Leica M6 vs Fujifilm X-Pro3 for Street Photography: Why I Keep Carrying Both

There is a point in almost every photographer’s life where they decide what they really need is a Leica M6.

Nobody knows exactly how this happens.

You can be perfectly happy one minute, taking photographs with a camera that has autofocus, automatic exposure and several decades of technological progress behind it. Then six months later you’re on eBay at midnight looking at a black box from the 1980s and convincing yourself that £2,000 is actually quite reasonable because it has the original papers.

The Leica M6 does that to people.

I eventually bought one.

And annoyingly, I sort of understand it now.

For street photography I’ve found myself carrying two cameras more than anything else: the Leica M6 with a 35mm lens, and a Fujifilm X-Pro3 with a manual-focus Voigtländer 35mm, which gives me roughly a 50mm equivalent field of view.

They are obviously very different cameras.

One contains film.

One contains a computer.

One is a Leica, which means strangers on the internet will happily explain why mine is either the greatest camera ever made or the wrong Leica entirely.

But when I’m actually walking around taking photographs, they feel surprisingly closely related.

And I think that is largely down to how involved they make me feel in taking the photograph.

Why does everyone want a Leica M6?

This is probably the question I had before buying one.

Because, objectively, an M6 doesn’t do much.

There is no autofocus.

No auto exposure.

No motor drive worth talking about.

No screen.

No RAW files.

No histogram.

No little green box identifying an eyeball three streets away.

You get a rangefinder, a shutter-speed dial, a light meter and a hole where the film goes.

That’s basically it.

And yet that simplicity is precisely why the M6 works so well on the street.

You raise it to your eye and there is almost nothing between you and what is happening.

The viewfinder is bright and uncluttered. With a 35mm lens you can see outside the frame lines, so you are not simply watching the photograph you are about to take — you can see things approaching it.

That becomes surprisingly useful.

Someone walking into the frame.

A hand about to appear.

Two people about to cross paths.

You start anticipating photographs rather than simply reacting to them.

There is something very satisfying about that.

The rangefinder focusing is part of it too.

You line up the little patch in the middle, decide your aperture and shutter speed, and press the button.

It is wonderfully direct.

Until the subject moves.

Then it becomes considerably more character-building.

But after a while you stop trying to focus everything at the exact moment you want to photograph it.

You start thinking about distance.

You pre-focus.

You use depth of field.

You know somebody is going to walk past that doorway, so you focus there before they arrive.

The camera starts changing the way you see the street.

That, more than the red dot or the mythology or the fact Henri Cartier-Bresson once touched something vaguely similar, is what I think people are actually chasing when they want an M6.

It feels very little like operating a piece of electronics.

It feels like using a camera.

And then there’s the X-Pro3

The X-Pro3 is an odd camera too.

Which I mean as a compliment.

Fujifilm made a digital camera, gave it an optical viewfinder, hid the rear screen and generally behaved as though twenty years of digital camera development had been an unfortunate misunderstanding.

Naturally, photographers loved it.

Put a small manual-focus Voigtländer lens on the front and the similarities with the Leica become even more obvious.

The Fuji is not pretending to be an M6. It is still very much a digital camera.

But the experience is unusually analogue.

Shutter speed is on a physical dial.

Aperture is on the lens.

Focus is done with your left hand.

ISO is something you can choose and then largely forget about rather than allowing the camera to negotiate with itself every time you press the shutter.

And because I’m using a manual-focus Voigtländer, there is no focus motor humming away in the background trying to decide what I meant.

If the wrong thing is sharp, I did that.

Which feels oddly important.

The X-Pro3 optical viewfinder

This is probably the feature I’d be most interested in if I were researching an X-Pro3 specifically for street photography.

I love the optical finder.

It gives the camera much of the same feeling I enjoy with the Leica.

You’re seeing the actual world rather than a television broadcast of it.

There is no exposure preview changing brightness every time you move the camera.

No picture profile.

No digital rendition of reality.

Just whatever is actually happening in front of you.

It keeps me looking outward.

And for street photography that makes a difference.

I’m not examining the photograph before I have taken it.

I’m watching what people are doing.

Obviously the X-Pro3 also has an EVF when you need one, which is one of its great advantages.

Particularly with manual lenses, being able to flick into an electronic finder and check focus is extremely useful.

So you can have the slightly romantic optical-viewfinder experience while retaining the ability to quietly cheat whenever necessary.

Which is more or less the ideal arrangement.

35mm on the Leica, 50mm on the Fuji

Using the two cameras together has also given them slightly different jobs.

The Leica has a 35mm.

The Fuji’s 35mm lens becomes approximately a 50mm equivalent.

And I really like that combination.

The Leica lets me get closer to what is happening.

Thirty-five millimetres gives you the person and enough of the world around them to understand where they are.

It suits busy streets, groups of people and those little situations where several things happen in the same frame.

The Fuji is tighter.

The roughly 50mm view strips more of the scene away.

I find myself noticing individuals, faces, hands, signs and smaller interactions.

I’m not deliberately switching between them thinking:

THIS SITUATION REQUIRES A FIFTY.

That would make walking around Oxford considerably more dramatic than it actually is.

But having both focal lengths available changes what I notice.

And because the cameras are both small, carrying two bodies doesn’t feel particularly ridiculous.

Or at least not photographer ridiculous.

They don’t look like professional cameras

This matters more for street photography than specifications tables normally suggest.

The Leica M6 is small.

The X-Pro3 with the Voigtländer is small.

Neither has an enormous lens hanging off the front.

I can fit both in a little bag and walk for hours without feeling as though I have brought equipment.

That matters.

For wedding work I use Sony cameras and G Master lenses.

They are exceptional.

They are also unmistakably professional cameras.

Put a Sony body behind a 50mm f/1.2 GM and nobody thinks you are casually wandering around enjoying the architecture.

You look like you are there to photograph something.

Possibly for the council.

The Leica is particularly good at disappearing.

Most people simply don’t react to it.

The X-Pro3 isn’t quite as tiny, but with a small Voigtländer on the front it still feels unobtrusive.

Neither setup screams:

A PHOTOGRAPHER HAS ARRIVED. PLEASE MODIFY YOUR BEHAVIOUR ACCORDINGLY.

And on the street, that is incredibly valuable.

Manual focus is slower. That’s the point.

Coming from the Sony system, manual focus should theoretically annoy me.

My wedding cameras can identify an eye, track it across the frame and keep it sharp while somebody dances directly towards me in near darkness.

It is completely ridiculous technology.

And exactly what I want when somebody is paying me to photograph their wedding.

I don’t want character-building exercises during the first kiss.

For my own photography, though, I have found myself wanting the opposite.

The M6 and the manual-focus X-Pro3 introduce a tiny bit of resistance.

I have to choose the distance.

I have to turn the focusing ring.

I have to think about where someone might be rather than asking the camera where they currently are.

Sometimes I miss.

Quite regularly, actually.

And yet I feel considerably more attached to the photographs I make with them.

Not because they are automatically better.

They aren’t.

A badly focused photograph doesn’t become profound because I missed focus on a Leica.

But the process feels different.

There is a little sequence of decisions between noticing something and photographing it.

Distance.

Focus.

Aperture.

Timing.

Click.

It feels like I participated.

The M6 slows you down without making you slow

There is a cliché that film photography “slows you down.”

I don’t think that’s quite right with the Leica.

An M6 can actually be incredibly quick.

Zone focus a 35mm lens, set an aperture with enough depth of field and the camera is basically ready before anything happens.

There is nothing to wake up.

Nothing to boot.

No menu.

No focus mode.

No autofocus area.

No question about whether I want subject recognition set to human, bird or 2017 Volkswagen Polo.

It’s just ready.

What film changes is what happens immediately afterwards.

Nothing.

There is no photograph to inspect.

You don’t know whether it worked.

So you carry on walking.

That is possibly my favourite thing about the M6.

Take photograph.

Wind lever.

Continue with life.

The X-Pro3 gets surprisingly close to that feeling

This is why I think the X-Pro3 makes such an interesting digital companion to the Leica.

Particularly if you hide the screen and use a small manual lens.

You can treat it almost the same way.

See something.

Focus.

Photograph it.

Keep walking.

You still have all the advantages of digital photography if you need them, but the camera doesn’t constantly encourage you to inspect what you’ve just done.

Is the Leica M6 worth it?

This is inevitably where any article about an M6 eventually ends up.

The sensible answer is no.

There are plenty of film cameras capable of producing exactly the same photograph.

A Leica does not put additional artistic information onto Kodak Tri-X.

Nobody looking at a print can identify the incredibly smooth action of your film-advance lever.

There are cheaper rangefinders.

There are cameras with better meters.

There are cameras with aperture priority.

There are cameras that don’t require you to explain to your wife quite how much a thirty-year-old metal rectangle cost.

But I don’t think that is really why people buy them.

The M6 is an unusually good combination of simplicity, size, viewfinder and physical feel.

Everything you need is immediately available.

Almost nothing you don’t need is there at all.

After using cameras increasingly designed around computational assistance, I find that incredibly refreshing.

I pick it up and want to go somewhere.

And perhaps that is the only specification that really matters.

Leica M6 or Fujifilm X-Pro3?

If I had to choose purely on practicality, the X-Pro3 wins comfortably.

You get digital files.

You can change ISO whenever you want.

You have an EVF.

You can check focus.

You can shoot hundreds of frames.

You do not have to buy film and then spend the following week wondering whether Royal Mail has permanently incorporated your negatives into its national infrastructure.

But the M6 gives me something the Fuji doesn’t quite replicate.

There is an extraordinary purity to it.

Film, shutter, lens, viewfinder.

That’s all.

The X-Pro3 is perhaps the closest I’ve found to getting some of that experience from a digital camera without simply making life inconvenient for the sake of it.

Which is why carrying both makes more sense than it probably appears to.

The Leica with a 35mm.

The Fuji with effectively a 50mm.

Both manual focus.

Both small enough to disappear into a little bag.

Neither particularly intimidating on the street.

And both make me feel connected to the act of taking a photograph in a way my professional equipment doesn’t.

That’s not a criticism of the Sony cameras.

Quite the opposite.

For weddings, I want cameras that make getting the photograph as easy and reliable as technologically possible.

But I don’t photograph the street because I need the photograph.

Nobody has hired me.

There is no shot list.

Nobody is going to email on Monday asking why I missed the man smoking outside Greggs.

So perhaps efficiency isn’t the point.

My Sonys are brilliant because they get out of my way.

The Leica M6 and X-Pro3 are brilliant because, in their own peculiar ways, they make me stay involved.

And when I’m only taking photographs because I enjoy taking photographs, I think that’s exactly what I’m looking for.