A Day with Leica

Today I obey Sony Alpha and join Leica. The outing was organized by Photo Malaysia and Schmidt Marketing. Leica is the Rolls-Royce in camera industry. So the price and quality is all at premium level. There were two groups of user, black and white film and digital. I was in the digital group and given a Leica M8 loan unit. Even though it was 30 minutes of usage, it has proven I am a lousy photographer and M8 is a good camera. The specialty of M8,

1. It's a rangefinder. What you see from viewfinder is what you get, no darker nor brighter. Just it doesn't has DOF preview as SLR.

2. The viewfinder will display the gird/guide line for framing, thus different focal lens will have different square size. I always hard to frame (although just 30minutes of usage).

3. No autofocus. All focus done by my index finger. The middle view finder will display the split image, just match it at ur subject. The difficulty when focus subject is not in the middle. Bye bye multipoint auto focus.

4. The camera is light so hardly notice shaky hand. Also the mechanism is simple, just a nice 'qichak' buzz.

5. No funny stuff like vivid mode and stitch shot. All you have are Aperture or Manual (self define shutter speed and aperture). Thanks Leica there is continuous shutter and timer.

6. Aperture dial from lenses. The Manual mode will have metering info to tell you dial up or down. Cool! (because it make me feel like driving an antic Rolls Royce with Turbo)

7. No zoom lens. Save the zoom effects with SLR.

8. Small body size. Can shoot like lomography (shoot from hip).
9. THE MOST IMPORTANT POINT. VERY CLEAN AND CRISPY IMAGE. POISONEOS!!!

I am happy to be a 30 minutes Leica user. In the afternoon we back to Schmidt HQ to attend seminar. Sifu Teng Wei enlighten us with colour management stuff. It's technical as attend a degree course, but it does clear many doubts and mysteries happen in digital photography workflow. Finally we receive a Leica T-shirt (which wear by the Leica promoter) and two prints of best shot. Not a bad day since we paid registration fee. Ok, Sony AMC I am coming back now.