‘Reflecting on this photo, I feel emotional': Karen Weideman's best phone picture
The restored heritage village of Old Petrie Town lies about a 90-minute drive from the farm in Queensland, Australia, where Karen Weideman lives. She and her husband, Michael, were visiting back in 2022 when she took this photo on her iPhone 11. 'The town is spread across 48 acres of parkland, and some of the buildings date back to the 1800s. It has markets, museums and galleries; we love to just wander around, taking in the sights,' she says. 'You're also spoiled for choice when it comes to food; we had some incredible chicken satay for lunch. Then it started raining so we began heading home, but we passed these beautiful old buses on the way. Number 77 was a Brisbane city council school bus from the 60s.'
Related: 'The plane I was supposed to be on passed above me': Nima Bank's best phone picture
Always on the lookout for new things to photograph, she asked Michael to step inside and pose for her. 'He's for ever patient, and my biggest supporter; he has complete faith in whatever I'm trying to achieve,' she says. She later made some minimal enhancements using the Snapseed app.
While Weideman set out to create a melancholy mood but leave the story open to the viewer's interpretation, her own feelings towards what she captured that day have changed with time. 'Reflecting on this photo, I feel emotional, as my husband now battles stage 4 metastatic melanoma,' she says. 'It feels as if he's trapped behind the glass, reaching out to me, and I can't stop him as the bus pulls off and his journey begins.'
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The Q3 43 is, in some ways, its spiritual successor. It has a gorgeous full-frame sensor with an extremely high-quality fixed lens. It takes stunning images, and I can carry it with me pretty much all the time, keeping it slung around my neck, ready to shoot whenever I see an opportunity. I took the Q3 43 to the Arctic and photographed out of the back of cars while speeding around a frozen lake. Fun times. Volvo It has a fixed 43mm lens, which may not suit everyone, but it's ideal for most of my work. I usually flit between 35mm and 50mm focal lengths, so 43mm is an ideal sweet spot between the two that I've never found limiting in the many photos I've captured with it. I tried the 28mm version of the camera and didn't get on with its wide-angle view. I wrote recently about the three types of cameras photographers need to have, which include a workhorse, an everyday carry and a more artistic option, and while the Q3 43 has absolutely been all three for me, it's the second point where I feel it's had the biggest impact for me. It's not a camera that I have had to make any allowances for when carrying it around. I don't need a big photography backpack, just a small sling or messenger bag. Sometimes I've even gone out with it slung around my neck with no bag at all. I absolutely love having a camera with me always. It's true that the best camera is the one you have with you, but it's doubly the case if the camera that's always with you is actually the best camera. Fine, it's not as small as my Sony RX1R, but it's smaller than my Canon R5, and it's been a great companion on photowalks around Stockholm, Edinburgh and Barcelona. It's a joy being able to quickly lift it up and fire away. Having the camera always ready to go meant I could quickly capture moments like this. Andrew Lanxon/CNET It helps that it's simple to operate. I shoot mostly in aperture priority, twisting the dedicated aperture ring on the lens when I want to adjust the depth of field. I keep it mostly at ISO 400, and the camera is always pretty good at giving me the correct shutter speed for whatever scene I'm capturing. At night, I have to crank that ISO hard, especially since the camera doesn't have a stabilized image sensor like my R5. In fact, on a technical level, the Q3 43 doesn't shape up super well, with both its burst rate and autofocus system being slower than rivals. Its subject detection is also best described as "hit or miss." Using the Leica Q3 43 in Sweden was great. Its small size made it easy to always have with me. Andrew Lanxon/CNET But that's why I like this camera. I don't have to dive into the infinite abyss of the settings menu to figure out different autofocus options. I just keep this camera at single-point focusing, half-press the shutter to focus on whatever I want and then recompose to take the shot. Or I'll focus manually. It's a more basic shooting experience that encourages me to think more about the shot I'm taking and less about the settings I'm using to get it. Then there are the built-in color profiles Leica offers, which I absolutely adore. I shoot almost everything using Leica's Chrome look, which does things to colors and contrast that I'm obsessed with. I mostly pair this with a warm white balance and, more recently, a PolarPro Gold Mist filter, which gives my images a warm, filmic vibe that I love. This filter almost never leaves my camera and is, for me, a must-have. I love the tones that the camera can achieve, resulting in almost no post processing. Andrew Lanxon/CNET In fact, I now shoot most of my photos in JPEG and use them with almost no post-processing. That's in stark contrast to my way of working with the R5 -- I only ever shoot in raw on that camera, and all my images go through some level of work in Lightroom. Do I wish Leica offered options to tailor these profiles further in camera? Absolutely. I treat the Q3 43 as a classic point-and-shoot compact camera. I use basic settings to shoot quickly and creatively, leaning on in-camera colors to minimize my time stuck editing. It's offered me a different way of working, and I've thoroughly enjoyed every moment I've spent with this camera so far. The Q3 43 is small, but Sony's full frame RX1R is even smaller. Andrew Lanxon/CNET To be fair, it's not just the Leica Q3 43 that could give you this. Fujifilm's X100VI remains a social media darling thanks to its compact size and customizable film emulation modes, while the Ricoh GRIII is lauded by street and travel photographers for its blend of quality and pocketable size. I did consider buying the X100VI instead of the Leica, but I'll be honest, there is another element I'm perhaps less proud of admitting. I wanted a Leica. I don't like to think of myself as a status symbol sort of person, and while I have no desire for a Rolex, a yacht or a Lambo in my drive (OK, maybe a bit), I have always daydreamed about finally owning a camera that sports that iconic red dot on the front. I worried that it'd be a novelty that would quickly wear off, but it hasn't -- I still find myself excited to pick it up and take it somewhere. It also helps that the solid metal construction of the Q3 43 makes it feel infinitely more premium than the lightweight, arguably quite plasticky feel of the X100VI. It gives me a creative buzz that I don't really get from my Canon R5. To lean on an analogy I've used before, the R5 is a worker's van; practical, it ticks the boxes for what they need to do a job. A professional tool for getting things done. But it's not the vehicle they fantasize about driving down the coast. The Leica is the fantasy car. A classic Ferrari, perhaps. It technically does most of the same things, but it does it in a very different way that makes you feel notably different when you use it. A simple settings layout. Andrew Lanxon/CNET It may have been a lot of money to spend on a camera, especially one that I strictly speaking didn't need. It helped that Leica in the UK offers interest-free credit, so I actually spread the cost over 12 months, rather than dropping the cash all at once. But it's money I was -- and still am -- happy to spend. It's given my photography a boost I didn't even know I needed. In the six months I've had it, I feel I've evolved more as a photographer, and I've taken images I'm incredibly proud of. I can't wait to see what the next six months with it will bring.
