This Is My Q

How does the Leica Q inform how we designed the OMATA One Cycling Speedometer?

I am a member of a tribe of folks who are passionate about both cycling, and photography. I've been making images with cameras way longer than I've been "seriously" riding a bike. Combining the two was always a necessity, even when I first started riding when I could use photography as an excuse to stop pedaling and have a rest.

The camera you see above is my Leica Q. I often take it when I go out on bike rides.

I also have a Sony RX100VA. That will often go on rides as well.

They’re both cameras. They’re both tools for taking a photo. They're both digital, doing a miraculous bit of modern magic by turning analog light into a digital image.

There's an important difference though (more than price).

The Sony is unconstrained, taking full advantage of a fast CPU that can do all kinds of extra things — image processing on the fly, applying creative filters to make your image look as though it were captured on a less-capable camera, and much much more.

The Leica is restrained, barely having more for the photographer to do than a well-designed analog film camera. Focus, and exposure are just about the extent of its features.

I like my Sony. But I love my Leica.

What's the difference between like and love?

The Sony does the extraordinary things the Sony engineers imagined anyone might want to do. It’s a feature-lovers dream. And I'm not a feature lover, particularly when the features feel excessive and encumber what I perceive as the purpose of the tool.

There’s a tax you pay for all those features. There's more to do and think about. Anything more to do and think about results in less thinking about composing my photograph.

With the Sony, I get anxious each time I reach into my jersey pocket to shoot, often while pedaling. Will the settings all be as I expect? Will it (again..) accidentally be in one of the weird “creative modes” turning my image into a computer-generated cartoon or black and white scene? How many button clicks do I have to bang (while pedaling..) to manually adjust the exposure for a harshly backlit scene?

Etc.

The Leica that I love, on the other hand? I switch it on with a flick of my finger while I bring the viewfinder to my eye. Compose. Adjust exposure with the same big dial that is always right at my thumb. Focus. Click.

The Leica is beautiful. It reminds me of photography with my dad’s old Nikon F when every click of the shutter mattered. It reminded me of training my eye to read the light of the scene, pre-setting the exposure, clicking the shutter and eagerly developing the film in our laundry room later that day to see if I got it right.

These are the sensibilities and experiences that also inspire the OMATA One. We weren’t chasing after long lists of features. We weren’t hoping to engineer-in every possible technical do-dah that the remarkably sophisticated platform we built could support. Just enough to show you in a beautifully compelling way how fast, far, long and high you're riding — and capturing all your ride data for sharing (if you want..) later.

Restraint. Only as much as needed and not so much that you felt like you were riding with a data center on your handlebar.

Feel the reward for your effort by what your heart, legs and lungs tell you rather than a tweet or a bleep.

Focus on what really matters.

Less fuss, lots more fun.

With OMATA, you just turn the bezel and ride. It won't beep at you, ask for your Twitter handle, tell you which way to go. While it may seem natural that more is what the future is about, certainly this cannot always be the case. Less makes for simplicity. Less makes for more riding, less fiddling.