Vintage cameras

While sitting on the bench outside the Absinthe bar in Zeng Cuo An one day, enjoying an ice cream with a South-African I had met a few days before, a Chinese man carrying a Leica M2 grabbed my attention. I had never seen a Leica in the wild in China, and certainly not a vintage model like this M2 (even in Europa they are a rare sight). Of course I didn't know immediately it was an M2, but when he sat down for a chat, I noticed the marking, and asked him how old it was. The camera happened to be build in the same year as me, that was a nice coincidence, haha! He had just bought it second-hand from a seller in Hong Kong for 4000 RMB, and was using his first film today to try it out.  He had spent another 3000 RMB on a second-hand Voigtlander Nokton 35mm f/1.4 lens, but this lens was not that old, they are actually still manufactured. Not at all a bad deal for such a legendary camera, in my opinion.
Cai (that's his name) is a geography teacher at the middle school in nearby Shangli, just a 15 minute walk from where we were sitting. I pass his school almost everyday on my way to Xiamen University.
I do occasionally see young people carrying an 80's era Pentax or Canon analog camera, and it always makes me smile. My South-African friend did not seem to be too interested in vintage cameras (he builds fiberglass racing kayaks at Epic in Hanzhou), but Cai took a great portrait of him. As a true photography enthusiast, he only shoots in black and white, and then develops the film by himself, and uses a negative scanner to transfer the images to the digital domain. It's a painstakingly slow process in this time and age, but perhaps it makes you focus better on the art of photography, compared to the current digital method of shootings hundreds of pictures a day and just delete those that didn't turn out too well. Both have their merits, I would say.

photo by Cai