I returned late yesterday afternoon, and would have been home half and hour earlier were it not for uncaring drivers blocking the road, queuing to get fuel from the local filling station. I'd driven 230 miles from Great Torrington in North Devon - seven and three-quarter hours on the road - and despite refreshment stops was feeling pretty tired. This kind of hold-up was the last thing I needed. And as I had the caravan hitched behind me, I couldn't do a nifty three-point turn, and go back the way I'd come in search of a clearer alternative way home. I was trapped in the tailback.
Eventually a gap appeared, and, assisted by a kind bus driver in the oncoming lane, who held back traffic for me, I snaked car and caravan through that gap and into the completely clear road beyond the filling station. And was home within five minutes.
This was all because BP had shut a few of their filling stations a couple of days earlier. Publicity had done the rest, creating a situation in which everyone, daft or sensible, rushed to secure a tankful if they possibly could. Fortunately, I'd been able to top up in North Devon but 230 miles of towing uses up a lot of diesel, and I barely had a third of a tank left when I hit this unwelcome hold-up. It was hard not to experience a degree of 'range anxiety', even so close to home. Certainly, watching the fuel gauge had been a preoccupation on the return journey.
I don't altogether blame people for getting fuel, whatever the inconvenience or frustration for others. We so depend on our cars.
It did cross my mind, of course, that an electric car owner would laugh at all this queuing for liquid fuel, and simply get home using a route that did not pass a filling station. Then plug in.
After unloading the caravan, and before having my evening meal, I did go out again to check out the filling stations in Burgess Hill, drawing a blank until I reached Tesco, where there was a queue, but it was moving. Tesco had stewards directing drivers to a suitable pump, depending on the fuel they wanted and how they would be paying. It was most efficiently done. I filled up, and will be fine now for the week ahead.
And I assure my readers that the tail end of the holiday wasn't at all spoilt by this experience. I had a very good three weeks, with plenty of fine weather, and all of it beautifully recorded by Lili, the Leica X-U camera I bought on 20th August. I took 2,776 photos while on holiday. And, counting today's batch, 4,493 since purchase on 20th August. Lili is a joy to use, and very rewarding.
But I went on holiday with a few questions in my mind. These were all to do with having bought a camera with just one fixed lens, no zoom, no macro mode, and no quick-access special scene modes. In fact no gimmicks at all, just the essential controls. Would Lili feel slow to use or adjust, and her picture-taking abilities limiting? To ensure that I gave her a proper chance to prove herself, I deliberately left the cherished little Leica D-Lux 4 behind. I would rely on Lili only, and if I hit an issue, then I'd be forced to find a workaround.
I'm glad to say that there were no issues. I solved all the operational glitches that came up. For example, using the flash, which is designed primarily for underwater conditions. But it produces good results on dry land too - you must however first change the White Balance from 'auto' to 'flash'. I don't think this point was picked up in any of the online reviews of the X-U that were published from 2016 to 2019. Their writers, no doubt pushed for time, condemned all out-of-water use of flash on the X-U, dismissing it as poor, giving flat, no-shadow illumination. But it's not so. This negative comment must have put off more than a few potential buyers.
Let's run through some of those questions I had.
Lili's fixed 23mm lens, matched with an APS-C sensor inside the camera, behaves as a 35mm lens on a 'full-frame' camera. 35mm is fairly wide-angle, but not as wide as the 24mm lens on the little Leica D-Lux 4. Would I miss a wider field of view, and the compositional possibilities it afforded?
Well, there were occasions when a really wide-angle lens would have been nice to have. But I can't say I felt frustrated with having 'only' 35mm available, rather than the more extreme 24mm. I just got used to composing 'tighter' pictures with no space around the subject. Or worked harder to simulate a steep perspective, or a great sense of depth. These shots of a river bridge in Looe in Cornwall, and the harbour at Ilfracombe in Devon, do I think demonstrate that 35mm can supply oodles of depth if carefully used:
And these shots of a gigantic crouching dancer outside the Theatre Royal in Plymouth in Devon show that I didn't have to back off too far for pictures that captured most or all of the dancer's body with a little room to spare:
It did help that this figure was crouching. But tall structures can be handled with a 35mm lens too - such as Verity, Damien Hirst's huge and visceral figure at the entrance to Ilfracombe harbour in Devon:
I'm showing her 'nice' side, of course, not the peeled-away, sliced-up side.
Wide-angle lenses are also the thing for landscape pictures. You can't photograph the entire scene with a 35mm lens, but you can include enough of it for the picture to feel unconfined, and full of space and depth, as in these shots I took with Lili at Treyarnon Bay, west of Padstow in Cornwall. And Lili has recorded a lot of minute detail - as can be seen if you click on a couple of these shots to enlarge them:
Or this shot taken above Porlock Weir in Somerset, where Exmoor meets the sea, and Wales looms on the horizon:
Or these pictures, before and after a fine sunset at Hartland Quay in Devon:
Of course, the little Leica D-Lux 4 would have taken rather more of the sky - but the phone even more so. While watching this spectacle unfold, gin and tonic at hand, I tried a 21mm shot with Prudence, my Samsung Galaxy S20+ phone. 21mm was super-wide, and gave a most impressive result:
As you can see, the shot includes one of my fingers at the top left! It's not always easy to keep fingers out of the way when holding a phone - which is partly why I prefer camera-shaped cameras.
Still, I think I should conclude that Lili can deal with most landscapes, and if I need to capture a wider view, I have only to bring my phone into play.
At the other end of the scale are macro shots, where you want to shoot the detail of small things from close up. The little Leica has a macro-focus setting, and can produce amazing results. Lili has no special macro-focus setting. I can however get her as close as eight inches (20cm), and crop the result to simulate a much closer shot, as in these flower pictures at Umberleigh and at Knightshayes (the National Trust property near Tiverton), both in Devon:
No complaints about those. I can't crop much more without losing sharpness, but lots of tiny detail is clear to see.
35mm is generally regarded as a great focal length for 'street photography', where you take pictures of people and other things in town or city streets. I agree. I won't show more than one shot that Lili captured, but it proves the point. These two walked past me while I had the camera trained on a building. I immediately swung round and got this grab shot of them, before they went too far away:
I wonder when he'll regret being so covered in tattoos?
I also expected Lili to do better than the little Leica when the light wasn't good, as in these shots I took yesterday evening, before I went out fuel-hunting:
The little Leica D-Lux 4 is on the left, Lili on the right. Click on the shot to enlarge it. Lili clearly produces a superior result in the yellowish illumination of an indoor light bulb. The little Leica just can't produce a crisp result with plenty of distinct detail, not in this kind of low light. It doesn't help that the little Leica's wider-angled picture on the left has had to be magnified to make the scene seem the same size as Lili's on the right, which simply accentuates the flaws in its rendition. Both cameras have excellent lenses, but the 10-megapixel 2008-vintage sensor (left) is no match for the much more modern 16-megapixel 2016-vintage sensor (right).
There was one more area in which I questioned Lili's capability: pictures of food. The little Leica seemed very good at it. But a comparison once I was home again revealed that if I made a lot of adjustments to Lili's meal shots in post-processing, I could get to a decent result. As in this picture of a chicken dinner with gravy. Little Leica left, Lili right:
It obviously came down to White Balance. Under my kitchen light - an LED tube - the 'Auto' White Balance setting on the little Leica worked very well, but the 'Auto' setting on Lili produced a cool picture, with nothing bright (or appetising) about the rendering, as with tonight's sea bream dinner:
But I didn't have to stick with this. Lili's White Balance menu offered several other ways to get the right rendering under my kitchen light. I decided to do it by 'colour temperature'. The tube gave out light at 4,000 degrees Kelvin. The nearest I could get was 4,200 degrees K. Adopting that setting improved the picture to this:
Not yet perfect, but definitely better. A meal I'd feel like eating! I saved the 4,200 degrees K setting in one of the picture profiles in Lili's memory. It would need tweaking still - perhaps to 4,600 degrees K, which would shift the rendition towards blue, and reduce the warmness of the picture just a little. But all this showed that Lili could be adjusted to take food pictures as well as the little Leica could.
Or I could revert to 'Auto' White Balance, and in post-processing just turn up the warmth of the picture, and add a tad of extra contrast to intensify the colours. But getting the rendition right by direct, in-camera means would save a small amount of time and effort.
So all the potential problems had been sorted. Well done, Lili!
Cameras in 2021 often fall down on battery life - and no wonder, when you consider they contain power-hungry electronic viewfinders, several electric motors to drive focussing and maybe the zoom, maybe an image-stabiliser, and a super-capable image processor. Lili's battery has much less to do, and consequently she achieves very good battery-life figures. So far her cumulative average shots-per-charge figure in my hands up to 22nd September, when the last recharge took place, is 789. That's 3,947 shots divided by 5 charges. The best 'spot' shots-per-charge figure to date has been 992 shots from one charge in the seven days to 14th September. I'm impressed.
