First Frames: A Leica M EV1 on the Streets of Round Hill, VA

First Frames: A Leica M EV1 on the Streets of Round Hill, VA

TL;DR: I picked up a Leica M EV1 and spent the first week walking Round Hill, Virginia with three manual-focus lenses: a Summilux-M 50 f/1.4, a Summarit-M 90 f/2.0, and a Voigtländer Color-Skopar 35 f/3.5. Nine frames from the first walks, with what each lens seems to be for.

How it came home

I bought the camera and the Summilux 50 at AcePhoto in Ashburn, VA. Moe, the owner, took a pile of my beloved Nikon gear (almost all of it) in trade toward the camera and the 50mm lens. It was a hard goodbye to a lot of good glass.

The kit

The body is the Leica M EV1, a full-frame mirrorless digital camera and a historic first for the M system: it replaces the traditional optical rangefinder with an integrated electronic viewfinder. The lenses are still all manual focus. Three came along:

Lens	Why it’s in the bag
Leica Summilux-M 50 f/1.4	Summus (highest) + Lux (light). A fast prime that balances speed and size. The low-light lens.
Leica Summarit-M 90 f/2.0	Entry-tier modern M prime, the long lens for isolating a subject.
Voigtländer Color-Skopar 35mm f/3.5 (Leica M)	Small, slow and wide. The walking-around lens.

Pre-dawn and evening (50mm)

Pre-dawn and evening walks are where the fast 50 earns its keep. A streetlight over a car dusted with yellow leaves, then a sidewalk glittering with wet leaves under another lamp, both handheld at the edge of usable light.

Subjects at a distance (90mm)

The 90 pulls a subject out of a busy background. A porch skeleton against a blurred street, and a cast-iron skillet filling with rain and maple leaves on a green bin.

Wide and slow (35mm)

The Color-Skopar has no electronic coding, so the camera doesn’t record a focal length for it. These are the frames it made: red maple against the sun, the soccer fields at first light, the sun breaking over a retention pond, and a stone path between the trees.

About the files: the leveling workflow

The M EV1 has a built-in tilt sensor and records roll, pitch and a Perspective Control crop in every DNG. Photomator ignores that data, so I vibe-coded a small workflow with Claude to use it. The key attributes:

• Import over USB-C with Image Capture, one folder per camera.
• Cull in FastRawViewer. Ratings and rejects are written to XMP sidecars, so no files get moved by hand.
• One-click sort (a small Mac app) files every image, with its sidecars, into dated shoot folders. Rejects go to a _Rejected folder instead of the Trash, and re-imported duplicates are ignored.
• Leveled copy of each keeper: <name>_level.DNG. The script reads the camera’s roll, pitch and crop corners, warps the frame straight, and writes a 16-bit linear DNG. That means the leveled file is still RAW, so shadows, highlights and white balance stay fully adjustable in Photomator.
• The original DNG is never modified. The leveled file is a second copy.
• Edit locally, archive to the NAS. Photomator works on a local library, and finished exports go to a separate Published folder. The NAS holds the archive.
• Tools: Python (rawpy, OpenCV, tifffile), exiftool, FastRawViewer, Photomator.

Ask me anything

Curious about the M EV1, the lenses, manual focus with an electronic viewfinder, the trade, or the leveling workflow? Ask me anything in the comments and I’ll answer, and I may fold the best questions into the next post.

What’s next

Off to Florida in a few days, looking forward to adventures with the new system.