Leica Boston - Leica on Loan and photowalk

Yesterday the new Leica store opened in Boston. This is bad news for my wallet. So many beautiful objects of temptation. 

I was able to borrow a Leica SL for a few hours to walk around Boston and take some street photography.

30 other people walked out from the shop. This was part of a street photography workshop led by one of their in-house experts. I was a few minutes late and didn't catch his name.

I put down my drivers license and a credit card, and they handed me a beautiful brand new Leica. This isn't a full product review, but I will say that I was impressed overall. The buttons on the back weren't labeled, so it took a bit of figuring out to get it to do what I wanted. In the end, I set it to aperture priority mode, f8, ISO 800 and just shot it like that. 

Autofocus on a Leica seems bizarre to me. I'm used to the M-system, which is manual all-the-way. They did a very nice job on the autofocus set up for this camera series. There were more options than I could test through in 2 hours, so most of the time I stayed in shutter priority. However, I did try out their "Touch AF." This means you start with the camera in manual focus mode. But, when you hit the joystick on the back to select an autofocus point, it autofocuses there very quickly. Next shot you're back to manual focus. The override is very simple and stays out of the way while you're shooting.

The lens they lent me was a 24-90 zoom. The full name is Leica Vario-Elmarit-SL 24–90 mm f/2.8–4 ASPH. That's a really long name for a lens. For the most part, I set it to 24mm and left it there. The Aspherical elements lived up to Leica's legendary standard for glass. There was no distortion in the corners of the frame, and no discernible vignetting.

Great day for shooting

Perfect weather and lots of outside events made for a great day of shooting in Boston. We started in the Boston Garden, where several wedding photo sessions were already happening. Mix in the usual crowds walking around in the area, and you've got plenty of subjects to choose from. But it didn't stop there. Just across Charles Street in the Boston Common, Hempfest was in full swing. Plus, over on the Esplanade, MixFest was rocking.

This all made for great crowds of interesting people to shoot. These images are nearly all straight out of the camera with little to no adjustments in post. I wanted to showcase the automatic prowess of the camera. 

Interested in licensing or using one of these photos? Let me know.

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Interested in licensing or using one of these photos? Let me know.