Our camera collection lays at the heart of Gal Meets Glam. Early on we decided that we wanted to be a source of beautiful fashion, travel and lifestyle imagery so we made it a priority to invest in always improving our photography. While we often advise people that buying better equipment is a quick solution for improving the quality of your photos, there’s no substitute for mastering your technique through continual repetition and practice. Since we receive loads of questions on this topic Thomas and I thought it would be helpful to share some details on our many cameras. 

We mostly shoot with our Leica M-P 240s, over the 5 years that we’ve been shooting and the dozen or so cameras that we’ve tested, these are hands down the best. Every time we go out and shoot, our goal is to get the absolute best image in camera. When we shoot with our M-P 240s editing is a breeze. There are two unique things about Leica Ms that make them better than anything else we’ve shot with, the Manual Focus Rangefinder and the Extremely High Quality Lenses. While shooting Manual Focus is very old school we’ve actually noticed that the Leica Rangefinder Focusing System helps us take perfectly focused shots that separate the subject from the background, it’s so accurate that we prefer it over any autofocus cameras. Leica is famous for making some of the best lenses in the world. While they are considerably more expensive that lenses from other companies there is a major level of difference in quality. It doesn’t take a trained eye to see the difference.

We recently bought the Sony RX1RII so that we had a professional level point and shoot camera. Our Leica M-P 240s as I’ve mentioned, are great cameras but they do have limitations, ease of use being the biggest one. We found that we needed something between an iPhone (which we don’t use for blog photos) and the Leica M-P 240s, so last year we bought the Leica Q. It was a fantastic camera and had some really useful features, our only complaint was the focal length was 28mm, which is a little too wide compared to our favorite 35mm and 50mm focal lengths.

We tested the Sony RX1RII over a week long period and found it very similar to the Leica Q but it has a great 35mm 2.0 lens. It’s an awesome size, small enough to fit in almost any purse, and it takes professional level photos. We’ve used it mostly for detailed shots and flat lays, it’s especially great for food pictures. We found a new home for the Q and purchased the Sony RX1RII.

At the end of the year last year we got the Leica SL. While we wanted it to be a good all around camera for us, we’ve found that it excels at taking Landscape images. Truth be told, we don’t use it as much as we’d originally intended to. We purchased it because we wanted Leica M quality images, on an updated system but have found that even when using the same lens, the M-P 240 photos are much better. A camera that has the camera world buzzing right now is the Sony a7rII, we’ve tested it and have been really impressed by it. We’ve been considering swapping out the SL for the a7rII.

Occasionally making an appearance is our Canon 5D Mark III. While we could have sold it months ago we’ve kept it around for indoor shooting, specifically to use a SpeedFlash.

While we have no immediate needs for new cameras as you can tell we are always looking for new technologies that can help us take better photos. We are interested to try the new Light L16 camera that looks like an iPhone but has 16 camera lenses built into it, 10 of which fire at the same time to create 1 picture. In fact, the next iPhone is rumored to have two lenses with different focal lengths which can work independently or in tandem. With newer generations of smartphones, the margin between professional camera and smartphone camera is quickly shrinking. We are now taking and posting a surprising amount of photos on our iPhones and iPad, much more than I did 1-2 years ago.