Leica D-lux 5 street photography is wonderful. In this article I’ll detail what makes this camera such a joy to use in the streets. Let’s dig right in.
Leica D-lux 5 Street photography
The Leica D-lux series have always been favored by street photographers for good reasons, it’s really well suited for the genre, here’s why.
It has a nice wide angle
The D-lux 5 has the focal length most favored by street photographers, the 28mm. Well, technically the wide angle end is 24mm, but it’s negligible. This is enough for the camera to be street-proof, and the image quality is excellent.
Zoom range
But while the best focal length most prefer is the 28mm, there’s the possibility for a lot of street creativity with the zoom range, the D-lux 5 has a 24-90mm lens making it perfect for street but also ready for when you wish you had a telephoto by your side.
The 90mm short telephoto allows you to get stealthy shots while incognito, while the 24mm offers a more classical approach to things.
It has a fast lens
The camera is equipped with a fast f2-3.3 aperture. While an f2.8 at the telephoto end would be preferred, the 24mm f2 is fast enough to get squeaky clean images when there is low light, making night street photography possible, at least in the wide angle end.
Stabilization
Even if you lens if wide open at f2 and you still need some light, the good news is this camera has some really good stabilization built-in. The image below was shot at night with low light, you can see how clean it is because of the ISO being at a low ISO 100.
Since the ISO was low for such low light, the shutter speed was set to 1/5th of a second, and as you can see the middle subject is sharp. The stabilization allows you to handhold great street shots even when there’s low light.
Stealthy body
Nothing screams “look at me!” more than a bulky camera. This camera is more point and shoot size than anything and that means you can stroll down the streets and be stealthy. No one will pay particular attention to you with such a small camera.
The small sensor
While most of the time bigger sensors are better, there are advantages to a small sensor. How so? Well the smaller the sensor the larger the depth of field so for street photographers even a little f2 has a lot in focus due to the 1/1.63″ sensor size.
So you don’t need that much light and shutter speed to have a lot in focus, a blessing for street photographers when the light starts becoming rare.
Good AF
While this camera isn’t the latest and greatest the autofocus is adequate enough to focus while people are walking down the streets. This is probably the most important aspect of Leica D-Lux 5 street photography you should know besides the focal length.
Manual focus could be better
If you like your street photography shot in manual, this camera allows you to set it on manual, simply put it on the MF setting on the left of the lens and you are done. The only issue here is that manual focus will have do be done with a dial and not on the lens itself.
But the good thing is that once the focus is set, it is set. Even better is that there’s a manual focus scale that appears on the back so that you know where you are in focus: 0.3, 1m, 2m and infinity. This allows you to set your depth of field easily without any external tools, very useful for street photographers that zone focus
Conclusion
I hope you liked this article about Leica D-lux 5 street photography. It is one of the best Leica cameras you can get for the job.