Leica M wedding photography is something I wish I had started on earlier in my career! The lack of autofocus seems to have been the biggest ‘reason’ for not using the Leica. This is strange as it was all manual focus for the first 20 years of my wedding photography!
A Little History
Sometime in the 1990’s clients started asking for a more natural ‘capture the moment’ style of pictures. Less of the stiffer arranged pictures. Having tried with medium format Bronica, fitted with waist level finder it soon became apparent that this was the wrong camera! A Nikon F100 was introduced and the results started to come. Very soon the Bronica was retired and even the formals were covered on 35mm.
Despite most of my peers saying digital will never be good enough for weddings we took delivery of one of the first Nikon D1x cameras in 2001. We were making good money in those days and we bought each upgrade, up to D3s. Eventually the weight of cameras became difficult and we switched to Fuji in 2015.
Leica
The Leica M9 was a 2012 purchase but by then the autofocus ‘crutch’ was well imbedded, so the M9 was not used as much as it should have been and we traded it in for a Leica SL in 2016. This was a step backwards in size with the wonderful but huge, 24-90 lens. Although a great camera and lens the SL was just too big and was swapped for an M10-p in 2019.
M10-p with 35mm Summicron, 21 Super Elmar and 90mm APO makes a great Leica M wedding photography kit. A Leica Q3 gives cover for those autofocus moments!
So what is so great about a rangefinder for weddings? Simple controls, discrete quiet camera, no viewfinder blackout, are the main points. Leicas are expensive cameras however being a business, the cost is Tax deductible. When we are VAT registered it was even better! Good Leica M lenses will in time increase in value, win, win!
More of our wedding photography is here.
