The Leica Q3 Has a Special Power That You Might Not Have Heard About

Even a lot of the people who purchased the new Leica Q3 might not be aware of a feature this camera has that can greatly expand your creative possibilities for using flash. Within the Q3’s beautiful magnesium alloy body lies a secret hidden in plain sight.

In the interests of full disclosure, I must start by saying that I purchased my Leica Q3 with my own money and that my opinions about this camera are entirely my own. This is not in any way a sponsored review.

I fell in love with the Leica Q Series after owning a Leica Q2 for a while. It quickly became my camera of choice when I was going on a trip or just heading out of the door to go for a walk. I enjoyed it so much and was so impressed by the quality of the images that it produced, that I soon started using it for my personal photo projects as well. The image below was shot on the Leica Q2 as part of a personal (and ongoing) project to explore in all six of New England’s states, the visible legacy of the region’s industrial past on its landscape.

When the Leica Q3 came out, I knew I would want to upgrade. There were several aspects of the new model that I thought were worth the upgrade, but the Q3 also happens to have a 60-megapixel sensor compared to the 47-megapixel sensor in the Q2. When you’re working with a wide angle, fixed focal length lens, every extra pixel can come in really handy if you find yourself needing to crop your images in post production.

One feature that all of the Q Series cameras have in common is a leaf shutter. Most modern cameras have a focal plane shutter that consists of a pair of curtains that open and close one behind the other in a staggered sequence to expose the light-sensitive sensor or film emulsion behind them. A leaf shutter, by contrast, is an annular arrangement of metal blades that are usually built into the lens, and are able to rapidly open and close somewhat like the iris of your eye. This is not to be confused with the aperture of the lens, whose construction is quite similar, although if you examine the arrangement of the metal blades in your lens aperture, you can get a pretty good sense of how a leaf shutter is constructed and how it functions.

So why is this a big deal?

Leaf shutters are more complex and expensive to manufacture, but they have a number of advantages over focal plane shutters. They’re typically quieter and produce less camera shake, but the big advantage they have is that they allow you to sync your flash at much faster shutter speeds.

Most cameras that are equipped with focal plane shutters have a maximum flash sync speed somewhere in the region of 1/200 of a second. If you try to use a faster shutter speed with your flash, the moving curtains of the focal plane shutter do not have time to get fully out of the way when the flash fires. What you get as a result is a shadow cast on the image by one of the shutter curtains as it crosses the frame. This effect is demonstrated in the photographs below which were taken with a camera that has a focal plane shutter. In the left-hand image at a shutter speed of 1/100 of a second, the flash exposure works just fine. In the right-hand image at 1/500 of a second, you can clearly see the shadow of the shutter curtain in the lower part of the image.

Unlike a focal plane shutter, a leaf shutter does not have elements that must traverse the entire frame during the exposure—rather, it opens and closes radially about its center in a manner that is mechanically similar to the way the iris of your eye opens and closes in response to changing light levels. This allows you to use much faster shutter speeds with your flash without the risk of catching the shadow of your moving shutter in the frame.

For cameras with focal plane shutters, there is always the option to use a high-speed sync strobe for faster shutter speeds. Instead of a single flash during the exposure, a strobe capable of high-speed sync will produce a series of pulses of light of very short duration throughout the exposure. This does circumvent the problem of catching the shutter shadow in the frame, but—not all cameras and strobes support high-speed sync; the setup is a little more technical; and the biggest drawback is that you often end up needing a more powerful strobe because the pulsed light output of high-speed sync is significantly less efficient than the delivery of the light in a single flash.

Thanks to its leaf shutter, however, the Leica Q3 is able to pull off this trick without the need for high-speed sync—working flawlessly with regular strobes even at extremely fast shutter speeds.

This can be incredibly useful when you want to use flash outdoors. If you’re photographing a dynamic scene with rapid movement—dancing or sports, for example—you might want to use a fast shutter speed to freeze the motion, in combination with a wide aperture to get some nice separation of the subject from the background. Even if there’s little or no movement in the frame—when shooting portraits, for example—you often still need to separate your subject from a busy background, and this can require the use of a wide aperture. This is especially true when shooting outdoors where you have much less control over the background than you might have in a studio.

When shooting outdoors, however, the ambient light levels can be so high that it is very difficult to use wide apertures in daylight without needing to go to faster shutter speeds to prevent overexposure—shutter speeds that are often beyond the flash sync speed of your camera.

And this is where the Leica Q3’s leaf shutter really shines.

The following series of images was shot on a beautiful, bright afternoon here in sunny Cambridge, Massachusetts. One of the landscaping experts from my wife's gardening company, and our youngest son, who is a confirmed soccer maniac, kindly agreed to be the models for this brief test of the Leica Q3’s flash sync capability at high shutter speeds. For the flash, I used a Godox AD200 strobe triggered from the camera hot shoe with a Godox X2T flash trigger. Everything was done with the camera and the strobe in fully manual mode (no TTL), with the camera shutter speed set to 1/1000 of a second and the strobe at full power.

For the portraits, I did close down the aperture somewhat to demonstrate how you can separate the subject from the background by lowering the background exposure instead of blurring the background with a wide aperture. This also creates the kind of dramatic light that you see in the two portrait photos.

I shot the soccer photographs a little later in the afternoon when the sun was lower and less intense. Without using an ND filter, I could shoot with my aperture open to f2.8. I was also able to really leverage the high resolution of the Leica Q3 sensor by shooting wide to make sure I captured all of the action, and then cropping the images in post-production. As I said in my introduction, this is one of the features of the Q3 that makes it a very versatile camera, capable of handling many different shooting scenarios in spite of its fixed focal length lens.

In closing, it’s worth mentioning that the Leica Q3 is not the only camera that sports a leaf shutter. If you are looking for an alternative to the Q3 that also natively supports fast flash sync, look no further than the new Fujifilm X100VI, or indeed any of its X100 predecessors. With the X100 cameras, you even get a built-in flash which the Q3 lacks, but its output is tiny compared to a strobe like the AD200 I used here. If you’re using the Fuji built-in flash outdoors during the day, don’t expect it to be able to serve as much more than a close-up fill flash to reduce shadows. You're probably still going to want to hook up a more powerful, external strobe if you find yourself shooting in bright light.