Employees wear low-static shoes to avoid tracking dust, and dust-absorbing floor mats are placed at the entrances to the assembly area. The M8 and M9 are built in parallel with analog cameras using similar techniques - the entire process includes roughly 35 people and takes about eight hours per camera.Ī tiny dust particle in the interior of the camera can cause major problems, so the Leica factory has some of the features of a clean room. A workbench is set up to assemble analog cameras in the Leica assembly room. Every viewfinder has to be adjusted after installation, and Leica requires that the focus of an image seen through the viewfinder be no more than 0.0001 millimeters different than the image captured through the camera's lens. In this stage of quality control, a technician determines the accuracy of the camera's viewfinder.
Other giants of the field followed, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose work with a Leica popularized street photography and the impromptu style of postwar photojournalism.Ībove: Leica technicians put every camera through a series of rigorous tests, checking each of the camera's systems, including shutter timing, range finder and focusing-system accuracy, as well as the sensitivity and consistency of the CCD. As early as 1928, Aleksandr Rodchenko, a master of Soviet propaganda, and André Kertész, the father of the photo essay, both owned Leicas.
He designed a pocket-sized device that used modified movie film - the result was the world's first 35-millimeter still camera.īarnack's employers dubbed the new product "Leica," short for "Leitz camera." The initial model, now known as the Ur-Leica, went into mass production in 1925, and the Leica legend seems to have rolled off the assembly line along with it. Barnack enjoyed exploring the mountains nearby, but to document the vistas one had to lug a box camera and its permanent sidekick, a heavy satchel of glass plates. Each lens is roughly the thickness of a human hair.Īt the turn of the 20th century, engineer and amateur photographer Oskar Barnack was working for Leitz, a maker of optical instruments based in Wetzlar, Germany. Its surface is covered in tiny microlenses designed to shift incoming light rays so that they strike the sensor evenly, with one microlens in front of every pixel. The CCD is made to Leica's specifications by Kodak.
The cameras were compact, unobtrusive, reliable in the face of daily punishment and able to capture lifelike pictures without a second's preparation.Ībove: Technicians insert the CCD, the camera's image sensor, into the M8 body. In fact, the company can honestly claim to have made such photographs possible in the first place. Korda's portrait of Che Guevara the naked, wailing Vietnamese girl photographed by Nick Ut as she fled a napalm attack the sailor kissing the nurse on V-J Day in Times Square in 1945 by Alfred Eisenstaedt - all were snapped with Leicas. The right tool can make all the difference.įor generations of photojournalists working in the middle of the action, a Leica camera was that tool. But philosophical objections don't stop photographers from pursuing the ideal image, which requires craft. No photograph is a true copy of its subject, or even of the image that strikes the camera's lens.