Low gear with the Leica
A day in low gear
I wasn’t really in the game today.
A few days of man flu is nothing to make light of, and anyone who laughs at it has never lain under the blanket counting the cracks in the ceiling.
So I went out anyway.
Slowly.
With no demand to come home with anything.
And sometimes that is exactly when you do.
Leica Camera News
Mari Amman is an American-Italian contemporary artist working across disciplines with photography, installation, video, poetry, painting, sculpture, textile and design.
She describes her own work as research-based, using concepts such as Geological Empathy and Sublime Rheology to explore the relationship between people, nature, technology and built environments.
Young, Inspiring and International: LOBA Emerging Talent
The German photographer Serghei Duve won the 2025 Newcomer Award with the series “Bright Memory”.
In the project he explores his family’s connection to Transnistria.
📷 LEICA M11 Monochrom · Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH. · f/11 · 1/500s · ISO 6400 · 50mm · 2026-08-29
Low gear with the Leica
Coffee, and then more coffee
The day started at Global Living, and it stayed there longer than planned.
There was a lot of coffee.
It was the kind of fika where the cup gets refilled without anyone asking and the conversation is allowed to take the time it takes.
No stress.
No agenda.
Just chairs, tables and time running the right way for once.
I needed it more than I wanted to admit.
Low gear with the Leica
Out into town
After that came a walk around town.
The camera came along, as it always does, but I wasn’t chasing anything.
The rain had gone ahead of me and left the outdoor cafés empty, with water still beaded on the tabletops and the chairs turned towards no one.
You only see things like that when you walk slowly.
On through the pedestrian street.
People heading their own way, a woman in a white coat who turned around just as I raised the camera, and that look which stays in the picture long after she has disappeared around the corner.
I don’t know who she was.
I don’t need to know, either.
A quick visit to Lars of Sweden
A quick visit to Lars of Sweden
On the way I also looked in on Lars of Sweden’s exhibition.
It was quick, far too quick, more a greeting than a visit.
But that was fine, because we are going back.
Bildgruppen Prisma are going together, and then there will be time to stand in front of every picture and talk about what we see.
Looking on your own is one thing.
Looking together is something else.
📷 LEICA M11 Monochrom · Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH. · f/11 · 1/750s · ISO 6400 · 50mm · 2026-08-29
Afterwards, at the screen
Afterwards, at the screen
Then came the evening and the editing, and that is where the day really settles.
I have cropped harder than usual this time.
The café tables lost the whole grey upper section, so that only the two wet tabletops and the chair backs remained, like two ellipses against black.
The children by the wall kept their empty stretch of concrete, because that is what makes the picture, but the bollard in the edge had to go.
The street picture went from a view of a street to an encounter when I stepped closer with the crop and let her and the man walking away share the frame.
Tonally I have closed the bottom more than I usually do.
Rain and overcast want blacks that actually bottom out, otherwise everything stays in the same grey.
When the chairs go black, the tabletops are allowed to glow.
That is the whole trick.
And then the picture of the back.
Three safety pins holding a dance costume together at the back, exactly where no one in the audience would ever see them.
It needed almost no editing at all.
It only needed me to see it.
Leica Camera News
Mari Amman is an American-Italian contemporary artist working across disciplines with photography, installation, video, poetry, painting, sculpture, textile and design.
She describes her own work as research-based, using concepts such as Geological Empathy and Sublime Rheology to explore the relationship between people, nature, technology and built environments.
Young, Inspiring and International: LOBA Emerging Talent
The German photographer Serghei Duve won the 2025 Newcomer Award with the series “Bright Memory”.
In the project he explores his family’s connection to Transnistria.
Pictures from today’s adventure
