Studio Test of the new M10 & a Lunch Time Walk

On Saturday I popped to the studio to give the Leica M10 a test.  Studio photography with a rangefinder is certainly not its strength, but with care its certainly an option.

This is a simple image taken on a plain white background, a main light and fill, plus a hair light and lights for the white background.

Now this background is not white because I coloured it in photoshop and gave it a slight radial gradient.  I’ll post a quick note on how to do this at a later date.

Where the Leica excels is in street photography.  So this lunchtime I took it out for the first time to the streets of Lincoln and the local coffee shops to take a few snapshots.

My old Leica M8 has a 1.3 crop factor while the M10 is 35mm full frame so it will take a while for me to get my eye in but I hope to get in plenty of practice over the next few weeks.

Heading out I took my first couple of shots of people wandering the streets, I was zone focused and had the ISO set to Auto at 1/f for shutter speed and the aperture at f/8.  With my M8 I would usually have the ISO set at 640 and hope to get a high enough shutter speed.  After chimping at the viewfinder after those first couple of shots I was disappointed to find them blurred, with a 50mm Summicron lens I was getting a shutter speed of 1/50 with the ISO being set by the camera at 100.  I quickly dived into the settings and set the auto iso to 1/2f, that should give me 1/100 as a minimum speed, but I may manually set it to 1/250 depending on how the next couple of days go.

The shots on the streets of Lincoln were decidedly average and not worth putting up here, so next I hit the coffee shop.  This was more challenging as I was shooting at around f/2 so had minimal depth of field.  I cheated by setting the focus using live view and focus peeking, this is the first camera I have had, that features this, but it is functionality that Sony and Fuji’s have had for sometime.

As you can see its fairly sharp.  The auto iso was capped at 1600 and this is what the camera set with a shutter speed of 1/90.  For ISO 1600 is quite clean; there is a touch of colour noise but nothing more then any other current camera, and a touch of noise reduction and grain has cleaned it up nicely without losing too much detail.

So far I am pleased with the results and look forward to testing out and really getting the hang of it over the coming weeks.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.