Leica Camera

In 1986, the Leitz company changed its name to Leica and moved its factory from Wetzlar to the nearby town of Solms.

The Wetzlar factory was located on the opposite side of the administrative building of 1957 and formed a special urban architecture; it is upstream from the slope of Kalsmunt and forms a structurally attractive graduation from the skyscrapers to the ruins of Kalsmunt Castle.

In the last decades of the 19th century, Ernst Leitz moved its production facilities to the slopes of Kalsmunt with sufficient residential buildings and workshops on the Laufdorfer Weg.

At the turn of the century, the production of optical devices expanded so much that it originated the first skyscrapers in the city of Wetzlar.

Narrow wall patterns and lightly embedded parapets summarize the three lowest floors.

After the planning of Jean Schmidt, contractor Robert Schneider built a four-story building in 1911.

Again, the original plan, which provided a horizontal structure of the building through the cornucopia, was abandoned in favor of a simpler façade design.

The still existing façade drawings show the columns with arches on the ground floor and that are fitted between a long strip of windows with excessive pilasters.

The general design shows a mixture of very graphic elements and remains of curved Modernist forms that recall the buildings by Joseph Maria Olbrich at Mathildenhöhe of Darmstadt.

The building was built with a concrete construction modeled from the production halls of Opel in Rüsselsheim, Zeiss in Jena and Wernerwerk in Berlin.

Due to the urban landscape that characterized the size of the building, the planning of the district government was initially rejected because of a simple and unsatisfactory exterior design.

[4] The first 35 mm film Leica prototypes were built by Oskar Barnack at Ernst Leitz Optische Werke, Wetzlar, in 1913.

The Leica had several model iterations, and in 1923, Barnack convinced his boss, Ernst Leitz II, to make a preproduction series of 31 cameras for the factory and outside photographers to test.

The first Leica lens was a 50 mm f/3.5 design based on the Cooke triplet of 1893, adapted by Max Berek at Leitz.

During the mid-1930s, a legendary soft-focus lens, the Thambar 90 mm f/2.2 was designed, and made in small numbers between 1935 and 1949, no more than 3000 units.

Early Leica cameras bear the initials D.R.P., which stands for Deutsches Reichspatent, the name for German patents before May 1945.

Leica continues to refine this model (the latest versions being the MP and MA, both of which have framelines for 28, 35, 50, 75, 90, and 135 mm lenses, which show automatically upon mounting).

These include the Leotax, Nicca and early Canon models in Japan, the Kardon in USA, the Reid in England and the FED and Zorki in the USSR.

[citation needed] Until at least the mid-1950s, Leitz offered factory upgrades of earlier Leica cameras to the current model's specifications.

In 2009 the R-series was discontinued, citing new camera developments that had caused a massive loss of Leica sales.

The earliest Leica reflex housing was the PLOOT (Leitz's five letter code for its products), announced in 1935, along with the 200 mm f/4.5 Telyt Lens.

In addition, the optical groups of many rangefinder lenses could be removed and attached to the Visoflex via a system of adapters.

Leica also offered focusing systems, such as the Focorapid and Televit, that could replace certain lenses' helicoid mounts for sports and natural-life telephotography.

[15] In May 2014, Leica Camera AG finished building a new factory at Leitz Park 1 in the new industrial part of Wetzlar and relocated back to the city where it started.

The commercial depicts photojournalists in war-torn and politically unstable environments; one of whom takes a photograph of the Tank Man during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.

[18] Leica cameras are particularly associated with street photography, especially in the latter twentieth century;[19] they were used by photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sebastião Salgado.

[citation needed] The earliest Leica prototypes were developed by the company Ernst Leitz GmbH during the first years of the 20th century, but marketing did not commence until the mid-1920s.

However, the advent of reflex camera technology made rangefinders somewhat obsolete, leaving Leica the main product of a diminishing market segment.

[citation needed] During the 2018 Photokina in Cologne, Leica announced that Sigma and Panasonic had become licensed for the L-mount platform.