Leica Q2 Monochrom with Knox Bertie

[Music] good evening everybody i hope everybody can hear me okay um nick rains here from leica academy australia and leica camera australia introducing you to the obviously our new member of our camera stable and that is of course the leica q2 monochrome which you will no doubt have read about and heard all about in the various news over the last few days um welcome to our launch now obviously we'd like to do this in person but with things being as they are we are doing it online and what i'd like to do is to be able to show you the camera itself and i'd like to put it in your hands because when you actually pick it up and feel it you'll realize how how beautiful it feels so the best i can do is to actually move my camera view let me just see if i can do this i'm going to drop myself out of the way with one clever little button and i'm going to change to that uh which should give me a nice close start view of the camera and hopefully the autofocus is going to work and there it goes so the first thing i want to talk about before i get into any of the details about the camera and obviously we'll talk about some of the specifications is just have a look at this lovely sort of stealth look that the camera has it's got this lovely discreet matte black look about it and when i first picked it up i've got to tell you i just went oh yeah that is just so gorgeous um and if you get a chance drop in one of the shops and and have a look and when you pick it up i'm sure you'll feel the same way but whilst i've got it in close-up mode here something else i want to point out to you if i get in the right spot there is the q2m is and the q2 of itself of course is one of the very few modern digital cameras except for the m that has a genuine mechanical focusing mechanism and you might wonder why i'm you know making a major point about that because it's a if you're into street photography and we'll talk about this more when we join knox joins us later on one of the standard techniques is to set a distance and then shoot with the camera on a fixed distance and that's actually quite tricky to do on a on an autofocus camera where you don't have a mechanical scale you may have some sort of hybrid electronic focusing system but it's really hard to judge and this mechanism here isn't electric to the whole thing and that makes it unbelievably good for street photography so i just wanted to make that point whilst i've got the camera in close-up mode but yeah there she is the leica q2m and this is its little sister brother whatever you want to call it this is the q2 which i've got slightly out of frame there and you can see it's somewhat more glossy with the big red spot on but otherwise it's this obviously the same dna same feel same 47 megapixels and everything like that so that's the camera itself let me just pop back to me and this hello me back again um let's have a talk about the camera itself um i've just got to swap to my presentation here which if i can just do my keys here to a keynote and then i'm going to share my screen to that keynote presentation so i'm not going to bore you with too many technical technical details so you should be able to see that now on the screen and i think you'll agree um that this sentiment that came from head office is one of our sort of sales tools is the fascination of black and white is as alive as ever black and white photography digital or film um has become very popular and there's quite a few people out there shooting only black and white knox being one of them and there is something about black and white that really really floats a lot of people's boats and i just like to go through some of the features of the camera before we get to the more aesthetic side of things let me just get rid of that border for you and so there's the camera itself without going getting too dry on details let me just go through a few of the technical specs but i want to put them in context for you i want to just explain why these things are important and what the consequences of them are first of all it's a brand new 47 megapixel sensor and 47 megapixels is a lot if you wind the clock back a decade you know that simply wasn't even available to us and now we've got it in the camera that's it's not a pocket camera exactly but it's extremely small and discrete and highly you know uh functional um so there's that but it's not really the most important thing it's the lens and the handling of the camera that gives it that just just makes it a pleasure to use the lens is a genuine sony lux lens and if you compare it to the m semilux lens obviously for the m camera it's optically astonishing it's absolutely cutting edge technology and it absolutely can pull out all 47 megapixels of that resolution no question about it and being f 1.7 you do get that nice out of focus background which i'll show you a sample of in a minute the viewfinder is genuinely useful and there are people out there who say i don't like electronic viewfinders well they're mostly people who've not tried one of the current proper viewfinders from leica or maybe a few other people but that gives you a very realistic view of what you're going to be capturing it's shrouded in black obviously because you're looking through a viewfinder and so what you see you can pretty well judge and it's not the same as looking at the back of a camera that's you know the ambient light shines on it it can look bright or darker depending on the surrounding light but looking for the viewfinder nice and crisp it's not too high contrast you don't get that smeary look so it's really really good high iso i'm going to talk a little bit in a sec about why the q2m has such an astonishing uh high iso ability obviously it's to do with the fact that it's shooting in black and white only but it does allow you to shoot in situations that you probably couldn't imagine shooting in before i mean really in you know coal sellers it's quite remarkable and i would happily shoot this up to twenty five thousand iso fifty thousand and a hundred thousand it's going to look a little bit noisy on your screen but the thing is when you make prints or you go to reproduction that noise tends to disappear so 25 000 looks good on the screen but 50 000 is genuinely usable and 100 000 as well maybe not at full size so that's quite an astonishing step forward um 120 second exposures that means that you can do those lovely shots with the clouds blur and the water blurs which looks fantastic in black and white you know architectural shots with that blurry water and the clouds whizzing past it looks really great um the autofocus is extremely quick and accurate it's happens in the blink of an eye i know i was going on a bit about the manual focus before and obviously that's a huge part of it but if you choose to use the autofocus you'll find it's unbelievably quick um the the lens mechanism is light it's 28mm lens which means that the actual elements are only relatively small so there's not much inertia in that so that the end the motors can move the elements really quickly and if you try it you'll see that it just focuses almost instantaneously when the queue originally came out i used that camera a lot and that was my impression of just focusing this like this you can shoot video so if you want to do arty black and white videos you can shoot in 4k which is you know quite a big deal um it's also ip52 rated for dust and water so you don't have to worry about this camera if you take it out on the street and it rains you just do your best to keep the rain off it because obviously you don't want water on the lens because it will give you a blob in the shot but you don't have to worry about the camera itself getting damaged so that's a really big bonus no red dot on the front for those that like that discreet look and of course it does connect electronically to the like a photos app if you want to copy your pictures off and put them on social media you know within seconds of shooting them if that's what you want to do so those are the the sort of the technical features obviously there's a lot more to it than that but um this is the lens itself now i have spoken about this before of course but i do want to make the point that this is a genuinely it's a genuine leica summit lux lens it's not an adaptation of something else it's the real deal it's real like glass and it absolutely shows and one of the things that i enjoyed about the original cube which like i said i shot with a lot was that when you shoot portraits with it you can get a genuine out of focus background which makes it look like it actually wasn't shot in a 28 millimeter lens at all so that's something like this you see that if you ask somebody what lens that was shot on they probably wouldn't immediately say a 28 millimeter lens because the giveaway is usually the falloff of focus and you don't normally get that with a wide-angle lens so you can do really quite creative effects with that lens out f 1.7 you've also got the digital zoom which some people have been a little bit sort of a bit skeptical about because it is a crop it's not an optical change anyway you're literally just cropping the picture to smaller amounts which of course you can do in post nothing stopping you doing that but the difference is that if you look for the viewfinder and you have the crop mode set you'll see bright lines just like in an m camera so if you've got the camera set to 35 millimeter crop you're still getting i'm not exactly sure how many megapixels how it drops down to maybe 30 something like that and if you maybe connor would know what that is exactly and could put it in the chat but it's still a pretty big file size but you can see outside the bright lines this is the key so on an m lens if you're shooting 35 mil you've got a 28mm field of view you can see action coming into the shot before it enters the frame which you can't do on a normal camera so that gives you one one effect the other thing is if you shoot raw plus jpeg you get the full raw file 28 mil coverage but you get a cropped version the jpeg so you were having a bet both ways so i've found the q2 and the q2m's crop motor particularly the 75mm one genuinely useful for portraiture and you still get f 1.7 and a nice out of focus background behind the head but obviously you don't get the 47 megapixels it's it's more like uh i'm going to guess at about 10 to 12 but i'm not exactly sure so there's that now what is it about a monochrome camera that makes it special this is the this is the big deal with this camera all black and white all color cameras are really black and white cameras with very few exceptions there are some other sensors that capture all the colors at once but the vast majority of modern digital cameras actually capture luminance information which is just simply grayscale information and the way the color is collected or recorded is essentially a bit of slight of hand it's a magician's trick because each of the little photo sensor elements as you can see in this picture is covered by a colored filter you have one red one blue and two green and the the reason it's too green is is that your eyes are slightly more sensitive to degree than the other colors and it's trying to emulate that the visual look of things that means that you're measuring the brightness of the red all the blue all the green but not at the same time in one photo site the other thing is the blue sensor in particular is quite dense and it actually removes half of the brightness of the light so you get half the intensity you lose one stop of sensitivity so the idea is that when you shoot a color picture and here's a picture of brisbane where i live and i'm just going to magnify part of it that little box there when you look at those individual pixels that color has been calculated it's not a genuine capture of color information so it's kind of a cheat and it does soften the image slightly so when you've got this capturing information you have to guess the intermediate pixel values and that interpolation tends not a hugely but a little bit softens the picture because some of that information is calculated and not actually captured when you remove the bayer array and you only have the monochrome sensor left behind with no color filters you're not absorbing any light of course and you get so the color ones on the left the black and white ones on the right now you'll see a much crisper result at edges and if you examine a shot off the the q monochrome and the m monochrome you'll see that it has that accuracy that sharpness that christmas which you don't see with normal cameras it's subtle but it's clear absolutely so you end up with a slightly crisper result and a really punchy black and white image straight out of the camera now one of the questions i get before we move on to knox's work is the um what is the uh the comparison between the look of this sensor and black and white film and the only information i've got to share with you at the moment is from the monochrome itself and you'll see that the sensitivity across the spectrum is very much like kodak tri-x film or delta 400 used to be so you have quite an even spread and if you want to change the relationships of the colors and how they are rendered in black and white you can put colored filters on the front of the lens and anybody who used to shoot black and white film will understand what i'm talking about totally and that is how you actually change the relationship if you want a really punchy sky you put a red filter on the front if you want to lighten skin lighten foliage you put a green filter on and so on so that's how that works all right that's the q2m that's enough of the technical information um if anybody's got any questions please for knox for instance or for me um or about the camera there's a couple of ways we can do this firstly in the chat we have conor mcgill and and ryan williams monitoring that so any questions you have broadly speaking they're very happy to answer your questions questions for knox or even myself about the camera please use the q and a and i will see those on my screen right here and i will do my best to either interrupt knox or save them for the end so we've got ryan and connor on chat and we've got knox and nick on the q a so we've got quite a few people actually attending which is really good to see so please feel free to to ask questions all right i'm going to move on to the next slide because it's time to welcome knox knox how are you hello how are you good good you're sitting there very patiently as we go through this this presentation which you've seen before okay so um for those of you who don't know knox bertie knox is uh you're a chemistry teacher i believe and you connect from canada originally and you have developed a particular look and style of street photography over the years and you're also particularly interested in black and white analog chemistry and film as well i believe so maybe you could just introduce yourself a little bit and tell us a bit about how you got into photography sure um welcome and hi to everyone um i'm my background is is as a chemistry teacher i did a chemistry degree in university um and was always interested in in the chemical process and and i can remember in the days of university i spent quite a bit of time in a in a dark room learning that and um and just kind of kept playing around with that sort of sort of stuff i spent a lot of time when i when i first started teaching um all over the world and um taught in international schools for a while and always always took my my camera with me and um and just really kind of developed a love for film photography in particular playing around with the chemicals and the processes and developing looks through that i've been in sydney now for the last it's been about 12 13 years now so i've been here for quite a while and in that time i've i've just spent a lot of time you know documenting and shooting my my daily life and things that i see around sydney and i believe that you shot film right up until you got hold of the q2m what what prompted that sort of that switch um look at i did and and i still shoot film so i i just was a i just never completely switched over and and when the the the kind of the trend of digital photography came along uh probably for two reasons i i couldn't afford the cameras and i had some pretty good cameras at the time and so i just never went with that trend and i you know the the process was really sort of meditative um uh for me i i started talking to laika and and uh and like i asked if i wanted to to try this camera and try out how it works and so really that was that was probably what preempted the switch more than anything else there's a picture coming up in your presentation which we'll get to in a bit that actually shows how similar the uh the monochrome sensor is to film in so many ways and i won't spoil the surprise because it was quite astonishing when i first saw it we'll we'll get back to that in a sec um now one of the genres that i've seen you shooting a lot in is the these nightscapes in sydney and this particular pitch we got on the screen here we maybe just should talk a little bit about this this project that you've been working on for a while and we will talk through these pictures and just explain how they came about and what you saw in that particular scene sure um first picture that you see here is is a shot that i shoot quite a bit um i i'll often shoot my daily commute i i live in in tempe in sydney's inner west and i live five six hours up from the station so it tends to be anywhere i go i'm walking down to the train station getting on a train which is part of the reason why i shoot a lot of these shots um if i'm bored at night rather than sitting around and watching tv i'll often grab a camera go for a walk jump on a train go into the city and um and and i really like i like shooting at night on trains in particular because you get these kind of isolated sort of urban shots their dark windows the you know the fluorescent lights come out and uh and you get these kind of these people alone in in these these big empty carriages um so let's go to the next one here and just see what's coming up there yeah same sort of thing but this isn't a night shot though i don't think is it uh no this was this was a few weeks ago just on my on my way to work and um it was if if anybody in here is from sydney we had about three weeks of rain and uh i was carrying the camera around and the sun had just kind of come through you kind of see in the windows there's a bit of cloud there in the background and there's there's still rain on the window so just had the camera ready and and and sort of shot that that small bit of sun that came in through the the train on that morning yep a moment in time and i think that's probably one of the things that um i was alluding to when i mentioned the manual focus on the camera because um situations like this i mean you probably had time to focus this one but there are plenty of pictures where you don't get time to focus so i i know i've asked you this before but um how often would you use autofocus versus manual focus um generally for this type of shot i i i mean i i'd always use manual focus because it's kind of what i'm i'm used to so but i did start playing around with uh with the autofocus a little bit this one is actually an autofocus shot and i was focusing just playing around with focusing off of the seats um to set it up and generally what i would do is is is get the the focus set and then wait for somebody to come into the shot and then line the shot up with that um one of the things that i really liked about this camera camera in particular is the the ability to go from manual to auto very fast and so because it's on it's on the ring you know very few cameras you can do that normally you've got to go into you know into menus or change things around but you can just instantly just go auto focus manual focus and just pop it back and forth um and so depending on the situation you can move pretty quick with it yeah yeah yeah actually i'm glad you might point that out because i was busy focusing on the new features of the q2m but in talking about the queue in general i should point out to our listeners and viewers that the aperture ring is around the lens and the shutter speed ring is an analog one on top of the camera and you could if you have them both on a it's program mode you have one on a it's that automatic have the other one on a it's that automatic if they're both off a it's manual it's unbelievably elegant the way that's done there's no menus there's no controls no modes to change you just set it as you want it and it's i found it a very effective way of actually working and obviously you found the same thing yeah and and even the focus ring you can just kind of very quickly pop up into that that auto position or pop back down into manual so the ability to just kind of switch between the two is is really fast exactly exactly i'm sure you probably can't see it in my little thumbnail but there's there is the um m style level focusing lug underneath the lens bottom right and there's a little catch on it which locks it into order in and out of autofocus very smooth mechanism as well which is really important so yeah i'm glad you raised that point so this is one of the pictures that i when i look through your original pictures to select for this presentation it really struck me as being very sort of uh evocative and i just maybe you could tell us how this came about um this this i'm just waiting on a platform i'm at uh sydnum station uh which is just one station down from where i i live the platform's empty uh to get back to tempe often if you miss a train there's a 30 minute wait so i get stuck there quite often and uh it's where i'll normally sort of shoot through windows and and just get those kind of shots just because i'm i'm sitting on an empty platform really by myself uh this train had uh had just pulled up and so the door was actually about to open in this shot and i actually had the camera just said everything just set on auto on this one and it was quite literally just a very quick almost from the hip sort of shot um of this girl that was was staring out the window you can't see it in the picture but the lighting of the girl there actually is a fluorescent light um there's a set of seats there and there's a fluorescent light over the set of seats and so the the floral light is what's lighting the girl and makes her sort of stand out um in that picture and you can kind of see the floral lights in the background and the in the windows at the top yes yes i can see what you mean it's that little gesture of blight which lifts the picture up remarkably if if people see me looking down it's because i've got a little monitor here with with knox's work on it so i'm i'm not sort of looking away i'm looking at the work and examining it closely because every time i see the pictures i find something new to look at which is which is really nice okay is another one from the train series this is a very strong one as well can i tell us a bit about this one um same sort of thing as i as i described before and it's uh this is actually at redfern station i popped out at redford station and uh again was just waiting for a train um because it's a 28 mil lens this is pretty close so i'm almost you know touching my chest to the train in this shot i've got the camera up above my up above my head um and again i was playing around with the autofocus on this so the camera's above my head i'm not framing the shot and then just using the autofocus to see um what i can can get from that i generally sort of over expose these shots a little bit as well which is what gives that sort of um really bright sort of fluorescent sort of look to it and then the florals are so light that it cancels out really anything in the background which gives a you know a lot of blacks yeah i think probably one of the things i like about this in in in these types of shots and i i quite liked um is sort of the detail in the face through the glass um probably shows a lot of maybe what the the camera can do but there's a you know i really like the sort of gray skill that came up on the skins in this one yeah absolutely now i'm going to take an opportunity to answer a couple of questions that have come in um well two comments and two questions at this point um ian porter wants a monochrome cl we've had a few people wanting a monochrome sl so maybe we need to push the word up to head office and say let's have the full set of monochrome cameras i think it'd be a great idea having a monochrome cl um russell shakespeare says no question just loving the work so that's russell thanks russell thank you now tim souta um hi knox tim from sydney here i know you've had a chance to shoot the m10 monochrome before the q2 monochrome what advantages does the q2 have over the m10 in your style and workflow um they're both they're both great cameras and in a lot of in a lot of respects the the um just so you're aware of my my go-to 35 mil camera is a is a 1932 leica 3a with a 35 mil sumer on on it and i've been carrying that around for years and so there's actually a lot of similarities between that camera and the q2 but there's also some similarities between that camera and uh and obviously i like m as well but it's it's different and unique and it's in its own right um both interesting cameras and do kind of very very different things the sensors to me had a lot of similarities and so the files that came up from both cameras when you look at them and process them on the screen are very similar but they do force a sort of slightly different sort of shooting style um i'm pretty analog in the way that i work but i i can't lie having some of those features on that i started using them pretty fast and and you get quite addicted to being able to operate pretty fast and the thing i liked about the q was really it's pretty fast you can move pretty quickly with it yeah yeah i i completely concur with that the the m monochrome is a beautiful thing the q monochrome i don't know having those extra little bells and whistles there sometimes just saves the day it really does it's a nice little fallback position and now then another couple of questions before we move on ian picken do you use spot or field focusing and also focus peaking assistance i don't use focus peaking assistance but um generally if i'm in a strange lighting situation i i really grew up learning spot focusing and and i use spot focusing for mostly everything um i i very much use this camera like like a film like i would use a film camera and generally the technique in film is you should be exposing for the shadows and then developing for the highlights but i don't do that which is part of the reason why you get such heavy blacks is is generally i'm exposing for the highlights um and also developing for the highlights which which gives that sort of black look and and really i just did the exact same thing with this camera so i used the spot meter a lot which worked um very well and then the rest of it i either had the camera set on auto or i'm because i'm so used to working with with manual film cameras i'm just setting it by instinct of what i know especially in the kind of subway sort of shots i kind of know what the the setting should be so i just set it to that and go for it yup fair enough i'm just going to change pictures on the screen and this one's been a while but we'll come back to this picture but i've got a couple more questions coming in we'll just get through those and then we'll move on to the to the talking about the pictures um peter meyer would like to know how much post edit is done on these general and that's also a question from andrew reeves as well so i don't think you do hold a post do you with these pictures the the one that's on the screen right now i think there's almost exactly zero post editing done on it this is pretty much what came out of the camera um i might have tweaked a little bit of contrast on i honestly can't remember but it's you know it's not something i really enjoy doing i'm not a i'm not a guy that really enjoys being in photoshop and playing around with photos i i really do more so enjoy getting it right in the camera and being in the dark room um i i in saying that probably the editing that i'm doing in this would be exactly how i would either edit in the dark room or how i would edit if i was scanning skinny film i'm with you yeah yeah um have you ever just this question for me actually have you ever tried changing the um the jpeg settings in the camera for contrast to see what the results are like why are you strictly shooting raw and that's that um i i did play around with that and it was really interesting and you get really interesting results and um the thing i liked about the jpeg settings uh is that the files that came up with the jpegs probably looked closest to me to to film so if you if you are trying to get sort of a film look particularly at high isos the way that they were processed you do get a you get a really interesting texture um it's different to film but it's in some digital cameras it's different and ugly um it was different but i i quite liked it and it had a kind of a unique look to it um the rest of the shots were all shot in raw yeah brilliant that's yeah that's a really good way of putting it actually because it's when obviously we transitioned as an industry from film into digital it was always this comparison is i can't get my digital shots to look like my black and white film shots and i always say well you're never going to because they're different they can both be awesome but i don't think you can even make them look the same because they are such a different process and it seems that you've brought them together in a really good way so that looking at these pictures even when you look closely and i mean magnified it's really hard to tell that they were actually shot on digital a digital sensor there's that organic grain which we'll come to in a sec which is quite remarkable couple more questions um kenneth wang what is your preferred f-stop for these kind of shots um this one i i'm shooting at at sunny16 i think i was on sunny 16 and i just brought it back down to f11 or potentially f8 i can't remember exactly for this shot but i i sort of start at sunny 16. for anybody that doesn't know what sunny 16 is i'd start on 400 iso um roughly you match your shutter speed to the iso and you have an f-stop of of 16 and in a bright light situation like this and the bright light is obviously the light from outside that's coming in on on the woman's face um your lighting should be pretty good there's a little bit of a tint to the train windows so i would have backed it off to an f11 or an f8 yeah see that's experience you see a lot of people including myself wouldn't have actually thought that the windows of course are tinted so you're probably losing half a stop of light so nice little tip there for people shooting manually um gary gordon hi knox i'm impressed that you have the 3a a classic i've used the 3a for becca weapons for a long time what differences do you find using black and white film versus the q2 monochrome in terms of dynamic range graininess and which do you prefer that's a tricky question to answer yeah look i've spent my whole life shooting film so that's a that's a tough question um film to me is as much about the meditative process to shooting film and being in a dark room and i'll never stop shooting film just because i i love shutting the door to a dark room and playing around and and seeing what i can come up with um the best way that i could describe this camera in my reaction to it is if you've shot a lot of film particularly from something like the 3a when i compared the pictures the the lenses are actually very similar um that i was that i was using and actually the results from the lens were were very comparable but the the files i really liked because they compared to scan film um and so there's there's a lot of dynamic range in them and there's a lot of dynamic range to be able to play around to either get blacks or pull the highlights back and i always felt that if i i slightly exposed i was never in a situation with this camera where i thought i've just lost all the the whites and they're gone which any other digital camera i've ever picked up before that that's always my first complaint i put it down straight away because i think for the style i'm shooting this just isn't going to work okay all right and i'll move on to the picture i still got a few questions a lot of questions which is really good it's excellent asking questions and getting answers because it's interesting for everybody but let's move on to some more pictures now this one did strike me as a very powerful image um maybe you better just tell us how this came about as well um this again this was just on my way to work and and i'm i'm i'm the train is rested on the platform at at central station i'm sitting on the the end seat and i'm i'm got the camera pointed out towards the platform and the the picture of the woman with the mask on is the reflection in the the glass and the glass on these trains they they bend and in the bend you get these kind of like double and triple kind of um kind of bits and pieces which you can see is kind of like that that outline of her face um the two kind of streaks of light going through here is a reflection on the on the glass from the lights that are behind and then obviously the woman sitting on the bench is inside of her is the woman that's sitting on on the platform so it's it's really just a reflection off the the glass on the train yeah yeah it's a really interesting sort of optical illusion as i said when we did our media briefing the other day i didn't actually see the woman on the seat in the the bottom there until you point it out so it's a a multi-layered shot which i think is very very clever i do like that one but i think you can see also i'm not sure if it will come through on the screen but the viewers but that's very organic looking that's very film-like um i mean i know film-like is not necessarily a goal that everybody might have but that organic thing seems to appeal to people even if they don't necessarily know that's what's appealing to them um would you agree with that knox yeah i i'd say so i think this this shot probably is uh it's a really good example it's a really high iso shot as well um and so i i purposely was just playing around to see what the um what a high iso shot would come out of the camera and i i can't remember exactly what it was on but it was very high um and uh and i mean generally that's that's what came out of it and again i i think as i said before you know sometimes you look at sort of digital noise and it's just not pleasing you just don't like it um i was actually really happy with it you know when i when i put this on a big screen on a computer and really kind of zoom into it i was just i was really happy with what the kind of noise looked like yeah yeah yeah i think i've i've found the same thing when i've had a brief look at the i've only had the camera briefly to play with and i didn't shoot anything vaguely interesting something like this of course but you can still take some pictures around the house and shoot at 50 000 iso and i did have to look twice at the metadata a couple of times to go hang on and say that's oh it is 50 000 like crikey so it is quite shockingly good at high iso um quack has a question oh sorry i'll come back to you in a sec i've missed a question um shane dahl are you using any of the color filters um that you can put on the front of the lens yeah this this shot has a red filter on it i often shoot with a red filter on a on a film camera i shoot yellow filters red filters but red filters are one of the the kind of the goes that i use um particularly in artificial lighting if i wasn't using a red filter here her face would have come up really very gray just wouldn't have had the same sort of look to it and so what the red filter does in this situation is creates that real white to her face which makes which is the reason why it's sort of glowing and i i quite like that kind of ghostly glow that you can get with a with a red filter i played around with a lot of filters too on it i i you know there's a couple shots in here where i had a red filter a circular polarizer a neutral density filter so i yeah i play around a lot with filters and yeah that's impressive um quark high knox do you kwok is in the process of either having just bought a q2a or about to buy a q2m so just to give you a hint hi cor hi knox um do you mix the dark room process do you mix the dark room process when shooting digitally or is it accomplished in the final print photo sorry is accomplishing the final photo paramount both your film and digital photos achieve the same resonance he thinks um it look it's it's a really good question but i i nick i'm not sure if you'd agree with this but i think sometimes the photo in the image is in the photographer and it comes out through the camera and the camera becomes a tool and either the tool can be a mechanism that will allow that to happen or not allow that to happen um and so it never surprises me when a a shooter shoots on film or on digital it looks relatively similar comes out with a similar style because mentally i think you're you're trying to get to the same the same ends yeah that's a really interesting answer actually i i i do agree with you you having explained it like that but uh yeah that is a good way of putting it you tend to converge to a certain degree um amit knox what iso would you normally go up to at the maximum when shooting at night um does the q2 have an advantage um presumably over the m or the q2 itself um i very briefly had an m in my hand so i don't want to speak out of turn with what it can do it was it was very good um as well and i shot that at night a bit while i i had the opportunity to use it um like you said nick you can shoot this at anything you know i if i wanted to to freeze a shot or shoot at a you know a bigger f-stop at night i would be very comfortable shooting at this at a very very high iso and be confident that the pictures are going to come up really well for anybody who is a film photographer and absolutely loves films they'll probably hate me saying this but this was definitely one area where digital beat film um you know with uh with a 400 speed film at night you've got to be really precise with how you're working and and oftentimes you're dealing with you know wide open you know shutters and you got to be super still or think of things to lean up or set the camera down where um it did kind of free up my ability to take shots at night that i would have never had the opportunity to take with a phone camera sure now i own uh quack an apology because i noticed he corrected his question about three or four questions down which i missed and when he said do you mix the dark room he meant do you miss the dark room process when shooting digitally whole different question apologies for that so yeah do you miss the dark room process but yeah i think you've answered it in the sense that you do both anyway so still sorry about that don't worry um right next one uh let's dismiss that one jay horton um does infra whoops my screen just went weird on me what there is back again um does infrared work on the q2m as it does on the m9m the original monochrome do you know i don't know that for certain maybe connor would can chip in i'm sure it will do because i noticed in the spectral response curve that we put up on the screen earlier it does extend up to 750 nanometers which is infrared so have you tried anything in the infrared range sorry i haven't yeah yeah yeah jay i think the answers are definite probably but i couldn't be there if you asked the question in the chat if you haven't already then connor and ryan might be able to uh find out for you okay let's move on to some there's still some questions here but it's time to change the picture now this is the image that uh i thought showed up how non-digital the monochrome sensor style can look so can you tell us what we're looking at here knox um yeah for sure so this is uh i i took this shot while waiting for a train 5 6 pm after work at central station i'm standing on the platform and in this woman just walked by me i've got in this shot i'm using a red filter i'm using this is the one where i had a circular polarizer and a neutral density filter on i think the shot was shot with a with a one second exposure and the woman is in in bright bright daylight and so what that allows me to do is um even with a one second exposure to be shooting at f 16 and still not blow out the highlights or the the whites and then you get that movement within the shot this picture in particular it's a tiny tiny little bite-sized portion of the actual picture um and it is a crop and so it's cropped in and it's probably something like one pixel or something it's it's absolute it's absolutely tiny and then blown up um afterwards and i did blow this up in photoshop afterwards to the same size of pixels as all the other shots that come out of the camera to see what it would look like and that's and that's what it looks like yeah yeah that was remarkable when you explained it in the previous discussions because to me that looks exactly like you know chemical film grain which from coming from a digital sensor is actually makes no sense at all it's amazing so yeah very impressive one couple of questions i'll come back to um one of our regulars it's called anonymous attendee i don't know if it's the same person each time which anyway hi anonymous one question as an m user i am wondering how you like the electronic viewfinder that's a good question yeah it's you know i wasn't sure and i'd never never used a camera with a electronic viewfinder before i i really liked it there's a couple things i really liked about it i didn't notice until the second day that i was shooting with it that the viewfinder is in black and white and then once i realized that the viewfinder is in black and white i really like that because it really does give a pre preview of of what the shadows and highlights are going to look like and just takes how all of that all of that color that kind of changes and so you it did change to some extent how i was viewing through a viewfinder the other point that i would i probably would raise is that the you know the the electronic viewfinder was definitely better at night and had a big advantage at night for any of the night shots on the train i was able to focus better and um yeah i i really liked it it moves fast as well like i was expecting that it would have sort of a jerky movement across the screen as i'm moving but it wasn't anything there was none of that and so it just felt like a regular viewfinder in a lot of respects to me that's great i believe it's a 60 frames per second refresh i think which is pretty quick considering 24 25 is sort of movie speed so that's why it's not got that sort of jittery look to it um let's move on to the i've got a few more questions but let's move on to picture-wise um okay we're going from train pictures to graphic architectural stuff around sydney um again yeah just talk us to this picture knox okay this this picture is um it's just outside central station in sydney uh late afternoon sun there's a couple streets that you can walk down to get to george street that nobody basically walks down they're very empty and there's these really these beautiful kind of um i don't know how you describe the architecture of this it always reminds me i'm a big fan of george orwell and i kind of picture these buildings in 1984 because they have that sort of like you know ministry of speak sort of look to them and when you put this kind of light to it it's i don't know i find it i find it quite interesting um and so i'm just using sunny 16 here uh i've got i've got the camera set to to infinity so i can very quickly shoot any sort of situation when somebody comes into the frame and i'm ultimately shooting more like probably a landscape photographer here and then waiting for people to to walk into the frame and kind of more looking at sort of that combination of whites and darks and trying to line up how that kind of works yeah and the figure of course is critical to the shot so with just a question for me um with this picture like this how long and in general how long do you find that you you're waiting or i mean are you shooting and waiting a lot to get just the right person in the shot or are you moving on to other scenes yeah it's it's probably more dynamic than people would think because you're also dealing with light and light changes fast and in the city light changes fast with buildings and so you know this building is in this light for this period of time but then it's blocked by another building 10 minutes later um and so i've shot a lot in sydney and i kind of know where to go now and kind of where you're going to pick up bits of light and and sort of have these kind of reference points in my my mind at a certain time i should be walking through this part of the city and the other thing i think that's really interesting if you get to know a city cities are built in grids and at different times of the year the sun is either shining through the streets or shining at diagonals to the stream which can also change where you're going and where the light is going to go off the building and so on that night i came to that spot knowing that at that time of year at that time if you get you're going to get some really interesting light coming off the buildings but i i sat there probably for a good hour and didn't take a lot of shots maybe three or four shots where somebody actually walked through it was pretty empty street and then this is i believe the same place is that right yeah this is this is quite literally i'm standing in one location with my camera and like i said i was there for for a good hour and this really is just a 180 degree turn in the other direction and so if i were to go back three or four shots before this you'd actually see this guy walking through the other shot and then he walks into this shot and uh and so really i was just following him as he walked along the street and i i think the thing that probably caught my eye i often often don't shoot in portrait but i quite liked how the guy was walking with that curve and then it sort of mimicked what the lens distortion did to the building which i i quite enjoyed yeah that's really cool questions um amit again knox do you generally shoot at between -1 and -2 exposure compensation given that you are on a low iso generally is that true to say um good question it depends on how i'm shooting so in these i'm shooting manual and so you're not putting any you're not dealing with exposure com compensation but if i when i did use it on automatic session uh automatic settings i i had it either at minus one or minus minus two all the time and the reason why i do that is because i am looking for blacks and um where if i was on one or or two in the harsh lighting situations that i'm shooting in you'd blow out the whites which film would do that as well so if you shot regular on film and and just shot with normal exposure and didn't underexpose you'd be in the same situation okay all right not a question statement richard smith lucky my q2m arrived today so congratulations richard as the owner of a brand new q2m that's great sherwin spencer how did people resp so yeah sherwin how do people respond to you photographing them on trains etc um i think after years of doing it you can get very good at going by unnoticed i would it would be maybe once a month that anybody would ever notice me taking a photo on a on a train um you're very good at figuring out how to hold the camera and how to move and and with a wide angle lens you can you can point a camera in a way where it doesn't seem like you're taking a photo of a person it looks like you're holding taking a photo out the window and then if i do get caught generally i just smile and say hi and have a conversation with the person and usually defuses the situation so i can say in lots of years of shooting i've very rarely been in a a negative situation yeah that's pretty much what jesse marlowe says in his workshops as well and his discussions is you know you just get used to this way of working and then every now and again somebody might say you know what you're up to and it all depends on how you present yourself doesn't it if you just own it and come across as just a pleasant sort of person most people are very happy to have a conversation so yeah all right let's move on to a couple of pictures then we'll do a couple of questions and then we're probably getting towards the end so this one i love i think this is terrific so this is just this the timing on this one has got to be just exquisite i think um this shot is is right in the center of sydney um i i've gone in on the train if you you can kind of see for anybody who does know sydney you see the t in the background that is the t of event cinemas on on george street and there's there's that laneway that connects connects the two streets um what i liked about this shot is this is right in the middle of a very busy saturday um i stood in that one position for a long long time that day and the light kind of traveled and moved around around that that spot i really liked how the light was bouncing off that that sign to the left which to me really mimicked the kind of like diagonal lights that i get on on trains coming through so to me that really fit the series um but there was just timing wise this one lined up where the light was coming on on the woman and there just happened to be for that split second no one else there which gives that that real feeling of a deserted or isolated city really brilliant a couple more questions uh i think we've had as many questions if not more than any other event which is great it's just been coming thick and fast um kwok says that's wilmot street by the way in sydney so uh thanks quark ingrid hendrickson um i'm used to editing my images to monochrome so presumably converting to monochrome from color and like to be in control of the image look what are the major differences stroke advantages you find in using this camera to what are the advantages compared to taking a picture to black and white in photoshop or lightroom or something um look i'm i'm probably not the best person because i don't have a lot of experience with digital cameras um and so i'm more used to kind of shooting on black and white film and and seeing that anyway so to me the process wasn't a whole lot different of what i was looking at the one thing i i would point out if you work in a more traditional sense you you can control the contrast in the camera a lot better with this because you can use filters and it it's a more traditional way of shooting black and white which i i really liked about this camera where if you you throw as you know a red filter on a color camera you just get a red shot exactly and you try to edit that afterwards and it really just doesn't do anything but make a washed out photo yeah that's right but i think it's also interesting to point out that you know the the files that come up are are different and i've spent a lot of time in a dark room staring at grayscales and getting in really close to looking at grays that come up and analyzing that and i think from any digital camera i've ever shot before to this one the thing that that really caught me about the files probably that is different from converting from color is is the gray scale is quite unique to this camera yeah that's absolutely the that is in a nutshell the difference really because it is the way a monochrome camera works is just not the same as capturing color and converges black and white you might be able to get awesome results either way they're just a different path and the thing about the filters is it changes the light coming into the lens onto the sensor which is not the same as changing the color of the image after it's been onto the sensor it may sound like we're spitting hairs but the difference is uh quite you know appreciable um definitely go ahead please i think i raised this with you before the the one thing i really did like about this and it's probably been the thing that more than anything has has really kept me shooting film for so long is the edges of the black and white when you're shooting high contrast um when you shoot on a any digital color camera i've ever picked up and shot what you tend to get is sort of black and white and then you get this kind of weird strip of a line in between the white and black and no matter how much you try to edit it or play around it's it's always there but i think this shot's a really good example of that because if you look at her back and the black of her back and then the light of the of the street you just see black and then grayscale but you're not seeing that kind of outline that you would see on a color digital camera see what you mean in fact yeah thanks for reminding me because we did discuss this last time and if you imagine that ansel adams type shot with clouds and blue sky if you use post-processing from a color image to darken the blues using selective color or something like that if you go too far particularly with architectural shots you get a very strong white line around the transition between the object and the sky you don't get that with this camera if you put a red filter in front of it it's because it's a different process you're changing the color of the light coming in and you're not fiddling around with it afterwards so that's a great example thanks knox um i'll do one more picture and then some more questions uh this might even be the last picture so um this is a bit of a departure from the other pictures which are very urban um yeah this one's pretty urban too this is a jacaranda right at the entrance to tempe station just near my house the lighting of this is the very bright fluorescent lights that kind of hang over the it's one of those classic a-frame stations was built long time ago 1880s and and at the very top of that kind of a-frame stairs there's these super bright lights and the bright lights are hanging over this jacaranda and it's right at that time where the dracaran is just coming into bloom and and those those purple like the bright purple leaves of that we're just catching that fluorescent light so beautifully i thought um and and it just gave this i thought a very very surreal sort of lighting thing i take a lot of these shots this is i take a lot of shots at trees for some reason i find just the interesting movements of trees and light and dark and how it falls on it but particularly trees under man-made artificial light i find interesting yeah i didn't actually realize this was with fluorescent lights i i saw this as a sunlit shot with a blue sky but that's because i'm more of a landscape photographer now you mention it there was something about it that i found just a little bit strange and that explains it it's a very different quality of light so that's that's yeah that's remarkable i think that's the last picture yes it is and we're finishing on this one so we still don't go away knocks because we still do have a a few more pictures a few more questions so i'm just going to unshare so that people can see us that's better should be able to see knox and myself there and we'll just finish off any last questions that people have gotten there's still half a dozen to go so if you're okay sticking around for a few more minutes we might as well continue um stephen godfrey um has the kovid 19 situation changed your street photography practice um are you enjoying things being a bit more empty yeah well i quite like empty shots i'm i'm sure for a street photographer that likes busy shots it's probably not the best thing in the world but for me i i quite like people isolated within scenes so um yeah it's it's been interesting probably the biggest change i would say is i'm i'm still not so sure about pictures of people in mass and not seeing the details of people's faces faces and and it does change the mass but probably years from now we'll probably look back and love these shots because it's a period of time in history and you know and have a unique look to them as well i suppose i find i have the same problem with people looking at phones i think that's cheating because they're not going to notice you yeah me too i i i do try to get nobody on a phone but it's very a very hard thing to do really hard simon ross hey knox love your images uh in particular the dreamlike quality that comes with your dark room work these sensors are so precise do you see yourself spending more time in the digital dark room to emulate that or will it give rise to a different aesthetic uh yeah good question i i never i doubt i'll ever become a guy that spends a lot of time with post editing shots i just it's not where my interest area lies um but i will shoot this camera a lot and i'm i am interested i'm really open to see where it goes and how it changes the shots because it will change the aesthetic and i'm not sure where that aesthetic will follow with that but it'll be interesting to see where it goes i suppose absolutely okay um tim suter again knox um who do you think has influenced your style more than anybody else photographers cinematographers any influences um probably more cinematographers painters and photographers i probably later in life got more into looking up photographers and figuring out you know who was good and looking at that but i'd also say you know i'm i read a lot i read a lot of books and i'm probably more influenced by the kind of this will sound strange with more the thoughts in my head and so i use the example of george orwell in 1984 and when i'm out looking at scenes i kind of imagine what i think that would look like more so or you know a shot on a train or something like that um probably in terms of uh cinematographers we're really influenced by kubrick's early work in the way he framed shots um i love his films and how he balances the shot and how he frames a shot he uses a lot of the same sort of diagonal streaking lighting that i use it's really common sort of technique that he would use in his shots um and so there's yeah there's probably that's probably my strongest influence i would say right all right good i never thought yeah kubra i mean how could you not be influenced by his look i suppose um next question dean cookman the outback and i've gone back to using my m6 film camera congratulations mostly because they are in they are don't sell it because they're getting very valuable m6s their prices are going up um because they are tough cameras that do make it well in harsh dusty conditions my type 240 m didn't like the heat and dust do you consider this camera tough enough to use on an assignment uh yeah i mean i definitely would i've been carrying this around it's been pretty hot i've it hasn't left my shoulder in in two weeks i'm bumping into people on trains i've taken it through the rain um i'm not i'm not being overly nice to it to be honest with you hasn't missed a beat for me so i'd be i'd be pretty confident with this camera yeah well if you look on the bottom of the sl2 and the and the q2m you'll see this ip52 number and if you google that this dust and water protection there's an enormous list of different standards that cameras and other instruments are tested to and this one is is tested to a particular standard of ip52 which means it's not just a claim it's actually an industry standard that this is built to so these are absolutely uh water resistant uh which also makes them dust resistant as well i mean you wouldn't dunk it in a bucket of water or you know throw it in the sand exactly but they will you know they are tough and it's also um i know the sl2 is milled out of aluminium but i can't quite remember what this one is made out of connor can you help me out there i do know it's quite it's a little bit heavier than it looks which means to me that it's metal um which means it's tough so that's a that's a good good recommendation yes ryan says yes it's milled from aluminium so there we go so tough weather sealed camera um that's dean i'll just take these last three and then we'll call it an evening i think uh quack again hi um hi knox have you tried the q2m with flash uh i'm curious to know how flash settings might differ giving how easily the sensor can have blowout highlights um i did play around with a couple flashes on it i i also played around with it with a strobing bike light in the dark on on trees just to see what it would look like um it handled it handled pretty well with with a flash but when i was shooting the flash with it um i'm probably not the best guy to ask that question because i'm actually purposely trying to blow out the whites to get the look that i'm looking for so it worked really well really well for that um i don't use flashes all that often so i'm yeah it's probably not i'm probably not the best guy to ask okay last two questions then um one this is quite funny um do you as his tim suter again do you ever secretly shoot color even if it's just for yourself um you don't have to answer that it's a good question i i i do if i run if i'm in a city or if i go anywhere and i run out of black and white film i will go to uh a chemist or a drug store or wherever i am and and and buy color film and so any of the kind of color shots that i've taken it's because i've run out of black and white film can't get my hands on it and i'm buying cheap color film and taking shots with it good answer good answer i love it and last one uh normic norbert hi knox you're teaching chemistry do you influence sorry do you involve your students in your photography and if so do you get influenced by the view of a presumably younger generation um i i i'm a high school teacher and so i'm i'm quite careful about you know the the relationship between what i do privately and as a teacher and and i think all teachers have to be aware of of that sort of stuff i teach all of my students black and white processing and the chemistry behind that and we go through um i make i think the last time we spoke we talked about kodak triax and rhodanol i'm i teach students how to make rodanol in the way that they would have made it in the second world war um which was out of you know common chemicals that you would have found either in a drug store or in uh you know in winemaking and things like that and so what i do is i teach them how to isolate the chemicals to make the you know the same processes and and then we develop it and look at uh we look at the prints we look at the film and then we compare it to the shots of the greats um who shot in the second world war to see if we can emulate the grain structures that they had that you can't in modern films okay i wish you'd been my chemistry teacher at school that sounds absolutely awesome and on that note i think it's time to call a close to the proceedings um i'd like to thank knox uh hugely for sharing his time with us and his very subtle insights into not only photography but also this rather lovely camera um so yeah so thank you from everyone hopefully speaking for everybody when i say thanks knox for taking part um the camera is in the stores of course um if there's any left they've been quite popular and i do urge people if you are interested to get your hands on one it's all very well having me tell you about specifications or read them online or whatever but the feel of this camera is is something else and it will make a big difference you'll probably pick it up and go oh my goodness where's my credit card all right anyway ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for taking part i'm just going to swap my screen to a picture of this lovely camera and i'm going to just leave it there for a few minutes whilst we all disappear so thank you very much for taking part thanks everyone thanks nick

Channel: Leica Camera Australia

Views: 35,831

Keywords: Leica, Leica Camera, Photography, Leica Akademie, Q2, Q2M, Q2 Monochrom, monochrom, black and white photography, b+w, monochrome, black and white, street photography, Knox Bertie

Id: QgjRFbYSTJo

Length: 67min 34sec (4054 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 23 2020