Leica Q2 Monochrom Reporter
It’s really not about the gear. Usually. This was a camera I never thought about much and certainly didn’t think I needed. Until I thought about it. Photographing with a camera that captures images only in black and white is different than shooting in color and converting it, even when you see the image before-hand and know it will end up black and white. In this case, it is about the gear because there is no other option.
The Leica Q2 Monochrom Reporter (the Q2MR) is by far the camera I’ve spent the least time thinking about before I actually purchased it. Usually I spend months on end pouring over every single review and digging for every little tidbit about a new camera before I’m willing to fork out my hard earned money for it. I usually know more about a camera than the sales person trying to get me to buy the camera. It’s strange that it was different in this instance because the Q2MR is by far the most expensive camera I’ve purchased. From the moment I first thought, “You know, there might be something to that . . .” and started to look at Leica’s range of Monochrome cameras to buying the Q2MR was probably 3 weeks. Certainly less than a month. I hadn’t even thought of the Leica Q2 model until I started thinking about a monochrome-only camera.
But leave it to me to buy a Leica without a red dot on it. How am I supposed to express my Leica snobbery without flaunting the red dot? (Ann swears I have risen to the task and have attained the full heights of Leica snobbery even without the dot.) And I bought a green camera to boot! Unless someone knows what they’re looking at, they might think it was a toy! Oh, but what a toy!
The camera has heft that belies its size. It’s built like a tank. And in all respects, it is a Leica. It has an autofocus lens, but flip a lever on the lens and it is in manual mode. And then the smooth action of the lens focusing ring sends one (read: me) back in time to the lovely feel of manual focus lenses. There is even a depth of field scale etched on the lens for those of us who love to zone focus when photographing landscapes.
The Q2MR even has a macro mode that you engage with the turn of a collar that is impressive in the results it can produce.
And the camera has optical stabilization.
All that while maintaining a simplicity in camera (and menu) design that puts most modern cameras to shame. It is a photographer’s camera. Perhaps not a working sports photographer’s camera, but a photographer who loves to practice one’s craft, who loves the tactile process of photographing and of using very nice gear.
There was much I didn’t know about the Q2 series of cameras, even up to the point of when I entered the Leica store in Munich to “just look” at one. From the moment I picked the Q2MR up and turned the lens ring, I was hooked. When I turned it on and saw the monochrome viewfinder, the hook was set. Ann probably knew before I did that I was not going to walk out of the store empty handed.
The Q2MR has a fixed 28 mm lens on it. It is not my favorite field of view. But it’s not the only view one has. Oddly enough, the raw file in Capture One downloads an image that is actually a 24 mm field of view (but that’s what C1 does, unlike in Lightroom, which converts a 28mm-framed image). So if the 28mm isn’t quite wide enough, I often know I’ll have the image I want on the raw file. There’s also a button on the upper right back that allows you to change frame lines within the eyepiece so you see frames for 35mm, 50 mm and 75 mm focal lengths, allowing me to frame images using focal lengths I prefer much more than 28 mm. Given it’s a 47 megapixel sensor, even the 75 mm crop gives a useable output, though I wouldn’t want to blow that image up too much. Importantly, the frame lines allow me to compose the image as I see it instead of having to think about cropping all the time (which is what I need to do with the raw file when its downloaded because the raw file always captures everything).
And the Q2MR images are exquisite, both tonally and in resolution.
One advantage with the sensor being monochrome is that filters that allow a sensor to “see” color have been removed from between the lens and sensor, and there is no “interpolation” of the pixels to try and render colors correctly. This means you not only get straight tonal values from your image with the Q2MR, your image is even sharper than from the regular color version Q2 because there are no intervening filters to distort the light rays and no computer wizardry needed to rebuild the image’s tonal values. And, the low-light/high-ISO ability of the sensor (remember - no light lost to the intervening filter) is amazing. I never Imagined I’d be able to hand hold a night image like the one below.
At this stage, I’ve done no real landscape photography with the camera. Life got turned upside-down right after I got the Q2MR (for the better we think), but that has not stopped me from using the Q2MR to make images I probably would not have made otherwise. Even with an abstract image like the one below, I way more often than not focus the camera manually instead of using autofocus. It’s simply a joy using this camera.
And while we haven’t made any major landscape photography trips yet, my first efforts at photographing nature have been gratifying.
I’m looking forward to doing some real landscape work with the Q2MR. Not the least because it will take me back to my old film days where I can use colored filters to manipulate certain tonal values to enhance the black and white image that is recorded on the sensor.
As I said, the moment I thought about what a camera like the Q2MR meant for the craft of photographing with it, I was doomed. And I haven’t regretted it one single bit!