Just how well does the Leica Q2 perform in its macro mode? And just how good is its noise performance?

Evening at Will's house. His separate studio/office in the background.

Mark checking messages in the mid-ground. A glass recently emptied of 

Champagne in the foreground.

When I purchased a Q2 I was not looking at it's close focusing performance and I was really less interested in how it handled noise at ISO 4000 and above than I was in how well it handled when operating it, and the overall quality of its files for general use. But after having used it for months now I find myself taking it everywhere. And using more of its other features...

I had the Q2 with me when I met novelist and essayist, Daniel Pinkney, on Friday evening at the Humanities Research Center at UT. I had it with me this morning when I went to buy fresh coffee beans at Trianon coffee, and it waited patiently for me in the car when I went to workout at the gym last evening. The camera is small and unobtrusive but can it perform? Short answer? Hell yeah. May be the perfect "dinner party" camera as well...

There are three things I didn't really explore in the first few months of its residence here. One is the macro mode. One is the ISO performance. And third is the camera's ability to focus well via the manual focusing mode. Which feels just like a well done SLR of old.

I want to write about the first two items here. Starting with macro. This camera makes shooting closer easy. You are still limited to the angle of view of the 28mm lens but with the simple twist of a ring closest to the camera's body you are able to extend focusing, complete with AF, a lot. The image just below shows the closest focus I can get on a bowl of peppers and fresh tomatoes. It's enough magnification to get in pretty tight. It's not a miracle setting and it's not going to give my Sigma 70mm Macro Art lens a run for its money but it gets you closer, cutting the full frame image in half. By which I mean it magnifies by about 50% more. It won't replace your dedicated macro rigs but it is very useful when you realize that you are working with a nearly 50 megapixel image which can be cropped without undo anxiety over image quality. And I mean cropped a great deal. 

This is as close as I could get to the flowers with the macro engaged. 

It's still a wide angle lens. You can see Mary's arm over in the right bottom 

corner. But the detail crop below showed me just how sharp the lens can be right on

the actual focused plane.

The photos of the tomatoes just above and just below are both from the same frame. The bottom frame is a 100% crop of the photo. There are two things of note. This was taken after dark in a dim kitchen and required a high ISO (ISO 6400) and a steady camera. The resulting file was a bit noisy. I expected that. But I ran it through the A.I. DeNoise noise reduction (new feature) in Lightroom to get a fairly noise free photo. I cropped in below to show off the wonderful, fine detail on the leaves of the tomato plant. The ones that are in the plane of focus. Pretty amazing detail given the slow shutter speed, of the handheld camera, and the high ISO which generally robs detail. And kudos to the in lens image stabilization. It just works.

I don't know if it's really visible but on close examination, in the 100% mag. frame above, I see some chromatic and luminance noise in the black area between the front two tomatoes. But given the 6400 ISO setting I think it's an excellent performance. I'm happy with it. 

Yesterday evening I posted a casual, black and white portrait of Will in a blog. I made the image into a monochrome. I thought you might want to see where I started from. What the color image looked like when it existed in LRC as a raw file. I am not AT ALL asking you to pick favorites. There are things about both that are good. I'm not looking for a critique or scoring. I think after 40+ years of shooting, printing and publishing I know what I'm looking for. I just wanted you to see "under the hood" so to speak. 

Will in color.

I'm still finding out just how much the Q2 can do. If I ever retire (and why would I?) the idea of just owning a Q2 and maybe a companion Q2M seems awfully tempting. And carefree. Pondering the future is always a bit dangerous.