My Leica M11-P Setup & Settings
I’ve had the Leica M11-P for almost three months and in this blog I thought Id share how have the camera setup, what settings I’ve changed and landed on using the most.
High Contrast Monochrome
Kicking things off with an unsual one, which I didn’t think would happen. I pretty much always shoot the picture profile set to high contrast monochrome. This means when I use live view and also see the jpeg previews everything is in b&w.
The first reason is because if I use the screen to focus quickly, maybe I’m hip firing and don’t want to rise the camera to my eye. The red focus peaking on the b&w screen is much easier to identify. The red focus peaking mixed into a scene that’s also in colour makes the focusing harder to pick up.
It’s just a subtle difference but I’ve found it to be helpful.
Half the time, I do shoot with screen switched off but in different situations especially if I’m lining up compositions and shapes, the screen is useful and I also just find the b&w profile simplifies everything I’m looking at.
Street Photography Settings
If I’m out for a day of street photography I almost always use shoot in auto ISO with a manual shutter speed and fstop.
If the light is great then I’ll go for 1/1000 shutter speed and anywhere between f5.6 and f/11. if the light isn’t so good (like it hasn’t been in London for the last few months) I’ll lower the shutter speed and open up the aperture to compensate.
With street photography I like to keep things as simple as possible so auto ISO is key. This is capped at 6400. Anything higher than that I find the noise to be unusable.
I alsoI use highlight weighted metering. I would prefer to protect my highlights and crush the shadows over exposing the shadows and clipping my highlights.
Generally though, the raw files are lovely to work with anything I’ve had no issues with anything exposure related.
If i’m not doing street photography and maybe taking photographs of friends and family, maybe some portraits - I’ll flick everything into manual and work out what looks best.
Is the preview is playing with me?
Maybe I can mention this point in my longer term review of this camera but I wonder if anyone else thinks the same.
When I look at photos on the screen, they sometimes look like I’ve missed focus and there’s a lot more motion burr than intended. Then I open the same photograph in Lightroom and they’re sharp. I just find that the screen isn’t showing me as accurate of a preview as what I see on a computer screen. Just my personal experience.
White Balance
Moving onto white balance. If I’m inside, then I switch it to auto, if I’m outside then I typically select cloudy or shadow.
Tthe auto white balance does look slightly magenta, I know a few people have mentioned this about M11 and It’s not a huge deal to add some green to the tint or warmth in the temperature. But also by using a specific white balance and not shooting in auto means all your images are consistent from that day and that helps when batch editing as well.
I will say however that the auto WB is way better than it was on the Q2. I remember the Q2 had no idea what it was doing.
Lets talk megapixels
For personal work, I have landed on just using 36mp. I dont think i need the full 60MP and I honestly can’t tell the difference plus appreciate the smaller file sizes.
I see people mention about extra dynamic range and better low light performance … I can’t tell.
For work, I do however change it to 60mp. Because obviously I want to provide the best quality I can. Even though I’m sure nobody would be able to tell the difference. I just feel more comfortable delivering photos in full resolution.
I also have only shot in raw. I’m sure the jpegs are cool but I want full flexibility and don’t mind editing all my images so I’m working with full DNG raw files only.
Custom Settings
I have only customised two buttons on my camera, the first one is the small right top button which allows me to change the profile which I have set to B&W.
That button might be already set by default so maybe check that.
The only other button I’ve changed is the auto ISO dial which is set to M and then when I push the back dial in I can quickly and easily adjust my ISO.
If I didn’t set it up like that, flicking the top dial up and changing the ISO physically does feel a little cumbersome. It’s much easier to have it set to manual and I adjust it myself with the dial on the back.
Accessories?
Physically I haven’t changed anything about the camera in terms of accessories except for the strap. I use the Leica rope strap. It’s a little shorter than the regular leather strap that comes with the camera. I find the regular strap just too long for the way I like to carry my camera around.
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