Allure of the M

This post was originally published January 2, 2023 on and has been lightly edited before reposting.

On a vacation to Charleston I took with me a Leica Q2 Monochrom (which has a fixed 28mm f/1.7 lens) and a Nikon Z9 with a Nikkor Z 50mm f/1.2 S. Together they allowed me take the kind of photographs I had planned - wide angle landscape photos and medium street shots with the Q2M and more street shots and full length portraits with the Nikon combination.

With the Leica I was able to capture photos like these:

 

And with the Nikon:

The cameras complemented each other well.

The one drawback of this setup, however, was its bulk and weight - particularly that of the Z9 (1340g) and the Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 (1090g) combo. That, among equivalents from Sony & Canon, the Nikkor is the bulkiest and heaviest does not help. The charming streets of Charleston’s famous French Quarter offered several opportunities for family portraits, however I reached for the Nikon combo sparingly and with hesitation. Besides its heft, the technical look of the Z9 screamed attention each time I pulled it out - it did not exactly make for a good street photography camera.

How could I improve my kit? While similar wide aperture 50mm from Canon and Sony are smaller than the Nikon, neither is really small. Any M-body with a 50mm Summilux ^[1] is positively diminutive compared to similar combos from the usual suspects.^[2] After researching till my hair greyed, I settled on a used Leica M-P Type 240 with a Summilux 50mm f/1.4 to get my feet wet with a rangefinder.

Soon after acquiring the M-P 240 and Summilux, I started playing with the rangefinder. The body and the lens were pre-calibrated and I had no trouble focusing on stationary and slow moving objects quickly and reliably. On moving subjects, like my precocious toddler, it was an exercise in frustration. The wide aperture of the Summilux afforded little tolerance and the photos out of this combination didn’t meet my standards for focus. When the focus nailed, the look of the images was top notch and this kept me going. I changed my photography some - rather than taking photographs ad-hoc which was possible with a fast autofocus system, I took time to set and frame my photographs (in as much possible). Sometimes I would think forward to a photo that could happen, setup the focus for it and wait. Other times, I put some distance between me and my subjects to afford some tolerance in focus. Soon I was getting photos like these:

These have the same dreamy look that the Nikkor 50 f/1.2 gave me during my Charleston trip - at close and medium distances, subject isolation is great. The Summilux has a bit more vignetting and worse corner sharpness but (in my opinion) it gives it personality and a certain look. Judging both critically, I think the Nikkor has lesser color fringing and better sharpness throughout the frame, but the small size of the Summilux more than makes up for this. Also I’m under no illusions of being able to take action photos like the last one in the Nikkor gallery above - a manual focus rangefinder just does not cut it.

The M-P 240 gave me a taste for Leica M blood. A few months and a few thousand photographs later, after getting comfortable shooting with it, I started to notice its drawbacks more and more (especially when compared to the Q2M). High ISO performance was lacking - I personally limited myself to 1600 - which I found I was hitting more often than I expected despite the Summilux’s wide f/1.4 aperture. A resolution of 24MP felt stifling when it came to cropping ^[3]. General speed of the camera - navigating menus, scrubbing through photos, live view etc. - was not confidence inspiring. Most of all the fact that I was the owner of a digital camera nearly a decade old gave me nightmares about some part failing without spares and support from Leica. Yada yada yada and I got me a Leica M11 ^[4] to complement the Q2M.

Overall I’m convinced that the Leica is a much more everyday camera than the Z9. Combined with a wide aperture lens, there isn’t any other camera-lens combination that has a better image quality to size ratio.^[5]

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1. Leica’s terminology for faster then f/2 but slower than f/1.2 lenses ↩︎

2. To be clear, I prioritized size over everything else - the Leica M system lacks autofocus and is eye wateringly expensive ↩︎

3. Further exacerbated by my other two high resolution bodies ↩︎

4. Many say the Leica Q system is the stepping stone to the Leica M system - I can see that now ↩︎

5. Some would say the Fujifilm X100V, Ricoh GR, even the Leica Q2 are lightweight alternatives, but I argue they are not 50mm ↩︎