7 hours ago
5
Buying a Leica M11, struggling with it, and selling it within a couple of months is a cycle plenty of shooters know well. The rangefinder demands patience most digital cameras have trained out of you, and that gap between wanting the camera and actually using it is where the frustration lives.
Alex Barrera admits he has bought and sold the Leica M11 three or four times, never keeping it long enough to get comfortable, and he brought in Leica ambassador Jaime Fernandez to help break the pattern. Fernandez went through the same thing with an M10-R, holding it for a year while a second kit sat alongside it and slowly pushed the Leica out of rotation. His fix came from forcing himself onto one-camera, one-lens trips, including a nerve-wracking first run to Guatemala where taxi drivers kept warning him the camera would get stolen. The fear faded once he decided the worst case was a theft his insurance could cover, and after that he stopped planning his day around whether the Leica was safe to carry. Speed followed, not from a trick, but from repetition.
The lens conversation is where the practical advice sharpens. Fernandez focuses fastest with a 35mm f/1.4 because he knows exactly where his finger sits before he even looks through the viewfinder, and he noticed real speed differences between focus rings even on similar builds like a 24mm. His guidance to Barrera is blunt: put one lens on the camera and don't touch it until it feels like an extension of your hand. He points to the Leica Q3 with its 28mm or 43mm crop options as another way to lock into a single focal length. Barrera, meanwhile, has set his own rule, committing to keep the M11 for at least twelve months, helped along by a deep scratch he put in the back on day one that killed the fear of babying it.
There's a quieter shift running underneath all of this, and it's worth applying to your own work whatever camera you shoot. Both men describe recovering from what Fernandez calls a "Sony sickness," the habit of chasing tack-sharp eye focus wide open because years of aggressive autofocus trained them to expect it. Stopping down to f/5.6 or f/8 does more than raise your hit rate on a rangefinder. It pulls the whole scene into focus, which changes what a photograph can say. Fernandez credits gallery visits and photo books with opening his eyes to how much context a sharp background carries in street and documentary work. Shooting wide open can become a crutch that blurs away an ugly backdrop instead of building it into the story. That principle travels far beyond Leica glass, and it's the kind of thing you learn faster by studying printed bodies of work than by scrolling a feed.
The two also get into the mechanics that make or break a rangefinder day. Focus-and-recompose with a centered patch means learning to shift on the same plane rather than pivoting, since a twist throws your subject slightly out. Fernandez shoots continuously while he adjusts focus, banking frames in case the moment or the person disappears. They trade notes on approaching strangers, playing the tourist card, and grabbing a frame before someone notices, then a second once eye contact happens. They also talk gear that smooths the whole process, including Gaston's Owl Crown baseplate with an integrated tripod mount, and Barrera's current setup running a Light Lens Lab 35mm while he waits on a proper Leica lens before a trip to Italy.
Fernandez lands on a specific recommendation for someone still fighting the system: skip the 35mm f/1.4 for now and shoot a 35mm f/2 Summicron instead, because the slightly deeper depth of field forgives focusing mistakes while you build the muscle memory. He and Barrera also flag the Leica SL3-P and the Q line as lower-stress ways into the same ecosystem if the M never clicks, and they close on the pull of M glass with fifty years of history behind it, right down to the Noctilux 50mm f/1.
Watch the full conversation above to hear Barrera and Fernandez lay out the trip-and-lens plan meant to finally end the sell-and-rebuy cycle.
English (US) ·