When the weather is fine it's so refreshing to take a small camera and a 35mm lens and get one's 10K+ steps in. Something about this 10+ year old camera that makes files sing...

I have been progressively warming up to the Leica M240 cameras and a nice, little collection of M mount lenses. While I used M6 cameras extensively back in the 1990s I spent the intervening years working mostly with SLR cameras across formats. It takes a bit of time and a lot of shoe leather to get back into shape and comfortable with both rangefinder focusing and also looking through an optical viewfinder that doesn't give you feedback (other than the small, coincident rangefinder patch) about what is in and out of focus. Or by what degree. The finder always shows everything sharp from front to back regardless of whether you are using a fast, short telephoto lens with the aperture wide open or a 28mm lens stopped down to f16. You have to imagine the effect focal length and aperture will have on the final image as it pertains to depth of field. 

I think many of us expect that cameras have changed, in terms of technical performance capabilities, quite a lot over the past ten to fifteen years and that a camera introduced in 2012 would be at a constant disadvantage when compared to the latest BSI sensor equipped cameras; and I know this is a prejudice that I carry around as well. But progress is rarely linear. And most of the places where the last decade's performance metrics have changed are to be found in the extremes of the performance envelopes. Not in the center where the lot of us day time shooters operate, mostly.

We always expect that the latest cameras will overwhelm older units in clearly observable ways and we'll find the older cameras wanting which will motivate us to....upgrade. 

I can see clearly that the sensor in the Leica SL2-S, and similar recent cameras, is a much better performer at ISOs above 800 than the plain Jane CMOS sensor in the M240 cameras. But so much of my photography seems to happen these days during the daylight hours and not in low light levels where the performance differences become obvious. 

For quite a while my inherent laziness led me to use the older M240 mostly in a Jpeg mode. Partly it was because I was experimenting with black and white right out of the camera. But mostly because I felt like I could get close enough to getting consistently well exposed and correctly white balanced images without the hassle of raw processing and the burden of bigger files. As in many things I found I was wrong to consider the overall image quality of the camera by working solely with its Jpeg files. During the last few weeks I decided to bite the bullet, buy a couple more 12 Terabyte hard drives, and start shooting all of the M cameras in DNG. The universal raw format. I wanted to take advantage of the upgrade from 8 bit, compressed Jpeg files to the 14 bit, uncompressed DNG files to see how much of a difference I could detect in the final results. I also wanted to be able to shoot with cameras with the lens profiles turned off in camera so I could apply the much more precise, non-Leica system profiles for lenses from Zeiss and Voigtlander when post processing in Lightroom Classic. 

I'm glad I've been photographing this way because I can see an obvious difference in the final quality between the two file types. It becomes especially evident with images that need shadows lifted in post or highlights preserved. It's also obvious in files that require color grading and hue corrections. The DNG files are clearly superior. Finally, shooting in raw allows me to use the very powerful A.I. Noise Reduction in Lightroom's latest rev which helps the 2012 sensor in those cameras to better compete with the sensors in newer cameras. I worked carefully on photos taken on three different afternoons on S. Congress Ave. in the past week and there's not much about the resulting images left for me to want to improve. Due diligence makes the camera a much better and closer competitor to newer models. And makes me appreciate them more.

I used the cameras exclusively with a weird 35mm lens this week. Instead of the Zeiss 35mm Biogon (f2.0) I've been using a Voigtlander 35mm f1.4 Nokton MC type 2 lens. With the 35mm focal length I've been more interested in using the wider angle of view to give context to my shots. With that in mind I've been making good use of f5.6 and f8. I am extremely happy with the level of detail that lens provides at those apertures. The sharpness and fine detail is pretty amazing but at the same time the contrast doesn't become overwhelming. The overall look is one of high sharpness but with mellow contrast. A nice combination for most outside images. 

I hope to have a chance in the near future to use the cameras and some of the faster lenses I have for them in more traditional dark settings. Theater, convention events, evenings out. I'm anxious to see how more attentive processing, more bit depth, and better incorporation of A.I. noise reduction change my appreciation for the M240 cameras. Here are samples: 

A motorcycle with a "Rue du Faubourg" plate on it. 

Parked in front of the Austin Hermés store. 

A referent to the store's original location in Paris.

I wonder what an Hermés camera strap for a Leica costs....