24 hours with the Leica q2 m
As you can tell from this website or if you’ve ever seen any of my youtube videos or follow me on Instagram, I’m a big fan of black and white photography. There is an explanation for this but I’ll save that for another day. This is about my 24 hours using the Leica Q2 monochrom.
If you have ever read Photography News you will have heard of “Photo 24” but if you’ve never seen a copy I suggest you look it up, it a great photography resource magazine / paper with great articles and gear reviews. Anyway, they run a, lets call it a challenge called Photo 24 which takes place in London, the idea being you move around the streets of London taking pictures of what ever you like from noon on Saturday to noon on Sunday, then you all meet up again for a debrief. There are hourly competitions to enter as you go, plus three other themed comps to enter by the end of the following month. If you’re interested in this then keep an eye out for Photography news around April May time next year where you’ll find details on how to enter, the magazine can be read online as well.
Now I don’t own a Leica and I’ve never used one before, but I have always wanted to try out the Leica Q2 monochrom, I’ve seen the reviews and I’ve heard great things about it and I finally got the chance to try one out courtesy of mpb.com, the new sponsor of Photo 24. I was excited about being back at P24 as it hadn’t happened for three years, but now I was also getting the chance to use a Leica Q2, and totally free of charge, how good is that?
This isn’t a review by any stretch, it’s just about how I got on with the camera, how I felt about the way it functions and what I thought about the images that come out of it.
When you settle with one brand you become used to the way it works, you know where the controls are and you know it’s little quirks, there are always small things you don’t like so much and others you love. With the Q2m you could put it on auto choose the multi metering and you’ll get a well exposed picture every time, just like all modern cameras.
Now everybody has their own way of using a camera and I’m no different. I either use manual or aperture priority, mostly I like aperture priority and spot metering and so that’s how I set up the Q2m. This is where I found a little quirk that I personally found a pain, I like high contrasty conditions, so bright light with some deep shadows and I spot meter from the bright areas of a scene and lock the exposure with the AE-L button, the Leica doesn’t have a dedicated AE button, but you can program the button where your thumb rests (image below) to a selection of functions, I chose the AE-L function.
There were a few things that didn’t work for me here, as you can see, the button is very flush with the body and while looking through the view finder I found it fiddly to find and push it in, it felt to me that it needed to protrude out a little more, but I’m sure if it was my camera and I used it every day I would probably get used to it. What I thought was odd though was the fact that once I had my exposure locked in, when I moved my focus point around it would unlock the exposure and I would have to re expose and lock it in again and not move the focus point. Now there could be something in the menu that I don’t know about that would change this, but I couldn’t find it. I don’t know how many people shoot this way but it’s become a habit of mine and I’m quick at it, it’s not a real deal breaker for me as I could change to manual and none of this would matter, it’s just that’s the way I like to work.
If I had more time with the camera I would have tried various ways of setting it up just to see what worked best for me, but one things for sure, there’s no complaining about the image quality from the camera, great image detail and great iso performance.
To make the image above iso 25000 was used, what can I say, I was amazed at the low light performance of this camera, I’m hoping to finish a project I’ve been working on that’s taken me an extra couple of years due to a certain pandemic and this camera would be great for it with such outstanding iso performance, but it’s going back to mpb a week to soon.
The images look great on the back of the camera and they didn’t disappoint once they were on my screen at home. People talk about a Leica look, all I can say is there’s something different about the pictures but I’m not sure what it is, there is a definite crispness about them and this will be down to the amazing glass Leica produce. I don’t know if I could tell the difference between a Leica Q2 converted image to black and white and a Q2 monochrom image, all I do know is I loved the images from the Q2m, and I’d love to own one.
The following three images were made during an organized photo session put on by photo 24 and all are night shots.
Click to enlarge.
