About 9 months ago, the shutter curtain on my Leica M6 jammed up. It was damned unfortunate, and kind of infuriating, given that a Leica M body typically lasts decades with very little in the way of maintenance requirements.

Around that same time, Michele let me use her Nikon D200 for a bit. It piqued my curiosity enough to purchase one, along with a 17-55/2.8 Nikon DX lens.

Recently, I realized that, with my Leica broken and my new camera being roughly the size of a cinder block, I’d all but stopped with the photography hobby. I never carried the Nikon with me. It was too large, too loud, and too fiddly.

Early hints at my distaste for the beast could be gleaned from an article I wrote for JPG Magazine.

Last week, I sold my Nikon and shipped the Leica to Don Goldberg for a repair and once-over. And yesterday, my precious little Leica was returned to me.

The new shutter mechanism is amazingly smooth. It’s much nicer than it was before, and I imagine it will last me a long time.

An interesting note is that my enthusiasm for photography returned no more than an hour after having sold the dSLR. I can’t quite explain this, other than with an assumption that this hobby, for me, is a romantic thing and that at least some of that romance revolves around film and the analog process. Who knows?