Fun little cameras and their facility for traveling light.

 

For all the years I worked professionally as a photographer I would inevitably approach vacations as yet another permutation of the professional life of a cameraman. I'd pack a "really good" camera, the three lenses I held in highest regard at the time, a second matching body, plenty of batteries and maybe even a small table top tripod. Out the door with a camera bag I would guess I was carrying ten or fifteen pounds over that left shoulder. Always the left shoulder. Don't know why...

But when I finally decided to retire from the day to day work of being a commercial photographer I decided to do it in the very most binary way: a total abandonment of anything that even remotely smelled like a client driven assignment. No exceptions. 

Once that switch flipped I felt a sense of relief when it comes to organizing for a trip. When we went to Chicago four weeks ago I packed the a small, consumer-esque Leica DLUX8 and the Q2. A couple extra batteries and....absolutely nothing else photographic. No identical back-up cameras. No specialty cameras. No interchangeable lenses. No tripods. It was... freeing. 

B. and I walked everywhere. At least 10,000 steps a day. And as you can imagine the DLUX8 over one shoulder felt like a feather; especially compared to toting around a couple of Leica SL2s and a couple of prime lenses. The smaller camera trades ultimate image quality for speed, comfort and, actually, flexibility. 

The small camera will never match the ISO performance of the SL2-S or the SL3-S but for all those photos we tend to take between sun up and sun down I'm hard pressed to worry about the difference. 

I thought the small batteries in the DLUX8 would be problematic but one in the camera and two in the pocket were enough for even the most photo intensive day of shooting, with lots of chimping and reviews.

When I was working every day I dreamed of vacations on which I would walk around with two Leica rangefinders. One equipped with a 28mm lens and the other with a 50mm lens. In my imagination I'd walk down long streets and pull one of the cameras up to my eye and grab just the right shot and then, a block later it would be the other camera with the other lens and it would be just right for that shot. 

I have to say though that while I had successes with two rangefinders on a personal trip to Montreal the  nice EVF and the quick automation of the little point and shoot camera was faster to use and actually gave me better Jpeg color and quicker lock on for AF. At least when comparing the DLUX8 to a pair of M240s...

I thought to myself that I should buy a second one, you know, as a back-up. But then it dawned on me that nothing in the near future would depend on the reliability or fallibility of my camera. If I'm on vacation in any civilized city a broken camera (if it's the only one) can quickly be replaced at a camera store or big box electronic store in short order. In fact, if the vacation is for family fun I could forgo getting another camera altogether and press the ubiquitous iphone into service. I can always circle back to a fun location at another time to get whatever artsy photos I might have missed the first time. Not something I could have willingly said back when work cloudy my recreational thinking...

While my first impulse it to always buy a back-up camera when I become satisfied with a recently purchased camera it feels healthier to change away from that impulse and spend more time looking than shooting. 

I recently compared the two versions of the DLUX8; the chrome, 100 year anniversary model and the basic black model. I bought the black one because the chrome one looked cheesy in photos. But when I compared them in person, side-by-side, the 100 year model looked really good. Really nice. Now I wish I'd spent the extra $200. 

The image at the top of the blog is a quick shot of cloud's swirling around a high rise in Chicago. I looked up and the image was there. The clouds were moving quickly. I pulled the little camera up, zoomed the lens out to its longest focal length and shot three frames before the clouds moved on and moved away. The image relied on getting organized quickly. 

I would not have gotten it if I'd been shooting with one of my M cameras and needed to stop and change lenses, etc. The final image might have been better but timing insisted that it would never have existed. 

Everything is a tradeoff. You get to pick the combination of features and performance you imagine will work for you. 

Loving the small camera concept. Doesn't have to be a Leica. One of my favorite small cameras of all time was the Canon G10. Wish I still had one. I think...