What kind of weather was that in Hamburg on New Year's Day? I have rarely seen the Elbe so foggy. Ideal conditions to try out my two "new" Leicas on a New Year's walk. The SL2's autofocus in particular was pushed to its limits in these low-contrast conditions. To put it bluntly: no, the AF of the Leica SL2 worked perfectly even when the seagulls were flying quickly and uncontrollably.
I was even more excited about using my new Leica Monochrom outdoors for the first time. I bought the camera used last week. I got into this particular game very late. This type of camera body has been around since July 2012. It still has a CCD sensor with 18MP. The basis is the Leica M9 and since it does not have a Bayer film in front of the sensor, it can only record grayscale. A splendid anachronism, rather than that of many commented shaking his head wurde.
I've always found this approach interesting, but I have a much cheaper and faster analog one Leica MP and can insert a black and white film at any time. Now I found a Leica Monochrom that wasn't quite that expensive, had a freshly replaced sensor and just over 11000 releases under its belt. Even during my first attempts at walking, I was fascinated by what felt like ten thousand shades of gray. The noise is also significantly less noticeable - even compared to current sensors.
So now fog. I screwed that onto it Noctilux. Because of the high basic ISO - due to the lack of a color film in front of the sensor, at 320 it is twice as high as the Leica M9 with a color sensor - I needed a 3x ND filter despite the not that bright daylight. A bit much technology, right? Anyway – here are the pictures!
Of course, wonderfully reduced photos are also possible with the Leica SL2 despite the color sensor and converting them to black and white is of course possible. The difference is the approach. But of course that can't be seen in the final results.
Let's move on to the autofocus of the Leica SL2 mentioned above, which had a very high hit rate. I suspect that I wouldn't have had a better rate of sharp images with the highly praised Sony A7RIII - which I've been using for sports for a year and a half without any problems. I am only writing about this matter-of-factness of current modern cameras because there are critical reports online about the autofocus of the Leica SL2. These people probably have problems with the camera because the AF on the SL2 works completely differently than on other bodies.
Here are three examples that I photographed during the New Year's walk - I could show dozens more, but that will probably just bore you. Please do not pay attention to the JPG artifacts in the color gradients - of course they are not there in the original and are only due to the strong compression here for the web.
I set the AF mode to Zone. So I just had to make sure that a seagull was within the relatively large area of the AF fields. The camera then captured the flying seagull with high precision and I was able to take my picture. For the AF profile I sometimes used team sports and sometimes wild animals. The continuous autofocus profiles specified by Leica both showed excellent results.
As I said: given the low-contrast conditions of the New Year's walk, I would definitely have excused a poorer hit rate for the Leica SL2. I am even more convinced that the SL2 is better than its reputation. I look forward to further activities with this Leica. With the monochrome anyway – a wonderfully unlikely pair.
Oh yes: did you actually know that I have a Twitter account? There I have Something shown on New Year's Eve, which over 350 people liked. Maybe you would have liked it too.
