Leica M9-P for budding Cartier-Bressons

The Leica M9 is unique in that it packs a full-frame sensor into a compact camera body. If you’ve ever used one of the film-based Leicas or the digital M8, you’ll find both the handling and the build quality of the latest version, the M9-P, familiar — and it will take almost every M-series bayonet lens going back to 1954. What’s more, the focal lengths are correct. You can finally use digital the way you used film, with the bonus that you get even better image quality.

The M9-P is a sort of “stealth M9″: it doesn’t say Leica on the front, and it doesn’t have the usual red dot. This makes it look inconspicuous, especially compared to the average professional DSLR. It’s also very quiet: there’s no SLR mirror noise, and the shutter is almost silent. In sum, it’s the camera of choice for professional documentary and reportage work, and for the sort of candid “street photography” pioneered by early Leica users such as the late, great HCB himself.

In the UK, Leica offers a half day of free instruction to M9-P buyers, which I did with Brett. Since I’d used rangefinder cameras in the 1960s, before cheap SLRs took over, this turned into something of a nostalgia trip. However, people who have grown up with modern cameras could find the M9-P something of a culture shock. For example, it doesn’t have automatic focusing or built-in flash. And while it does have aperture-priority automatic exposure, I ending up taking almost all my snaps on full manual. Taking the first shot on auto provides a preview that you can check on the LCD screen. After that, you can adjust the manual settings to get the effect you want.

I must confess that I still repeated the mistakes of my youth. I took quick snaps while forgetting to remove the lens cap, and some that were out of focus or badly exposed. I also resorted to old tricks such as manually prefocusing on a certain zone where a shot might come up, and shooting candids underarm without looking through the viewfinder. The M9-P does have a “snapshot setting”, but in general, it encourages a slower, more thoughtful approach to photography. It’s not like taking snapshots with an auto-everything compact.

Using 35mm and 50mm prime lenses, I even rediscovered the use of my legs. Lacking a zoom lens, you have to move around to frame things. But if you can’t get exactly what you want, the 18 megapixel CCD provides so much real resolution — and such smooth resolution — that you can do the final crop on a PC. Leica provides a copy of Adobe Lightroom so users can “develop” the standard 5212 x 3472 pixel DNG (RAW) digital negatives, though I had the M9-P set to produce JPEG pictures as well.

In use

The M9-P is a solid camera with relatively few controls. The main one is the shutter speed dial, which goes from 8 seconds to 1/4000th and includes A for Auto-exposure plus B for Bulb (long exposures). The back has the 2.5in LCD screen, menu buttons and the usual circular 5-way controller. The buttons and menus are not identical to the ones on other cameras I’ve tried, but they work in the familiar way.

To take a picture, you set the aperture on the lens and the camera works out the shutter speed. You can see the number in the viewfinder and a red dot indicates the “correct” exposure. Setting a smaller aperture increases depth of field, but means using a slower shutter speed. Leica lenses are fast and famously good, so you tend to use wide apertures and fast shutter speeds.

Manual focusing is performed by turning a ring on the lens until two images are superimposed in the centre of the viewfinder. (Remember, you don’t see through the shooting lens, as with an SLR, so the viewfinder image always looks sharp.) This is the bit beginners will need to practice.

The M9-P’s centre-weighted metering generally works well. However, there are no “scenes” settings for unusual lighting situations such as sunsets, night scenes, or photographing people against the light so you have to check the preview and make manual adjustments as required. This should be a standard part of every photographer’s armoury, though smart compact cameras are trying to automate it away.

Of course, some automatic compact cameras and most DSLRs allow you to make the same adjustments, or take full manual control…. but I suspect few people make use of them. With the M9-P, there’s enough automation to get you going, but the manual controls soon become obvious, and you’ll use them because you get better results. This feels rewarding, and is part of the pleasure of Leica photography: you are in control.

A larger part is the quality of the results from the sensor, which is more than good enough for a double-page spread in Vogue, and could possibly fill a billboard. A 35mm frame has an area of 864 square millimetres, which is more than twice the area of the APS-C sensor (370 square millimetres) used in many consumer-oriented DSLRs. A top quality compact camera is usually 43, while the iPhone 4 manages 15.5. Sensor size matters more than megapixels.

Whether you can afford Leica quality is another matter. My loan outfit consisted of an M9-P body (£5,395) with a 35mm f/1.4 Summilux (£3,447) and a 50mm f/2 Summicron (£1,466). Either way, Leica’s German craftsmen are finishing as many as they can, and there’s still a waiting list for the M9-P.

The M9-P isn’t going to win any specification wars, but the feel and finish, and the quality of the results, do make a difference. I enjoyed using the M9-P, and miss it now it’s gone.

Links: You can see Brett’s pictures on Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/fotografiebrett/4507123547/

and there’s a Flickr group for M9 and M9-P users http://www.flickr.com/groups/leicam9/

Making Leica Lenses

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6bux2WBzx0

Henri Cartier-Bresson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson