Transcription
My name is Thorsten Overgaard, I am a Danish photographer. I travel the world taking photographs and teaching photography. Today I'll tell how to set up the Leica Q3 as a very special camera.
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Before I get into it; below the video there is free downloads. There is Styles and Presets that I use for Lightroom and Capture One to get the Leica look in black and white, and in normal colors. They $48 but today you just put in your name, your email and a code and it's free and you have it in a few minutes. There is also an ebook I wrote about some of the iconic photographers and their photographs and how they took them and also write about how I photograph and why I photograph. That one is also free, normally it's $38, but today it's free. You put in your email and the code and you have it free! As a surprise I also have my "Composition in Photography" eBook in a link below and you can get a BIG! discount on it - just look at the code. You can pause the video now and look at those things, or do it after thee video.
Today I will actually give you a little look into one of the chapters in my Leica Q3 Masterclass video that is a masterclass video I've done about all the history. all the settings, all the details of the Leica Q3, and how to use it at night, at day, for portraits and so on, landscape. Ivalso made a book, The Know-All-eBook" about Leica Q3, and that's something is based on you could say my experience with Leica through the years, many years actually, and also my experience with the Leica Q when it came out in 2015 and also the Leica Q2 and Leica Q3. So welcome, this is a free little class in how to make the Leica Q3 very special!
So, here is the good news today and that is you actually don't have to listen to everything I say. Well. you can listen to it but you don't have to do it, there's other ways of doing it. So if we take the Leica Q3, you could say many people get the Leica Q3 and it's a cozy, almost irresistible camera to get, and it makes you very happy to have it and use it and it's very high quality. But let's say that you came from an iPhone and you figured out, "I like to take photos with an iPhone", but now on a real camera, and then you happen to stumble over Leica Q3 then you can actually photograph with the Leica Q3 exactly as easy as you always did and how is that? Well, that is that you simply just set the camera here to Auto Aperture, and then you go in and you set the camera to Auto ISO in here. There we go! And then you have it on Auto Focus, so what happens now is that when I take pictures with the camera I just point it on something and it'll take a picture and the camera will decide what should the aperture be, and what should the iso be. The only, and even, you could say almost the camera of course don't decide the focus because I set the Auto Focus I focus on something so this can result in all kinds of photos but they're all going to be extremely high quality. It's going to be 60 megapixels brilliant colors and you can convert them to amazing black and white and you can zoom in and crop the pictures and you have amazing details. So that is something you can do and that's actually how even beta testers and reviewers that I see, that's how they photograph: They use that Leica Q3 you could say in the very simple way that everything is just on auto. The camera decides everything and that's a total valid way to use it ...
But you might be missing out something that you can actually do with a Leica Q3 So you might have seen a beautiful photos that friends took, or online ,or you have seen a lot of my photos which is what is called Narrow Depth of Field, and that means that if for example if I take a photograph of this typewriter here, then I'll focus right here and everything in front and behind is going to be out of focus. And that's an effect you can only make with what is called a full-frame sensor or even bigger sensors. When you have small sensors like you have in some, you could say "easy to use cameras" or whatever, and the iPhone, you cannot get a narrow depth of field because, shortly told, the lens on the camera is so wide-angle that there is no depth of field, and the way you get less than super wide angle is you get just a crop of it. When you get a bigger sensor, then you can produce very narrow depth of field and you can say if you go up in what is called Medium Format or Large Format, then you have really, really narrow depth of field. So you can say, the bigger sensor, the more narrow depth of field. That is the first thing to know about that, so when the Leica Q3 comes in the box from the factory it is actually on Auto Aperture, and that is this the read "A" here, and then what I do is I immediately turn it to f/1.7 F-stop, and now it is the most narrow depth of field possible. It also means it's very critical where you focus, so now you have to be not only artistic and use your artistic mind, you also have to know what you're doing and keep an eye on what you're doing.
Along with that, you could say my whole philosophy is that a photography is very simple, but you have to be able to control your camera. You can say, it's not very simple if the camera does everything, then you can't predict what's going to happen and ... you have you can look at the file and analyze, "What did the camera do?" when it took a picture, but you can't really control it and you might not be able to understand it because you don't actually know, how does this camera think, how does it come up with photos like that. So the next thing I do then is that I go in and set the ISO, which is how light-sensitive the sensor is, I set that to a "daylight-ISO", it's daylight right here, so I would set it normally to 200 ISO. You can also set it to 100 ISO, but I like 200 because then if it's a little bit of shade the camera is still going to work. So now, suddenly when I take the photo of this typewriter, then the button is going to be in focus and the background is going to be blurred, and the front, if there is a front, is also going to be blurred, and then suddenly you make it into an artistic camera.
But then you have to keep an eye on, you can say there's different Focus modes in the Leica Q3, and the one I pick here is, I go in and I say "Spot" and that is this little cross in the photo. So wherever I put that little cross, that is where the focus is. So if I point the cross here but I hit the table instead, then the table is going to be in focus and the keyboard on the typewriter is going to be out of focus and then that didn't work so you can say if you, if you don't get into that you know what you do control it and you use that and you know what you're doing then you're going to have a lot of photos where they are out of focus or something went wrong. And that is what the something that went wrong is; you pick the focus the wrong way. Then you can say, what works against you being artistic and competent is that if you go in and pick a different Autofocus Mode, because there is "face recognition" there's everything, then suddenly ... I can go in I can take here Multi Field that sounds great. Multi is better than one field, everybody knows that, it's like the lottery, you have Multi Lottery, there's a bigger chance of winning, so let's try that. The problem is that now, when I point it here, then each time I pick a focus, the camera's going to pick a different focus, and I actually don't have any idea how it picks. You can say sometimes you see ads or articles about cameras and it says they have 540 or 20,000 or 2 million Focus Points or whatever - that's a little bit too much - but it has a lot of them and that is basically what you have here, and then the camera picks one of them and factually ,one of the times the camera picks this one, then it picks here, then it picks here ,and I'm actually holding the camera the same place and it picks a new spot each time, and what I want exactly to be in focus is this Magic Column Set button that you can see in the photo here.
So that I can control and I can make it very specific and suddenly I can direct, well one thing I get an all very artistic look, but I can also direct your attention, because the eye, when you look at a photo, your eye goes to what is in focus, what is sharp is what you look at first, so if I take a portrait and the eyes are in focus, that's where you your view or your eyes go. You look at the eyes and then you analyze or look at the rest of the photo and see, "Oh this is the context," it looks beautiful. That could be like a blurry background, a Street in Rome, or it could be something else ,or it could be maybe an office or you can see it's a birthday party with people behind. But the essence of the story is the face and the same, suddenly you can sit in a cafe or home and you can take a very artistic photo of a coffee cup with a blurred out-of-focus background and it looks beautiful and that is what you can do um with the Leica Q3
Then you can ask, "Why don't they make all cameras like that?" Well, I don't know, but what I do know is that the reason you can do it with a Leica Q or with the Leica Q3 is that it is an excellent lens and that's something everybody will say about any camera almost and even smartphones have excellent cameras, because everybody knows if you can do 20 or 60 100 megapixel it must be excellent. That's not what I'm talking about. What I'm talking about is that the philosophy of the Leica lenses, if we take a camera here Leica M11 or; any of the Leica M cameras have, you could say fundamental they just have the best lenses in the world and they also make cinema lenses which I wouldn't say it's the best lenses in the world, but it's very Leica Look, there's lots of great cinema lenses, so it's not a matter of best it's about that look and in a way you could also say I say it's the best lens in the world because it is the most well-made and, I don't know if you could disagree that it's a it's a great look, possibly you could you could find something else you think, this is, I like this better or something but the Leica Look is very interesting, so what is called a Leica Look is that you have details and clarity but it's not razor sharp, so you've seen probably in at past camera test and lens test, you see this photo and you zoom in and everything is razor sharp and what you look at is actually edge sharpness, so if you took a photo of me you will see my eye, you zoom in on my eyes and you can see every hair is super razor sharp and it's kind of it sharpness you see that's great that's a way to measure how sharp is a lens how sharp is a sensor how sharp is a screen whatever. But what it is more interesting and what is the Leica Look is that if you take a photo of a face then you can feel the texture, when you look at it you can see almost how wet the texture is, and you zoom in you will not see sharp edges.
This hole gets smaller and smaller and larger and larger and one thing you can use it for is light control ,so that means that the smaller hole, the less light is coming in, so if you have sunshine and you want to make the photograph darker so it doesn't get over-exposed then you can turn down the aperture. The thing with the aperture is that the smaller the hole gets, the more sharpness you get from front to back, so you say it's a great solution if you want to make sure everything is in focus then you just turn down the aperture to this small hole it's actually something if you go like this and you look uh through your fingers here and you can do like this and you make it smaller you can actually see that it gets darker and you can also particular see that the sharpness increases from front to back and if you want the artistic look then you want to stay wide open and that is what this lens does 1.7 that's unusual for a that easy to use and that small a camera to have and a lens like that and the philosophy of Leica is to make, or the lens desig at Leica is led by Peter Karbeand the philosophy is to make the lens optimum at wide open, so that means that normally when you use a lens wide open then the quality goes down because it's a lot of light to control um and it takes a lot of know-how, it takes a lot of special glass, it takes a lot of precision to have precision when it's wide open and control the light rays but that is the ideal for Leica that lenses are made to be used wide open and that's also why you will see you have a lot of Leica lenses that's are f/1.4 you have a f/0.95 and f/2.0 you don't see a lot of Leica lenses that af f/4 or f/5.6 which would be very easy to make and they're also more compact and they would cost less uh and that's one of the ideas that it have to be the best lenses in the world and part of that is that you can use it wide open and that is this special artistic look and you see that is the unique thing that make the Leica Q3 magic is that it has a lens so you can actually use It wide open you can make super artistic photographs
One small limit with the Leica Q3 is that you have a 28 mm lens and that means a wide angle lens and wide angle is kind of more sharpness from front to back and it's both true and it's not true you could say an f-stop depth of field is the same for all lenses but the difference is that if you have a 50 mm you only look at this frame if you have a 200 mm lens you only look at this Frame and if you have a 28mm you look at this so it means when you look at this wide or bigger picture, if you will, everything looks kind of sharp but if you take a 28mm picture and you crop it in so it's just 200 mm you're looking at a frame like if it was 200mm and you could say here on the Leica Q3 maybe that's more relevant the Leia Q3 you can you can do "digital crop" so you can actually have the camera crop to 90 mm, 75mm, 50mm, 35mm and then 28mm, and the way it does it is that it makes a crop It actually makes the full picture but when you import the photo in Lightroom or Capure One Pro, you only see the 90mm crop or the 50mm crop. Then if you click the crop tool now you see the entire picture but the point is if you look at the 90mm crop it looks as more narrow depth of field simply because you're looking a a smaller portion of the picture than the wide angle.
The point I wanted to get to is that that is a shooting style of when you shoot 28mm and one way to have narrow depth of field is that you go close to the subject and you have the background far away and that kind of makes sense you can say you have here on the camera uh on the lens you have a depth of field scale here and what that one shows is that if you go to different if stops how much going to be in focus and that changes uh you could say if I have a short distance like here this is like 2-3 ft or 70 cm, then it's going to be very narrow depth the field, so maybe I have this m in focus of here from here to here if I then focus 5 meters away then it's suddenly like this so that means I have three people sitting 5 meters away and they're all going to be in focus and that also means the background is going to be relatively more in focus than compared to if I have near focus one way I can then make the background blurred again is I can have if I have those two people sitting on a terrace with a city behind them so you look down all the city because then the background is far away and then suddenly I have the same effect; I have narrow depth of field. But that's all something you get into once you set the camera to f/1.7 and you start controlling uthe focusing and where you want to put the focus, then you can start thinking and you can see you can start thinking with narrow depth of field you can see how it works but it is the trick and that's also you can say the trick this has a f/1.7 is very narrow depth of field for a camera like this ubut you could actually take a camera like this uh and even if you have a f/2.0 lens you can make it look like it's a much wider lens and that is a trick you move close to the subject or have the subject relatively close, and the background you push away. If you also have the background with some sparkling light and you expose for what your photographing, what is in focus, then you're going to have an explosion of light and then it's a whole new artistic level, so fundamentally the point was and is this is something you can do with the Leica Q3 you can make the Leica Q3 you can make something magical but you could also just say I'm putting everything on auto and I'm using it like an iPhone, I just have 60 megapixel, the best lenses in the world, brilliant colors, amazing black and white and I don't care so you have both choices Leica Q3 and that's basically what I wanted to say apart from that you don't always have to do as I do or listen to what I say that was all I had to say about this and this is basically a chapter in my Leica Q3 Master Class, a small little fraction of the things I get into uwhen I talk about cameras and I want to teach you everything I know about cameras and give you ideas and inspiration how to use it that's all remember below the video there's links to free stuff and there's also a very special offer on my "Composition in Photography" eBook, it's a 860 page book with lots of illustrations about the subject of composition and of course also it gets into light and color that's all thank you for watching and remember till I see you next time to always wear a camera.