Having spent the best part of the summer testing the M9, I left for Crete on September 1st with the release version of the firmware and resolved simply to take photographs.

We stay in Finix, which was a busy port in Roman and Byzantine times. Nowadays it’s a little inlet, with a peaceful hotel (the Old Phoenix) there is a road to the village, but it’s a long mountainous drive from Sfakia, and a short boat trip or a delightful walk.

Here the White Mountains come right down to the sea, the cliffs are up to 700 metres high, which makes for spectacular (and tiring!) walking.

These pictures are fundamentally holiday snapshots, but with intent! Although Leica M cameras have been known for years as the perfect camera for photojournalism, the advent of high resolution digital sensors gives them a new lease of life as a travel and landscape camera. The M9 is not perfect for telephoto or macro work, but the 18mp sensor does allow for some cropping, so that using a 90mm or 75mm lens can provide very good detail, even for butterflies and flower details. For landscape I think it’s wonderful - one might do better with medium format and a tripod, but if you’re climbing 1000 metres in 40C temperatures it really isn’t feasible (not for me at least!). For most of the walks I carried the M9 in my left hand, with a small rucksack containing lenses . . . and water, it’s a joy to use and very simple to carry a complete setup.

Hopefully you will enjoy these photographs, my intent was simply to give an idea of the range of photography which is possible with the M9. There has been some post processing, but in most cases it was confined to cropping.

I’ve provided exif information with the shots, however it’s worth mentioning that my (very early) test camera had not been completely calibrated, so that the generally large negative exposure compensation was set to deal with this.

Click on the Blue and Red photo to look at the pictures.