Picture it! Cullowhee 2005. I was amidst my second year in college. It was also at this time that I was rediscovering my joy for photography. Going to school in the Smokey Mountains of North Carolina provided me with a magnitude of inspiration and splendor; and I wanted to capture it all. I borrowed my …
I’ve decided to sell my Leica M typ 262, so I thought it about time I write a bit of a post about it. This has become a bit of a trend now, I buy a digital Leica, shoot with it for a while, decide to sell it for one reason or another, and then scramble to write about it in the final few days of owning it. It happened with the M8, M9, more recently the M240 and now the M262. Actually, a large part of this is because they don’t often inspire me to write about them whilst I own them, yet I hate to see them go without doing them the justice of sharing a few thoughts.
I never intended to purchase a Leica Q when it was first announced. I watched a couple of videos on YouTube that entered my feed when it was initially released and disregarded it. Presumably due to how street shooter centric the videos were. A year later I had sold my A7 series Sony in the hope to simplify my equipment. I was predominantly shooting film for commercial and personal use and was starting to grow frustrated that the Sony was simply not as enjoyable to work with as my analogue offerings.
I’ve used dozens of compacts, including most of the cult favorites like the Ricoh GR’s, they all had some glaring issue I couldn’t overlook. I’ve long wanted a digital compact I could always keep with me, in the Jeep, a coat pocket or even as a backup, that could offer me good quality results without too many sacrifices. My hope when I got my hands on the Leica D-Lux (typ 109) was that it would be a winner. But I had my doubts.
Released a decade ago, the M8 was Leica’s first digital rangefinder. By the standards of most people, this thing is now old technology; it’s long in the tooth, many times superseded. Yet in the context of this blog – where I’ve been known to talk about cameras from the 1930’s as still being relevant today – it could be considered a relatively new camera. So which is it? Is it old and not worth the time of day, or can and should the Leica M8 simply be regarded as a perfectly useable second hand camera in the same way most of the kit I talk about can?
