Four Dates with my Leica M EV1

How I Stopped Testing It — and Started to Love It

A few months ago, I bought myself a Leica M EV1. A camera I absolutely wanted to have. Along with a Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4. A beautiful combination. Minimalist, beautifully made, manual. Exactly the kind of photography that had fascinated me.

And, of course, I loved the M itself. That wonderfully simple body. The lens. The way it feels in my hands. The deliberate act of focusing manually.

It was my most luxurious Leica yet.

And then? I hardly used it. That wasn’t exactly the plan.

I picked up my Q3 43 almost without thinking. I immediately found plenty of reasons to use my SL3-P. But the M? It stayed at home surprisingly often. And yet I liked it. I enjoyed holding it. I thought it was beautiful. I even enjoyed the deliberate process of focusing manually. I just wasn’t taking many photographs with it. And eventually, I had to ask myself the question I didn’t really want to ask:

Had buying my Leica M simply been a rather expensive idea?

Keep It or Sell It?

Of course, I could have approached the whole thing rationally. How often do I actually use it? What can it do that my other cameras can’t? Do I really need another camera system? And how much money would I lose if I sold it again? But at some point, I realised that none of these questions were helping me make the real decision. Because if I judged the M purely by what it could do, it would lose rather quickly.

My Q3 43 is easier.

My SL3-P is more versatile.

Both have autofocus. And I can make wonderful photographs with both of them. So I asked myself a different question:

What actually happens to me when I photograph with nothing but the M?

That question led to a little idea: Four dates with my M.

No tests. No comparisons. No second camera as a safety net. Just my M EV1, the 35mm Summilux — and some time to photograph.

And Then There Was a Beer

The first date was actually supposed to be a street photography walk through Bern. Except that on that particular day, I had absolutely no desire to do street photography. So I sat down and ordered a Simmentaler. My favourite beer.

That probably says something about me. 😉

Street photography was the plan. A Simmentaler is what happened instead. And somehow, that was exactly right.

At some point, I opened my Summilux to f/1.4 and simply started playing with whatever happened to be in front of me. The glass. The light. The colours. The blur. The little PANIK LINIE. An old leather chair.

I hadn’t been looking for any of it. And suddenly, photography became incredibly enjoyable. After that afternoon, I wrote a sentence in my first journal:

I was no longer looking for photographs.I had started to see them.

At the time, I had no idea that this sentence would eventually tell the whole story.

Something Began to Change

For the next date, I took the M to a place I’ve had a special connection with since I was young: Bern-Belp Airport. Photographing aircraft with a 35mm lens. Not exactly the most sensible idea. No telephoto lens. No autofocus. I couldn’t simply isolate the aircraft from their surroundings. So the surroundings had to stay.

And suddenly, there weren’t just aircraft. There were fences. Shadows. Landscape. People. Movement. And two airport staff members who were actually in the way.

They were actually in the way. Then they became the photograph.

In the past, I might have waited until they were gone. This time, I pressed the shutter. A tiny moment.

But looking back, perhaps quite an important one. Because slowly, I began to understand:

The M didn’t bring me closer to my subject. It made me notice more of what was around it.

And then something happened that was probably far more important to my little experiment than any of the four dates.

Suddenly, We Weren’t Even on a Date

Logically, Date Three should simply have followed. But it didn’t. Because suddenly, I started taking the M with me even when we weren’t on a date at all. To Thun. To Bern. On a walk. Just because.

And that was probably the moment when my experiment began to make itself unnecessary. I no longer needed to give myself a reason to take the M.

I wanted to have it with me. And at the same time, I began noticing something in my photographs.

In the past, the foreground might have bothered me. Now it became part of the photograph.

I suddenly became interested in the things between me and what I thought was my subject.

Reflections. Glass. Chairs. Shadows. People passing through my frame. Blur.

Things I might once have considered distractions.

The focus is on the chair. The person is allowed simply to pass by.

I began photographing through things. I allowed foregrounds to remain. Sometimes I placed the focus where it probably wasn’t supposed to be. Or perhaps exactly where it belonged. And eventually, I found a word for it:

the in-between.

The subject was no longer necessarily the most interesting thing in the photograph.

Sometimes it was the relationship between things. What was in front of it. What was reflected. What was only suggested. And perhaps that was the moment when my relationship with the M began to change.

At Some Point, I Stopped Testing the M

The third date began without me even noticing.

Our new solar installation had just gone into operation, and I climbed onto the roof to photograph it.

Which camera did I take? The M. No weighing up the options. No experiment. No challenge.

I simply took it with me.

At some point, I found myself right in the middle of the picture. With my M in front of my face.

Looking back, I find that almost amusing.

I had started this whole experiment because I wasn’t sure whether I should even keep this camera. And now I was standing on my roof, taking it with me as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Perhaps the decision had already been made. I just hadn’t noticed yet.

The Answer Was in the Forest

For the fourth date, I went into the forest with Mabel. My mind was actually somewhere else entirely.

I just wanted to get outside. Walk. Look. Not think too much. The M was hanging from my shoulder.

Sometimes all it takes is a ray of sunlight — and someone standing in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment.

I photographed Mabel. A branch in the light. A few blackberries. Shadows on the bark of a tree. A yellow arrow painted on a trunk. Nothing spectacular. And yet I kept stopping.

Perhaps I would once have simply walked past it.

At some point, I noticed something. I was hardly thinking about the camera anymore.

I saw something. Raised the M. Focused. Click. And kept walking.

That was when my experiment was actually over. Not because Date Four had ended. But because suddenly, I no longer needed to find an answer.

The Wrong Question

At the beginning, I wanted to know:

What can my Leica M do that my other cameras can’t?

Today, I think that was the wrong question. Because the answer is probably:

Not very much.

My Q3 43 is easier. My SL3-P is more versatile. And if Mabel comes charging towards me at full speed, I know exactly which camera I’m going to reach for. 😉

But the important question has become a different one:

What does this camera do to me when I photograph with it?

And by now, I have an answer. It makes me slow down. It makes me look longer. Sometimes it forces me to work with what is in front of me instead of simply changing the framing. And perhaps that is why I notice things with it that weren’t even my original subject. A reflection. A shadow. A chair. A person who was actually in the way. Or simply light falling on an old branch.

I’ve also realised something else about my photography that perhaps I wasn’t fully aware of before:

I love shooting wide open. And I love being close.

Not showing as much as possible. But moving in. Using f/1.4 to decide where I want the eye to rest. And allowing the rest of the image not to disappear, but to become a suggestion. Perhaps that is exactly why this 35mm Summilux has become such a good match for my M. I have to move closer.

And yet there is still enough of the world left in the frame.

The M doesn’t expand my photographic possibilities. It changes my attention.

And by now, that is far more valuable to me.

Of Course It Stays

I started these four dates because I wanted to find out whether my Leica M EV1 deserved to stay.

Today, that question makes me smile a little.

Of course it stays.

A beer in Bern. M-COOL at the airport. My shadow on a solar panel. A walk through the forest with Mabel. Four rather unspectacular dates. But perhaps, in the end, it wasn’t those four dates that gave me the answer. Perhaps it was all the moments in between.

Thun. Bern. A walk. A photograph by the water. Moments when I suddenly reached for the M even though nobody — not even me — had declared it a date.

Because at some point, I stopped taking the M with me because I wanted to test it. I took it with me because I wanted to photograph with it. After our first date, I wrote:

I was no longer looking for photographs.I had started to see them.

At the time, I thought that sentence belonged to an afternoon with a glass of Simmentaler. Now I know:

It tells the whole story. Perhaps I never needed to fall in love with my Leica M. Perhaps I simply needed to learn how to see with it. And somewhere between a glass of Simmentaler, M-COOL, my shadow on a solar panel, all those photographs in between, and a walk through the forest with Mabel, it happened anyway.

I fell a little bit in love.

Okay.

Maybe more than a little. ❤️