Heading abroad, wondering about Leica Q2 travel photography? It’s a great camera but how does it fare when you throw the chaos of travel towards it? Let’s find out.
Introduction
For a camera to be good at travel photography, you really need two things. First the camera needs to be somewhat portable and more importantly it needs to be good at everything. Because for the most part travel photography is everything: Portraits, street, macro and more.
And while one strike against Leica Q2 travel photography could be that it’s limited due to the fact that it has a fixed lens, there’s more to it then that.
Leica Q2 travel photography
Long story short, the Q2 (More here) is one of the best Leicas you can get for travels, here’s why.
Size matters
When traveling, unless you are under assignment, smaller is simply better. It’s not fun to walk down Paris roads for hours with a heavy camera, let me tell you. And while the Q2 might not be considered small, when you factor in the fact that this is a full frame camera, it’s pretty compact for what it is!
Overall the Q2 comes to 718 grams or 1.58 lb. That’s the same weight as many DSLRs and that’s without the lens! So this means you can have more stamina and shoot longer as you are out. It’s always better to have an extra battery on hand but since you have about 370 shots on hand, it’s unlikely you will run out of juice while out and about
Great for everything
The Q2 is really made for street photography with it’s built in 28mm. So that takes care of this when you are traveling. The f1.8 is really good for environmental portraits (and yes the Bokeh is nice) and it’s also great for night photography or when there’s low light. The Q2 has really nice IQ even when pushing 3200 so as long as there some light you are pretty much good to go for any situation.
There’s also the stabilization that helps in low light so you can hand hold slower than 1/30 and still have a sharp image. There’s a macro mode that is not 1:1 but stunning anyways in case you find exotic plants or insects you want to shoot.
But at the end of the day 28mm is a wide angle lens and there’s nothing you can do to change that. But that is where the most underrated feature of the Q2 comes in: Digital zoom. Yes it does nothing but crop the image but the thing is the Q2 has a very high 47 megapixel count and that makes it so that you can go up to an equivalent of 75mm and STILL have a 7 megapixel image you can use.
So you have access to 28-35-50-75mm if you so chose making this the only camera you need for travel photography. Like I said these are not true focal lengths but the images are razor sharp even at 75mm so the only downside is the fact that these are JPG only.
If you shoot in RAW you will get the cropped JPG and the full 28mm RAW with the JPG preview being the JPG version. So you still have the RAW file at the end of the day that you can re-crop after you’ve come back from your trip.
The image quality of the camera is of course excellent and with fast autofocus and 10 fps you will most likely get the shot that you want without too much hassle. There’s very little this camera can’t do even if it’s technically a fixed 28mm.
Leave everything at home
The Leica Q2 because it’s good for everything makes it so that all you need is the charger. This is the one letdown about Leica Q2 travel photography: You need the external charger. Leica should have made this USB C charging compatible but this is a small gripe.
Besides the charger you can pretty much leave everything at home, even your laptop. You can opt instead for your tablet or phone and backup your shots direct to them (and then if you choose, to the cloud) with the Leica Fotos app.
The combo of Q2 + charger + phone makes this an extremely light kit that doesn’t compromise in terms of image quality.
Safety
Let’s face it, what is your camera might look like a thief’s lunch. And they know to look for that red dot. So if you are traveling, make sure you have a plain-looking bag that doesn’t scream “camera bag!” and also if you are going places, some gaffer tape all around your Q will go a long way to deter thieves by making your camera unattractive.
Conclusion
I hope you enjoyed this article about Leica Q2 travel photography. Even if it might first seem limiting, because of the large sensor you can shoot longer focal lengths than the built-in 28mm. Even if you do not use the crop modes, the razor sharp images with no compromise makes this a travel camera that is hard to beat for the size. Price check here.