Yes. I've spent some time with the Leica DLUX8. Good acquisition or big mistake? As usual, I actually used it before I decided.

 Added on Sunday after seeing many Jpeg files: Good Acquisition? Yes. Very much so.

I bought the Leica DLUX8 camera. It came in on Thursday. I had already read the manual and watched the smarter influencers on YouTube talk about what they liked and didn't like. I was pretty sure the camera would be capable and nicely designed. I wasn't prepared for how tiny it is "in person." It's small. Really small. Which makes me happy that mine came with a half case that has a built-in front grip. I also got a thumb grip that fits into the hot shoe. Together they make the camera a better fit for my medium sized hands. 

I guess the reason I thought the camera was bigger is that on YouTube the "influencer/reviewers" are constantly holding the camera in front of themselves out toward the filming camera; the filming cameras generally have short focal lengths and so the size relationships are all skewed. It's an odd thing, expectations. But really, if you are one of those tender users who can't bear to walk around with a camera heavier than a creme filled donut you'll like this one. Used on a strap I constantly had to check and see if the camera had floated away. It's pretty light...

After four years of lugging around the brick they call The Leica SL2  I suppose it will take me some time to get used to its opposite. 

I know some photo bloggers love to get those links reviews out to the public before they have ever seen or touched a particular camera or lens. Perhaps it's more fair to say that they have made new camera introductions just a jumping off point that triggers a long flood of writing about something else. But I guess the point I've made for years now is that the only way to really get to know how a camera works, how well a camera works, and how well a camera will work for you is to get one in your hands and give it a spin. Use it the way you use your other cameras. Shoot the same kinds of stuff so you end up with some sort of basis for comparison. Right? Passing along the consensus of other people's reviews is hardly the way to "review" a camera. 

In terms of understanding the DLUX8's operation I had a bit of a head start since so much of the menu in the new camera matches the menus in three of my other cameras. In fact, the set up, including mapping out three custom profiles, took about ten minutes. The rest of my downtime was just waiting for batteries to charge. 

I didn't think I would miss a dedicated charger but in fact I do. I'm not remarkably thrilled at having to charge the four batteries I bought, one at a time, in the camera. Mostly because it means I can't use the camera while I'm in the process of charging batteries. Drat. Ah well, I'm sure, if I really, really like using the camera a lot, I'll source a third party charger that works. In the meantime I'll make do.

I started using the camera in earnest yesterday. B&B and I all got in the studio limousine and headed toward San Antonio, Texas to meet my brother's family, and my late sister's family, and a small subsection of my brother-in-law's family at a favorite Mexican food restaurant in what would have been my younger sister's 65th birthday. A remembrance of sorts. 

I'm always mortified if I am ever late; either for a casual social event or a time limited client engagement. I presumed that there would be traffic galore on Friday afternoon and so we headed down with two and a half hours set aside to make the trip. In the old days, pre-everyone-moved-to-Austin, we could make the trip to San Antonio in about an hour. Yesterday, with multiple full stop delays, we drove up to the restaurant with two minutes to spare. White knuckle driving on a busted up highway layered with four lanes of crazy, young people in giant pick-up trucks interwoven with looming and zooming 18 wheelers.

We sat on the patio under a nice, diaphanous shade, and had a really great meal. The main attraction though was my nephew's brilliant, sharp, funny and precocious almost two year old son, Ira. He was just amazing. He got through a two hour, grown up event without a single issue and spent the whole time reminding all of us just how much fun childhood can be. He "ordered" the kid's quesadilla plate. And enjoyed tearing apart the cheese-packed tortilla before consuming it. We did not let him order from the bar. 

I was at the far end of a long string of tables from the kid but it was the perfect opportunity to break out the DLUX8 and snap away with the lens extended to its maximum focal length; a 75mm equivalent. The camera focused and metered without issue and handled a bit of backlighting with grace.

After dinner the three of us, B & B & me headed back to Austin and endured yet another atrocious trip. This time traffic on this main highway that runs north to south was funneled down from four lanes to one lane which brought all the cars and trucks to a complete stop for the better part of half an hour while people figured out how to compress into one lane without chaos breaking out. 

This morning was filled with errands and routines. Since I won't be here for most of next week I wanted to make sure bills were paid for the business and that all the jobs which had come in recently were done and dusted. Final images delivered and invoices tendered. Then I needed to go by the Apple store and pick up a new iMac for the house. My delightful spouse/CFO had been working on a hand-me-down iMac from 2013 and it finally hit the point where we couldn't upgrade the OS to anything recent enough to satisfy the security requirements of our banks and brokerages. We ordered a custom build earlier in the week... Now she's better equipped than is my studio. A new machine with an M4 processor, 24 Gigs of memory and a Terabyte of SSD storage. Nice. But, of course, I am further down in the "corporate" hierarchy so going to the Apple store and shlepping computers back to home base is part of my responsibilities. Of course I made it to swim practice, etc. 

But when all the boxes on my list had a bold check mark on them it was time to find a shade-full hat and take the new camera arrival out for a more varied spin. I set it up as a fully automatic camera for today. Program automation. i-AF engaged, Auto-ISO on tap and I headed to the ever crowded and kinetic S. Congress Ave. Home of Jo's Coffee, the Hermés shop and so much more. 

The camera is quick to operate. The automatic white balance works well --- as demonstrated by the interior shots of fluorescent lit Allen's Boot Store. The exposures were mostly right on the money --- or at least as accurate as most other cameras I've used. And the battery life was actually much, much better than I had been led to believe (running firmware 1.4).

There is only one thing I'm not really fond of with the new camera. When it's turned on the lens extends and it looks dorky that way. The package looks so nice with the lens retracted... But it's something I'm sure I'll get used to. 

I shot a couple hundred images in both .DNG and Jpeg and I did minimal processing to the ones I'm showing here. Most of which started life as raw files. The raw files in this camera are limited to 12 bits but they are actually healthy and rich. A great starting point for more involved post processing. Lots of leeway in shadow lifting and what not. I processed in Lightroom Classic.

I am happy enough with the results so I'll toss this camera and its little flash into the camera backpack and take it along with me to Santa Fe on Monday. Might press it into use for some social, candid photos at one of the receptions. Talk about stealthy....

As far as file size goes the Jpegs out of the camera will be just right. I'll shoot in raw and Jpeg just to be sure. That's about all I can tell you about this little camera right now except for one more thing... the EVF really is as good as most fans of the camera say it is. Nice, bright, sharp and detailed. Just what this photographer asked for. Does that make it "worth the purchase price?" As always, that's your call. 

Some captions interspersed below.

Allen's Boots. No need for the macro setting, the lens focuses nice and close in its normal mode. 

all of the boot details shots were done handheld, depending on the image stabilization to save me.

Mostly as combinations like 1/25th of a second shutter, f2.8 aperture, ISO 400. 

Detail in the Hermés show window. Standing in my own shadow to block glare on the glass.

I never remember the name of this little shop but they always do great decor. 

A wreath of colored eggs for Easter! Again, I was excited to work close in and get details (below) without having to resort to the macro mode on the camera. 

and, of course, it was vital to ensure that the new camera could do a decent job with our treasured tradition of mannequin photography. It passed. 

sure. I bet....

Family resemblance --- loving those reds!!!

Shadows, highlights, full sun. And a dog.

Open Road Stetson in straw weave. Still not approved by resident hat critic, John. 

We abide by his preferences on this having no objectivity of our own...

And we end this blog with a quiet contemplation of cappuccino. 

Heading to Santa Fe, NM. early tomorrow morning. Looking forward to the change of venue.

After a weekend of pulling out stacks of paper, moving filing cabinets, rolling up carpets and other prep work for house upgrades there was a lot of pent up desire to be outside with a fun camera.

 

I've been shooting in Jpeg+Raw lately with the M 240, mostly to give myself a choice, when I review files, between black and white and color. The image above looked much better to me in black and white while most of the files below seemed to depend on color to carry the day. 

The Leica M 240 and the 50mm Voigtlander lens seem to be a perfect match. When I use wider lenses on that body, especially the 28mm, you have to move your eye around the finder to really see the frame lines with any degree of accuracy. And that's presuming that the framelines are accurate in the first place. A big assumption given parallax and the changing magnification as the lens focuses toward the minimum focusing distance. The 35mm focal length is the last stop before the inconvenience of wider angle lenses seeps in. I was going to go through the process of finding just the right diopter attachment so I would not have to wear my glasses with the wider angle lenses but I've pretty much decided that in the same way the Q2 is a camera with a fixed 28mm lens and the Fuji X100V is a fixed 35mm lens, the M240 might most comfortably be considered a camera with a fixed 50mm lens. At least the way I use it.

At some point, if I ever warm up to using the 28mm on the rangefinder I'll hunt down a very nice 28mm bright line finder to put into the accessory shoe of the camera. Then I'll focus through the regular finder and then compose with the bright line accessory finder. But for now? I'll keep sticking the 28mm on the front of the SL2 and be happy with it. Or, alternately, I'll stop worrying about where the edges of the frame lines are in the M 240 finder and just merrily shoot without making a big deal out of it. It's not like I'm using this particular lens and camera combination for client work, after all.

I could lie and chalk up the performance here to the fantastic dynamic range of a decade old sensor or I could be honest and admit that I started with a dark file, used an A.I. filter to accentuate the color and contrast of the sky, then made another layer in Lightroom and used the brush tool to select the area under the eaves and on the wall adjacent to the eaves and in shadow. Once selected I color corrected the underlying area (it was too blue), warmed up the white on the sign with the hand, and opened up the exposure on the underlying area as well. I finished it off by adding some clarity slider to the selection but not to the global frame since I wanted the sky to go out of focus. Lightroom makes area by area corrections much easier to do now and I rarely have to go into PhotoShop to get what I want.

Why am I happy with the frame above? Well, I screwed up the exposure by one stop. I forgot about the 1/4000th of a second limit and, using ISO 500 and f4.0, I overexposed and subsequently got into an argument with my camera. But I was able to pull back the details in the file by reducing the exposure in post. I'd read that the sensor in this camera and earlier M digital cameras had limited dynamic range but I think this is a repudiation of some of that reporting. Sure, if you are off by two stops I'm betting your file is screwed but one half or even one stop? Worth a try every time. Or....you could just take the time to get the exposure correct. (Red-faced with shame....). 

the City of Austin likes murals. They'll commission people to paint them on just about anything. 

Above and below= Two versions of the same frame. Color and "Monochrome" AKA: black and white. 

I went back and forth but after looking at them for a while I decided that I like the black and white version better. Not sure why. Retro charm?

Great idea but I'm pretty sure Willie doesn't want the job and wouldn't like the salary....

On this image and several below I used the Lightroom feature: Lens Blur to selectively blur the background. You'll note that because it analyzes the original frame to determine it's "depth" via a 3D mapping routine the focus falls off in a natural progression the further it "extends" away from the main subject. You can control the amount and intensity of the fall off as well as modifying the range of the effect. I absolutely love it and will probably never have to buy a fast lens ever again (kidding? maybe). 

A bit overdone in these examples but easier to see that way....

Nothing beats an A to B comparison, right?

Top one is with the Lens Blur filter using default settings. 

The bottom image is unfiltered. As it appears right out of camera. 

Not a huge difference but enough. 

One click. that's it. No time having to select the subject, etc. 

This is either machine learning or artificial intelligence but whichever it is

I like it.

I used a "dramatic sky" filter from the LRC presets and toned it down by 50%. 

Is any day really complete without a dose of Mannequin? Especially a mannequin with what appears to be a pyramid in the background. 

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