I've had three different Leica monochrome (Monochrom) cameras in my shopping carts in the last week. Thought I really wanted one. But then I looked back at stuff I converted and wondered what I was looking for in the first place...

 

My friend Will. 

I started out photographing back in the mid-1970s and the combination of the times and my budget helped push me into beginning my tenure in photography shooting and printing with black and white film. It was actually about four years into my time experiencing photography as a hobby that I finally felt comfortable trying color film. Color film, for me, was tricky back in the late 1970s. The color negative stuff was dreck and getting a good color print from a lab back then was damn pricey. Exposure with slide film was tricky --- at best. And mixed lighting was... a problem.  

I could make mistakes with black and white because I was buying Tri-X film in bulk and loading it into reusable film cartridges. My cost per roll was about fifty cents per. And my print cost was whatever the cost of a sheet of 8x10 inch paper was at the time. Keep in mind that this time period was before the Hunt Brothers tried to corner the market for silver. Once they did their market cornering stunt silver commodity prices soared by a factor of 5X. Kodak used the moment to increase the price of their printing paper and their film and, funny thing. even when silver came back down in price Kodak's retail prices never dropped. Again. Ever. 

For the first ten years in which I worked commercially as a photographer I would shoot either black and white or color film at the direction of my clients. If they wanted color that was great. If they wanted black and white I had a darkroom and could do that as well. And happily.  But all during those years (with a few exceptions for family vacations) if I was shooting personal work it was almost always with Tri-X. And from 1978 until 1996 if a client wanted black and white prints I did them myself, by hand, in my own darkroom. I never sent out B&W negatives to a printer. I'm certain that I put in more than those "ten thousand hours" that some people think lead to mastery of a process. I lived in the darkroom --- figuratively not actually. 

But when I transitioned to digital imaging in 1998 my biggest single hurdle was getting black and white tones in printed output that were at all satisfactory. Nearly everything I tried had color casts, milky looking mid-tones, plastic-y flesh tones and blown highlights. Around 2010 I finally got my color to black and white digital conversions sorted out. If I was careful I could get close to the tonalities that would have been a piece of cake in a traditional darkroom. By 2015 I think I got the process well nailed down. But I'd been snake bit by the long and winding (and bumpy) road to get there. Gun shy? Not so confident? Pretty much.

Part of the issue is that none of the later black and white work was driven by clients and I stayed so busy right up until March of 2020. With less practice and less time in personal post production than when I was immersing myself into the process at the beginning of my career. I just didn't have the endless hours to commit to trial and error that didn't pay off for work.

So now that I've made a conscious decision to step back a little bit from the relentless hustle I'm more or less picking up where I left off so many years ago. Back to a passion; or at least a greater interest, in all things black and white. Or, as they say on the tonier blogs: Monochrome.

Since I started photographing with various Leica and Panasonic cameras, and since post processing software has improved so much, I've been mostly very pleased with my results from a routine of shooting images using a high contrast, in camera, profile and then tweaking Jpeg files in Lightroom or PhotoShop. But my early failures nearly twenty years ago haunt my subconscious which, lately, tells me that there must be a reason so many people sing the praises of fully monochrome cameras. And most of those cameras on the market consist of four Leica models. There is the Leica M which was based on the Leica M9 (color with CCD sensor) body, the Leica M246 which was based on the 24 megapixel, CMOS sensor Leica M240, The Leica M10 M based on..... and the monochrome version of the Leica Q2 (called, The Q2M). All of these cameras are set up with sensors that have had the Bayer filter arrays stripped away. They also have firmware that writes the files to the camera memory as .DNG files so no intermediary programs are needed to get the B&W files into my favorite Adobe processing apps. No conversions in third party software needed. 

The marketing around all of these cameras points to a higher level of image quality in two major areas. First, since there is no Bayer pattern filter or interpolated color assignment scheme for the various pixels, the cameras are capable of higher sharpness. That's cool. I get that. And secondly, the cameras without filters in front of the sensors get more light to each pixel which yields a better performance at higher ISOs. Most of the monochrome cameras were on equal footing with their color counterparts at the usual, lower ISO settings but as the ISOs went up the spread in noise quality between the two increased as the ISO increased. A monochrome version might equal the look and overall noise of its cousins at settings up to 400 or 800 or even 1600 but a move to 3200 revealed the B&W camera to have a one stop noise advantage. But the clean performance is not linear. As the ISOs went up the spread between the color and B&W cameras increased by 1.5 than 2.0 stops and more.

So, the advantages are really threefold. 

One advantage is enhanced sharpness. The second is the improvement in low light/high ISO use which works well in conjunction with modern post processing apps. One can shoot at lower levels (think half to one stop underexposed) and then use shadow recovery to bring back shadow detail with much less noise while preserving highlight integrity. Finally, one bypasses the need to shift hues in post production to get a "look" as the look is baked in at the time of shooting. One can add traditional color filters (green, yellow, red, orange, blue) to the taking lenses to shift color tonalities at the time of exposure. By not having to make post processing decisions about color conversions there is less that needs to be done to get the images to final fruition. 

Some of my nagging doubts about using conventional color cameras and converting in post came from some less than excellent B&W files I kept getting when shooting with monochrome profiles in the stock Nikon, Canon and Sony cameras I tried. And that would go a ways to explaining my frustration and my resulting churn through camera systems in years past. Most of the systems were just fine in color but were never that convincing when shooting B&W files in camera; as Jpegs. 

If I wanted something out of those systems that matched my needs for a final image in monochrome I had to shoot in color, in a raw file, and then spend a lot of time working with contrast curves and HSL menus to get exactly the kinds of tones I wanted. Not an optimal solution for someone who never wants to spend hours working on one image. Not by a long shot. 

When I switched to Panasonic cameras I found a profile called L.Monochrome.D and it got me very close, right out of camera, to the kinds of tones I was looking for. I still had to add contrast to most of the images and still worked a lot to make that contrast fall in the mid-tones instead of globally through the frame. But when I switched to Leica cameras and started using their monochrome settings in the color cameras (with added contrast from a menu setting) I was mostly able to nail the tones I wanted. 

Leica, it seems, has added appropriate mid-tone contrast much in the same way that a yellow or orange filter would back from the B&W film days. So, since late fall of 2020 I've been working in black and white by shooting Jpegs with the appropriate profile + contrast tweaks with Leica cameras and I've been satisfied. But for those on tighter budgets I will say that the Panasonic S system cameras are very close in quality and style.  

One under-reported benefit of the Monochrome only Leicas is that they generate a .DNG file which can be pulled directly into PhotoShop via Adobe Raw and which gives one a huge range of tweak-ability in post. 

But in the back of my mind I kept thinking that there must be some advantage to the dedicated black and white versions of the Leica cameras, The Monochroms, otherwise why would people shell out the extra cash to buy and use a much more limited and niche camera? Surely if I researched the subject and was as dedicated to black and white imaging as I thought I was I would be able to suss out enough advantages to justify adding an Monochrom M camera to my dangerously expanding Leica inventory.

To that end I picked up four different M mount lenses. I read up on as much as I could find and watched every influencer video about monochrome photography with monochrom cameras I could source. And that's when I started putting M-M cameras in my shopping carts...

But uncharacteristically I kept hesitating. I'd go back the next day and the prize would have been snatched from my cart by a quicker and more determined buyer. Because nothing is ever yours until you push the "buy" button. 

Of the cameras out in the wild there are really only two that I'm interested in. One is the Leica Q2M but it's holding its pricing quite well. Still commanding over $6K for an excellent condition used one. Partly because the supply is so tight. If you want one you'll just have to pay for what's on offer... But also because Leica has been, until recently, the sole supplier of high quality B&W cameras. A limited supply for a market that seems to be growing by leaps and bounds. Driven also by a recent interest in black and white only photography by talented influencers like Alan Schaller. 

The other one would be the Leica M246 which is a model that arrived in 2012, around the same time as the Leica SL mirrorless camera. Those seem more plentiful but the idea of spending $3500 to $4000 for a ten year old camera just didn't sit right. If I was going to commit then I might as well try one of the Leica M10 M rangefinder versions instead. Mostly available for around $6K and up. 

I'm like that. Impressionable. Looking for technical solutions to what are, essentially, artistic problems. 

But then I had one of those moments in which the universe steps in and gives you unexpected guidance. My wonderful and reliable computer started crashing its finder and then started crashing when using anything from Lightroom to Mail. A computer that has been flawless since late 2017. 

I got on the phone with Apple Support and, after lots of diagnostics, figured out that I had an external disk that was dying and, since all the HDs are on a shared bus it was taking the system down with it. I pulled the disk, checked the file catalog and made sure that I had back-ups on other drives. I duplicated the disk again from a different HD onto a new drive. Plugged that new one into the system and breathed a sigh of relief. The old disk went into recycling. 

But in the process I decided to clean up my internal 2TB SSD to make sure it has at least 50% free space on it. And in that process I came across tons of black and white images that I'd been taking. And more and more of them. And I liked all of them. Which is to say that I like the tonality, the contrast range, the preservation of highlights and the overall look of them. Not just a little bit but very much. And I started to calm down about the "urgency" of getting one of those fine Leica Monochrom cameras to play with. 

I found several taken with a "lowly" Panasonic S5 (which apparently has the same sensor as the much more expensive Leica SL2-S) that were shot at 16,000 ISO and still looked just fine. I looked at images from a wide range of cameras. The Leica CL, the SL2, the SL and the Q2. All were slotted right into the range I think of as "optimal black and white." 

I'm fortunate. I could afford getting a stand alone camera from Leica for monochrome shooting if I really wanted it. But would I actually use it enough to justify the expenditure? The scale in my brain, after being exposed again to my current black and white work, tipped over, resoundingly, into the "no" column. I know myself in some regards. I know that a new (to me) Mono camera would get a lot of attention in the short run. My poor readers would get blasted with a plethora of blog posts extolling the virtues of it. But in short order I would remember how much I like color as well and I'd start reaching over the Mono camera to grab a more "well rounded" color model and head out to shoot clouds and mannequins, and buildings at sunset, that are drenched in color.  Understanding all the while that I now know how to make color files look great in "grayscale.". 

I'd like to get an M Leica. But not a monochrome one. I'm interested in finding a really nice silver M240. For no other reason than to play around once again with a rangefinder camera that outputs at a high enough resolution to be usable for any type of project. But cheap enough to not worry about. 

One benefit of the older M240 model is that the top and bottom plates are made of brass. Just like the first M camera I owned; an M3. A bit heavier, sure, but ...... "brassing." That's sublime. 

Computer is back to normal. No funds have left the vast VSL H.Q. to fund a monochrome camera. No therapy required to be comfortable shooting B&W and at the same time knowing that the camera can also shoot color. Happy to have been through the process of wanting, researching and ultimately passing on yet another camera. 

Waiting with much interest to hear JC's experience with the new Monochrome Pentax. Hope to hear about it soon!!!

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