The perfect shot

All these years, we were never very serious about photography. In fact, there was even a time when we went on some holidays and did not even take any photos of the places we visited. But with the advent of Facebook, suddenly everyone, ourselves included, wanted to post photos of anything whatsoever, but especially holiday photos, to share with their friends and family. Hence, in 2009, we started to take photos again so as to post them on Facebook. And because we love to eat and many of our holidays revolved around food, naturally many of the photos we took were of the food we ate at the different places in various parts of the world we visited. After a while, we realised that Facebook wasn't the best place to share our food photos (as a large album on Facebook takes a long time to load, and adding long descriptions and commentary about the photos on Facebook was awkward) and the logical conclusion was to put our photos and writeups in a standalone blog. From that, Who took our cheese puffs away? was born.

We started out using our camera phone (our Nokia N95) years ago, and then invested in our first DSLR, the Nikon D60. When we started expecting our food photos to look better, we upgraded to the Nikon D90. This is a great camera capable of taking the best shots, but soon we felt constrained by its sheer size and the difficulty of lugging it around for dinners. Moreover, it was a bit too conspicuous taking photos with such a large camera in a dining room full of other guests. So we 'downsized' and got a mirrorless sytem camera (Sony NEX-5), which is also a great camera and can fit somewhat into my jacket pocket. For almost 2 years, the NEX-5 was our trusty road warrior, travelling with us to all the restaurants and taking very good photos. However, during our recent New York trip, we realised that many fine dining New York restaurants generally have very dim lighting at night (probably to create a more cozy ambiance). And our NEX-5 was no longer going to cut it. As a result, we started doing some research on what kind of camera would suit food photography best, taking to account the need to take photos in a very low light environment and also sometimes in a discreet manner (so as not to startle or annoy other diners).

Instinctively, we were only considering the mirrorless or four-thirds systems (not the DSLRs because of their size and certainly not the compacts because, well, we were snobs for large sensors). At that time, it seemed like the new Sony NEX-5N would be the best choice (even more so than the NEX-7 because the NEX-5N supposedly performs better in low light). But at lunch one day with a friend (who also had an NEX-5), I was urged to take a look at the Leica D Lux 5. A compact? I sniffed.

But after doing more reading, the fatal allure of the Leica brand started to wrap its tentacles around us. The Leica lovers seemed a breed apart from the rest of those who use cameras, like as if they were superior. The Leica 'red dot' has such brand premium that a Panasonic LX-5 compact camera when rebranded with the 'red dot' can sell for double its price (and people on the Leica forums will defend with their lives the assertion that the D Lux 5 is superior to the LX-5). As it turned out, the Leica D Lux 5 did fit almost all our criteria for a new camera specially for food photography:

(1) it was reasonably small (slightly smaller than the NEX-5);
(2) it could take macro pictures from up to 1cm away from the subject (which is an amazing feat);
(3) it was noted to be one of the best low light cameras;
(4) its manual functions were quite easy to use (unlike the NEX-5);
(5) it can take photos silently (which is a great plus since the DSLRs and mirrorless cameras have the shutter click which can annoy other restaurant guests); and
(6) well, we are suckers for cult brands.

The downsides were that:

(a) it was still maybe 80% bigger than the Canon S100 (which we considered too and is a great compact);
(b) it did not have a CMOS sensor; and
(c) it didn't have the start-up and image processing speed of the DSLRs and mirrorless cameras.

At the store, I was almost waylaid by the Leica X1 instead (which had a CMOS sensor) which cost 3x more, but fortunately decided against it as it was bigger than the D Lux 5 and supposedly wasn't as good in low light. So the D Lux 5 it was (though it is quite likely that we'll be back for the X1 some day - it's a gorgeous camera).

Check out our new toy: Leica website

We tested it last week at Joel Robuchon and were quite impressed by the results, though we have a lot to learn before being able to unlock it's full potential. What was immediately apparent was that it seemed to have better stabilisation function and could take really close up shots better than the NEX-5.

Oh yes, one more thing. Our new D Lux 5 came with a free Adobe Lightroom 3 which is a brilliant photo editor (it is slightly better than the Aperture 3 which we were using previously). From that, we were inspired to take photos in RAW and convert them into JPEG after editing. So we'd expect that there will be some improvement in our photos from now on.