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[otto.f]

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On 12/16/2025 at 3:32 PM, JMPerona said:

What should I do?

Could it be that your camera is unconsciously too much in your head, the hidden elephant in the room, exactly because it is a Leica and and thus it's imperative to love it?  Forget your gear. Forget the urge to make good photo's or being a good photographer. Just concentrate on the world and what happens there; which is worthwhile to capture, for you to own or to show others just because it's just (a bit) remarkable. 

Edited yesterday at 08:37 AM by otto.f

[otto.f]

5 hours ago, businessasusual said:

“the cat sat on the mat” is not a story.

that depends... time, space, usual, unusual, history, is the story written or told, if told, in what tone of voice, etc...

Edited yesterday at 12:35 PM by otto.f

[pgh]

On 12/16/2025 at 1:44 PM, Eoin said:

Seriously though, grey boring dark days are not generally conducive to good looking photos.

Sorry - this is just all a matter of attitude. And what does "good looking" even mean? Personally, I hardly would strive for that. A strong picture, a great picture might be good looking. It might be hard to look at it. It might be strange. The world is awash in good looking, palliative imagery. 

There's a truism that bad weather makes better pictures. Neither is totally true - it's just all attitude, curiosity, ability to notice, ability to appreciate, ability to see. 

[Eclectic Man]

OK, lots of things spring to mind:

Read Richard Feynman's memoirs 'Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman' and 'What do You care what other people think?' and remember that you don't have to take photographs like Ansel Adams, Horst P Horst or Cecil Beaton, just have some fun.  After Los Alamos, Feynman went to be a professor of physics, but found that the magic had gone.  Jaded he noticed that in the canteen when the students played frisbee with the paper plates they tended to wobble twice before end of flight, so he worked out why, just for fun.*  Ansel Adams advised people to play with their cameras so that they would get used to handling them, try it.

Robert Mapplethorpe had a friend buy flowers at the local market for him to photograph. He took thousands of Polaroids experimenting and learning how to do lighting for still lifes because he could not ask his friends to sit for him for hours while he made incremental changes in lighting or composition. Try taking a beautiful picture of an ugly object.**

Wonder around your house taking random photographs of anything that takes your fancy.

And if all else fails, read the manual and try out literally everything in it.

And if that fails, be thankful you can afford to blow thousands on an exquisitely engineered paperweight!

But above all have some fun.

*It turned out the physics he did for this was useful in Quantum Mechanics, so you never can tell where 'fun' might lead you.

**Sadly, I am not available to sit for you for this task.

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On 12/16/2025 at 3:32 PM, JMPerona said:

What should I do?

Not all that difficult. Study one of your photographs you find so disappointing. Identify the case for disappointment. Go out and make a photograph which does better. Repeat.

[JMPerona]

7 hours ago, otto.f said:

Could it be that your camera is unconsciously too much in your head, the hidden elephant in the room, exactly because it is a Leica and and thus it's imperative to love it?  Forget your gear. Forget the urge to make good photo's or being a good photographer. Just concentrate on the world and what happens there; which is worthwhile to capture, for you to own or to show others just because it's just (a bit) remarkable. 

Maybe. Maybe I put a lot of pressure on me because I already have what I always wanted: a Leica M camera. Maybe the next step is not think about what great photos should I take with it and just enjoy it every day. 

1 hour ago, Eclectic Man said:

OK, lots of things spring to mind:

Read Richard Feynman's memoirs 'Surely you're joking, Mr Feynman' and 'What do You care what other people think?' and remember that you don't have to take photographs like Ansel Adams, Horst P Horst or Cecil Beaton, just have some fun.  After Los Alamos, Feynman went to be a professor of physics, but found that the magic had gone.  Jaded he noticed that in the canteen when the students played frisbee with the paper plates they tended to wobble twice before end of flight, so he worked out why, just for fun.*  Ansel Adams advised people to play with their cameras so that they would get used to handling them, try it.

Robert Mapplethorpe had a friend buy flowers at the local market for him to photograph. He took thousands of Polaroids experimenting and learning how to do lighting for still lifes because he could not ask his friends to sit for him for hours while he made incremental changes in lighting or composition. Try taking a beautiful picture of an ugly object.**

Wonder around your house taking random photographs of anything that takes your fancy.

And if all else fails, read the manual and try out literally everything in it.

And if that fails, be thankful you can afford to blow thousands on an exquisitely engineered paperweight!

But above all have some fun.

*It turned out the physics he did for this was useful in Quantum Mechanics, so you never can tell where 'fun' might lead you.

**Sadly, I am not available to sit for you for this task.

Good suggestions. I will try doing it: having fund a photograph what I see. Thanks for the reading suggestions. 

On 12/16/2025 at 3:58 PM, Tseg said:

Time to read and watch You Tube videos about photography technique and editing vs. equipment, I guess.   But more importantly, go out and take more pictures.

Today, most equipment can make very good image quality and decent dynamic range.  I use my equipment to motivate me to go out.   It was not until I heard stories about "the great" photographers of old that it finally clicked for me.   Many of them went to the same settings for months or years, taking thousands of photos.   Then they edited and culled them down to a few handfuls and produced them and everyone oooohd and aaaaahd over their result.   

In summary, if you take 1 photo with any camera there is a very high probability it will be pretty crappy.

This is a great tip. I spend more time watching gear videos than taking photos. The problem is that I can't find any good real life professional user of Leica M and find nearly only reviews of the camera all the time.

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On 12/16/2025 at 3:32 PM, JMPerona said:

It's not the camera: it's me.

This is actually the reason I initially bought myself a Leica. I just wanted to make sure that all shortcomings in my photography were indeed mine and not those of the camera. I then stubbornly went out and took photographs and scrutinized them and showed them to friends, none of them photographers of any description.

[albireo_double]

I think many of us sometimes begin wondering why we buy all the latest equipment and what we can do to create meaningful photographs. A good way, in my experience (and of others - Kyle McDougall talks about this in one of his YouTube videos) is to create projects. These can take a number of years (think Koudelka's "Ruins" which took him 28 years to complete). It happens often that a project starts somewhere and leads you into unexpected side projects, or morphs into something else. You learn something, meet new people as you go along. Create portfolios and maybe websites dedicated to the projects (one of mine is here Industry 1.0.). Study your subject, go in some depth. Create photo books - I have documented how our kids have grown since their birth and, every 3-5 years, created a magnificent CEWE photo book that was much appreciated by the whole family. We have four of these books now and they are a real pleasure to come back to. Another example of an interesting project is Brian Birk's (look up his videos) focused on classical car owners - he drives around, finds interesting old cars, rings the bell, talks to the owner, takes his portrait, etc. The projects will, no doubt, focus and drive your equipment choices. You may even find out that you don't need a Leica M11 for the project (this advice coming from a man who is expecting delivery of a new 8x10 camera tomorrow).

Edited 21 hours ago by albireo_double

[pgh]

3 hours ago, JMPerona said:

The problem is that I can't find any good real life professional user of Leica M and find nearly only reviews of the camera all the time.

That's because comparatively, there aren't many. There are numerous good reasons for that. Lack of professional support being top of the list, as well as the affordability;value calculation. Most of us out here are struggling, even when doing well. I've (impractically) preferred to use M's whenever I could from early on. For most of my life my used M camera was worth more than anything else I owned.

There's also the fact that there are few jobs where M's can cover all the bases in a way a client demands. It's just not the right tool for most sorts of jobs. The M is a fun picture making tool. It's also a luxury good really. I use mine for jobs, but I am one of very few I know who does, and I do now because I set expectations up properly and no longer take whatever is thrown at me. Also, most are not bothering on youtube. The exception I know of is Justin Mott. 

But anyways, when you don't need to deliver anything specific, just photograph what you are interested in. 

The above point about projects is also a good one. It escapes me because it feels so obvious, so inherent to me. Pictures that are not parts of projects are like words without a sentence around it. I think that's especially true now, the thing that defines a good photographer is a body of work, never just one amazing picture. Some people make one amazing picture, but that's usually more a function of circumstance. 

Edited 18 hours ago by pgh

[charlesphoto99]

5 hours ago, pgh said:

That's because comparatively, there aren't many. There are numerous good reasons for that. Lack of professional support being top of the list, as well as the affordability;value calculation. Most of us out here are struggling, even when doing well. I've (impractically) preferred to use M's whenever I could from early on. For most of my life my used M camera was worth more than anything else I owned.

There's also the fact that there are few jobs where M's can cover all the bases in a way a client demands. It's just not the right tool for most sorts of jobs. The M is a fun picture making tool. It's also a luxury good really. I use mine for jobs, but I am one of very few I know who does, and I do now because I set expectations up properly and no longer take whatever is thrown at me. Also, most are not bothering on youtube. The exception I know of is Justin Mott. 

But anyways, when you don't need to deliver anything specific, just photograph what you are interested in. 

The above point about projects is also a good one. It escapes me because it feels so obvious, so inherent to me. Pictures that are not parts of projects are like words without a sentence around it. I think that's especially true now, the thing that defines a good photographer is a body of work, never just one amazing picture. Some people make one amazing picture, but that's usually more a function of circumstance. 

I use mine for jobs as well. I'll never forget when I showed up in the pit for a Pearl Jam show with just my two M9's and the other photographers, with their Nikons and Canons and massive zooms looked at me like I had no clue. A couple actually smirked. I had the last laugh though when after three songs they were all escorted out and I stayed behind to shoot the entire show with my lowly M's. Last few times I also had a Nikon with long lens in tow. It can all depend on the light too - these new LEDs can give out lots of light but can be also pretty funky sometimes. Or the lighting guy sucks. Like the show I shot Saturday night for a pro bono benefit (Bob Mould and Blondshell). Had to shoot the M10-R at 12,000 iso, with too much light in the back and not enough in the front. Makes it hard to focus right for one thing. It was the one time I wish I had more than the M. Still got the shots I needed. 18mm Super-Elmar and 90mm Elmarit. 

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[Rollin]

I ended at a M10 because I wanted a digital camera where I did not feel like I was playing a video game while photographing, I wanted to directly control the focus point and no other digital camera is native manual focus (you could argue Nikon and perhaps others have now made decent MF assist in their cameras), and for the small size of the kit. Then traded to the M11 mainly for better low light quality. None of that is really about the actual photograph, but how I enjoy getting there.

Someone else mentioned personal project - best thing to improve your work! and I think you will find joy in it too. To me a good photograph is not about the photography, or the gear; it is about the feeling or experience you get from looking at the image. And don't go someplace else to do the project. Start by creating in a community you already know, or at least close by. (Don't get me wrong, I get joy out of the gear too, the history, etc., but is not what the topic seems to be about)

I felt stalled on the rangefinder learning curve and in my photography so at the beginning of this year I volunteered as a photojournalist on the staff for a couple local weekly papers, and I chose to do most of the assignments with my manual focus kit like I did when I was first starting out, but back then it was with an SLR and film. I also like the challenge of covering an even and having to come back with multiple good images. It had been over twenty-five years since I had done a news assignment and ya, photographing under pressure made me really learn my gear, but I have found a lot of joy again.

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[JMPerona]

14 hours ago, albireo_double said:

A good way, in my experience (and of others - Kyle McDougall talks about this in one of his YouTube videos) is to create projects.

I'm trying to figure out what kind of projects can I do. I will surely put this tips in practice. 

11 hours ago, pgh said:

Pictures that are not parts of projects are like words without a sentence around it.

Love it. That's what I really need, a context for my photos. 

5 hours ago, charlesphoto99 said:

I use mine for jobs as well. I'll never forget when I showed up in the pit for a Pearl Jam show with just my two M9's and the other photographers, with their Nikons and Canons and massive zooms looked at me like I had no clue. A couple actually smirked. I had the last laugh though when after three songs they were all escorted out and I stayed behind to shoot the entire show with my lowly M's

haha. I would have paid a lot to see their faces. Cool that the M9 worked just there. Of course, I know that each type of camera has its type of work, but I think that the major problem with rangefinders and manual focus is not just "rangefinders and manual focus", but the world we live on, where everything is done by a machine (even the creative thinking, now with Ai), putting the human effort behind. Cool photos!

4 hours ago, Rollin said:

I felt stalled on the rangefinder learning curve and in my photography so at the beginning of this year I volunteered as a photojournalist on the staff for a couple local weekly papers, and I chose to do most of the assignments with my manual focus kit like I did when I was first starting out, but back then it was with an SLR and film. I also like the challenge of covering an even and having to come back with multiple good images. It had been over twenty-five years since I had done a news assignment and ya, photographing under pressure made me really learn my gear, but I have found a lot of joy again.

That's what I should do. Put me under pressure. Learn to focus as fast as I can. That is my main problem right now, but I don't want to give up. I was thinking to buy a SL3-S or SL2-S as a complement to my M11 just because the fear of missing out. 
Oh, and what a wonderful photo that one!

Edited 7 hours ago by JMPerona

[Tux4711]

vor 14 Stunden schrieb JMPerona:

I spend more time watching gear videos than taking photos. The problem is that I can't find any good real life professional user of Leica M and find nearly only reviews of the camera all the time.

If you're looking for videos about photography, why limit yourself to professional users of Leica M? That way, you'll continue to focus on the equipment. I think most of the comments here clearly recommend that you should worry less about equipment. My recommendation would be to engage with photography in general, with photographers who don't put the focus on what technology they used to take the pictures but on the art itself. See if you can identify a few photographers in your favorite genre and study their work extensively. I would also recommend buying a photo book, going to exhibitions, or listening to podcasts about photography that aren't limited to technology.