Pale Blue Dot

My name is Martin, I’m 34 years old, and I’m from northern Germany.

In 2017, I travelled to Japan and spent two weeks in Tokyo. I bought a Canon 600D with a kit lens for this trip and thought I could recreate the feel and nostalgia of one of my favourite movies: Lost in Translation. It didn’t even come close to what I was expecting. I never used a camera, nor did I know about focal lengths, sensor sizes or editing. 

I failed miserably and only took around 100 pictures before I dismissed the camera for the rest of the time. 

I was never a gear guy or interested in technical aspects of things, but I was always into the design and simplicity of products, so I got interested in Fujifilm and their X system pretty early after neglecting the Canon system so much. The way it looked and the vintage feel just spoke to me, so I bought the Fuji X100F straight away when it came out and fell in love with it. 

I travelled to Barcelona, Amsterdam and Oslo with it before I started to take photography more seriously and got interested in full-frame cameras and wider apertures. I knew about Leica and how expensive these cameras were and always admired people owning them at this point, but I never dreamed about buying one because I was too bad and inexperienced in photography. I thought I could never justify spending this amount of money without being a professional. 

Well… in the end, I did. I bought the Leica Q2 when it came out and hoped to be automatically better and grow as a photographer. Of course, that’s one of the stupidest things to think of, and I was way too early in the process to really tell the truth, but I learned that the simplicity, the manual feeling, the quality of the lens and all the missing features made me focus on the essentials. So much so that wanting the M system was becoming inevitable. 

(If you think you’re not a gear guy, you’ll become one in the process.)