Bring a Knife to a Gunfight? Using the Leica M for Wildlife
by Mark Bohrer
Don't bring a knife to a gunfight, right?
Conventional wisdom says use a long lens for wildlife - at least 400mm, and longer is better for birds. And leave the short lenses at home?
Not really. Alongside the super-telephoto on the DSLR, I always carry a second camera with not-so-long lenses when I'm shooting wildlife. I'll need it for landscapes and close-ups, and just maybe for group flight shots.
That second camera is a Leica M10. The 135mm viewfinder frame and lens lets me track wildlife motion outside what goes on pixels, making usable captures much more likely. The M10 and 135mm lens came in very handy at a well-known National Wildlife Refuge.
Waterbirds Go To Bosque For the Food
The Arctic feeds at least 500,000 breeding sandhill cranes each summer. Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge hosts 5,000-10,000 of those cranes every winter, along with 12,000 to 24,000 snow geese and other migrating water birds. Cranes and geese will fly over 3500 miles to get there before winter snow covers their food.
I’d last been there in December 2003 after reading about bird photographer Arthur Morris’ trips to the place. I captured snow geese thundering up in a single noisy cloud against a pink dawn sky on that trip and wanted to take another shot at it with better gear.
Bosque is a short 107-mile drive south of my home base in Albuquerque. As usual, it took us a while to get dogs, humans and a small RV ready in the morning, so we arrived in midafternoon. After a brief stop at the visitor center, we drove in.
Marsh or Farm?
The refuge has two loop roads, the Marsh loop (south) and the Farm loop (north). Snow geese like water, so you'd expect them on the Marsh loop. But we found them in the ponds on the Farm loop. Sandhill cranes like corn and alfalfa leavings in the farm loop area. But they were also mostly in the ponds that afternoon, and not very close. I was disappointed by my lack of frame-filling opportunities with the big lenses, but I shot evening light with the M10 anyway. I figured I'd probably gotten a few good silhouettes, but sunset color was fleeting and duller than my last trip 14 years ago.
After a barely-edible dinner in Socorro and what I thought was unproductive shooting the next morning, we took a break for better food further south in Ruidoso. I hadn't done as well as I thought I should with the 400mm and 1120mm-equivalent telephotos. What I didn't think about were the shots captured from the Leica's shorter lenses, the in-your-face wetland landscapes, reflecting ponds and marshes with sun-starred winter trees that hadn't quite lost their leaves (more later on how I made those shots).
Morning Captures
When we arrived back at Bosque a day later, I was refreshed and ready to go. After another early morning at Chupadero Mountain RV Park a few miles outside the refuge, we went searching for snow geese. As the fog burned off with the rising sun, we found them. They were in the empty cornfields where the cranes usually hang out, on the north end of the Farm loop.
A few hundred gabbling geese looking for food on the ground will just hit you with their noise. Add heavy wingbeats and excited 'out of my way' calls of a mass liftoff and you have a sound riot rivaling an enthusiastic crowd at the Hollywood Bowl. I didn't get the liftoff with sunrise pinks and reds I'd wanted, but I did capture one in mid-morning. And it was still a spectacle.
All good things come to an end. In this case, the low-angle December sun extended my shooting time. But around 9:30 am, I could hear old mentor Moose Peterson’s voice in my head saying, “Light’s getting pretty hard – time to pack up!” We headed north to Socorro's old Spanish plaza for revitalizing hot chocolate and coffee. Breakfast beverages were at least reliable there.
Travel & Flight Shots with a Leica M
A Leica M’s optical viewfinder won't show me exactly what's on pixels, so I'll shoot a little loose. The only time an M10’s frame lines are close to 100% accurate is at 2m, and I’m never precisely at that distance.
When I'm capturing wildlife with a second camera and 135mm lens, I need to get close enough to allow cropping without too much resolution loss. Some of this is luck, but more is careful observation. Birds tend to choose the same overhead flight paths, and it's up to the shooter to see this and find the best position. Manual focus M-lenses complicate this a bit, requiring subjects moving perpendicular to the camera's aim to allow close-to-sharp follow-focusing.
After observing and choosing your position, you'll want to set the camera for over-exposure. I shoot aperture-priority because I'll have other things to worry about in the heat of battle. I set exposure compensation with the M10's thumb rest dial, usually from +0.3 to +1.7 EV. With white snow geese, I stay towards the +0.3 end of that range to avoid blowing out detail in white feathers. A digital camera lets you check this on the fly with histograms and LCD previews so you can change exposure compensation if you need it.
Then I pick an ISO for shutter speeds in the 1/750 to 1/4000 second range after sunrise. Recent digital cameras produce very acceptable raw-format noise for ISOs as high as 1600 or 3200, so I can usually get the speeds I need handheld without excessive noise. The M10 gives me noise I can live with at ISO 12500, especially if I nail exposure or slightly overexpose in a bright central area. Then I can decrease exposure in Lightroom afterward, and add noise reduction in selective areas with brush and graduated filter tools.
The flight shots were all captured with a 135mm f/4 Elmar from the early 1960s. Everything else here came from a 50mm f /1.4 Summilux-M ASPH or 75mm f/2 APO-Summicron-M. The sunstar landscape shows a pair of sunstars, one direct and one reflected. There was some diffraction around the tree branches to begin with. Stopping down to f/11 enhanced it, and a little moving around revealed the second sunstar in the water reflection.
I started with a 50mm for the sunset pond silhouettes but switched to a 75mm to narrow the coverage. Live view didn’t show me shadow detail – current LCD / EVF technology lacks the eye’s dynamic range, though it makes composing easier on a tripod. I focused and composed as well as I could in the optical viewfinder. In DNG or any other raw format, you’ll always get more contrast range on pixels than the LCD or EVF shows you.
Double sunstar, low flow channel
Snow geese on liftoff
Practice is important with longer focal lengths. I’m very used to 135mm since a 135mm Hektor and a 50mm f/1.5 Summaritwere the two lenses I had for an M3 in my teens. But no amount of practice and stealth will get you close enough to wild birds or mammals with 135mm. You’ll need 400mm or longer for wild couples and close-ups. Just bring the 135mm and shorter lenses too. Sometimes a knife is the right tool, even in a gunfight.
Choice of 135mm Lenses
I had the option of my old 135mm f/4.5 Hektor or something else. I picked up a 135mm f/4 Elmar (not Tele-) a few years ago, a $150 eBay special. Yes, it has a longer focusing throw than a Tele-Elmar would have. No, it doesn’t quite have the ultimate sharpness of a 135mm f/3.4 APO-Telyt-M, a lens I sold a while back when I switched to an M8 and its lack of 135mm frame lines.
Solo crane over the marsh
But the 135mm Elmar is very sharp almost to the corners at f/5.6 or f/8. Leica lens authority Erwin Puts thinks it’s better at f/4 than the 135mm Hektor at f/11. I haven’t missed the Hektor’s blurriness or the pristine sharpness of the APOTelyt at all with the Elmar. It just works, as you can judge from these pictures.
Winter trees and reflection, low flow channel
Hot chocolate at Socorro’s Sourdough Mine Restaurant
Sunset pond silhouettes