Really Good Things in Small Packages: My Leica IIIG Camera

Background

The stock market behaved as every economist predicted in response to the chaotic tariff regulations. Our family assets sink with each burp of the markets. That is sure making America great again...... The popular photo blogger, Kirk Tuck, recommended folks buy any cameras they might want immediately. Hmmm.....  

I like that advice!! I suffered another bout of GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) and ordered a camera I have thought about for some years, the Leica IIIG rangefinder. A sale of Leica goodies at Tamarkin Camera in Chicago was too good to resist. The 'Bay lists tens of IIIGs for sale, mostly from Japan. But the Tamarkin price was a bit lower, and all his camera bodies have been checked, cleaned, and adjusted as needed.

The Leica IIIG

The IIIG is the last iteration of the famous Leica thread-mount camera line. Leica made this beauty from 1957 to 1960, with production of only about 40,000 units. Ernst Leitz GMBH had recovered from the war and was selling their top quality cameras and lenses around the world. Leitz had introduced their fantastic M3 camera in 1954, and the IIIG was their last and most sophisticated version of the older thread mount series. Unlike all the previous III models, the IIIG had a viewfinder with movable frame bars to show the coverage of a 50mm lens. It was a major improvement, although not nearly as sophisticated as the finder in the M cameras. 

Framing the scene that a lens will project on the 24×36 mm piece of film is always imprecise with viewfinder cameras. In the past, I have been frustrated with cameras that have a viewfinder only, such as my Vito BL, Kodak Retina IIa, and Leica IIIC. Depending on where I placed my eye, the frame shifted left or right. The projected frame bars in my Leica M2 and my Canonet cameras are a major improvement in aiming more accurately. Therefore, my new IIIG provides this improved function also (see, I just justified GAS). 

 

Leica IIIG viewfinder windows including small window to illuminate viewfinder frame bars

Like the older thread-mount cameras, the IIIG has two shutter speed controls. The dial on the front is for B (bulb) and 1 to 1/30 sec. The dial on the top controls 1/30 to 1/1000 sec. The self-timer is the lever on the front. 

Immaculate engraving and machining

The IIIG is somewhat of an anachronism today, being a mechanical camera that takes film and has no light meter. But it is more compact than my M2 camera, has a hand-crafted jewel-like precision, and has a fun factor that today's electronic cameras lack. And film has certainly enjoyed a revival compared to the early 2010s. Whether it lasts, I cannot predict. 

Loading contemporary film in current 35mm cassettes requires some preparation. You need to trim the film leader to have a tongue about 10cm long, similar to the way film was supplied in the 1960s. You load the film from the bottom. Lacking a back film door, the body is especially rigid.

I already had three 50mm thread-mount lenses that I used with my 1949 IIIC: 

• 1949 5 cm ƒ/2 Leitz Summitar (in the photos above)
• 1962 Soviet 50 mm ƒ/2 Jupiter-8 (a Sonnar type of lens)
• 1950s 50 mm ƒ/1.8 Canon (late production model) 

So, of course, too many camera toys....   

Note: In 1999, Leica issued their 50mm ƒ/2 modern Summicron lens in a thread-mount version. Hmmm... 

Olympic Peninsula, Washington

On a sunny and cheerful April day, my wife and I set out north into the Olympic Peninsula. I mounted my 1949 5 cm ƒ/2 Summitar lens on the body and loaded a roll of Kodak Portra 160. Leitz designed this 7-element lens before the war and continued production until 1953 or 1954. My example is coated and unscratched. I measured light with my Gossen Luna Pro digital meter, set at Exposure Index 100. Here are some examples. Please click any picture to see details.

Hunter Farm, Rte 106, Union

Fix me up, Center Road, Quilcene (1/250 ƒ/5.6)

Fixer-upper house, Center Road, Quilcene

Waiting for repair with a bit of fungus, Rte 101, Quilcene

Skeleton man on patrol, Quilcene

Also waiting for repair, Rte 101, Quilcene

Rte 101 bridge over Hamma Hamma River (1/125 ƒ/8.0½)

Motel, Rte 101, Lilliwaup (1/60 ƒ/4.0½)

Country store, Rte 101, Lilliwaup

Oh, oh, no coffee here, Rte 101, Lilliwaup

Summary

OK, I am thrilled. This  IIIG certainly passes the test. The body looks great, the finder is clear and clean, film spacing is even, and exposure is uniform across the frame (meaning the shutter curtains are running smoothly). 

The old Summitar lens is contrasty on a bright sunny day. The center of the frame is high resolution. But it has serious field curvature and is not as uniform across the frame as a modern lens. On the scale of internet display, the frames look fine. The entire package is fun to use, with a mechanical watch-like precision. 

My recommendation: Buy a Leica thread-mount camera and get back to the basics of film photography! Have fun! 

Reading

One of the best reviews of the IIIG camera is by Mike Eckman. 

Appendix - Leather Case

Genuine E. Leitz case for Leica IIIG with short or collapsing lens

Tamarkin Camera included a traditional ever-ready ("never-ready") leather case. Such cases were ubiquitous pre-1975 or so, but they fell out of favor with most photographers. I had enormous bulbous leather cases for my Nikkormat and Nikon F cameras in the 1970s. 

I stopped using cases for most 35mm cameras years ago. However, the one for my Retina IIa was useful and compact, and the square one for my Rolleiflex 3.5E adds almost no bulk. Despite the criticisms, cases can be handy because you can walk around in a rain and have your camera protected. But the camera remains easily accessible. And, you can toss it into a backpack or the floor of your car, and it will be reasonably padded. 

The case above is beautifully made of molded brown leather. And this one still has good stitching. It is a compact model with short lens snout, probably intended for collapsing lenses or a small unit like the 35mm Summaron. My Summitar fits when collapsed. 

Leitz also made taller cases that, I assume, were designed to hold the camera and a mounted selenium light meter.

Would this be handy for a bicycle outing? The leather straps are old and need to be replaced for safety, and a light meter will need to be in another pouch or a pocket. Hmmm, something to consider.

1950s Excellence: the Leitz 50mm ƒ/2.0 Type 2 Summicron-DR lens

Leitz 50mm ƒ/2.0 dual range Summicron lens in original box. 

Introduction 

Leica's 50mm Summicron lenses have been famous for optical and mechanical excellence for over 60 years. Leica's term Summicron means a lens with maximum aperture of ƒ/2.0. They have been improved over the decades and are still in production - how many other consumer products have lasted over a half century? Even more amazing, a new lens will fit on a 50-year-old Leica M body, or a 60-year-old lens will work on a brand new film or digital body. When you consider the longevity, Leica lenses are reasonable price, despite the hatred (= envy) from many modern digital users.

A convenient summary with photographs of the different versions is on Ken Rockwell's site.

5cm ƒ/2.0 Summitar lens in extended (ready to photograph) position

Summitar

Ernst Leitz produced the predecessor lens, the 5cm Summitar, from 1939 to 1953, with 170,761 units total. War-time lenses were uncoated, but from 1946 on, they were anti-reflection coated. Eastman Kodak and Zeiss had coated optics for military use during World War II, but coating all air-glass surfaces on general civilian optics became widespread only after the war. The Summitar had a complicated design of 7 elements in 4 groups. Human computers using mechanical calculators and trigonometry tables must have made a heroic effort to compute the ray paths. The Summitar's central sharpness is superb, but the edges fall off and there is field curvature. This can be used creatively, and regardless, "sharpness" is not normally the factor that makes a photograph successful. For examples, please look at some of my 2017 Nepal articles. In 1953, the Summitar lens cost $158 in USA.

Summicron Type 1

E. Leitz introduced the first Summicron, the Type 1, in 1952. It was an update of the Summitar, also mounted in a collapsible barrel. This lens was also manually computed, although surely the workers used electrical tabulating machines. The first electronic computers after World War II were used for ballistics analysis, atomic weapons research, rocket trajectories, and military optics. The 1953 USA cost for the Summicron was $183.

A note on collapsible lenses: When the E. Leitz company introduced its first camera in 1923, it used perforated cine film but doubled the frame size to 24×36 mm. All other cameras then used much larger roll film or individual sheet film. So the new small image surface became known as miniature format. The cameras were intended for travel or adventures like mountain climbing. Therefore, the manufacturers wanted to make the cameras compact and portable. One way to do that was to build a lens in a barrel that could collapse into the body. As the years went by, cameras grew larger and heavier (like automobiles or, most grotesquely, American SUVs). The Zeiss Contarex of 1960 had grown to 910 grams for just the body. The Nikon F with its metering head was a big package, as well. And today, the digital single lens reflex (DSLR) in "full frame" size is a bulbous thing graced with a protruding penile lens that points at its subject like a cannon. Just tell DSLR users that they really have the miniature format.

1963 Type 2 Summicron lens with single focus range.

Summicron Type 2

E. Leitz introduced their Type 2 Summicron in 1956. It was in production until 1968. To improve the precision of the glass alignment, Leitz mounted Type 2 optics in a rigid barrel. It was a masterpiece of mechanical precision and elegance, but the construction of brushed chrome over brass made it heavy. This lens was also hand computed.

Leitz began computer-aided lens computations after about 1960 at their factory in Midland, Ontario, Canada, under the guidance of Dr. Walter Mandler (from Erwin Puts). It is an interesting history of international competition about this time. Japanese optical companies such as Canon, Nikon, and Topcon were also exploring new lens designs with the aide of early computers. They were able to market lenses with almost as refined optical characteristics as Leica but at lower price. The brilliance of the Japanese companies was to bring superb optics to a wide audience at reasonable price.

Leitz made two versions of the Type 2 lens. One had a single focus range covering 1m to infinity. The photograph above shows a 1963 lens that I bought from a friend in town. It was available in M-mount  (63,055 units) as well as the 39mm thread mount (1160 units; now a rare collector item).

1967 Dual range Summicron without goggles.

Dual range Summicron with goggles attached on the flat plate. The lens has been extended to its closest focus distance.

The second version had a dual focus range and is known as the DR. The normal range was 1.0 m to infinity. But if you wanted to focus on a closer object, you slid a spectacle viewfinder attachment onto a flat plate on the top of the lens. The goggles depressed a button, which let the lens focus from 0.48 to 0.88 m. The goggles correct the parallax of the rangefinder view. It was a clever way to let a rangefinder camera focus more closely than the normal 0.8 or 1.0 meter. A reflex camera does not have these limitations, but in the 1950s, most miniature camera photographers were still using rangefinders. Total production was 55,145 units.

Note: the goggle units varied slightly in design over the production period. You must have the correct unit for your lens for it to mount and focus correctly.

My stepdad bought the DR in the pictures above in 1966 or 1967. This lens and M2 camera took family pictures in Greece and traveled to Asia, Africa, the Indian Ocean, and North America. Now it photographs urban decay in Mississippi and Louisiana. This one has pristine coating.

I could not find a complete Leica price booklet from the 1960s, but I found a few prices in US $ for M2 body and lenses:

• M2 w/50mm ƒ/2 rigid Summicron 423.00
• M2 w/50mm ƒ/2 DR Summicron 465.00

Optical unit and focus mount of Summicon-DR lens. Serial numbers must match.

Special note: the optical unit can be unscrewed from the focus unit. If you buy a used DR lens, the serial numbers must match. Do not accept an unmatched lens. 

I also have a Type 4 50mm Summicron from 1984 or 1985 production. I will write about it in a future article. It is mounted in a lighter weight black alloy barrel as opposed to the gorgeous brushed chrome of my DR unit.

Examples with Kodak BW400CN film

On a recent day trip through rural Mississippi south of I-20, I grabbed a roll of Kodak BW400CN. I have had mixed results with this film in the past. Sometimes it looks muddy, but sometimes I like the tonality. Could there be differences in the C-41 chemistry? Regardless, here are a few samples from my Leica M2 and the 50mm Summicron-DR. I was surprised how the film renders green as quite light, but only for long exposures in settings such as dense underbrush. I do not recall seeing this before. The BW is pretty grainy, but I like the effect. (Click any picture to enlarge it.)

Abandoned farm house, Rte 18 in Brandon, Mississippi.

Remains of a gasoline station, Raleigh (with polarizer filter).

Big Smittys, MS Hwy 149, Mendenhall. This is a former Pan-Am filling station. 

Main Street, Mendenhall. Polarizer used to darken sky.

Shop on MS 28 east of Georgetown.

Historic Crossroads Store on Old Port Gibson Road, Reganton.

References

Laney, D. 1994. Leica Camera and Lens Pocket Book, 6th Edition revised and updated, Hove Collectors' Books, East Sussux, UK, 142 p.

Other

An interesting 2007 article about Leica cameras is in The New Yorker, September 24, 2007 issue, Candid Camera, The cult of Leica.

Update Dec. 2020: Here are silos in Delta, Louisiana, taken with long-expired GAF Versapan film. Click to enlarge.

Silos, Levee Road, Delta, Louisiana (GAF Versapan film, Summicron-DR lens, orange filter)

Good Things in Small Packages: Leica IIIC Camera

My Leica IIIC with its original 5cm ƒ/2.0 Summitar lens

English language instruction manual

At the Parthenon, Athens, Greece, 1953. Photograph on Kodachrome film with this Leica IIIC.

Background

This is my Leica IIIC rangefinder camera made in Wetzlar, West Germany. It uses the standard 35mm perforated film with frame size of 24 × 36mm. My dad bought this IIIC in 1949 when he worked for the US Navy on Guam. It came with a 5cm ƒ/2.0 Summitar lens. He had owned an American-made Perfex 35mm camera during the war years but had wanted a Leica for a long time. During World War II, a few Leicas were exported to the Allies via Sweden, but they were reserved for special uses (spies or well-placed generals?).

Advertisement from Olden Camera & Lens Co., New York, January 1947. Note Leica IIIB and Summitar cost  $385.00, a major investment in the late-1940s.

Modern Photography advertisement, September 1953. The IIIF was the contemporary model, selling for $368 with the Summitar lens. The superior Summicron lens cost $25 more. (Click to enlarge picture)

After the war, one of the ways a war-ravaged Germany began to rebuild its economy was to export precision optical equipment, such as the famous Leica cameras. Leica's advertising emphasized excellence and sophistication. My dad took the opportunity of low prices at the post exchange on Guam to buy this body and lens. As I recall, he said they cost $150. He used this little Leica for many years, taking family photographs when we lived in Greece and southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. I used it in the 1970s and 1980s and still do.

Operation

On modern standards, this camera is a bit fiddly to use. First, the viewfinder has two windows. The way I use it is to first look through the right finder, which shows the complete scene covered by the 50mm lens. If I like the scene, I shift my eye to the left window and focus on the object that is most important. By the way, it is a remarkably accurate focus arrangement considering the short base length. Then, I shift back to the right window, do the final framing, and take the picture. Really, it is easier and faster in practice than to describe in text.

With permission from The Online Darkroom.

Instructions for trimming film before loading

Second, the film needs to be trimmed with scissors to have a long tongue before you insert it in the take-up spool. Then you slide both the 35mm cartridge and take-up spool into the body from the bottom. Leica once sold a trimming guide, but you do not need it. Just use your Swiss Army knife to trim about 8 or 10 cm from the tongue, and it will work. Once loaded, turn the rewind knob gently to remove slack. Then, when you advance the film, make sure the rewind knob is turning in the opposite direction to be certain that the film is truly advancing. Again, it is easier to do than to describe. I carry a spare take-up spool with me, but I have never lost one.

As the photographs show, the camera has almost watchmaker precision in the fittings. The chrome on mine is pitted because in the early post-war era, chromium was hard to buy, and many German cameras had poor plating.

Lenses and filters

From Popular Photography, approx. 1950

With permission from The Online Darkroom.

Leica marketed lenses ranging from 21 to 400 mm, all the best quality available at the time. Oddly, my father never bought any more lenses.

My dad's IIIC came with a 5cm ƒ/2.0 Summitar lens (the prestige lens as opposed to the less expensive 5cm ƒ/3.5 Elmar). Mine is the Type 1 version with 10 aperture blades. The Summitar was in production from 1939 to 1953. It was designed by E. Leitz's genius lens designer, Max Berek, in 1937. The war-time production lenses were uncoated, but Leitz applied anti-reflection coating from 1946 on. The construction was a complicated design of 7 elements in 4 groups. It must have taken a heroic effort to compute the ray paths by human computers using mechanical calculators and trigonometry tables. The central sharpness is superb, but the edges fall off, and there is distinct field curvature. This can be used creatively, and regardless, "sharpness" is not normally the factor that makes a photograph successful.

A few years ago, Sherry Krauter in New York cleaned and checked the Summitar lens for me. Mine is pristine and never suffered the scratches in the soft coating that plague so many 1940s lenses (old-time photographers cleaned their lenses with their neckties).

These older Leica bodies have a screw mount for the lenses. The thread is 39mm × 26 turns-per-inch or threads-per-inch (tpi). This was a Whitworth threading standard, which was common in microscope manufacture in the early 20th century. German, English, and Japanese companies made hundreds of different lenses for this 39mm mount. Focal lengths other than 50mm require an auxiliary viewfinder to show the correct frame. Soviet companies made lenses for 39 × 1mm, but this was close enough to usually fit on the Leitz bodies. The Japanese company, Canon, continued to make superb thread-mount lenses up through the 1970s, when they finally discontinued their excellent thread-mount rangefinder S7 cameras. Note that this is a different 39mm than the 39 × 0.75 thread used for large-format Copal 1 and many other shutters. And it is different than the 39F pitch (39 × 0.5) used for 39mm filters that screw into the front of many Leica lenses. Confusing? Yes, of course!

The shutter in my IIIC body had been troublesome for over a decade, but Don Goldberg (known as DAG) in Wisconsin did a fantastic job overhauling it mid-2017. This is the main roller, on which Mr. Goldberg marked the areas that were badly worn. He replaced it with a new-old-stock main roller, the genuine Leica part. For how many other consumer products that are seven decades old can you still get factory replacement parts (possibly some fine watches or Rolls Royce motorcars?)?

The Summitar lens requires filters with a unique 36mm tapered thread. These were known as Type L filters (see Appendix 1 below). When I used filters on my Nepal trip, I had Leitz Series VI filters and a Tiffen 606 retaining ring (see Appendix 2). It is a bit clumsy but manageable, and the series filters will fit other lenses with the appropriate adapter rings. A polarizer is the most clumsy, but Leica made a brilliant fold-out polarizer just for this task (model 13352). I finally bought genuine Summitar light yellow, medium yellow, dark yellow, and green filters, which are faster to handle than the series filters and do not block as much of the view through the viewfinder.

As for a hood, the rectangle folding unit known as a SOOPD fits over type L filters and causes minimal blocking of the view through the viewfinders. 

The Summitar lens is a bit quirky. My example (and maybe all of them?) has a lot of field curvature, so the edges of a flat object will be fuzzy. But a typical scene with the subject near the center has smooth out of focus area away from the central subject. 

Areas outside the zone of focus look smooth and innocuous. This out-of-focus appearance is known as bokeh. Thirty years ago, almost no one thought about it, but now, "photographers" are obsessed with the topic (even though most of them just consider anything out of focus to be bokeh). The newer Type 2 and Type 4 50mm ƒ/2.0 Summicron lenses for my Leica M2 body are "better", but I rather like the old Summitar. It feels good to have my dad's camera in operation again. He would be pleased.

Examples

Village Elders, Siran Danda, Gorkha region, Nepal.

School girls, Dhulikhel, east of Kathmandu.

Young ladies of Nepani, Gorkha District, Nepal.

For a trip to Nepal in October of 2017, I decided to use this little IIIC with black and white film and skip the obligatory digital imaging device entirely. It was a great success. Many Nepalis were amazed that I was using a mechanical camera almost 70 years old. It was a tension-breaker to let people look through the viewfinder, but I had to explain that there was no LCD screen for them to see the results. Surprisingly, some of the camera stores in the Thamel area (the main tourist zone) of Kathmandu still stock fresh Ilford and Fuji film in 35mm size. But you probably could not find any 120 or large format film. These examples are on TMax 100 film, developed by Praus Productions in Rochester, New York. I had only used TMax 100 once before and I'm impressed by the fine grain. Nice stuff. To measure exposure, I used a Gossen Luna Pro Digital meter, usually in reflected mode but sometimes in incident mode.

Cooking pots at Thubten Choling Monastery, Solu Khumbu region.

Tools at Serlo Monastery, Solu Khumbu region.

Hanging around in Kathmandu. Note: most mannequins in Nepal are European ladies (but may be made in India??).

Nepal is a fabulous photographic destination. The people are friendly and welcoming. The country is developing and changing quickly. Go soon to see remnants of an earlier era before they are torn up and replaced with the new commercial world. The same warning applies to Cuba: Go before the developers pillage and ruin it, especially if American developers ever move in.

Summary

A few reasons to buy one of these ltm Leicas:

1. As time goes on, the remaining stock of these thread mount Leicas will be more and more beat up and will diminish in total number.

2. They will be repairable in the future.

3. They don't make them like this any more. Definitely not!

4. They will be usable as long as 35mm perforated film is made and sold.

5. You will enjoy occasionally using one as a substitute for a more sophisticated newer 35mm camera or digital unit.

6. These ltm Leicas are compact and great travel cameras, especially with the collapsible Elmar lens.

7. They are technologically elegant.

8. People stop to admire it when you are using a ltm Leica. It can be an ice-breaker.

9. It is definitely not a spray and pray photon capture device: you need to think with one of them and know a bit about what you are doing (i.e., you can't just push a button).

10. They are unlikely to depreciate.

11. Thread-mount lenses can be used on modern digital cameras.

12 The lenses are appreciating in price, especially for clean examples without fungus, scratches, or haze.

These little Leica thread-mount cameras are still available at reasonable acceptable prices. They are fun to use and have a precision feel that most modern cameras do not replicate (other than Leica M film bodies, which, as of 2025, are still in production). Just go buy one and return to the basics of photography. Your creativity will blossom.

Other articles

For an earlier article about how I have used Leica cameras to record urban decay, click this link. 

Mike Johnston, former editor of Camera & Darkroom magazine and now author of The Online Photographer, wrote an excellent article in 1992 about Leicaphilia. He also wrote about The Leica as a Teacher. "A year with a single Leica and a single lens, looking at light and ignoring color, will teach you as much about actually seeing photographs as three years in any photo school, and as much as ten or fifteen years (or more) of mucking about buying and selling and shopping for gear like the average hobbyist."

35MMC has a useful article titled 7 Reasons You Should Own a Thread Mount Leica. I agree with the author that these cameras slow you down and make you think. You just can't spray and pray and then doodle around with Lightroom for weeks culling files, doing the "workflow," and hoping that you might have "shot" a meaningful photograph. Film does not work that way.

Johnny Martyr wrote a detailed review of the Leica IIIC, titled Tempered Indulgence. Also, check his review of the Summitar lens.

Phoblogger has an interesting interview with the manager of Richard Photo Lab (Los Angeles, California) about how film most definitely is not dead and is reviving among many age and skill groups.

Andrew Yue wrote a nice introduction to the Leica thread-mount cameras titled, "- Leica Screw Mount Cameras - the 1930's through the 1950's -"

Update 2019

I bought a Canon 50mm ƒ/1.4 ltm lens and have had very nice results with it.  Click the link to see examples. I also have a 50mm ƒ/2 Jupiter-8 lens from the Soviet Union.

 

Appendix 1, Summitar Filters

The Leitz Summitar used a unique tapered 36mm filter thread. As far as I know, only Leitz and Walz offered this size. This note from the Leica Users Group (LUG) by Marc James Small describes the Leitz filters:

In any event, here is the best listing I can produce for the Summitar filters.  These were known at Wetzlar as L filters (by comparison, the E39 range were O filters). 

Very Light Yellow       GBOOM   13080

Light Yellow            GBWOO   13085

Medium Yellow   GCOOL

Green #1                GEYOO

Green #2                GCYOO   13095

Graduated Yellow        GHOOF   13105

Graduated Green GILOO

Orange          GDOOK   13100

Light Red/IR            GECOO   13115

Medium Red/IR   GFEOO   13120

Dark Red/IR             GFOOH   13125

Blue                    RQPOO   13097

UVa                     GHIOO   13130

Blank Filter Holder     FOOXC

Haze                    FIHAZ

Skylight                GCSKY   13150

Type F          FKDSUM  13137

Type FP         FPKSUM  13147

Type A          FIDAY           13135

Photoflood              FIFLO           13140

Flash Conversion        GCHEO   13145

Swing-Out Polarizer     FISUM           13395

Rotating Polarizer      POORE   13355

Filters which only have a catalogue code-word and not a catalogue number did not survive into production to 1954, the first year for the universal use of the numbers.  Many of the 

Summitar filters had dropped out of the catalogues by 1960 and all were gone from the Leitz catalogue by 1962.

If you are a Summitar user, buy the genuine filters when you see examples in good condition. 

Appendix 2, Series Filters

The most comprehensive description of series filters and the various adapter rings made for hundreds of lenses is from photographer Robert Allen Kautz in Vermont. 

• Summitar adapter: Tiffen model 606
• Jupiter-8 lens (40.5mm thread): Tiffen 602 

40.5 mm was common on many German lenses in the mid-1950s, and you can find 40.5mm filters that screw into the lens directly. Beware that Tiffen, Ednalite, and Enteco adapter numbers are different (Confusing? Of course!).