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Initial Thoughts On The Leica M (Typ240) When Used In Classic Rangefinder Mode

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , on March 2, 2013 by johnbuckley100

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All photos Leica M, 50mm APO-Summicron-Asph

For years, Apple computers operated out of the mainstream.  With an elegantly different approach to personal computing, Macs were used by a fervent few who well appreciated their superior characteristics, and occasionally acknowledged their limitations.  There are many reasons why today the market for Macs is growing, while that of Windows-based PCs is, at best, stagnant, but an important business threshold was crossed when Apple enabled third-party developers to come up with a way of loading Windows onto a Mac, in essence letting Mac users have what they wanted, but at the same time, conceding to the marketplace that they were also capable of being used in the more conventional manner of a PC.  Few actually ever used a Mac as a Windows machine, but it was a smart concession for Apple to make.   They “normalized” their specialty product, thus opening it up to a broader audience while in no way diminishing what its adherents cherished. I thought of that this afternoon when using, for the first time, the new Leica M.

The Leica M, which aficionados refer to as the M-240, or M (Typ 240), has everything we loved about the Leica M9, and more.  With a CMOS sensor, instead of the M9’s CCD sensor, the new M is capable of both Live View and use of an external Electronic Viewfinder, which means that when accessories are added, the classic Leica rangefinder — a separate category, like a Mac, that stubbornly persists despite the market dominance of Canon and Nikon DSLRs — can now offer many of the things a DSLR offers, which in our analogy stands for Windows.  Moreover, with Live View, and an EVF, and importantly, a small adaptor, Leica R lenses can now be used on an M body, which means that essentially for the first time, one can use a digital M with telephoto lenses beyond the 135mm focal length.  All these represent concessions by Leica — a tiny company that to its devoted followers produces a superior platform for certain kinds of photography — and an opportunity to appeal to the masses.  But would Leica be giving up something special when it so “improved” the M?

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This morning, the UPS man arrived with a new M — which because this is what you have to do with a company whose products are so sought after by a decisive few, we’d placed an order for it two years ago, well before it was announced.  The announcement came in September at the biennial Photokina trade fair in Cologne, but only in the past few days has someone in Solms, Germany nodded, and boxes emerged to be shipped around the world. In Leica circles, this is a huge moment, though in terms of the world’s attention, it is not, it must be admitted, like the line-waiting excitement generated by a release of a new iPhone.  For one thing, this is because this isn’t a mass product, but also because the devoted know that Leica can only produce some number of dozens of cameras per day.  There’s no point in waiting in line if the camera with your name on it won’t be made for another month.

Our initial thoughts, even without using the M with Live View and an EVF, nor with the adaptor that would make R lenses work, is that the M is, well, a real Leica M.  But the changes readily apparent in just a short walk around the city on a brutally cold day are incredibly impressive.

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Now it must be said that we have not downloaded the Lightroom beta which has a color profile for the M (Typ 240), so the pictures shown here are based on the embedded profile that, we suspect, thinks these images came from an M9.  (We’re not sure how this works.)  To our eyes, the colors aren’t yet as good as they likely will be when a color profile has been released by Adobe in a standard upgrade.  Our sense, though, is that absolutely nothing has been lost in the switch from a CCD to a CMOS sensor.

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As for how the M shoots, our initial impression is that you do not notice the very slight addition in the camera’s weight, and the form factor is so similar to the M9 and M8, that it instantly feels right in the hand.  We have not yet gotten the new accessory grip, but the very small protruding thumb rest on the upper right side of the camera, when used with a Gordy wrist strap, makes the M feel safe and snug when shooting.

We were very pleasantly surprised by the way the frame lines work. An advantage of rangefinder photography is that, because you are not viewing the scene you’re about to photograph through the lens, but instead through a viewfinder at the center of which are frame lines that indicate the parameters of the image you are about to preserve on film or a sensor, you have a much more informed understanding of the scene, which leads to an intuitive reflex of quick composition.  But the new M has electronic frame lines (edit: that are back lit), which if wandering around with the camera turned on, only materialize when you activate the camera by pressing down slightly on the shutter button.  It’s a small thing — having the frame lines suddenly materialize amidst a broad view of what is in your finder, and thus potentially in your picture — but it instantly forces the eye to decide whether what is in the center is the image you want, or whether you want to adjust to get something repositioned.

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Another delightful improvement is that the shutter “click” is to our ears as silent and unobtrusive as it was on our film M7.  The Girl Scouts above did not know the photo had been snapped, because they couldn’t hear it.  It is an incredibly subtle sound.

In the days ahead, we will take the M out for usage in its “DSLR mode” — that is, we will use Live View and the EVF to get a sense of how different it is when the Leica M takes on the characteristics of a DSLR.  For today, we just wanted to see how the M behaves as an M, in classic rangefinder mode.  To any Leica fans who have worried about what horrors were being wrought by the changes Leica announced last September, we can reassure you: for less money (in 2013 dollars) than you spent in 2009 on the Leica M9, you have a camera that seems identical where it doesn’t seem better.  This is a very exciting development.

NOTE: On March 3rd, we posted a second set of thoughts an images on the Leica M here.

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Reflections On A Month With The Leica Monochrom

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , on September 27, 2012 by johnbuckley100

All photos Leica Monochrom and Noctilux f/0.95, except where noted.  Click on photos for a clearer view.

It is, of course, some kind of post-modern irony that with the release of Leica’s digital M Monochrom, which offers stunningly powerful technology yet takes only black and white photos, we rediscovered the timelessness of monochrome photography.  Yes, there are aficionados who never stopped taking pictures with silver halide film, and yes, since the earliest days of digital, there have been straightforward software solutions enabling color images to be transformed, as it turns out, back to the black and white images that are first captured by the camera’s sensor.  But as we have used it over the past 30 days, Leica’s Monochrom, which captures data as black and white and then, in a somewhat revolutionary move, stops there, not subjecting the image to a color filter, has been for us a revelation.

Photographers who embrace Leica cameras and lenses, particularly in the digital age when Canon and Nikon offer high-end devices with a plethora of options for the operator to consider, tend to favor fairly radical simplification.  After all, to use an M, even a digital M, means turning one’s back on things like spot metering and automatic focus — things most modern photographers take so for granted, they can’t imagine what kind of retrograde personality would do without them.  And yet here is Leica removing the option even to capture an image in color.  But as we have learned over the past month, there are many benefits to this approach.  To begin with, the image below was taken well after sunset, at ISO 5000 — a setting commonplace for use by DSLR photographers, but not by rangefinder photographers who use Leica’s legendary lenses.

Leica Monochrom, 35mm Summilux FLE, f/8, 1/500th.

Over a decade of shooting with Leica rangefinders — first film, and later the digital M8 and M9 — many of the essential elements of photography we learned as a kid came back to us.  However, it must be said that with our M7, we shot black and white film sparingly, and with the M8 and M9, seldom converted digital images to black and white, because we so loved the highly saturated color that we saw in Fuji Velvia transparencies or what showed up in Lightroom.  Being forced to think in black and white, viewing things in luminance, not chroma, has been an adjustment, a revelation, and a delight.  Did we need to use a monochrome-only camera to achieve this?  No, of course not.  But the binary system has forced us to take our Monochrom into situations we previously would have “seen” in color and forced us to see them anew — and in more classical terms.

Leica Monochrom and 35mm Summilux FLE

The grip of color is too powerful to give up, and even after we had our Monochrom for a week or so, when the opportunity presented itself, on a beautiful sunny day, to wander around the city taking pictures, of course we took our M9 — it was a cloudless day, the sky was blue, and we realized that we think of black and white more for when the light is dimmer, the sky is grayer.  (When we think of the thousands of black and white pictures taken by our favorite photographers, they always seem to have been taken on days with imperfect light — imperfect for a color photographer who needs bright light to get the saturated colors he loves.)  The warning that blown highlights with the Monochrom cannot be recovered, because nothing is hiding in one of the color channels, hasn’t really affected us so far — and blown highlights, in which the sky shows up as white, looks pretty much the way they always have in black and white photography.  But even now, we find ourself giving into our instinct, when wandering out into the street on a bright and sunny day, to leave the Monochrom behind and shoot in color.  After all, one can always convert to black and white in post-processing, right?

The possibilities inherent in the Monochrom and its sensor, in softer light, has consistently blown our mind.  Consistently, we’ve gone out to take pictures and been transported into a prior time — not just the black and white film-wielding days of our youth, but something that we are not too self-conscious to say reminds us of some prior age of classic photography.

A picture we might well have previously taken with our M9 has emerged from the Monochrom looking, well, different.  Maybe everything we’ve learned over the past decade is paying off; it obviously can’t just be the equipment.  After all, cameras are just a tool, right? But we can’t help but think that the Monochrom is a special tool — a deliberately limiting mechanism that paradoxically opens up new horizons along classical lines.  When William Eggleston and Stephen Shore and others shook the art world by its lapels and demanded that color photography be taken seriously, something important happened.  But this back-to-the-future approach of using cutting edge technology to render something timeless is strangely liberating.  Skeptics will say, Yeah, there’s nothing here that couldn’t be captured by an M9, or any other camera, and be coaxed out through software.  And our reply is, Yes, but we never would have explored those possibilities before the Monochrom.  If the best camera is the one you have with you, as the saying goes, the corollary is that the best way of seeing may be the one that reflects the tool you have to use.

Yes, of an evening, we would have wandered Northwest Washington D.C.’s gardens and urban oases with our M9, and come back with some lovely images, because how could you not, given the gorgeous material?  Yet we doubt we would have thought of what magic could occur, after sunset, when the light was “bad.”  The range of the camera is extraordinary — and we have barely scratched the surface of what it can do.  We’ve barely used it at high ISOs, we haven’t deliberately taken it into impossibly dark situations, we’ve shot most of the images we’ve taken with it at ISO 640 or below.  And yet we find ourselves gravitating to an approach that is at odds with the capabilities most celebrated, and used this simplifying camera in a simplified form: low ISO, but mostly shot with fast glass wide open.

Not just because it takes color images, we view our M9 as our main camera, and the Monochrom as a specialty tool.  But just as all photographers, learning and trying to improve their craft, seek to find an identity that is their own — a style that has some consistency, and isn’t simply a grab bag of opportunistic snapshots — we are fully willing to accept a split personality.  The Monochrom will operate in one universe, the M9, or someday, the M, in another.  We sit here, having had the Monochrom for just a month, marveling at the worlds it has opened up.

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