Road Show

On Tuesday April 20th I attended the Leica North American Road Show for the Leica M-9 in San Francisco California. There were about 30 other attendees who ranged from people who were making the switch to Leica from DSLR cameras to professional photographers and everything in between.
The road show was hosted by Leica and they had their west coast distributor and there USA representative from New York handling the presentation.  It covered the M-9 from top to bottom starting with the controls on the outside of the camera body to software shooting and set up menus. A number of the attendees had brought their own M-9s and Leica supplied the others with cameras and lenses they had brought with them for the hands on portion of the seminar.
Everyone was encouraged to follow along with their camera through set-up, trouble shooting and hands on focusing practice. It seems that the biggest adjustment for people is to get a grip on how to focus a range finder camera quickly and accurately.
One of the hints during the focusing session was to start your focusing from the infinity position rather than the close focus position. I found that for me this really helped in the accuracy and the speed of focus. They went over the use of Hyper Focal and Zone focusing systems which was helpful.
There was also a very good demonstration of street photography by Chris Weeks if you are unfamiliar with his work do yourself a favor and check out his website.
They also had every lens available for the M-9 for the attendees to look at and try. Probably the only time I will get my hands on a $10,000.00 lens. If you have the opportunity to attend one of the road shows I think you will find it well worth the time. Especially if you are interested in purchasing a M-9.

  Attendees getting their questions answered.

Working on the menus and camera set up.

Focus slide demo the lights are out and I took this photo without flash.