Tool Kit: Leica Cameras Have Eye-Popping Prices, With Photos to Match

Leica Cameras Have Eye-Popping Prices, With Photos to Match

Aaron Durand and Nick Bilton/The New York Times

A train speeding through a tunnel in San Francisco. This 30-second exposure was taken with the Leica M9-P and a 28mm f2 lens.

Today’s smartphones can take pretty crisp pictures, so buying a regular camera might sound like a waste of money. Now imagine buying a fully manual Leica digital camera that, with a body and lens, can cost as much as $20,000.

Ridiculous? Perhaps. But the hard-core photographers who own a Leica swear by its craftsmanship, lens quality and lack of bells and whistles even as they acknowledge that their beloved camera gear is, well, not for everyone.

The question is whether your love of photography â€" and perhaps your skill â€" run deep enough to justify dropping enough money to buy a car, on a camera.

“For most people, the Leica is absolutely the wrong camera. But if you’re really, really dedicated to the craft, then the pictures it can take are beautiful,” said Christopher Michel, a photographer and investor with Nautilus Ventures.

Leica, based in Germany, released its first high-end digital camera in 2006, the M8, but the company has been in the camera business for almost a century. In the 1950s, Leica rose to fame when it introduced the M-System camera, its first so-called rangefinder body with an interchangeable lens mount.

Although it had a rough start crossing into digital, Leica now sells almost a dozen varieties of digital cameras, including some point-and-shoots. But the most coveted models are still in the rangefinder M-System series.

Unlike DSLR (digital single-lens reflex) cameras, in which a photo subject is viewed through a mirror, rangefinders offer crisper images because the lens is closer to the sensor of the camera. The shutter on a rangefinder is also incredibly still and quiet â€" unlike the DSLR, in which the mirror flips up and down at the moment a photo is snapped â€" so little vibration is added to a photo when the shutter is pressed.

Still, focusing with a Leica rangefinder is not as easy as just snapping a picture with your iPhone.

First, the camera focus is completely manual. A Leica viewfinder shows two versions of the scene before you. The trick is to line up the images and make them overlap over the area to be in focus.

Leica offers several digital camera bodies. The Leica M-E is the lowest-priced model of the M-System. The bare-bones M-E body costs $5,450. It has an 18-megapixel sensor and can shoot at an ISO of 160 to 2,500 (the ISO number measures the sensitivity to light). Photos taken during the day will be flawlessly clear, while in very low light the images will deteriorate and become grainy without a flash.

The latest high-end camera from the company, the Leica M, was announced late last year and costs $6,950. It features a newly designed 24-megapixel CMOS sensor (CMOS stands for complementary metal-oxide semiconductor), which makes it possible for the camera to shoot in lower-light situations while keeping a crisp image. The Leica M is the only M-System camera that can shoot video.

Leica also offers the Leica M Monochrom, an 18-megapixel camera that can shoot only black and white. Some people might ask why anyone would buy a camera that cannot even take a color picture, but Leica has poured years of research and development into optimizing the sensor on this camera for the subtlety of black-and-white photography.

The results from the Leica M Monochrom are astounding. Pictures have the tonality and contrast that make them look as if they were shot with real black-and-white film. The M Monochrom can also shoot at an ISO up to 10,000, which allows pictures to be taken in extremely low light.

Keep in mind that once you buy a Leica camera body, it still needs a lens. But this, professional photographers say, is where Leica excels.

“Leica makes a lens the way it should be made, with metal and glass, while everyone else is making plastic lenses that are meant to be thrown away in a couple of years,” said Ken Rockwell, a photographer and expert on cameras and lenses. “The Leica lenses are so special because they are smaller, faster and sharper.”

Mr. Rockwell notes that Leica’s lenses, which are still assembled by hand in Germany, do not have the added features of modern DSLRs, like motors, and that the company uses the highest-grade glass available.

“The Leica glass,” Mr. Michel said, “adds that special ethereal quality to the image that no DSLR can match.”

I have tested almost all of the company’s cameras and lenses. The control I have with a manual Leica makes me realize that today’s abundance of buttons and features on most cameras often makes people take poorer pictures.

Leica’s lenses can vary in price from $1,650 for the Leica 50mm f/2.5 Summarit-M, to the Leica 50mm f/0.95 Noctilux-M, which costs $10,950. Once you have recovered from seeing the price of the Noctilux-M, keep in mind it is considered one of the best low-light lenses in the world and has such a wide aperture it can shoot almost in darkness.

The company names all of its lenses based on the amount of light a lens can let in through the aperture; these include the Summilux, Summicron, Summarit and Noctilux.

If you have been doing the math, you might have noticed that the best Leica setup will cost almost $20,000. My personal Leica setup is half that. I own a used Leica M9-P with a Leica 50mm f1.4 Summilux lens, which cost almost $10,000, and although the price might make you choke on your morning coffee, I would give up my iPhone before I’d part ways with my Leica.

This was true decades ago and is still true today. Henri Cartier-Bresson, considered by many to be the father of photojournalism, said in his biography, “The Mind’s Eye,” that when he discovered the Leica camera in the beginning of his career, “It became the extension of my eye, and I have never been separated from it since I found it.”

But be forewarned: Although Leicas are tough and rugged, if your camera does break, be prepared to wait a couple of months for it to be fixed, because the company’s repair facilities are only in Germany. If you do buy a Leica, it will also take a long time to become completely used to the rangefinder and manual setup. Leicas are in such high demand that there is a three-month wait to purchase several of the latest models.

“Don’t think that if you buy a Leica you’re going to be taking the same photos as the world’s best photojournalists,” Mr. Rockwell said. “The camera doesn’t take good pictures; the person holding it does.”

Obama to Speak at March on Washington Anniversary

WASHINGTON â€" President Obama will speak on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to observe the anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on Aug. 28 â€" 50 years to the day after one of the march’s organizers, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., delivered his “I Have a Dream’’ speech.

The White House said Mr. Obama would speak at the Let Freedom Ring ceremony organized by the King Center in Atlanta, but offered no other details. The event, billed as a commemoration of Dr. King’s speech and a “nationwide and global day of unity,” will begin with an interfaith religious service and include a bell-ringing ceremony at 3 p.m.

Separately, the National Action Network, a civil rights group founded by the Rev. Al Sharpton, is organizing an anniversary march on Aug. 24. That march is expected to be more like the original, focusing on issues including economic justice and racial profiling, a contentious topic in the wake of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Florida teenager.

As the nation’s first black president, Mr. Obama has often shied away from talking about race relations, though that has been changing lately. He used his platform last month to give voice to the anger and pain that many African-Americans felt after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the Florida neighborhood watch volunteer who killed Mr. Martin.

Mr. Obama also linked racial tensions to economic inequality during a recent interview with The New York Times, noting that the original march was a call for action on jobs as well as civil rights and predicting that if economic inequities persist, “racial tensions won’t get better; they may get worse.”

“It’s part of my generation’s formative memory, and it’s a good time for us to do some reflection,” he said of the anniversary. “Obviously, after the Trayvon Martin case, a lot of people have been thinking about race, but I always remind people â€" and, in fact, I have a copy of the original program in my office, framed â€" that that was a march for jobs and justice; that there was a massive economic component to that.”

On West Coast Swing, Obama Squeezes In Dinner With Donor

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. - Many in Washington were surprised that President Obama came to California on Tuesday and did not, like presidents almost always do in the Golden State, squeeze in a fund-raiser.

But, it turns out, he did make time for a big political donor.

After dodging questions from White House reporters on Tuesday, Jay Carney, the White House press secretary disclosed on Wednesday that Mr. Obama had a private dinner in his Los Angeles hotel, the Hilton Woodland Hills, with “his longtime friend, Jeffrey Katzenberg,” the chief executive of DreamWorks Animation, after taping his appearance on NBC’s “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno.”

“Just the two of them, at the hotel,” Mr. Carney added.

The president paid, the spokesman said.

Gadgetwise: Getting the Right Light in a Photo

Getting the Right Light in a Photo

High Dynamic Range photography takes a series of over, under and properly exposed photos and then mashes the best parts together to cover a full range of light.

The eye can see a much greater range of light and dark than a camera can, which is why windows look like glowing boxes in daylight photos taken indoors.

That is where H.D.R. (High Dynamic Range) photography comes in. It takes a series of over, under and properly exposed photos and then mashes the best parts together to cover a full range of light. It makes images that are much closer to what the eye actually sees.

But there have been barriers to using H.D.R. The primary issue is that moving subjects change position from shot to shot in the series and appear blurry in the final images. That limits H.D.R.'s use to still-life photography conducted under careful conditions with a steady tripod.

But a new H.D.R. software program from Unified Color, called HDR Expose 3, does two things well that other H.D.R. programs generally don’t (especially the H.D.R. software built into cameras). One is to line up pictures from slightly different angles, which eliminates the need for a tripod. If you’re taking hand-held H.D.R. photos, though, be sure your shutter is set to a fast speed, burst mode and auto bracketing â€" and you’ll still have to be as steady as possible.

The other thing that it does is make moving objects, like people walking through the frame, solid instead of a blur. In the software, you pick the frame in which you like the positioning of the people (or kites, clouds, animals â€" whatever is moving) and the program compares that frame with others. It eliminates the elements that are in different positions from the frame you picked when it mashes them together.

H.D.R. has been criticized for the otherworldly look it can impart. Expose 3 settings allow it to be much more subtle and natural, though it also has a “grunge” setting that delivers striking effects.

There is a little bit of a learning curve to the product, which is available either as a stand-alone program or as a plug-in that works in other programs like Adobe’s Photoshop. The video tutorials on the Unified Color Web site are a big help, especially because the software isn’t foolproof â€" you need to learn a few manual fixes.

The stand-alone version of HDR Expose 3 is $120, or you can buy a $90 version called 32 Float V3, which adds Expose 3’s features to Photoshop.