Photography with the Leica Mini 3

Photography with the Leica Mini 3

The Leica Mini 3 is a little point & shoot camera, with a Leica Summar 32mm lens. It costs about $150 at B&H. I wrote this document after my posting on photo.net saying that I loved the camera resulted in several enquiries regarding (a) Can one do xyz with this camera, or (b) How does it compare to the Yashica T-4, or (c) Have I scanned in pictures that I've taken with it.

Warning: Most of these pictures were taken when I was a beginning photographer. Artistically, they aren't worth much. I just made this page so people can benefit from my experiences with this camera.

This was my first camera. I bought it in September 1998, after careful consideration about whether or not I should buy an SLR. I decided not to buy an SLR mainly because I was a beginner, and this little camera would allow me to all the things that I wanted to at the time. At that point, I wasn't even sure if I would like photography or not.

Everything that I say here applies to most point & shoot cameras, not just the Mini 3. I assume that you are at least somewhat familiar with the concept of a point & shoot camera, and how it differs from SLRs. If not, you should read some excellent articles and discussions on the topic on photo.net. Pretty much everything I know about photography, I learned there. In large part, this document reflects the general guidelines in a similar article by Philip Greenspun.

The convenience of a point and shoot...

The nice thing about a point and shoot is that there is not much planning involved--you just click. It can be bad if you want more control of, say, the aperture. But for the most part, it is relatively easy to convince the nifty point & shoot cameras of nowadays to do just what you want them to do. The not-much-planning often means that people don't think at all while taking their pictures. For some people, that works, because they really don't care what their pictures look like, as long as the subject shows. Those people should go back to taking bad pictures, and stop reading this document.

The Leica Mini 3 has a sleek plastic body, and I found all the buttons and the little icons in the LCD display to be intuitive and easy to read. There is even a +2 EV compensation feature, other than the standard modes. Plus, the greatest advantage of this camera over the Yashica T-4 (the other camera I was considering at the time) was that it pre-focusses when you depress the shutter half-way, thus removing the lag time between when you (fully) press the shutter and when it takes the picture. Some people say they find the status-indicator LED at the top of the viewfinder to be overly bright and annoying, but I got used to it within the first couple of weeks and it has never bothered me at all.

What it does not have is a cover for the lens. I compensated for this by buying a $15 cover for the camera from B&H.

The nice thing about a good point & shoot is that it allows you ample room to play around, if you want to get creative. The Mini 3 gives you plenty of opportunity, and the great lens makes it a winner.

...with a great lens

This camera has a nice 32mm Leica Summar 3.2 lens. It is a four-element lens (non-aspherical), but still delivers the goods. I could say a lot of things about this sharp and contrasty lens, but you can see for yourself. To see how sharp it is, click on the image on the left. You can see not just the details of the "Orpheus" inscription, but also the print in the dim window at bottom right.

All the pictures on this page were taken with Fuji 100 speed print film.

When you press the shutter release half-way down, the camera focusses--and sets the exposure and aperture--on whatever is at the center of the viewfinder image. If you press the shutter all the way in one motion (like most people do on most cameras most of the time), then the camera focusses on whatever is in the center, and takes a picture.

Caveat: Because of the aforementioned, it is important to not move after you pre-focus. I would often pre-focus, and inadvertently move to improve composition. I realized I was doing this after some pictures came back with the subject slightly out-of focus, and the background (or somehting else) very sharp. The picture above left is an example of one of these.

The Golden Rule: Keep the flash off

The flash on the camera is not meant for beginners. That is my conclusion after ruining some great picture opportunities with the flash. Flashes should only be used by experts, and people who know what they're doing. For the rest of us, there is the feature in most cameras where you an force the flash off. That way, the camera automatically keeps the shutter open long enough to make an adequate exposure. And the picture is inevitably much better than what it would be with the flash. For an example, in the picture of the little gift shop in Mohonk on the right, the colors would not be nearly as vibrant if I hadn't turned the flash off. (Note: I do have one example of using the fill-flash below.)

The only reason this picture of my friend Sehgal on the left is even worth looking at is because I chose to keep the flash off, so that he doesn't have the infamous "deer in the headlight" look that most with-flash portraits have, and in fact shows exactly what that scene looked like. As a portrait, I would have liked the aperture to have been open wider, so the background would have been a little more out of focus, but you can't control that kind of thing with a camera like this. Because of the wide angle lens, I decided to crop this image in gimp (my photo editor of choice), but that is to be expected when buying a camera with a 32mm lens.

When I went to visit the Cloisters last year, the only picture I took that I would ever want to see again is this one where I put the flash off, steadied myself against a wall, and hoped for the best. There is nothing actually interesting about this picture, but it still illustrates the point of not using a flash.

Get a tripod

Even though I only had this little point & shoot camera, I was taking enough pictures without flash that I felt the need to buy a tripod. Plus, owning a tripod appeals to my nerd nature, and makes me feel less like a girlie-man, even though I do own the very cheapest tripod on the market. My little tripod also has the advantage that, when collapsed, it forms a tube about one inch in diameter and one foot in length. So it becomes a nifty companion in the take-your-camera-anywhere philosophy. (One of these days, when people start paying me $250 an hour for web consulting, I'll buy a real tripod.)

The picture on the left comes from my trip to Spain. I desaturated the image in gimp, and restored some of the color here and there. I think it looks better this way than the original.

The tripod plus self-timer makes for an excellent combination to take pictures at night. If the light is too feeble, the camera automatically goes into "B" mode, where the shutter will stay open as long as you have the shutter pressed. Personally, I've never been able to take decent pictures in B mode. I always get some shake, which may also be because my wimpy tripod is so feeble that it shakes when someone nearby sneezes.

... and be there

The most familiar guideline for how to take good pictures has always been "F/8 and be there." The F/8 is a mildly technical reference which I think is meant to throw off non-nerdy photographers, but point-and-shooters can conveniently ignore it because they can't control aperture anyway --- the important part of that rule is the "be there" part. And that is the easy part for point & shoot photographers, because they have a pocket-size camera which can go anywhere.

I was dog-sitting for my friends Moira and Cliff at their house in Edgewater, NJ on January 1, 1999, and I had my camera with me. I decided to take advantage of the full moon, and went to take pictures outside. It was 11pm. The wind chill was -20 degrees, and my hands froze every time I took them out of my gloves to take a picture. Like always, I used the tripod and the self-timer. And I made several important observations, such as sticking a cold hand back into the glove doesn't warm it up! I was outside for about an hour, and the camera worked fine. (Cameras don't feel wind chills, so I should point out for the record that the temperature was about 10 degrees F.) The shutter didn't freeze or get stuck, and the shutter speeds were right on, judging from the results.

When I show the picture on the above-right to people, every now and then someone will refuse to believe that it was taken at night -- the only thing that convinces them is the Manhattan skyline showing in the background. (Both this image, as well as the one on the left, were taken between 11pm and midnight.) The image on the left is made useless by its lack of subject (as is the one above-left, as well as most of the photographs I have ever taken, I am learning), but the orange-ish sky does make it a little more interesting. I think it is a function of a long exposure, and not having any filters attached.

Not using the flash is a great asset in taking unremarkable pictures like this one on the right, taken along Columbia's college walk one night of November 1998. Once again, there is no subject, but the picture illustrates that the camera is quite capable, even if the photographer is not.

Most point & shoot cameras nowadays allow the user to manually switch the flash off. This takes the burden off the user regarding setting the exposure time, aperture etc. And most of the time, the camera seems to do a good job of making these decisions. Sometimes I wish it would tell me what it had decided, but mostly I do like not worrying about these things.

And do try the flash sometimes

The only time I was ever satisfied with a picture after having used the flash was with this one when I used it as a fill-flash, forcing the camera to make a slow exposure based on ambient light. I put down the camera on a little post, and I like this picture despite the fact that my friend Jaideep is not in focus.

(This was the first picture that actually convinced me of the sharpness of the lens. You can see details of the mannequins in the Abercrombie and Fitch showroom in the back.)

The limitations

The only limitations that I found with this camera arose from my desire to have greater control of my pictures. That's why you don't find too many serious photographers who use a point & shoot as their primary equipment.

For instance, when I take a picture with the self-timer, I would like to be able to tell the camera what to focus on. But in self-timer mode, the Mini 3 seems to decide what to focus at only at the moment of exposure. So it focuses on whatever is in the center. This has sometimes resulted in pictures with nicely focussed backdrops and non-focused people standing in the foreground -- like the one above left. But for the most part, I haven't been too bothered by it.

The advantage of having a point & shoot is that it goes everywhere, even in hard-to-carry situations. The disadvantage is that once you get to just the right spot, if there is a hard-to-meter situation, you can't always get the camera to do what you want. During a departmental retreat to Mohonk in January 1999, a few of us went hiking, and it looked like it was going to start snowing, but I brought along my little camera in my pocket. I took many pictures of the local scenery, a lot of which had great views, but in almost all cases, the pictures look dull, like the one on the right. Even though it does convey the mistiness of the scene, I feel that I could have captured more richness in the scenery if shutter had been open longer. (Using the +2 EV feature didn't seem to make any appreciable difference.) One of these days, I will go back, and take pictures with an all-manual camera, and see for myself.

The bottom-line

This is a nice camera with a somewhat wide-angle 32mm lens, which I find perfect for most occasions -- portraits not being one of them. As I said above, the Mini 3 was my first camera. I found it very convenient, and seeing the pictures was rewarding enough so I started thinking about photography more seriously. As I did that, I realized that I needed a little more control of what my camera was doing, and so decided to go to the next step: an all-manual 35mm camera.

But regardless of what I do, I shall always treasure this little wonder!