Ujo Fotovrah // Miriam Sherwood

Leica 1 - First Attempts

I’m so excited about this that I’m going to break my blog silence and do my first ever written post! Before I left London I got my grandad’s Leica 1 serviced at the -highly recommended- R.G. Lewis on Southampton Row. The Leica is a German camera first built in 1913, and was the first practical camera to use 35mm film (so says wikipedia). This allowed photographers the freedom to work much more freely and unobtrusively - as the 1919 photo Children Admiring My Camera taken by André Kertész using one of the first Leicasproves (you might remember it if you saw the amazing exhibition Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century at the Royal Academy in London this summer):



Before I could start taking photos I had to trim an extra few inches off the bit of film that feeds into the spool so that it would catch properly - it took several aborted attempts to make it work before I found someone who informed me of this crucial step… You can buy an expensive template to do the trimming, but I actually found that with the help of this brilliant (and brilliantly titled) page (http://www.zorkikat.com/entering-from-the-bottom-loading-a-leica-properly-also-for-fed-zorki-and-canon-rf-cameras/115/) I was able to do it just fine with an ordinary pair of scissors (smaller might have been better) and a piece of cardboard to hold the film in place.

Then I was ready to go! I went for a walk with my friend’s flatmate around Ostkreuz and Treptower Park in Berlin. I altered the distance measurement each time depending on how far away the subject was, and apart from that I just clicked.

I had no idea if it was going to work at all, but I got the photos developed and I’m very very veeeery excited to say that it did! I’m going to post the best results straight away, hopefully they haven’t suffered too much from the scan.

Here’s a photo of the camera itself, taken last year in Munich: