A Week of Street Photography in Porto and Lisbon With a Leica Q3 43

A week of travel built around the Leica Q3 43 and its fixed lens puts every framing decision on your feet and your patience. Porto and Lisbon push that setup hard, with steep streets, tiled facades, river light, and weather that can swing from blue sky to downpour within a day.

Porto was so walkable and so full of pictures that Andrew Lanxon nearly forgot he was supposed to be filming it. He spent his days there wandering a market and the riverside with his Leica Q3 43 slung around his neck, then waited out the evening as the lights came on along the water. For those dusk scenes, he switched between two of Leica's built-in color looks and admits he can't pick a favorite. The standout Porto sequence is in black and white. A group of chestnut roasters stood under an umbrella while smoke rose around them, and the smoke turned the umbrella into a huge overhead softbox. Lanxon exposed for the highlight and let everything else drop into darkness, which isolates the people under that glow. Smoke, steam, and fog all scatter light this way, and once you start noticing it, you'll find small pockets of studio-like light at street stalls everywhere.

Lisbon gave him a more varied city to work with. In the Praça do Comércio, a man was making giant bubbles for a crowd of families. Lanxon doesn't usually photograph children in public, so he asked the parents first, in what Portuguese he could manage, and got their okay. The resulting black-and-white frames are full of kids jumping and laughing. Farther along the river, under the 25 de Abril Bridge, he found a fisherman in a red top that matched the bridge and jeans that matched the blue around him. Lanxon then dropped his shutter speed so a passing runner would blur against the still figure with the rod. He tried the same trick on a cyclist and admits he wasn't quite fast enough with his settings. Pairing a moving subject with a static one is a simple idea, and it gives a busy waterfront scene a clear focal point.

Fixed-lens compacts have become one of the most talked-about camera categories of the past few years. The Fujifilm X100VI was hard to find for months after its 2024 launch, Ricoh keeps a loyal following for its GR line, and Leica followed the original Q3 with the 43mm version in 2024 for people who wanted something tighter than 28mm. The appeal is practical. A camera with one lens leaves you nothing to swap and fewer settings to second-guess, so you can think about where to stand. A 43mm lens sits close to how your eyes take in a scene, which suits travel work, where you want a picture of a place to look roughly the way the place felt. If you tend to overpack and then leave the bag in the hotel, a single compact you can carry all day is worth trying. If you already own one, try a trip where you don't bring anything else. Working within one fixed view quickly teaches you how much you can get by moving a few steps or crouching low.

Lanxon's biggest break from the Leica was a day trip to Cascais, about 30 minutes from Lisbon, which he took knowing storms were forecast all day. He brought a 100-megapixel Hasselblad with the XCD 90mm f/2.5 V, which frames roughly like a 71mm lens on full frame. He used the camera's XPan crop mode to silhouette figures against the bright backdrop in a wide letterbox frame, and then the rain drove him into an indoor food market. Inside, he raised his ISO to 800, set white balance to auto, and shot wide open at f/2.5. He looked for stallholders mid-conversation and shoppers hauling bags of cabbage, and he angled down from the upper level for top-down views. With that much resolution, he shot a flower stall from above, planning to crop in until the colors filled the frame. Back outside, the tighter lens made the town's lighthouse harder, since it filled the frame and left out the trees and rocks around it. He tried low angles and shooting through leaves to bring some of that setting back in.

Earlier in the week, an aquarium visit in Lisbon turned out better than he expected. He switched to black and white for the tanks, including his favorite sea creature, the ocean sunfish, and caught a woman looking straight into his lens while her partner gazed into the tank. She smiled afterward, and he likes the frame because it's authentic. The next day, he shot street photos with an OM System OM-3, which he covers in a separate video. Back in Lisbon after the Cascais trip, his last full day brought torrential rain and a lost voice. He set his ISO between 400 and 800, kept the aperture around f/2.8 to f/4, and walked for miles without much to show for it, until a building fire drew a crowd of firefighters and onlookers. Behind it sat a brutalist concrete building, all steps and walkways, which he shot in black and white, including a figure half hidden behind one of its blocks. A bar he ducked into during the worst of the rain gave him one more frame he likes. He came home with enough portfolio work that he's thinking about printing a small photo book of the trip.

Lanxon's favorite of the chestnut roaster frames, with the smoke lighting the people under the umbrella, comes early in the video.