Leica IIIg

Thumbing the small advance knob on a narrow street at dusk, squinting into a separate finder window, lifting the camera in one fluid motion that has not changed since the 1930s. That is the IIIg at work. It is Leica's last screwmount body, made from 1957 to 1960, after the M3 had already arrived and stolen the spotlight. Leica built it anyway, for people who had drawers full of M39 lenses and no intention of switching.

The big improvement over the earlier III bodies is the viewfinder. The IIIg finally got a larger, brighter finder with bright frame lines for 50mm and 90mm, plus parallax correction. It is still two separate windows, one for focusing and one for framing, so you focus in the small high-magnification patch and then move your eye to the larger window to compose. People raised on the M3's single combined finder find this clumsy. People who shoot the IIIg long enough stop noticing. The rangefinder patch itself is contrasty and precise, which is why these bodies still nail focus at f2 in low light.

The shutter is cloth, horizontal-travel, focal-plane, running from one second up to about 1/1000, with flash sync near 1/50. It is quiet. Not M-quiet, but a soft cloth swish that disappears in any room with conversation in it. The whole thing is brass and steel, dense and cool against the palm, the kind of weight that settles a camera in your hands. Film loading is the famous chore: you load from the bottom, and you have to trim a longer leader on the film or the takeup spool jams. Carry scissors. Everyone who shoots screwmount Leicas carries scissors.

There is no meter. None. This was a high-end camera in its day and it still expected you to know light or carry a separate one, which back then meant a clip-on selenium cell that has almost certainly died by now. That absence is the body's one real weakness, and also its strange virtue. With no battery and no electronics, a clean IIIg will outlive you. An incident or spot reading from the Zone Light Meter app is how you place exposure here, the meter the body never had, and it lets you put the shadows exactly where you want them before you touch the speed dial.

Today the IIIg sits in an odd spot. It costs less than an M3 but more than the rougher IIIc and IIIf bodies, and many consider it the most refined of the screwmount line. Street shooters who want something tiny and discreet pick it over an M for the lower profile and the lighter weight. The cross-shop is always the M2 or M3, and the honest answer is the M is faster to use. You buy the IIIg because you like the deliberateness, the small size, and the way it forces a slower pace on you whether you wanted one or not.