weddings (and engagements) with the leica q2

I keep ending up with a Q.

It’s always the ‘other’ camera, the extra, the unnecessary alternative.

Alongside the Canons, the Sonys, the Leica SL’s, the Nikons and the Panasonics, it’s always there, except when it’s not, generally because I talked myself into thinking it was too wide, too redundant, too much money tied up in something not essential.

Except it is.

When all you have is what you need to do a job, then all you’re doing is the job, which, when your job is photography, isn’t the worst problem to have.

But if you go too long only doing your job, you forget that your job isn’t a static - or even an especially pragmatic - vocation.

So you, again, return to the unnecessary, the extra, the non-essential, and realize the importance of its presence.

Quiet, unobtrusive, curious, simple, limiting, bulletproof, singular and quite imperfect.

The amount of surprises this camera gives me, where I’d be satisfied with far fewer, is always, in itself, surprising.

It reminds me that one thing can do a lot if you give in a bit.

Give in to the frustration of (and I’m being generous here) adequate auto focus, a too-wide lens (it really is,) and lack of any modern bells and whistles and in doing so, find yourself seeing whole scenes, undisturbed and real, all captured with some inexplicable fairy dust where it all just looks, well, really damned good.

It doesn’t do anything that anything else couldn’t do, perhaps, a little (or a lot) faster or easier. But it is something that nothing else is.

It’s extra.