We are jumping back to the 2024 Trail of Lights for a few posts to show you how well the Leica D-Lux 8 performed at this outdoor event at night. I featured two of these images and much more in my monthly magazine coverage, which you can read for free.

I zoomed in to the maximum 75mm equivalent as I saw this jubilant boy with his bubble gun. At a maximum f2.8 aperture at full zoom, I shot this at ISO 500 at 1/60 second—well within the sweet spot for a high-quality image.

I’m happy with the image and how it’s composed. However, the only negative is the deep depth of field, which pulls in more of the background than I ideally like. A shallower depth of field would’ve softened the background details to put more emphasis on the boy.

One limitation of a small sensor on the D-Lux 8 is that using a telephoto with a big aperture still doesn’t overcome the cropped Micro 4/3 deep depth-of-field tendencies. With extra processing, I could’ve used software to add additional background blur, but that was more than I wanted to do for this image.

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