete.”
Final Verdict: The Unlikely Time Capsule
The G2 isn’t just a camera—it’s a kintsugi masterpiece, mending analog’s cracks with titanium and grit. For the price of a weekend in Kyoto, you gain:
A relic from photography’s last romantic rebellion
“A camera that whispers: ‘The past is not dead—it’s just waiting to be rediscovered.’”
Pro Tips:
Battery Hack: Use SR44 cells—avoid the dreaded mid-roll blackout.
Film Pairing: Ilford HP5+ @1600—grain dances with Zeiss’ clinical precision.
Zen Mantra: “The best camera is the one that makes you forget time.”
Epilogue: The Blue-and-White Whisper Contax’s G2 scoffs at digital’s ephemeral glow, whispering: “True artistry lies in the seams where light hesitates.” Like a 竹简 (bamboo scroll), its beauty thrives in the tension between fragility and endurance—a tactile chronicle of moments etched not in code, but in silver. Now slip it into your bag and wander, not to conquer light, but to let it unravel like ink on rice paper. 📸
Nowadays, when you can grab almost anything from the supermarket, I’ve noticed how little I interact with nature anymore. My most recent “nature moment” came from peeling back the rind of an orange – that bright citrus scent lingered on my hands like bottled sunshine. Realizing this, I immediately reached for my camera. Maybe you can catch a hint of its scent through the image.
