Less is more: the quest for distraction-free portrait photography
Just go with the flow
Leica recently launched the latest version of their digital M camera, the M11-D. While it’s almost identical to the Leica M11-P, what’s unique about the M11-D is that it has no digital screen on the back; the only way to view the photos you’ve taken is to download them to your computer or view them on your phone through the Leica app. Taking photographs on the M11-D is supposedly as close to the experience of shooting film as it is possible to get using a digital camera. A return to the latent image, but digital.
The rationale for the Leica M11-D is that it keeps the photographer “in the moment” and focused (no pun intended) on taking photos, not looking at them. This gets to the heart of Leica’s philosophy das Wesentliche, which the company defines as “to eliminate all distractions and to concentrate on the essentials.”
Being free from distractions doesn’t come cheap. The M11-D is listed at $9,395, $200 more than the M11-P on which it’s based. In true Leica style, you’re literally paying more for less.
While I freely admit that I find the rationale for the M11-D a little pretentious—and not to mention eye-wateringly expensive—I can’t deny that I see the benefit of eliminating distractions when taking photographs, especially when those photographs are of people.
In January 2016, The Verge commissioned me to photograph Michelle Obama at the White House. I had been allotted ten minutes with the then-First Lady before she was due to sit down with Nilay Patel to film a 360-degree video interview—genuinely cutting-edge technology at the time. After an hour and a half of set up and prep, Michelle Obama arrived exactly on time, and the photo shoot began.
I was shooting on a Canon EOS 5D Mark III tethered to my MacBook Pro. My laptop was obscured by her team of stylists, hair, and makeup, who would comment on the photos as they appeared on screen and make suggestions for adjustments to pose, clothing, etc. Not that those suggestions weren’t extremely helpful, but at one point, when the team was in deep discussion over the outfit, Michelle Obama and I looked at each other, and I commented on how ironic it was that seemingly everyone in the room could see the photos we were taking except the two of us, the photographer and the subject.
As a rule, I usually avoided tethering the camera to a computer. I had issues in the past due to loss of connection, often causing the computer to crash and lose frames in the process. Instead, I preferred to shoot on 4GB and 8GB SD cards, downloading them into the computer as I went. I treated the SD cards like rolls of film; shooting this way was practical, familiar, and generally more robust and reliable than the dodgy connection cables and finicky capture software I had experienced in my early days of shooting digital.
But there was also another huge advantage of shooting on cards from a creative point of view: No one else on set could see the photos until the card was downloaded.
Shooting untethered, i.e., not connected to an external laptop or computer, avoided any awkward interruptions from the client, agency, PR, stylists, or anyone else on set giving conflicting instructions to the person or people being photographed. I once had an experience during a shoot with a band where their management, the record label, and various other people in the studio all gave conflicting instructions to the band members while I was trying to keep them focused and their energy up to shoot something else entirely. The back and forth created a nightmare “too many cooks in the kitchen” situation that infuriated the band and almost derailed the entire production.
When photographing people, regardless of whether they’re professional models, musicians, actors, or someone who has never stood in front of a camera before, the photographer needs time to build trust with the subject. Directing someone on a photo shoot is not a matter of posing them like a mannequin. It’s a process of encouraging them to relax, get comfortable, and build their confidence enough that they can move seamlessly through a number of poses, different expressions and be as natural as possible in front of the camera. It’s rarely an easy process.
Anything that distracts from that process—like having anyone in the studio randomly tell the subject(s) to do something different mid-take—makes the shoot inexorably harder. It breaks the momentum.
That goes for me, too. I often avoided looking at the photos I was taking on the camera screen so as not to disrupt the flow of the shoot; I didn’t want to be a distraction, either. I would surreptitiously check the images on the camera screen for focus and exposure but resisted the temptation to scroll through the photos to see what I had taken. I would wait until I could pause the shoot at a natural point and everyone could take a break. Only then would I review the images with the team: myself, the model, the production team, and, most importantly, the client.
Before shooting digitally, this review process relied almost entirely on Polaroids. When you’re shooting on film, there’s no other way to see the photographs unless you’re going to wait around for a few test rolls to come back from the lab. There was rarely enough time for that; it was much quicker and easier to shoot Polaroids to check framing, composition, styling, etc.
But as useful as they were, Polaroids also created problems of their own. I occasionally had clients become fixated on a particular Polaroid and ask me for my assurance that the final image would look exactly the same. All I could honestly tell them was that the final shot would be similar but not identical, an answer which sometimes led to a client fretting that the best photograph from the entire shoot would be the Polaroid they were holding in their hand. Fortunately, I can’t remember that ever being the case. But I do recall the stress of a nervous client and it’s yet another reason I’m grateful those days are long gone.
Back to today. One of the reasons I am so happy to be shooting film again is precisely because I don’t know how the photographs will come out. The stakes are not the same. I am taking these photos for myself; no one is paying me. I am under no pressure to guarantee that I’ve got the shot. Conversely, much as I love shooting film for myself, I doubt I could use it on a commercial shoot again. I don’t need the angst. But a digital camera that works like a film camera? Yeah, maybe.
The Leica M11-D intrigues me, and I wonder what it would be like to shoot with such a camera in a professional setting. Perhaps I could get used to a digital camera that had unparalleled resolution and image quality but without the distracting baggage of a screen and the added get-out-of-jail-free card of being able to download the photos onto my computer to review just as with any other pro digital camera.
The only caveat is that I’d have to make sure that my clients never learned about the live view feature on the Leica app. I imagine them fighting over my phone to comment on the photos I was shooting that I hadn’t yet seen myself, and I couldn’t even if I wanted to because there was no screen on the back of the damn camera.
But on second thoughts, and if I am honest, I think the Leica M11-D is akin to a sledgehammer being used to crack a nut. I don’t see myself returning to professional photography any time soon, and even if I did, I could easily rid myself of the distraction of a screen when I am shooting; I‘d just turn it off.
I’m sure that there are some reportage photographers out there who can justifiably make the argument that a screen is intrusive and that it’s a positive advantage not to have one on the camera. The M11-D may be the perfect camera for them, and who am I to judge? But it’s not for me. I shot for years with digital cameras and never once found the screens to be a distraction, at least not compared to the distractions caused by some of the people on set. If anything, I thought of my camera screen as my digital Polaroid there to reassure me that everything was working and A-OK.
So, no, I won’t be buying the Leica M11-D. The good news is that I just saved myself $9,395.