Chapter Eight: Leica User Forum Photo Walk in Antwerp, July 2013
The Leica community has a popular online forum which boasts 5600 active users and 133000 members in total. The forum contains a wealth of information around the Leica product family, and members also organise informal get-togethers, or photo walks, around the world. In July 2013 I joined a group of 10 photographers in Antwerp. We spent the day wandering the streets and chatting cameras, with inevitable breaks for (liquid) refreshments.
Antwerp is a friendly city, and on a summer Saturday is alive with a mixture of tourists discovering what the city has to offer, and locals going about their business. We started off at Central Station, and then meandered through the back streets, finally ending up in the dock area at the MAS, or Museum aan de Stroom.
I spent most of the walk around using the 35mm Summarit lens, but during a cafe stop I switched to the 50mm Summicron to focus on some candids of the rest of the group. I find the Leica very unobtrusive for taking candids, as people don’t seem to notice the camera in the same way as they would do with a larger SLR, and even when they do see the camera, they tend to react in a different way