Leica Vario Elmar R 21-35mm

Sometimes one becomes conscious that life has become too complicated, and that it is all one’s own fault. That happened to me a few months ago while trying to decide what lenses to take with me on a trip. I had lenses with seven different mounts: Olympus OM, Konica AR, M42, Contax/Yashica, Zeiss Icarex, Leica R and Minolta SR (aka MD). For focal lengths shorter than 28mm, I had only primes. Granted, all of those primes are great lenses – you can read my opinions about a few of them here. But after a while changing lenses gets old, and I am of the impatient variety. I admit that I may have passed on some good photos out of indolence – take off the backpack, fish out the lens you want, exchange lenses, put away the other lens, put on the backpack, repeat. If I had to switch to a lens with a different mount it usually got worse, as I had to fiddle with adapters as well. And if I was using the Novoflex tripod collar (that little anodyzed blue masterpiece of metalworking that grabs the adapter and takes all the weight off the camera mount) it got much much worse. To top it off, Sony full-frame sensors exposed to the elements (i.e., in mirrorless bodies with no lens attached) are dust magnets, meaning that you want to keep lens switching to the absolute minimum.

So the thoughts crossed my mind. Is there some way in which I can substitute a zoom for all of my wide angle primes? Can I reduce the number of different mounts that I have to deal with without feeling that I lost something precious? The key here was image quality. Take wide angle focal lengths. Is there any vintage manual focus wide angle zoom that can equal the 21, 24 and 28mm Zuikos, Hexanons and Elmarits? Yes, I had one of each in each of these focal lengths and only one was mediocre, the Leica Super Angulon 21mm f/4. In fact it was worse than mediocre, it was truly awful (at least mine was). The other primes from this list are all stellar – could they be replaced by a single zoom? In an ideal world Zeiss would have built an 18-28mm zoom in Contax/Yashica mount, so that just adding that lens to my Vario Sonnars (28-85 and 80-200) would have given me all the coverage that I use in Zeiss quality (second to none, equal to Leitz). No dice. Third party lenses, as well as some famous OEM names that I have no interest in, were out of the question. That left me with only one choice: the Leica Vario Elmar 21-35mm aspherical zoom. There were two problems, though. First, it is very expensive. Second, there is remarkably little reliable information about it, and even less images of good enough quality to judge whether it could replace all of the primes I would be giving up.

If you search for information about this lens you find  relatively few opinions, ranging from the well-informed Erwin Puts, who considers it to be at least as good as the Elmarit primes of comparable focal lengths, to a comment that I read somewhere – and that I have no interest nor time to search for again – to the effect that towards the edges the Vario Elmar is no better than a Lensbaby. A comment given with no objective support whatsoever. This is the sort of comment that makes me hate “forums”, “social media” and the internet in general, and a large part of why I have my own websites and refuse to join any and all (anti)social media “communities”. The sort of uninformed opinion that now anybody can propagate to the entire world as if it were scientific truth. I often wish that I had been born fifty years earlier – I would had almost certainly died before Y2K and before the “information superhighway” had brought out the worse in human nature, culminating with the apprentice Führer at the White House. But I digress. The bottom line was that, in order to buy the Leica zoom, I had to sell many primes, and sell them before making the purchase. I asked around in the Leica community and got some helpful and well argued opinions, backed by good quality images, that came down to the following points: (i) it is a very sharp lens, though perhaps not as good at 21mm as at 35mm, (ii) the corners are just fine throughout the entire range, (iii) color, contrast, “optical signature” are pure Leica and (iv) if it has a weak spot it is its distortion, which can be quite visible at the shorter end. As I don’t do much in the way of architectural photography this last point was not a deal breaker for me.

I decided that I was going to go for it and that, in the name of “mount rationalization” I would also get a Vario Elmar 35-70mm f/4. With the two zooms I would need only one lens switch, and no adapter switch (the tripod collar stays in place), from 21 to 70mm – a range within which I stay probably well over two thirds of the time that I am photographing. I was yearning for simplicity and I had to pay a steep price for it. In order to fund the purchase of the two Vario Elmars I sold: (i) My entire Hexanon collection, including a 15mm fisheye, a 21mm f/2.8 and a 105mm macro with the rare helicoid, (ii) my entire M42 collection (too many to list), (iii) All of my Zuikos except the 18mm f/3.5 – a truly irreplaceable lens, (iv) the Leica 21mm Super Angulon (I was happy to see it go, and for a good amount of money), and the 24 and 28mm Elmarits. At this point I had the funds to purchase the two Vario Elmars and had eliminated two mounts from my menagerie (Konica and M42), so I stopped there and called it a day. I kept some Leica, Minolta and Icarex primes, the 18mm Zuiko, a couple of Minolta zooms and my beloved Vario Sonnars. Everything else, a collection built up over the years, was gone in a few weeks. Almost overnight, a couple dozen lenses were replaced by the two Vario Elmars, purchased in mint condition from a very honest small dealer in Germany (contact me if you would like to know who this person is). And I promised myself that there would be no more lens trading, I have all the lenses that I am ever likely to need, I don’t have to fund any more lens purchases, and I have my reasons for having kept what I kept, which I will get to on another day.

But let me get back on track and talk about the Vario Elmar 21-35mm. I will include about a dozen pictures, all shot with either a Sony A7R or an A7S. All of the images were shot in raw format and processed in Capture One. They were all shot at f/11 or thereabouts, and at unrecorded focal lengths – I simply have neither the patience nor the interest to record this information. I am only interested in how the images that a lens is able to make talk to me. If you are truly interested in the missing technical information all I can do is offer my apologies. There are no “fully open” shots, as that is not the way I would ever use this lens. For me this is a landscape lens, I’m not after its bokeh – it is a wide angle lens! The same goes for vignetting. There is no significant vignetting above f/8, and what little there may be depending on lighting conditions is easy to correct in Capture One. Whether or not it vignettes fully open I frankly don’t know and I could not care less. If there is not enough light then I will either use a tripod or, if there is no time for that, mount it on the A7S (more on that below and also here). 

Let us begin at the corners. The following photo, shot in the Alpujarras of Southern Spain, is a square crop of the entire right side of the original image. It is not a 100% crop, simply a square taken from the right end of the 2×3 frame. No pixel peeping, but rather looking at an image the way one is supposed to do so. An aside: all images are displayed at 960 pixels on the longest side, but if you click on them you can access the files that I uploaded at 1920 pixels on the longest side, which is still far from full resolution, of course.

And now an example of the left end, shot in the West Fjords of Iceland (remember to click to see the files as I uploaded them):

Would you agree that these two images should put to rest any concerns about the corners of the Vario Elmar 21-35mm being “no better than a Lensbaby”? On the first photo look at the wild wheat ears and, a little bit further from the corner, at the wildflowers. Some of the wheat ears closest to the camera are not as sharp as the rest, but this is a depth of field effect, it is NOT a lens “defect”. I was very close, and optimized the focus point more or less on the wildflowers. And the shot was handheld at 1/60s. It would almost certainly have been sharp throughout if done from a tripod at f/22, but of course overall sharpness at f/22 would not have been as good. On the second image, look at the lichens on the bigger rock and the tufts of grass and, for overall sharpness, at the surface of the fjord.

The next three photos are meant to address the distortion issue. The Alpujarran wind turbines were shot at 21mm. I remember because I struggled to get the closest turbine completely covered. The original image shows quite a bit of distortion, which I corrected in Capture One as best as I could. It is not perfect, but it works for me. While you are at it, look again at the sharpness, from center to edges.

The next two images, from Iceland’s Northeast and the West Fjords, respectively, were not corrected for perspective. There is certainly some “stretching”, especially noticeable in the shed on the second image, but this is what any wide angle lens will show. Not even Leitz can break the laws of geometry. There may be some distortion too, but is it a problem for landscape photography? I would claim that it is not. While you are on the second photo, take a look at that rusted wire close to the lower right corner (you may have to pull up the original file to see it). The resolution is quite impressive.

How does the lens perform “as a whole”? I.e., once we are satisfied that it is a technically brilliant lens and want to focus only on capturing the light, which is what photography is (or should be) all about. I was driving from Ísafjörður to Þingeyri in Iceland’s West Fjords at the end of April of this year. The weather was miserable, rain, sleet, low clouds, wind. It was getting close to sunset when all of a sudden as I was going around one of the fjords a small hole opened up in the clouds. The light was sublime, but it was changing very quickly. Not much time to think or to try to get a better composition or to find another place to pull over. This was my first shot (click…).

That strip of land with the guy wires was in the wrong place – but look at the reflection of the low sun on the fjord. When I was able to move to a spot so as to get away from the nearby strip of  land the light had already changed and I got the following shot. Not as good, but not bad, I think. I said no pixel peeping, but if you look closely you will see along the coastline several farmhouses, groups of bare trees and other structures, including some antennas. The reason I bring this up is because these photos were shot with a Sony A7S, which has a “modest” 12 Megapixel resolution. But these are huge pixels, which goes to show that the quality of the pixels, and in particular their intrinsic signal to noise ratio, may sometimes be as important as the number of pixels, especially in low light situations such as this one.

A little bit later still, as I was rounding the last fjord head before Þingeyri around ten in the evening the Sun was almost gone, the wind had died down and this was the view. I am quite certain that this shot is also at 21mm, as this is what I absolutely love about super wide angle lenses. The way they suck you into a scene, as if there was high vacuum at the far end.

The next morning, as the tide was going out, I had a chance to test how easily the lens flares. It does flare, but, surprisingly, not as a easily as the longer Vario Sonnars. The flare is red and it is quite circumscribed, so it is possible to correct it during processing. The original of this picture has a a quite unacceptable red flare – can you tell where it was? click!!

I’ll close with three photos that show a bit more of human influence, which I feel tends to show off the character of a lens more easily than a natural landscape. I think this may be because there is less variability among human structures than among landscapes, and we tend to know what to expect when we see a boat or a house or a bridge, whereas we may be less familiar with some types of landscapes. Whatever the reason, here they go, with no commentary – draw your own conclusions. The first two are from Stykkishólmur in West Iceland, the last one from Flateyri in the West Fjords.

Addendum. A few photos taken with this marvel of a lens during a trip to Paris in December of 2018, all shot with a Sony A7II.

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