If you’re a Leica user, this is a distressing picture. Why? Because the Tri-Elmar retails in the UK for an eye-watering £3198.

I came on it via a tweet by @jwcgraves pointing to Cory Doctorow’s post on BoingBoing, in which he observed:

Hefting and peering through a high-end camera lens, you get a sense of the craft, the precision engineering, and the thoughtful design that went into it. But look at it in cross-section, as with this photo a neatly bisected Leica Tri-Elmar-M 28-35-50mm lens and the hellish, gorgeous complexity is revealed in a visceral way: “These were actually made by Leica students as a graduation project and boxed as a ‘cutaway model’ of the lens.”