obsession

After all that research, I decided that, besides buy­ing bet­ter lenses for the M3, I was will­ing to fork over some seri­ous shekels for an M9 — or bet­ter yet, an M9-P, as I didn’t trust myself not to scratch the view-screen. […]

I spent the next cou­ple of months obses­sively research­ing Leica cam­eras and lenses. I began by down­load­ing the owner’s man­ual for the M3 rangefinder. Then I prac­ticed com­pos­ing and focus­ing with no film in the camera. […]

I quickly real­ized that the lens that Joe had given me was imprac­ti­cal: the frame lines were too restrictive

… Then Joe took a trip to Roswell. As I men­tioned in Part 1, Joe rides motor­cy­cles: BMWs, Kawasakis, and more recently, a Harley. He’s also inter­ested in UFOs and the Roswell Incident. I think he’s more inter­ested in the char­ac­ters who are drawn to them than to the alleged aliens and space­craft themselves, […]

My best friend Joe Crumley is an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. He grew up on a farm in west Texas, served his coun­try in Southeast Asia dur­ing a shoot­ing war, stud­ied at the University of Chicago with Aaron Siskind, founded and taught at the pho­tog­ra­phy pro­gram at Florida’s Daytona State College, rode motor­cy­cles from an early age, turned a job making