Leica M Typ 240 Winter Landscape Field Test

Can a Leica M handle harsh winter conditions while providing excellent quality landscape images, and retaining it's legendary usability?That was the question I had in mind as I set out for a fortnight of photography in Assynt, in the far north west of Scotland. It's a place of unrivalled beauty and very target-rich from a photographic perspective. My first week was a landscape photography masterclass with an idol of mine, David Ward, about which you can find a write up here. The second week was intended to put everything I had learned into practice, in the company of a group of photographer friends who had travelled up.My weaponry for the trip was very minimal - My Leica M with 3 lenses, 28mm Elmarit, 50mm Summicron and 90mm Summicron APO ASPH. A spare battery, some Lee Seven5 filters, a cable release, an Olympus electronic viewfinder, and a Sony RX100 mkIV rounded off a very compact kit which all fitted into a Billingham Hadley bag. Add a carbon Velbon tripod to that list. My thoughts were that this little kit would be small and light enough to go anywhere easily without restricting either my creativity or my agility.On previous landscape trips of this duration and intensity I've always taken far too much gear and ended up with a rucksack full of stuff which has literally held me back and made it very awkward and inconvenient to actually take pictures.The Leica M is more usually known as a street photography camera. It's not often thought of as a purist's landscape tool. Needless to say I was the only one on the masterclass with an M - others had Sony A7R series cameras, 5D's and even a Canon 1DX, and all the gear to go with it. I felt a bit out of place.PortabilityThis is a huge plus. Firstly, using a shoulder bag means that everything is instantly reachable. No need to take a rucksack off your back, lie it on mud or wet sand, and rummage around inside. This helps hugely when scouting about for locations, trying different positions etc.The bag also acts as a safe place for lens changes, fiddling with filters etc. While the Sony A7 series may be no bigger from a body perspective, the Sony lenses are significantly larger than the Leica equivalents. You could use the Leica lenses on your Sony of course, but then you have to work with the Sony user interface which is a nightmare in itself.Another super addition was a Peak Design Capture Pro clip. For climbing up mountains, it's important to have the camera available, but not swinging about everywhere. Using the PD clip I could keep it handy without it getting in the way. Superb! The clip was rock-solid and the camera mounting plate also fitted onto my Manfrotto quick release tripod mount which kept everything very simple indeed. I did keep the camera strap around my neck though...Weather Sealing & EnduranceWe had some crazy weather on this trip. 70mph+winds, hail, rain, sleet, snow, all horizontal and often at the same time, with warmish sun in between. Temperatures ranged from -12C to +12C. You can't beat Scotland in February for bonkers weather. I put the Leica away during heavy rain - there's simply no point proceeding when your lens is covered in raindrops. I had no problems at all using it in light rain, spray from waterfalls, snow etc. The camera never stopped working, locked up, or did anything untoward. I just looked after it, kept wiping it with a cloth, and kept the lenses moderately dry.The camera did take a drop from head height onto the floor when it decided to tangle itself up in my neck buff as I took it off. It landed on a slightly spongy sandy surface and suffered no ill effects at all (rangefinder alignment still fine etc).In the bitter cold on the top of Stac Pollaidh, the camera did slow down a bit in terms of image write times. This could be due to a slower card I put in that day which I only realised afterwards.I never used exhausted a battery in a day. I always recharged overnight so I was ready to go with a fresh battery in the morning. The highest number of shots I took in a day was 266, with a lot of live view/EVF action.I found the sensor quite susceptible to dust. I was changing lenses many times a day which obviously doesn't help, and there is no sensor-shake dust cleaning facility. I didn't clean my sensor during the fortnight, so ended up with quite a lot of dust-bunny cloning in post processing with about 10-15 noticeable spots. The sensor was clean prior to the fortnight.I didn't treat the camera badly, but I didn't baby it either. I regard it as a professional work tool which should simply do its job, which it did very well.HandlingLeica cameras like the M and Q are delights to use. Simple, with no extraneous functions, it's just so easy to get them to do what you want. The physical, connected-feeling controls (the aperture ring physically controls the actual aperture - amazing!) makes the shooting experience much more involving than many other digital cameras like the Sony A7R which I used to own. Even my Sony RX100IV compact is an over-complex user interface mess which frustrated the hell out of me after using the Leica.Usually I was operating in manual mode. It would be handy to have an ISO dial to complement the aperture and shutter speed. Occasionally I'd use aperture priority and have auto-ISO running, but in general I'd be at base ISO 200, have the aperture set to something smallish, and adjust shutter speed to suit. A lot of shots were tripod-mounted due to slow-ish shutter speeds resulting from the small apertures used and often low dawn or sunset light.I do like the Thumbs-Up. It gives a more secure grip on the camera when taking it out of the bag in a hurry and feels good when shooting handheld. It was a bit of a pain to keep removing it to put the EVF on (more on that shortly) and replacing it again to keep the contacts covered.Focusing & FramingFirstly, I really like rangefinder focusing. It's quick, simple, and you know where you are with it. For landscape, you can focus once on your scene and just leave it alone. No need to fiddle about moving focus points using obscure menus, or missing focus as the camera has decided it has a different opinion to you. Having a marked depth of field gauge on every lens is very valuable to ensure everything you want is going to be sharp.However...when you are using Lee Seven5 filters, the filter holder and filters can obscure the small rangefinder window below the shutter speed dial. This means that it's necessary to remove the filter holder when focusing, then replace it again when you're done. It's not a lot of hassle to be honest, but annoying nonetheless.For determining the correct exposure, I'd often take a shot in aperture priority, note the shutter speed, and then set the shutter manually to allow over or under exposure as required. I never used exposure compensation. I'd check exposure on the rear screen using the histogram view.Often it's necessary to have very precise framing especially when there are a number of components of the image that need to align. The offset of the optical viewfinder from the lens makes this very tricky when you are quite close to the foreground. I found live-view was essential for this, and often used an Olympus VF-2 electronic viewfinder, which is identical to the Leica version.This viewfinder (mine was 2nd hand from eBay) is a bit slow to warm up to full brightness, but I found it invaluable when being very accurate. A half-press of the shutter gives the WYSIWYG exposure. I recommend using this EVF if you need this level of precision. Yes, you need to focus with the rangefinder then recompose (I didn't bother with focus peaking) with the EVF but I didn't mind that so much.LensesOut of my 36 high ranked 4* and 5* images, 13 were with the 90mm Summicron, 17 with the 28mm Elmarit, and 6 with the 50mm Summicron.All three lenses are astonishingly good.For this sort of work you could go for an f/2.8 90mm as you don't really need f/2 except for the odd very special shallow depth of field image. The Summicron is a bit heavy compared to the Elmarit as well as being more expensive.I took an M-to-A7 adaptor and let one of the other workshop attendees use my Leica lenses. He's now buying his own 50mm Summicron as a result - he was very impressed with the clarity, sharpness and rendering compared to the Nikon and Sony lenses he was using.Image QualityRich colours, clear and crisp details, lovely clarity. What's not to like? The RAW files from the M are lovely, needing very little post-processing if you want to just leave things alone. If you do go into the depths of detailed image adjustments (I use Lightroom), I found the files to be very easy to work with, possessing a lot of latitude to slide the sliders. Obviously it helps to get the exposure right in the first place.White balance was generally very well handled. I did have a WhiBal card with me which I didn't use very much. Our tutor David Ward showed us a great way to set white balance to a setting which closely resembles the scene as you saw it (rather than a technically correct setting) which was great for bring the most out of my images.Having owned an A7R, I find I am very happy to trade a few megapixels for the superior user experience, handling and general gorgeousness of the M. At no point did I find the Leica files lacking in any way compared to the Sony.ConclusionKnown primarily as a street photographer's tool, the Leica M makes an ideal landscape camera. I'm amazed I don't see more of them out there (OK, they are a tad pricey!). Small, quite light, and with brilliant lenses, my Leica kit performed fantastically on this intensive trip.Quite simply I'm delighted with it. I loved using it, and it's a camera you can "bond" with, rather than "just a piece of consumer electronic equipment". It feels special every time you take it out of the bag. My Sony A7R really annoyed me with its odd and complex user interface, which spoilt the experience of photography for me. The Leica involves you much more and as a result you want to get the best out of it and yourself.The conditions in Assynt were remarkable. I feel very privileged to have been there to try and capture how amazing it was. In particular, waking up to a heavy snowfall on Wednesday morning, and driving unploughed roads (winter tyres & 4-wheel-drive) to get to a stunning location (the loch below Stac Pollaidh), and experiencing cycles of snowstorms and sunshine can only be described as photogasmic!Finally, here are two slideshows, one colour, and the other rather more moody in monochrome trying to capture some of the feeling of the place.