Leica Elmarit-M 135mm f/2.8 (v2)

There is a strange-looking fixture riding above this lens, a pair of optical goggles that rise over the camera's finder windows and magnify the frame. Pick up a Leica M body with this 135 mounted and the first thing you notice is the bulk on top, the second is the weight out front. That is the price of putting a 135mm short telephoto on a rangefinder. The Elmarit-M 135 was Leica's answer to the hardest focal length the M system ever tried to handle, and the goggle finder is the engineering compromise that made it work at all.

Focusing is the whole story with this lens. At 135mm on an M, the rangefinder base length is being asked to do something near the edge of what is physically reliable, and wide open at f/2.8 the depth of field at portrait distance is paper thin. The goggles magnify the rangefinder patch and viewfinder image, which raises the effective measuring base and snaps focus into believable precision, but you still learn to rock focus and shoot a frame or two for safety. People who shoot this lens well tend to stop down to f/4 or f/5.6, where the focus tolerance opens up and the optics also tighten considerably.

Optically it is a five-element design, in three groups, and a relatively simple formula for the focal length. Wide open there is a softness and a gentle glow, more in the rendering than in any harsh aberration, and contrast is moderate rather than punchy. Close down a stop and it sharpens up fast; by f/5.6 it is genuinely crisp across the central field, which is most of what a head-and-shoulders portrait needs. Bokeh is smooth and unfussy, neither swirly nor nervous, the kind of quiet background blur that keeps attention on the face. Color from the vintage Leica glass of this period skews slightly warm and never garish.

The people who reach for it are portrait shooters who refuse to leave the rangefinder for an SLR, and reportage photographers from the era who wanted reach without switching systems mid-assignment. It is not a street lens in the 35mm-Summicron sense. The goggles and the focal length kill the speed of that work. This is a deliberate, set-up tool. Today it sits in the affordable corner of the M lens catalog precisely because of the goggles and the focusing difficulty, which scare off buyers chasing easy shooters. That makes it one of the few genuine bargains in Leica glass.

The honest weakness is the f/2.8 maximum aperture combined with the focus problem. You bought a fast-ish 135 to shoot it open, and open is exactly where it is hardest to nail. In dim light you are fighting both a thin slice of sharp focus and a rangefinder patch working at its limit. Meter for the shot you actually intend, not the wide-open look you hope for; wide open in low light, set Zone Light Meter to read for the subject's face and let the thin depth of field fall where it will, because there is no recovering a missed plane of focus in post. The 55mm filter thread takes standard screw-in filters if you want a warming or ND filter for outdoor portraits.