My Weekend with M9

It was like renting a high class call girl. One I couldn’t really afford to “take away from all this,” to rescue from the day in and out handling and discarding by so many a Samy’s Camera goer. But one I could justify whisking away for a lost weekend. 

It was inevitable. That it would come to this. To last Thursday evening. It had been gnawing at me all through New York, but it was easy enough to resist since the only renter I could find was an online out of town deal. 

I bought an M6 from Samy’s in 2000 and have been barely able to look directly through the lens of a camera since—save for my slr Polaroids. Even my recent flirtation with a Hasselblad 500c c/m seems to have been merely that. Alas it may even end up getting recycled through that unholy meat market that is ebay and break my insidious buying streak with a lone sell. I love my Toyo view camera but that’s an entirely different entity and  when the dust settles it’s my rangefinders that I feel most comfortable with. I never considered for more than a moment an M8. But M9  has taunted me— though never much more given its really ridiculous price tag and my ambivalence about digital.

Here’s a link (http://adamgoldbergasunwittingkerouac.tumblr.com/post/15073261963/i-did-a-terrible-thing-yesterday) so I don’t have to recycle my rumbles and rambles thus spare the reader redundancy re: digital v. film,  but as fairly as I fall on the side of film for reasons aesthetic, practical, and habitual (spiritual?), this weekend may have changed if not all that then at least tipped the scales gently. As I suppose would be inevitable with digital, given how much I already shoot/scan/upload analog,  a shitload of our time together this weekend will (dis?)grace the glowing pages of this diary in the coming days. It will appear as—and for me I suppose it was—a particularly un-hermetic weekend given my usual lack of breadth of subject matters, save for the recent cross country trek. 

I had to cram a lifetime of memories into 3 days and 1 night (for the price of 2 days, let’s be clear) with M9. Because the only way I can justify purchasing that camera is by selling all the medium format stuff and taking out another mortage. That is, of course until they work out the low light issues and make it competitive with Fuji’s X series, replace that absurdly low rent screen on the back, adjust the meter so it more accurately reflects the contrasty M series film meters, and eliminate these chronic electronic apparitions that crop up more than occasionally. Although maybe they threw those in there to remind us of light leaks and other “happy accidents.”  No extra cost. 

In either case, she’s a tough one to shake. I wonder who’s with her tonight.