What I learned from shooting the Leica M6 for 365 days
- Hipster_cph
- May 31
- 5 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
May 2025 # 15
I thought I knew my process. I have been shooting the streets for almost a decade. But after 365 days with the Leica M6 — the most demanding camera I’ve ever used — everything changed.
This isn’t going to be a heavy specs review. I will mention the specs I like but more about what the Leica M6 has taught me as a street photographer.
Enter the $6800 "dumb" camera
In May 2024 I finally took the plunge and bought the Leica M6. At that point I've been thinking about it for a good few years..
..Back and forth.. to buy or not to buy.
The endless lists of pros and cons. I always landed on "not to buy" as the cons outweighed the pros. I was naturally comparing doing street photography with Leica M6 to my digital camera the Fuji x100v, I purchased only a year prior in 2023.
Digital photography outperforms film in almost every (comparable) aspect expect for one. More on that later.
Looking back I was leading with "my head" oppose to leading with my heart. One of the downsides of being a highly rational and analytical person is that I often think about things from a logical point of view.
The few times I lead with my heart I ended up in trouble. But that's a story for another day.
Anyway, I bought the camera and instantly loved the feeling of shooting film.
Soon I began what I call my "journey of self-discovery".
The slow journey of self-discovery
As of writing, I've had Leica M6 for 365 days..and what a journey of self-discovery it has been.
When I bought the camera I was aware that there would be a degree of re-learning street photography as this was my first film camera in years - and a mechanical one too.
I had one back in the day long before digital cameras made their entry.
This time around I had whole other kind of patience when it came to re-learning street photography. Years ago when I was learning street photography for the first time I had a lot of emotions attached to it - most notably as most new street photographers can agree with - the constant frustration.
Frustration with not learning fast enough, making bad photographs i.e. bad composition, lack of storytelling and the amount of blurry and out of focus photographs.
As I said a lot of learning by failing had to happen.
Also back then I was hungry to learn in a different way. I wanted to learn as fast as possible and I often compared myself to experienced photographers. Looking at their photographs and judging my own skills based on that.
There is nothing wrong with being ambitious - but there is a fine line between being ambitious and foolish. I was the latter many a times.
Of course I couldn't match the level of an experienced street photographer back then for obvious reasons (read: lack of skills and experience).
This time around - I found myself both curious and joyful every time I went out with my camera.
I can reveal I still cannot load film in the camera consistently. Sometimes it takes 15 seconds other times it take 5-10 minutes!
Key lessons learned
Let talk about some of the lessoned I learned as a experience street photographer using the Leica m6 for 365 days:
It's a slower more intentional process
You probably heard this before.. yes it is a slower and a more intentional process. But not for the reasons that you might think.
For me personally was a slower process in the beginning as I had to build up muscle memory to handle the camera in a fast and efficient way - and that takes time to build up.
In that period it slowed down my process of making photographs significantly as I was just too slow to change the settings required by the scene or situation I was trying to capture.
Every time I picked up the Leica M6 it was a intentional act because I was hyperaware of shooting film and and not digital.
So every impulse of taking a shot was based on a variant of this question to myself; "Do I really want to photograph this?" or "will this make a good photograph?".
Also every shot I took cost money in the end, and film is expensive.
That mindset naturally lead me to be more intentional with my photography. I wasn't snapping left and right as with my digital cameras. To be honest most of the photographs got deleted anyway.
I started to like slowing down and being more present and intentional with my street photography.
Next, one of things I underestimated using a mechanical camera with a manual lens - the constant decision making..
All the decision making
As mentioned before the M6 is a mechanical camera which essentially means that I as the photographer is in charge of making all the decision when it comes to making a photograph.
But why is that a problem you might think?
It's not a problem per say, its a different process than most of us street photographers are used to, as most modern cameras are digital and offers a lot of automatic or semi-automatic features to help assist us making a photograph. Now we even have AI to help us out. My point being, we have gotten so used to modern cameras assisting us that we don't even think about it.. well I didn't.
It just took some time to get used to. I can give an example of one of the most common "issue" I had when using a mechanical camera:
Light is a very important element in street photography, it helps set the tone and mood of a photograph.
On my fuji x100v I have it set to a ISO range, which essentially means that the camera will determine the most appropriate ISO within that set range. This is super helpful as I don't have to manually adjust the ISO settings to each changing situation where the light has shifted.
This happened a lot, the light constantly shifted and I had to quickly change the settings so either the aperture or shutter speed to accommodate the new light conditions. As the ISO is fixed at this point to box speed ISO e.g. Kodak Gold is 200 ISO and Ilford HP5+ is 400.
And constantly reading the light meter and changing the setting were just not a optimal way of doing Street photography for me.
But of course there is a hack that can be used in most cases, which I also came to use and love. I'm talking about zone focus. This significantly changed my speed, but it does not solve all problems.
I talk more in depth of the key lessons I learned in my Youtube video. You can watch it here.
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