It is my pleasure to share my heartfelt love to Leica with everyone over the world. Hope you all enjoy this short interview, can't wait to meet you at the f22 peninsula - home of the finest vintage cameras!

A few of my friends told me they really love the article in Leica Names and find them interesting. It is always fascinating to learn a little more about the history of Leica, and the history of the specific Leica camera you own! In fact, another very interesting “code letter” is the black wax that covers one of the 5 screws which help to fix the M bayonet mount together.

Let us talk about grey painted Leica, but we will skip the “legendary grey M2” for later and focus on some fundamentals of IIIc grey instead. There are many different variations of IIIc grey, but they do share some common features. We will cover the basic here and will go into more detail later. (Likely will need to split IIIc grey into 3-4 articles)

How many variations of Leica M3 existed?? 10? 20? 30? My guest is that it has over 50 different types of M3 cameras. Let’s cover all the variations one by one in the next 10, 20, 30 or 50 or so articles on M3. But let us start with some of the fundamentals and “fun facts” first:

During the guided tour on “Making of Black Paint Leica”, a visitor asked me about Leica lens names and their meaning and origins, I guess there might be interest to know a little about the names we all so familiar with. I decided to share some my findings here based on years of researches

I will now talk about screw mount Leica black paint and let us focus on Leica II and III this time.

Let us now talk about strap lugs of black paint cameras. Leica M3 and M2 are considered to be full black paint cameras in general with almost all parts in black paint (of course early batch of buddha ear M3 is probably the authentic full black paint camera, with serial number starting from 959, or all earlier black batches - I will cover that later). Therefore, M3 and M2's strap lug are black paint on brass, and when the paint comes off (brassing), it will show a golden brass colour underneath.

Anyone here interested in Leica Black Paint camera? Why all Leica collectors at some point of time are so obsessed with Black Paint Leica? They look like defected paint, they are not durable like chrome, they are not consistent and all look different.