After Maryam and Candan’s wedding, I flew out the next day to Germany for the final leg of my trip: a visit to the Leica Camera Headquarters in Wetzlar, Germany for a tour.
- Getting to Wetzlar
- Leica Elsie Package
- Ernst Leitz Hotel
- Product Consultation
- 90-Minute VIP tour
- One Hot Beverage and Cake at Café Leitz
- Ernst Leitz Museum
- Leica Classic Store
- Taste of SF
Getting to Wetzlar
I flew into Frankfurt and then took the train. I was so proud of myself because I found the correct train, and then at one of the transfers, the train “split” and went two different directions. Luckily I double-checked the signs and got onto the correct car, so I made it to the right station.
Wetzlar is a small town and the Leica facility is not particularly close to the train station, so I ended up catching a cab for the last few miles instead of waiting for the fairly-infrequent bus.
Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof station
Leica Elsie Package
I booked the Elsie Package. The Leica USA website advertises as a two-person package including:
- One night stay at the Ernst Leitz Hotel in a Comfort Room incl. breakfast
- Admission to the Ernst Leitz Museum
- 90-minute VIP Tour
- Product consultation at the Leica Store Wetzlar incl. a rental product
- One hot beverage & a piece of cake, per person at Café Leitz
- Sold exclusively at Leica Stores.
I feel like those bullet points and the emailed agenda didn’t give me a clear sense of how the day would go, so I am writing this up as the review I wish I’d found!
Also, the website says you can only get these tickets in-store but I was able to go online to one of the international Leica websites and just book it directly, no need to go through the voucher dance.
I also booked one extra night at the Ernst Leitz Hotel. So I arrived Friday night, stayed over, then Saturday did my Leica day, stayed that night, and Sunday morning I flew home.
The short version: The Elsie package was a great deal and a fun time! It felt worth the price (and would have been better if I shared with a second person). However in hindsight, I might have booked the Max package which does not include a hotel stay, and I would have turned it into a day trip in from Frankfurt (or maybe Stuttgart) because I don’t think I needed that much time on the Leica campus, especially since there wasn’t that much nearby. It also starts late enough in the day that I think I could have easily made the various trains and connections on the morning of.
Ernst Leitz Hotel
The hotel was great. It had a nice restaurant that was open for dinner too. Since the hotel and headquarters are a outside the main part of town, it was great to have as an option instead of having to cab or bus somewhere. The continental breakfast in the morning at the same restaurant had tons of hot options, no complaints there.
Online, the hotel advertised a sauna, but I was not able to find it. I probably could have just asked the staff, but I didn’t. The staff was friendly! So it was really just on me.
There were a lot of camera-shaped displays all over
Product Consultation
In my head, I imagined the product consutation would be some sort of like one-on-one discussion with somebody in product development or who might have access to “the vault” of Leica products, then I could borrow one, or a kit, for the day or something. I thought I had an appointment to check into, or that’s what I understood from the agenda that they emailed to me.
In reality, the “appointment” at 10am was that the Leica retail store attached to the museum opens at 10am. The friendly, useful retail staff are happy to chat and assist, and if you give them your ID or passport to hold on to, they’ll loan out whatever products they have on-hand. I borrowed some stuff for an hour at most (see mini-reviews below of Summarit 90mm and M-A with Summilix 35mm). Again to be clear, the staff was great, but I am pretty certain you could get this same experience at nearly any other Leica retail location without having to book a package.
Mini Review: Leica Summarit-M 90mm ƒ/2.5
I had three shots left on my Portra 400 roll, and I’d never used a 90mm lens on my M3, so I borrowed one from the store. They had a 90mm Summicron which is a little heavy, so I asked about anything lighter (I was hoping to try the 90mm Macro Elmar). The store did have the 90mm Summarit so I tried that.
From three photos, a solid lens! I understand why Ken Rockwell’s review comments on its build quality, but it still felt good my hands. I’m curious to try the 90mm Elmarit-M he prefers, but that will have to be another time.
Leica M11-P Monochrome statue
Balcony from the musem building
Oskar’s Restaurant attached to the hotel
Mini-Reivew: Leica M-A + 35mm Summilux ƒ/1.4 Steel Rim
I was also hoping to try a Leica M-P, a modern film camera styled like the vintage M3, but with a light meter inside.
The store didn’t have one, so they gave me an M-A and I threw in a roll of Kodak Gold 200 that I had on me. I misheard, so I thought I had an M-P until I realized that there was no light meter inside, the M-A is basically the M-P but without a light meter and I didn’t look closely at the model name on the top plate. Since my M3 is also all-manual, without a light meter, It’s almost like an updated version of that, so I use that as my point of reference when handling it.
The M-A has some nicer modern touches:
- It has built-in takeup spool for film. Instead of having to take out the M3’s spool to insert the film leader, and then put it all back inside, you can just load the film directly in.
- It supports all of Leica’s modern framelines (the 50mm/75mm pair, the 35mm/90mm pair, the 28mm/135mm pair), where the M3 only supports the original 50mm, 90mm, 135mm.
- It has a frame preview selector (my M3 is an older model that doesn’t have one, but newer M3s do)
- Extremely bright and crisp framelines in the viewfinders, my M3’s are clear but nowhere near as striking. I believe this may be due to advances in glass coatings in the last 70 years.
- 0.72x magnification viewfinder: the M3 is well-regarded for its 0.91x “50mm god mode” viewfinder, so I expected to be disappointed. I was not, it was fine! It was nice to be able to use a 35mm lens without an adapter like I do on the M3
- Minimum focusing distance of 0.7m: the M3 has a minimum focusing distance of 1m, even though a lot of newer lenses since at least the 1980s can go closer, it was nice not to run into the “gap” where the rangefinger patch stops working too close.
On the other hand:
- The M-A felt lighter and just not as solid as my M3. The M3 feels like a brick when you hold it, even without a lens on it, and the M-A just didn’t carry that same weight. Even small things like the film door that opens up felt flimsier.
Given that I have the M3 already, I wouldn’t upgrade. But for somebody who uses 28mm or 35mm lenses often, and wants a brand new all-manual camera, I’m sure the M-A would be a great choice.
The lens was a 35mm Summilux ƒ/1.4, the steel rim reissue model. It was great, small, light, easy to use. I don’t think I need to add one to my kit, but I wouldn’t complain if I were gifted one of them!
The same M11-P Monochrome statue
Museum entrance
Gotta shoot a mirror selfie
I loved the shallow depth of field that gives a good separation between foreground and background. These two shots of the plants in front of the buildigs show that pretty well, I think.
The back side of Café Leitz
The entrance and patio for Café Leitz
After shooting the whole roll, I rewound, unloaded and and handed back the camera to the store. I got my ID back and got ready to meet at the museum desk for the tour.
90-Minute VIP tour
For the VIP tour, I was paired up with another American and our tour guide Lothar, who has worked for Leica for 40 years!
From the museum, we walked across the campus to the headquarters building. I loaded the last roll of film for the trip along the way. Lothar pointed out a few red dots on the ground and mentioned there were something like 7 of them scattered around just for fun.
First red dot outside Oskar’s
Over in the HQ building, there’s a lot of displays in the lobby that are open to the public. Lothar took us to the side and used a special keycard to show us the roof.
The roof, shaped like a spooled roll of film
Part of the building was intended to look like binoculars, one of Leica’s other product lines
Second red dot on a globe, it represents Wezlar’s location
The other tour attendee’s rangefinder
We went back inside the building and Lothar showed us a bunch of displays. There was a series of famous photos shot on Leica over the last 60 years, like one of Muhammad Ali, and a still from the movie Bullit (or some other movie shot in San Francisco on Leica glass).
Of course, they had vintage cameras and various models over time. I wanted to see the model numbers on the M3s to see how they compared to mine, but they had light meters covering the serial number!
An M3 with a Leicameter inside a case
Lothar with his anniversary-edition M240
Our tour was on a Saturday, so normal business operations were shut down. But there was a big glass interior window they had to some of the camera-building operations. There were signs that asked folks not to take pictures of the workers, so I assume during the week, real work gets done there.
There were cool featurette viedeos showing steps in how the lenses are made and assembled too. At the end of the tour, we went to a desk at the HQ where we got to pick up rejected lens elements as little souvenirs.
I think the VIP tour was the main thing from the Elsie package that felt unique, like something that you couldn’t get just by showing up to HQ.
One Hot Beverage and Cake at Café Leitz
At the end of our tour, Lothar took us across from HQ to Cafe Leitz where we got to have our beverage and slice of cake. It was great.
As we were talking about cameras, Lothar went outside and found a group that from Stuttgart outside, who he’d given a tour to the day before. They had an American living abroad in their group so he was quick to introduce us. This was probably my favorite part of the trip because it was fun to chat with other Leica enthusiasts. Lots of them had used, beat up cameras, things they got second hand, non-Leica branded lenses, like signs they actually used their cameras.
After everybody finished at the cafe, I tagged along with the Stuttgart group to go to the musuem.
Ernst Leitz Museum
The museum was was pretty cool as well. It had a good mix of interactive and hands-on exhibits as well as things to read. Thankfully the signage was in English as well as German. One of my favorites was a surface screen with elements from a Leica lens, and you dragged the physical elements around and put them in order to show a simulation of the image. So when the elements are out of order, it would show how the image was focused wrong (for example, focused too far past the image plane).
They also had some cool exhibits that were like, photographer catnip. One with a bunch of mirrors, some with little sticks that they lit up to show the difference in color temperature.
Sticks illuminated with different color temperatures
Leica Classic Store
The Leica Museum has a contemporary Leica store, they have a few used products but mostly focus on the current line. Across the way at Leica HQ, they have a Leica Classic store, which has all sorts of vintage gear on display and for sale. We stopped in briefly on our tour with Lothar, who pointed out a Leica STEREOLY stereo attachment for Leica II and III that helped take 3D photos, I didn’t even know one existed!
Another cool thing is that the Leica Classic store staff can look up notes the factory had on cameras based on serial number. I knew that from its low number, my M3 was made in 1954, the first year of production. The staff member was able to look it up and see the three-letter acronym for the reseller in Berlin the camera was sold to (and where, I assume, my dad’s uncle Jack picked it up back in the day), and give me a copy of the record.
iPhone photo of a printout of a scan of original Leica sales records for M3 models in the 700701 series
I think, to be honest, I really wanted some external validation that I had such a special old camera. I got that, but only sort of. When I handed him my camera, he said it was in pretty good condition, so I asked what he would rate it. He took a look over it, noted that there are some light scratches on the bottom plate he’d give it a A/B score. He looked the top place and found a small nick and said it would be a B/A. I said something along the lines of, “awesome, thanks, I really enjoy being able to use it”. He replied with what I can only describe as the most German sentiment of “it should really be a collector’s item” which is just not my philosophy! It’s a tool! To me, its value comes from its utility not its status. But maybe also its status. I contain multitudes.
Anyways, I did purchase plastic covers for the flash ports on the M3, which are pretty hard to find, and also which helped me use up some extra Euro bills on my last day before flying home.
Taste of SF
I made it back home to San Francisco with 17 shots left on my last roll, so I shot them while wandering around the Mission/Castro on my way to Photoworks. Here are a few faves:
All in all, I dropped off 11 rolls of film! It’s been so fun to go through the 400+ shots I got back to relive these memories.