Hey everyone what’s going on welcome back to a new video today we’re diving into the Leica q2 now I’ve been looking into picking up a daily carry camera for quite some time now I’ve tested quite a few of them including the fuji x100v as well as some other just kind of film point and shoots and I kind of landed on this as something that I wanted to try to pick up instead of buying it because this camera is incredibly expensive I just wanted to rent it for the week and see if I enjoyed using it and I think I could safely say that this camera is pretty incredible I’ve had a really a fun time using this and I want to kind of dive in today and to show you guys some sample images and just explain to you what makes this camera so special and if I see this potentially fitting into my kind of everyday carry scenario.
so let’s get into the video so initially when i was researching on youtube i wanted to you know kind of see what kinds of videos were already out on this camera and i didn’t really find a lot there’s a few videos out that i watched and you know kind of found some valuable information but a lot of them were just kind of focusing on the specs and not really what this camera is actually like to use in everyday scenario and that was really what i was interested in using this camera for so i figured i would pick it up for the week and just kind of make a video on it because i know probably a lot of you guys out there as well maybe not a lot of you but i’m sure some of you watching this video you know who you are or potentially looking to pick up this camera and this video is for you this video is also for you know all of you guys as well who just want to see what this camera can do newsflash it’s pretty incredible i was not really expecting a lot i had a few friends who have tested this camera before and also the original leica q and they have said nothing but amazing things about it.
so I you know obviously had their opinions but I did want to kind of you know shoot this camera for myself and see if it fit into how I like to shoot so I do want to preface this video again by saying that I did rent this camera I have not bought this camera as of today I’m definitely thinking about buying it and you know if you guys want to hear my final thoughts on if I will be purchasing this camera stick around to the end of the video but I think I just want to preface it by saying you know this is a very unbiased review this is my first Leica digital camera I had a couple of Leica m6s throughout the years and I did love those.
but I really did want to try out lika’s digital side of things and see if that really kind of piqued my interest another thing that I did want to know before picking up this camera you know and this is kind of the main reason why I wanted to try out this camera is that I haven’t really used a digital camera in a long time that’s really been enjoyable to use I think my eos r5 is an incredible camera and I shoot a lot of work stuff with that camera but I want just a small camera that I can bring around and you know shoot my life with and I think that’s where this camera really fits in nicely with that the r5 is an incredible camera again it has all the features that I could ever need and more but the reality of it is it’s a massive camera and I don’t really feel the need to bring that around to take photos of my family, my, friend’s random outings throughout the day or the week and something like this really kind of makes a lot of sense for that.
it’s so tiny and compact and that was originally kind of what piqued my interest before deciding to rent this camera for the week so this is the final day before I actually send this camera back and I wanted to kind of take the entire week to kind of get some thoughts surrounding this camera and what I you know think I could be using it for and I’ve used it for a variety of different shots throughout the last week or so I’ve brought it on portrait shoots I’ve you know documented just like sunsets with this camera I’ve taken photos of my friends and really it’s been a joy to use I have very little complaints honestly with how this camera actually works and functions I love how simplistic and kind of minimal the design is I love that there’s no ports or anything like that and everything is very uniform and compact and that’s what I’m looking for.
when you know i think about a camera that i want to carry around on a regular basis i do love that the lens is not interchangeable i think when lenses are interchangeable we think that we have to own you know three or four different lenses to be able to shoot different kinds of things and you know the single 28 millimeter lens on here is more than enough for anything that i’m going to be taking pictures of it’s so sharp but not in a bad way you know i think a lot of cameras nowadays are a little bit too like kind of clinically sharp it almost looks like computer generated in a lot of images and i love the soft roll-off from you know what’s in focus to what’s not from this lens it’s a 1.7 aperture um and you can obviously go all the way up to f-16 very easy to kind of move that around on the front of the lens here and it’s just been enjoyable to use like i don’t really know how else to put it the lens is it’s great it’s really sharp it’s nice it’s a sumalux spherical lens i have owned a 35 millimeter sumo lux in the past which was also spherical and you just get this really creamy beautiful looking bokeh and i’m really happy with the lens.
so probably my favorite feature on the leica q2 is honestly going to be the crop modes now what i mean by this and we’ll show a little video explaining what that looks like visually is so you have this 28 millimeter lens here and you have multiple different crop modes that you can crop and basically like has done an incredible job kind of baking this into the software on the camera it’s really simple and easy to do there’s just a button right here that you can press first it starts out as you know the full 28 millimeters and then you can go down to 35 to 50 and then to 75 millimeters as well and you’ll get these cool little frame lines so you can kind of frame up your shot and compose it the way that you want and i think the coolest part about this is you’re able to import this into lightroom and lightroom recognizes that you shot it on this crop mode and it will automatically crop it for you now if you don’t like the crop you can adjust it you can also just completely reset the crop and go back to 28 millimeters.
now I think this is so genius and I don’t know why other manufacturers haven’t thought of this before but I found myself using this so frequently especially I would say the 50 and 75-millimeter crop modes are probably my favorite the 75 is really nice obviously because you don’t need to be very close to your subject and sometimes when I’m just walking down the street I see something really cool and I want to be able to shoot it without really having to go super close and I love the compression of 75 millimeters I think it looks really nice obviously it’s not technically a 75-millimeter lens it’s a cropped version of 28 millimeters but it definitely gives you know kind of look that you’re looking for I think when you’re shooting with a 75-millimeter lens and the fact that you don’t have to switch any lenses you just get to shoot with a single lens right here is really amazing and I think that’s probably my favorite feature on this camera and it’s made it really nice and easy to use.
so another thing that I really wanted to test as well as how the colors look coming right out of camera now I was mainly shooting dogs sometimes some jpeg as well I’ll get to that a little bit but the raws look amazing and the color looks really nice all the time I didn’t really even feel like I needed to edit very much I think they look just really natural really clean a bit desaturated at times.
so if anything I would add a little bit of contrast and maybe bump the saturation but overall when I’m shooting like this you know with a camera that it’s meant really to just document my daily life I’m not gonna be over editing really any of these images is really kind of I just want to be able to basically import them into lightroom quickly and you know maybe throw a black and white edit on it real quick or adjust just a few simple things and maybe send it to a family member or a friend you know maybe it’s a portrait of somebody or just a random photo I want to throw up on Instagram or Twitter or something like that this is amazing for that.
and I think another reason why this camera is just really making a lot of sense for kind of a daily carry scenario is also the Leica photos app now the cool thing about that app is you can transfer dings as well as jpegs directly onto your phone and you’re able to edit them and manipulate them however you would like and I found myself using that actually quite a bit as well especially I would shoot a combination of jpeg and raw images and then I would just export the jpeg image over to my phone take a look at it to see what I think and then I would save the raw images for the most part for.
when I got home and I could import them to my computer another thing that I really enjoyed and I think this is pretty similar in a lot of ways to canon’s menu system as it’s really simple when you turn on the camera and you want to change anything first and foremost you just get this really nice display of your shutter speed iso aperture whatever mode you’re shooting in as well as your exposure compensation and it just makes it really easy to use I love that it’s a touch screen as well and it’s really intuitive uh nothing’s really too complicated and you also in the top left here to see what kind of crop mode you’re shooting at currently which right now it’s at 75 millimeters and yeah it just makes it really nice and easy to use I think if the menus were complicated on this camera it would make it a lot less enjoyable to use I want to be able to just kind of dive into the menu figure out which setting.
I want to change and change it really quickly and I didn’t have any problems at all with being able to do that with this camera another thing that I love as well is the ability to be able to go between full auto and full manual and any combination in between so here on the aperture dial you can kind of click it all the way over to auto mode right here where it says a and that will obviously just take care of your aperture and the camera will just kind of pick whatever it thinks it is right for the specific scene I didn’t really tend to use that very much I like to be able to control the aperture I did, however, click the shutter dial here on auto quite a bit and I would usually mess around with the iso sometimes throwing that on auto as well and just kind of having like an aperture priority set up here and then the cool thing is right here you can kind of move this and change your exposure compensation.
so if I wanted to you know to shoot a stop underexposed or a stop overexposed it made it really easy to do that I found that that was probably the quickest way to get queen images with this camera was basically just being able to control the aperture control my depth of fields and you know for example if I’m shooting a portrait I’m going to shoot you know something closer to wide open versus maybe a landscape image where I’m going to shoot maybe like an f8 or an f11 and I found that that worked really well I really honestly have no complaints with how that works everything just feels very compact and uniform and feels very solid like it feels like a really solid beautiful well-made camera and that’s what obviously Leica is known for and you know I want to preface this again by saying this camera is probably not for most of you guys watching this video or me necessarily.
I just wanted to give this camera a shot and I really enjoyed my time with it but I think there’s obviously a lot of other options out there when it comes to you know a daily carry sort of camera I just wanted to see what this camera was all about there was a lot of hype surrounding this camera and obviously it came out quite some time ago I think at the time of recording this video I want to say it was at least a year ago and yeah I’ve really just been enjoying this camera so some of you are probably watching this video and wondering if I’m going to cover the video specs of this camera honestly I don’t even know what they are um I don’t really even care to look at the video specs I would never really shoot video on this camera I’m assuming you could probably do 4k.
but I don’t know like if I bought this camera that’s really just not what I would be using it forever you’d buy this camera for the incredible optics and the amazing lens and the 47-megapixel sensor all that stuff is really exciting to me it’s not really necessarily the video specs that would excite me too much I have other cameras that can record video um I think for a lot of people they’d be picking this camera up honestly again it’s just a way to document their life obviously if you’re documenting your life with 47 megapixels you know that’s going to be expensive um and this camera is no different I think I’ve found some used ones on like Facebook groups and stuff like that for about anywhere between 4 000 and 4 500 but I think brand new these things with tax are about 5 500.
so pretty pricey obviously but i think you do get a lot for that price and you’re getting you know an incredible build quality that leica is known for and this sumo luxe lens alone i don’t even know exactly how much a 28 mil sumo lux lenses but it has to be out there you know for the price of that single lens you could also get obviously just a camera with that as well and that’s i think what really enticed me you know it seems like a good deal in terms of leica cameras obviously leicas are incredibly expensive but there’s something about this camera that this is really enjoyable to use and i haven’t really had too many hiccups using this camera overall it’s felt really natural to use and i think that’s what makes it so exciting i want this camera to feel like you know just an extension of myself in a way like i wanted to be able to just pick this camera up take a photo really quickly and also the ability to be able to give this camera to other people and have them take photos as well maybe i want to you know give it to my dad.
so we can take a picture of me or something like that I want to be able to do that and the fact that you can throw it into full auto mode and all you have to do is just tell them how to press the shutter button that is also really nice as well so I think the combination of professional features with the ability to also go full auto mode if you want to um in such a compact and uniform design I really think just makes a lot of sense for me and you guys are probably wondering if I’m going to be picking this camera up not at this very moment I’m going to wait a little bit and see kind of how the prices fluctuate if they do but I definitely know that I want one of these at some point I’m just not going to be buying it immediately.
so definitely stay tuned probably the next several months I’m sure I’ll be picking one of these up um and I’ll be excited to film some more videos surrounding this camera and just kind of going out and taking pictures with it so overall obviously I’m really sad to be sending this camera back I really have enjoyed my time with it I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I would you know the first couple days I think it was just kind of figuring out how to use it in the way that I wanted to use it after a week with this camera I definitely want to kind of explore it more.
so if you guys are probably wondering i’m going to be picking this up at some point i definitely want to i’m going to be kind of monitoring the used market i don’t really think it makes a lot of sense for me to buy something that’s brand new so i’m gonna be kind of monitoring the facebook groups and craigslist to see what i can find but i’m i’m excited to eventually pick one of these up so if you guys will stay tuned for the next couple months i’m sure we’ll have some more videos regarding this camera just kind of going out and taking photos with it but yeah overall i’m just really impressed i i enjoyed using this camera a lot and i have almost zero complaints besides how expensive it is but the reality of it is you don’t have to buy this camera you know if you guys are going to get upset about the price of this camera in the comments like there’s thousands of other options for other cameras out there this is just the camera that i wanted to try so that kind of concludes today’s video hopefully you guys enjoyed this one if you guys want to see any of the images that were in this video i’ll leave a link down in the description to the hi-res version.
so you guys can take a look the 47 megapixels on this camera is pretty incredible and i would highly recommend you guys go check that out obviously that website is built with squarespace which is today’s sponsor now obviously squarespace is the best all-in-one website builder when it comes to making your website and displaying your work in kind of a natural way that doesn’t really feel you know too intense i love the layout options on squarespace’s website and the design choices as well everything from text to font choices and really kind of design and layout options they have a lot of really unique styles that make a lot of sense for photographers like myself i also have been posting some new work over on my website you guys want to go check that out as well i will leave a link down in the description if you guys want to get 10 off your first website or domain purchase definitely head to squarespace.com samuel elkins which is in the description thank you so much to squarespace for sponsoring this video and for the continued support of my photography and filmmaking hope you guys enjoyed this one and we’ll see you next week.
