Leica Q - the best travel camera Craig Mod’s ever used

Subject: Leica Q
Source: The Leica Q - A six month field test
Via: Daring Fireball

Four years ago, I attended a Tokyo A Book Apart promotional. Craig asked artists to raise their hands. I had just re-opened my commercial jewellery studio. I hesitated. Was I an artist? Today I'd not even flinch as I drooped my manspread heavier over my knuckles. I’m a calculating strobist. I measure, weigh, design sets, and plan. I don't have a great fashion sense and I follow skeptics more than creatives. For me, art happens by chance, not by choice.

My ridiculous review of Sony’s A7r proved that I’m not even a writer. 

While Craig's long-form, long-term Leica Q review is systematically written for a discerning reader, it is designed to read, and is flippantly aware. Skim it for the images. Read it for the prose. It's good for a double whammy. Great images. Good user insight. It wasn't popped off for debut whuffie. 

Craig learned the Q whilst travelling, hiking, writing, working. He discovered that it is part tool, part art - and none of that art mimicry stuff you see from engineers. Leica don't print doldrum Helvetica-derived typefaces on echoic bodies. 

By the way, here's what Craig has to say about LG1050, my favourite camera type face. 

The Q — like most recent Leicas — is engraved with the softly geometric, proprietary LG 1050 typeface. It feels so, totally, completely at home, stamped into the camera body in all caps. It's highly legible and precisely designed. Minimal, functional, but with a bit of quirky character. Like the Q itself. This is the perfect camera typeface used in the perfect way. Mic dropped. Case closed.

LG1050 is the only thing I miss in my Summicron 50 Type 3. Originally, it was the reason the 28 Elmarit ASPH caught my eye, and a guilty reason that I’ve collected four lenses from the same vintage. It draws the eye: bold, muscular, and totally self-aware. It’s one of the small things that add up to nothing less than a Leica. 

I’m surprised it has taken Craig so long to wrap his hands around a digital Leica. Welcome. You’re a better writer than me. You’re a damn fine documentary photographer and story teller. You deserve a camera designed by designers rather than four-eyed professors of history and knock-offs.

Tip of the hat to Daring Fireball for pointing me (and likely tens of thousands of others) to Craigmod's review. A man devoted to essaying design and industry standards should away the Fujifilm.