Leica’s Vintage Black and White

I had another opportunity to shoot my Leica M9 at a wedding over the weekend.  It still was not my primary camera but served secondary to my trusty Canon EOS 1D Mark IV.  This time I set the M9 to shoot both RAW and JPEG in vintage black and white.  The strategy was interesting since the RAW was in color and the JPEG was in B&W, but I can only replay the B&W version until the images were finally downloaded to my computer. I think the strategy allowed me to work better because when I reviewed an image on the LCD in B&W all I can see is mood and composition without the distraction of color.

It was such a pleasure to shoot and the images right out of the camera were so wonderful that I ended up using it for creating half the images.  I just wish I had a second M9 as it is always a pain to switch lenses so I ended up relying on both the M9 and the Mark IV.  The shooting style is very different with each camera.  With the M9, you want to be more methodical.  After all it is a manual focus camera and it is easy to bump up against the buffer if you are shooting RAW.  When I shoot the Mark IV, I tend to run and gun more because of it’s fast frame rate, huge buffer and fast auto-focus.  Next time, one of the bodies has to just stay in the car.  In fact, I have a small wedding coming up where it will be held in someone’s home.  There will only be 20 people there so it will be a perfect time to go Leica all the way.

Here are some more images from the day.  No processing was done with these images other than cropping them and running them through a sharpening preset.