Thank you William. Peter Karbe is a rockstar in my book!

Thank you for the quick response Mike. Happy to hear Peter Karbe is still involved.

Peter is still very much with Leica and his job title is Senior Managing Expert Optics and Platform. The head of optics has always fed work into the overall design process at Leica. That was the case in the time of Barnack where Berek did the optical designs, but it was Barnack and his team who did all the rest. For example test calculations on the effects of different lens barrel lengths and designs were sent to Barnack rather than Berek. That is still the case today where it is team work all the way. Even Stefan sometimes defers to colleagues on design matters and he did that several times in Dublin. It truly is a real team effort.

William

Hello. Is Peter Karbe still the Head of Optics at Leica? I ask because there are some on the Leica forums commenting Peter has either taken on a different role at Leica or retired.

See my reply to JP above.

William

Thanks for that and I am sure that Mike will thank you for your kind offer of assistance. As you will know, articles on blog sites like this don’t appear by magic and it requires hard work and care to put them together. As an author of nearly 50 articles on this site, all I can say is that Mike is a delight to work with, always professional and never losing his wonderful sense of humour. It is the same with conferences. I put in a year of hard work getting the conference programme together and it was delight for me to find the whole thing coming together, notwithstanding issues like a ‘Brexit busting’ deal involving people in Vienna and Manchester to provide a ‘Leica On Loan’ service for attendees and other issues about a visa for a Venezuelan winner of the Oskar Barnack prize. Stefan Daniel did a ‘no holds barred’ discussion with the attendees at my request and it worked. I thanked him afterwards for this. Then I put Mike sitting beside Stefan at the dinner at the end of the conference, so that he could get all of the information he needed about Leica’s plans for the future.

If it was the CL/SL piece that caused issues, this is the nature of things on the internet where people get worked over things that in the cool light of day are not as important as some people think they are. Personally, I find that online discussions on such matters rapidly become quite ‘circular’. I had the same issues on the Leica Forum earlier this year about No 105 when I posted a link to my Macfilos article. Outlandish accusations of fake and fraud were made in relation to the camera and its ‘Oscar’ engraving, but all of that ceased on the day of the auction when I posted the result from the auction room. Online publishing is a different game to traditional publishing and sometimes the distinctions between the virtual world and the real world become blurred. At the end of the day it is the real world that counts.

William

Thank you, JP, and I appreciate the direct and behind-the-scenes support you give to me and Macfilos.

I think you’ve gained the wrong impression from what I wrote, William. The event in itself was anything but stressful and, as you say, perfectly organised. I was referring to the week as a whole, in particular the stress that came from another web site and the general pressure of dealing with so many announcements within a few days. From Thursday to Thursday, it was a busy time for me! Mike

Dear William, probably my words were not chosen carefully enough. I never wanted to intend that the conference was stressful (after all, I can not judge it as I was not present). What I wanted to say: Mike has taken on a heavy workload. He has done this for us, and I have great respect and gratitude for that. So definitely no criticism of you or anyone else involved with the LCI conference. Jörg-Peter

PS: In German, stress also has the meaning of “a lot to do” with a more neutral connotation.

I am getting a bit confused. I presume that the stress bit relates to what happened after Mike came back from Dublin. There was no stress for him while he was there and Mike certainly seemed to enjoy every bit of what was, if I may say so myself, a very well organised conference with access to the top people at Leica and excellent speakers on photography and technical matters, plus some fun things like a Photo Walk competition and a visit to Guinness. We certainly don’t want any of our LSI conferences to stress our members and other attendees and we go out of our way to put on an enjoyable programme. All of the feedback which we have got so far has been extremely positive. I just want to set the record straight on this.

William