[Mint] +++

Today's episode is sponsored by Squarespace. What's better than being forklift certified? Being forklift certified twice and also getting your camera back from CLA. That's right, the M6 storyline continues as I try to achieve full Leica palingenesis. A while back I said this in a video. Now my Leica build is almost complete, which is a pretty good feeling. The final missing piece is just some brown replacement leather to have it finally looking like a smoke show. So a YouTube legend Cam Mackey reached out to Caleb, who reached out to me about a leather supplier for camera accessories, not bondage. A leather supplier that might be able to get me something close to that beautiful Hermes edition Leica M6, which I think is one of the most beautiful cameras ever produced. My own titanium Leica M6 is probably from the mid-90s and every time that I brought it into a Leica store, all the Leica techs gave me the same fortuitous warning, that camera needs a CLA, yesterday. I think that they only ever really arrived at that conclusion because the camera still had the original ostrich leather on it that was present when the factory shitted it out. Unfortunately, through some anecdotal reports, I had been hearing that Leica M6 CLA service by Leica was a bit backed up. Some estimates that I was hearing were saying it could take a full year. A year is a bit of a tough sell for me because the M6 is one of the main tools that I use on this channel pretty regularly because every time I use the whole guy, I get kidney stones. Luckily, there's Gus of Ken Rockwell endorsement fame and a local legend on this channel. He offered to help me out. Gus is a true compendium of knowledge on these old film cameras, so I knew I was in good hands. Thus, I finally received the new brown leather in the mail and sent it alongside my M6 off to Gus for a total CLA and more. Naturally, the camera would be down for a few weeks for maintenance, just like my toilet after the incident, but it eventually returned to my doorstep one day feeling brand new and polished. Feeling kind of like a mint plus plus camera that I just ordered from Japan. Anyway, there was a long list of items that needed to be spanked, oiled down, and kissed firmly but passionately into place to get it back to factory spec, but first let's take this mint camera out into the field and un-mint it. Sorry my car is so dirty by the way. It's either park under a tree and get pollen all over it or park under power lines and get pigeon s**t all over it. So I was joined by local film photography hottie Chris Sturm, a fellow enthusiast for good light. Neither of us had shot anything for quite some time and we wanted to get back on the horse if we could find one around there somewhere. You've upset the uh the dogs over there. What's different about it? It's the titanium version. The titanium version? That's f**ked up. So with my clean-ass M6 perched right up on my dirty-ass car, which makes clear my priorities, I loaded some bulk-rolled E100 that I got from a source I will not reveal because I can't afford to go to Kodak prison. Monica has already said that she won't wait for me. We found a window of clear weather in the forecast and after hitting on a local to gain valuable information she told us that the swells the past few days had been utterly insane so we knew we were in for something good. For this shoot I went in like a sniper looking for the whites of the eyes with my Light Lens Lab 35mm 1.4 in titanium. Obviously I have had some issues with this lens in the past and it's greenish wet pickle cast. I made a whole ass video about it so you really have no excuse not to know what I'm talking about. Unless of course you just hate me. So this time I was shooting with a KR3 filter which is a little bit rosier in tint to counterbalance the native drippy cucumber green from the lens and I think it does a wonderful job in place of the usual 81c filter. Mix it in with that huge Leica flip-up polarizer on the nose and it produces my favorite look for color photography even when the orange sunset daylight is still loading but hey at least it'll be here before GTA 6. Anyway just like D-Day we stormed the beach looking for photographic bangers and found a few. I like the shot. What a juxtaposition. So I wasn't really seeing anything wrong with my images on the technical end. There was no shutter drag, no half frames. The range finder and light meter seemed to be calibrated okay but that's always how it goes right? You bring your functional 96 LS400 into the shop and they tell you everything under the hood is a sh** show and they refuse to work on it. These cameras might not really display much of an issue on the celluloid until it's too late. It's not like they imprint a tiny check engine light when things start drifting out of spec over time. One day you will start seeing maintenance problems. Unless of course you're shooting Nikon in which case hell will have long since frozen over but for someone who shoots a ton of E100 to the point of near financial collapse I can't really afford to have any frames be f***** up. The official report that I got back from Gus stated that the 1,000th and 1,500th shutter speeds were issuing incorrect and uneven exposures. I guess the official name for it is gradient imaging. These high shutter speeds are typically the first to go in my experience. Also stated in the diagnosis inside the system was some debris buildup and some sort of green chemical muck that was cleared out before I ever got a chance to at least taste it. Gus tested the light meter as well and found that even for its age readings from EV6 to EV15 were accurate so that's a rare win. The light was starting to get you know pretty dreamy as we returned to the sketchy beach slums on the other side of town and it was time for me to replace my shore roll with another bulk roll. Honestly it felt pretty good to stretch my you know atrophied foticular muscles again. I was telling Chris the whole time you know in between freaking out about how good the light was that honestly I could shoot these seaside towns all day and just never get tired of it. Maybe that's my calling. The U.S. has 95,000 miles of coastline. 87,000 miles if you avoid Florida which I already do. Jurassic Park microwave as Chris puts it. Anyway the light was absolutely beaming in here for the for the shot but E100 just couldn't really hold on to both shadow and highlight info so I axed these photos from the set. Chris did a good job with it though probably because he was shooting color neg not some bum-ass slide film with extremely narrow exposure latitude. But there were still bangers to be had inside of whatever was left of this old surf shack. Outside the light was peaking like a guy at a festival who timed his drugs wrong and saw the beauty of the ever-expansive cosmos in a humid porta potty. It was that perfect orange color and I took this. Truthfully a bad photo amongst these conditions would be tough to pull off but I quite like this one and I feel like it was something I wouldn't really normally give a go because you know when it comes down to it there's no real subject it's kind of just a feeling. And yeah I followed it up with a rare self-portrait but there's a better version without me in it. I like this shot a lot too so much vibrant orange. It feels like summer to me the only thing really missing is that stupid summer reading assignment that I'll inevitably put off until 10 minutes before school starts up again. So last but certainly not least an upgrade was in order. Gus was a legend and sourced a flare resistant rangefinder kit for me which I can't even begin to tell you how much of a difference it made. Looking through the viewfinder feels like there isn't even any glass in between me and the uh the scene. It's crystal clear which only makes me question what sort of nasty ass super fungus got into my viewfinder in the first place but whatever. I had to take the uh polarizer off for this one because we're running out of light but hopefully I got it. I did get it and it's pretty good for the last of the roll but I maybe should have shimmed a stop or two of light off the top in hindsight. The reflection is a little it's a little hot. It did feel really good being out there with this freshly tuned camera and the upgrades but I will admit it didn't fix the one problem I always seem to have human error. Yeah no no tension. Well what can you do? I took the last frame advanced the film and ripped it off the roll because I didn't do a very good job bulk rolling it so I gotta take it into a dark bag now. This is the comp I should have shot. Light's way more diffused now. Anyway we waited the sun out keeping our eyes locked on the horizon for the legendary green flash while this you know pervert ass cursed effigy watched us. Man I didn't see sh**. But before I close this video out with a beautifully mindful monologue for the ages that you won't want to miss, I'd like to first thank today's sponsor Squarespace for their ongoing support. 2026 is the year to set up an online marketplace and start the flow of economy back to you and what better way to do that than through an industry leader in the space, Squarespace. 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Every website is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto-generated sitemap, and more to push your new website to the top of the search engine results. So, it's 2026, what are you waiting for? If you're ready to build a website, you can start a free trial today at squarespace.com slash grainydays. And if you use the code grainydays at checkout, you can get 10% off your first purchase. But the camera itself is a box. Are there those you just can't let go, sell, whatever? Yeah, definitely. It's like being a cowboy, you know, on the western frontier and having your favorite horse. I was actually thinking about this the other day. If I had to get rid of all my cameras, there's one I wouldn't get rid of, and it's the titanium Leica M6. Yeah, it's just, it's one of those cameras that I'll forever, I'll forever keep. You know, it's gonna be buried with me one day. It was an incredible feeling to have my freshly oiled down M6 in hand for this one. Not because it's once again, you know, functioning at a level only seen before when it left the factory, but because it's kind of the end of a long road I've been on with it. This camera is a legacy camera for me personally. It's my main workhorse. I made the pilgrimage to Wetzlar itself to have it engraved, and it even started snowing after the work was done. Every time I look down at that engraving, I think of, you know, my family being together out there abroad with me in Wetzlar for my mom's birthday. Now with this brown leather completing the look that I can only describe as a blatant ripoff of the Hermes edition, I can now stop daydreaming about modifying this camera until the ends of the earth. Even if everything, you know, goes down the shitter and gets so bad a plumber even refuses to fix it, I'll never get rid of this camera. It's completed to me. But realistically, with photo days, with the, you know, kind of light that Chris and I had that evening, I was reminded why I do this. It sounds corny as but yeah, it's true. It's ultimately not because of the gear, but more so because when the light touches down and you get that shot that hits perfectly on celluloid, it's a special feeling. It's better than drugs, probably. I don't know. I haven't yet tried all of them.