Leica M6 TTL

You can stand three feet from a face, trip the M6 TTL, and the subject never knows a photo happened. The shutter is a soft cloth release, quieter than most people's breathing, and that single trait is half of what people are paying for. It is the reason this body still earns its keep at receptions, in churches, and on a sidewalk at night.

This is the meter Leica finally got right. The original M6 from 1984 put a center-weighted cell behind the lens with two red arrows in the finder, and the TTL version that arrived in 1998 kept that match-LED readout while rebuilding the top plate around TTL flash control, which is where the name comes from. The shutter speed dial got bigger and turns the same direction the arrows point, a small fix that anyone who shot the classic M6 noticed at once. Speeds run from a full second up to about 1/1000, mechanical the whole way, with flash sync at 1/50. The meter is the only thing the two SR44 cells power. Pull the batteries and the camera keeps shooting at every speed, which is the kind of thing that matters at hour eleven of a job.

Focusing is the rangefinder patch, that bright rectangle in the middle of the finder where you slide two images into one. In low light it beats any ground glass, because you are not waiting for something to snap into focus, you are joining two edges. The finder shows projected frame lines paired by focal length, and on the TTL you pick a 0.72, 0.85, or wide 0.58 magnification depending on whether you favor 35mm or longer glass. The body is brass, and it has real weight for its size, the kind that sits in the hand like a hand tool.

The honest weakness is the finder in two situations. Shoot a fast lens wide open in bright sun and the rangefinder patch can wash out against a bright background and get hard to read. And the common 0.72 finder pushes the 28mm frame line right to the edge of your vision, so you end up squinting at the corners. Eyeglass wearers know that fight. None of it stops the camera. It means the M6 TTL rewards a photographer who knows exactly what a lens does before raising it.

Today these sit in the upper tier of usable film cameras, cross-shopped against the later M7 (aperture priority, depends on batteries to fire) and the all-mechanical MP. People who want the quiet, the brass, and a meter they can trust to stay simple land here. The TTL flash circuit is mostly a relic now, but the body under it is one of the best street and documentary cameras Leica ever sold.

The meter here is heavily center-weighted, reading a single circle in the middle of the frame, so a small bright or dark subject sitting off-center, or a stage lit against black, can still fool it. For those, take a spot or incident reading from the Zone Light Meter app, place your shadows where you want them, set the lens by hand, and let the patch and that quiet shutter handle the rest.