Quebec City on a Leica Q2
This years trip took us to Quebec City, Canada to celebrate the new year. As with all vacations, we play the game of “what gear will I take?” Do we take just the Leica Q2 with it’s 28mm lens or do we go wild and bring our Canon R6 or R5ii and something like a 50 or the 28-70?
Having the confidence from our trip to Cape Town which was a lot more photo intensive than this trip we decided to take the Q2 as our only cameras on this trip. I say cameras because Kristan and I both rock a Q2 for personal and we like the challenge of both having the same tools to capture the same areas to see what we come up with.
The weather in Quebec was definitely not as nice as it was in South Africa. We experienced cold, rain, snow and high winds. I am always nervous to bring my gear in the environments even though the Q2 is supposed to be great with weather sealing. I still try and not chance it when possible.
In most cases the cameras stayed either in a back or under our jackets until it was time to take the photos. Again, we know they should be able to handle it but if we have the means to protect the gear then we do. Although the light was not the best we feel like the images capture the old port city quite well. The gloom of the sky gives it a sense of character that would be completely different from a sunny day.
One of the areas the Q2 really shines is the wider 28mm lens. There were so many large buildings, castles and landscape images to take in, and anything tighter than the 28mm would prove difficult to get it all in one scene. I constantly debate about getting a 43mm Q3 but being this is my main travel camera, I find the 28mm perfect for capturing travel style images. A quick snap Kristan and Alyssa across from the table, a big building, shooting a landscape. You can most times get closer but often times cannot get farther back.
The Leica Q series gets a lot of hate from people that don’t own one and from some that do have one. We often hear complaints like “low light is terrible” or “it is not fast”. While I do think that the complaints are warranted, they are not warranted to the extremes they are trying to claim. Is the lowlight the best ever? No.. Will you get some noise in your images with high ISO’s? Yes. Is the autofocus the fastest in the world or the best at tracking? No. But realistically how much do you want or need? I have learned to love and embrace the limitations of the camera. I have learned to love some of the grain that the images produce. In the event I don’t want them, I can always use the new denoise feature in Lightroom to take care of most of it but I feel that embracing it makes the images have more character.
I think it goes without saying that we love the Leica Q series. The Q2 at this moment is one of the best cameras for us and our needs. Yes, they come at a price tag that is very steep considering you cannot change lenses and compared to some other options out there. But the ease of use, the simplicity of the menus, the quality of the build, we cannot say enough good things about it. I hope that the Q2 will provide me many many more years of amazing images of our family adventures.
