I didn’t want to write a post about my thoughts on the Leica SL for a number of reasons. First, I’m not a professional photographer. Hell, I’m barely an amateur one. Until a month or so ago my iPhone 6 and my Canon G7x Mk II were with what I took most of my pictures, with the iPhone 6 seeing the most use. Second, the internet is filled with articles, forums chatter, and blog posts about this camera. Third, Leica has haters. People who constantly attack Leica cameras as overpriced, under developed, cameras for status seekers and wealthy rubes. But, it seems odd for me not to discuss the camera taking the shots posted on this blog.
Any camera is a tool. A machine for processing what its user commands it to record. Do better cameras make better photographers? No. Better cameras take more technologically competent pictures. The photographer determines whether a picture conveys the moment, invokes emotions, exposes hypocrisy, tells the story, reveals beauty, records history, shocks the senses, implores action, constitutes a message, revolts or haunts the soul, reminds of the awe within nature or memorializes those seemingly common moments of living conveying life’s ever changing uniqueness.
The Leica SL is heavy. With its 24-90mm native lens attached it is heavier and imposing. People feel free to comment on its size whenever it is slung over my shoulder, and I’m no shrinking violet. I’m 6’3” 205 lbs and wear a 44L suit jacket. It does not have the fastest AF I have used. It does not have the highest resolution sensor. It is not a set-and-forget digital camera. It is expensive (and I bought mine after the July price drop). I don’t agree, but I see why some attack it as a Leica. A camera for those more interested in status than in technological capabilities. I researched the hell out of this camera before I bought it. I read all the articles and blog posts. I studied the example photographs. I read the chatter in the various forums. It was not an even split between those who love it and those who simply do not understand what Leica charges for its cameras and why people are willing to pay so much for them. More loved the SL than hated it. Other than the Leica Q, which I owned for about two weeks before I returned it and bought my SL, I have never owned a Leica. In the digital camera world I own or owned Fuji, Canon, Pentax, Olympus, and Sony. Before the SL, my most expensive camera was the Fuji X100, first generation. (I still own it and shoot with it.)
The Leica SL, however, is that rare tool that challenges me to be a better photographer. Unlike my other cameras, the SL makes me push myself. I know that whatever I envision for how I want the shot to look, my Leica will respond. If I fail, I failed, not my camera. Is this partly the heritage of Leica? Their excellent marketing of the image of a Leica photographer? The Leica mystique? Of course. So what? All that matters is that it inspires me to take better photographs. I look at some of the photos I have taken and I’m surprised at what I’ve accomplished. Oh, I know, from a professional’s vantage, they may be amateurish efforts, but they are my best efforts because the SL pushes me to make sure they are. It is a camera that engages the creative side of my brain like no other camera I have owned, except my Canon AE-1.
I was fourteen when I bought that camera and I had it around my neck constantly. Then, I also experimented and challenged myself. It was the camera that led me to build my own darkroom. A camera that had me imagining myself a photojournalist. A camera that let me escape the bullying and loneliness of a boy slow to reach puberty and who sucked at sports. A boy who snapped and developed a photograph of his father fishing that to this day both family and friends wonder how it caught the quiet, stern, emotionally awkward father we never really knew, who would die still a mystery five years later.
As a tool that inspires creativity, that pushes its user to push it back, the Leica SL has no peers among the cameras I have owned since I packed up my Canon AE-1 and chose a career path much different than my heart and camera sought.