I'm up in Scotland for my annual photography pilgrimage, with my pal Gordon who I have known for over 10 years now. Over the last decade we've explored everything photography has to offer and have finally settled (for a bit anyway) on our own photographic genres. I'm a landscape nut and Gordon is into "vintage" photography - everything from wet plate collodian to Polaroid.Yesterday and today were travel days. It's 650 miles from Guildford to Ullapool, so we overnighted in Fort William, north of Glasgow. There were weather warnings everywhere, with heavy snow falling, iced up roads and -9C temperatures.  Our 05:30 departure this morning meant that we were first on the road and it was rather hairy. Pitch black, ice everywhere, unknown roads, hairpins, mountains - everything. Once we stopped crapping ourselves it was actually quite good fun.I'm using this trip as a thorough road test of my new Leica CL camera. I've done a couple of lens tests which revealed that the 18-56 and 55-135 Leica "L" lenses are extremely good, but it's one thing doing test shots, and another thing altogether being up a mountainside in heavy snow trying to get a shot in fleeting light. Could the CL and those two lenses be the ideal lightweight landscape setup? How does it compare with the Leica M10 which I wrote about this time last year. I'll tell you in this post and a few more that I'll put up during this week. And just for the record, these are all my own cameras, bought with my own money.Firstly, the CL is small, light and beautifully made. Those two zoom lenses are fantastic quality - just ignore any thoughts about cheap "kit lenses" in relation to the 18-56 - it is a stunning piece of kit that keeps up with the best M-lenses at typical landscaping apertures. And the 55-135 is similarly excellent. In the bag, the kit weighs very little which is a great relief to the shoulders.Today I got snowed on, sleeted on and rained on. I did keep a cloth at hand to drape over the camera but it did get wet and carried on working. It wasn't soaked in rain, so don't get over-excited about waterproofing. Just take care of it and you'll be fine.Something I really like about the CL versus the M10 is the fact that you can leave the tripod mounting plate in place and get the card and battery out. With the M10 you need to remove the mounting plate, then remove the bottom plate to get hold of the card and battery. This is annoying and unnecessary these days. Score 1 to the CL.But the main handling difference versus the M-series is the more "digital" nature of the CL. With the L-series lenses, there are no physical aperture controls on the lens, no depth-of-field scale, and no labelled "manual" shutter speed and ISO controls. Everything is controlled using "soft" dials on the top of the camera. If you are used to the more analogue controls of the M, the CL will take a bit of getting used to. But it's far, far simpler and nicer to use than, for example, a Sony A7-series camera which is a mess of menus, buttons and dials. The CL is pretty simple when you get used to it, and typically I ended up shooting in either aperture priority with ISO 100 on a tripod, or manual mode with everything set specifically for the scene. It's really pretty simple to set up in manual mode. Right dial does aperture, left dial does shutter speed, and a press of the right dial button lets you set the ISO. The aperture and shutter speed are shown in the little top screen, but not the ISO unless you press the top right button. I'd like Leica to change this so you can see all three variables on the top screen at once without having to press anything.Being a slightly smaller sensor than the full frame M10, you get a bit more depth of field for any given focal length which is very handy for landscape work. Both the zoom lenses absolutely sing at f/11 and you can get everything nicely sharp front to back even when the main subject is fairly close as in the image above. From an image-quality perspective, the pictures from the CL are outstanding. As you may have read in those earlier lens tests, the differences between the L-series lenses and M-lenses are minute to non-existent. That leaves the sensor. With 24 megapixels, there really is no discernable difference that I can detect between images from this camera and from the M. Obviously we're not talking f/1.4 here. Compared to images I took with my M last year in the same area, the CL is easily the match of the M for this sort of photography.  More to come in Part 2. And here's a slideshow of all (halfway decent) images from this 2018 Assynt trip: