Leica CL in Scotland 2018 - Part 5 (last one)

This is the last of the 5-part field review of the Leica CL. You might want to read parts 1, 2, 3 and 4 before this one. The rather obvious thrust of this review is landscape photography, not portraits, not "street", not studio. The CL concept is ideal for landscaping in my view. Excellent image quality, great native lenses, in particular the zooms that give nothing away to Leica M primes at landscape apertures, all in a lightweight and very tactile and well built package.Having said that, last night skies were fairly clear so I thought I'd try a spot of astrophotography from inside my bedroom. No point going outside if you don't have to! For this, I put a 24mm Summilux-M lens on the CL, set it to f/2 and had a bit of a play.This seemed to be remarkably successful. I don't think the 18-56 L zoom is fast enough for this sort of thing as you really need to keep the shutter speed under 15 seconds to keep stars sharp. With the 18-56, you'd end up with a slower shutter speed or an uncomfortably high ISO. As it is, the CL performs very well at ISO 1600. OK it's not a Sony A7S or Nikon D850, but....it's totally excellent at 12 sec and ISO 1600 and f/2, and it's easy to zoom in to check focus, get the exposure right etc.Anyway, enough about astrophotography. Had the aurora been on show it would be a different story, but it wasn't unfortunately.Back to landscape. Today was a GREAT day. For the first day of my week up here the weather was on my side. The plan was to get up at 5:00 am, head out at 5:30 am with my pal Gordon, and climb one of the amazing mountains that litter the area. On arrival at the little car park at the foot of the Quinag (pronounced "Cooniag") mountain range at 6:00 am, we got kitted up, headtorches on, and started up the trail. Climbing up Scottish mountains in the winter in the dark is not a game, so we were very well prepped with proper gear, spare batteries, map, compass, survival goodies and suchlike.As we made our way up in the dark, it started to rain. As we got higher it started to snow. This was definitely not in the forecast. Snow up high is not good, and from what we could see it looked like there was low cloud coming in. I was pondering calling it all off, but as we progressed the snow stopped and we could see some light patches through the cloud. Things were looking up. After a 2.5 hour slog, including some rather difficult parts through slippery boulder fields, we hit the first summit just as the sun was coming up.  Game on.As well as the CL, I had the 18-56 and 55-135 lenses with me. The 55-135 stayed in the bag for the duration, with the 18-56 handling everything. It really is an excellent lens. I mostly used a Lee Seven5 ND 0.6 graduated filter, and occasionally a polariser, during the trip today.Being really quite cold (I'd say -3C), the CL noshed its way through its battery faster than when the temperature is more sensible. I got 86 shots and had 1 bar of battery left today. The camera was out all the time rather than in a rucksack. So, bear this in mind. I did have a spare battery with me tucked away somewhere warm. I should have had two spare batteries, but I dropped one at the back of the car and then ran over it the day before, crushing it to mushy oblivion.Back to the mountain. After a bit of scrabbling around looking for compositions (very difficult as the first summit was really quite a mess of boulders and rubble) we dropped down into a little saddle, then up the other side to the summit of Spidean Coinich which is just under 800m at the top. The view from up there was astounding, and the weather was still playing ball with views in all directions. As you can see above, Assynt is peppered with large and small lochs. In the distance is the fishing village of Lochinver, home to the Pie Shop where we rewarded ourselves after completion of our exploits.Oh, yes, this is a camera review, not a pie shop review so lets get back to the Leica. A few more niggles about the CL have emerged. One is that the focus mode seems to inexplicably change from "Field" to "Touch AF" for no apparent reason. It is possible that I'm prodding something while not really using the camera. I know that it does it consistently if I connect the camera to the CL app on an iOS or Android device. But it also occasionally does it when I'm out and about. This is rather weird and I haven't fathomed the reason yet.On a related topic, when in "Field" focus mode, I occasionally find the focus point in a different place to where I left it. I think that this is due to the rear 4-way controller getting actuated when the camera is in my bag and not switched off (I usually let it go to standby rather than physically turning it off). I am happy to put this issue down to user error.And the CL has a touch screen. I had completely forgotten about it. I never use it, but it doesn't seem possible to completely disable it. I'd like to be able to completely disable it please Leica. I suspect it may be the cause of the focus mode and focus point location oddness.Lastly on the subject of weird niggles, the camera file numbering rolled over from 999 to 1000. The filename went from C1000999 to C1001000. But the next frame was C1010000, with an extra zero appearing by magic. This is very strange. I suspect this is a firmware bug which I shall report on the Leica Camera forum.Having spent a week intensively processing 500+ images, I can report that the flexibility of the CL DNG files to often hamfisted editing is very good. Shooting at ISO 100, there's plenty of latitude in the files to push shadows and blacks up from areas that look like they should not be rescued. Highlights aren't quite as flexible - once they're blown they're blown as you probably know, so I usually erred on the side of slight underexposure.Another interesting thing is that there's still no dust on the sensor. On my M10 I'd have lots of annoying dust spots by now. The CL doesn't have any sensor cleaning tech on board, so I think I can attribute this to two things. Firstly, I'm changing lenses quite rarely due to the flexibility of the 18-56 zoom which provides pretty much all the range of the 3 M-lenses I had used on my M10. Secondly, the sensor is smaller, so there is less of it for dust to land on. Whichever the reason is, I like the result.In conclusion then, I've tried to be brutally honest with this review. There are a few issues with the CL, but in my view they are relatively minor and don't detract from the overall excellence of the camera. I only used my M-lenses once so I'll probably sell all but the 24 Summilux. I  remain very impressed by the 18-56 and 55-135 zooms. I rarely used the 55-135 but it was easy enough to pop into the bag and take with me just in case. As a2-lens kit, these two lenses are ideal for the CL. Sure I'd like something faster, but that comes with size and weight. I don't think I need the wider zoom - I didn't have any situations that necessitated anything wider than the 18mm could offer me.The CL is small, very well made, with excellent image quality and really very impressive native lenses. For this sort of travel/landscape photography it is an ideal companion. It's true that you don't feel as connected with the image taking process as you do with an M camera. This is a highly subjective thing, but it's a thing nontheless. But the upside of the CL outweighs the loveliness of the M for me and it's a keeper for now. Your mileage may vary. To finish off, a trip like this is so much more than the images that result. This is the joy of photography. To get images like the ones in this series, you need to go to incredible places and see amazing things, and the rewards are the experiences you have, some of which you document through photography. North west Scotland in winter is gorgeous. Go there.Thanks for reading.