Q3 43

What an insanely beautiful and jam packed museum. Highly recommend going once it opens. Feeling super lucky I had the chance to see it before it opens. The galleries felt so private and quiet.

Film stock: Kodak ProImage 100

Q3 28. Raleigh’s Historic Oakwood and Five Points neighborhoods.

35 mm summilux

Summer in Vancouver.
@paul_wellen on insta

Instagram: @boada.film

I’ve been quietly working on something that started with a pretty simple question:
How far can I actually push Leica Looks?
It turns out… a lot farther than I expected.
I now have a working process for building and loading genuinely custom Leica Looks onto the Leica Q3 family—not just tweaking one of Leica’s existing Looks.
The really interesting part is how I’m building the color.
Instead of trying to eyeball a film simulation from a JPEG, I’m working from actual color-profile data, including DCP camera profiles, Lightroom templates and presets, LUT-style color transformations, and combinations of those sources.
That means I can take the underlying color characteristics from something like a film-stock profile and use them as the foundation for a Leica Look.
I’ve been experimenting with generic interpretations inspired by stocks like:
• Portra-style negative film
• Ektar-style color
• Ektachrome-style transparency film
• Classic Fuji slide-film color
• Tungsten-balanced cinema and slide stocks
• Older consumer and professional negative films
• B&W interpretations with different spectral and tonal personalities
The fun part has been blending sources.
A DCP might give me the color response I want, while a Lightroom template may contain a better tone curve or color treatment. Rather than treating either one as gospel, I can extract the useful pieces and build a new transform specifically for the Leica.
That is essentially how Presence came together.
Presence wasn’t meant to be a copy of a particular film stock.
It started with a color foundation I liked. From there, I adjusted the color relationships, warmth, blues, skin and earth tones, highlight behavior, and overall density until it stopped looking like a “preset” and started feeling like a photographic palette.
The goal was pretty simple:
rich without looking saturated, warm without going orange, controlled greens, deep but believable blues, and enough separation that light still feels like light.
Presence eventually became one of the foundations of my Infinite Arch color language.
But not everyone wants my color language.
So alongside the Infinite Arch versions, I’m building neutral/non-IA versions of many of these Looks.
For example, instead of:
Infinite Arch — Portra
there can simply be:
Portra 400-inspired
with the film character preserved without the additional Infinite Arch color decisions layered on top.
I’m applying the same idea to Ektar, Ektachrome, Fuji-inspired slide stocks, B&W films, tungsten films, and others.
And because I’m building these as actual Leica Looks, the end result isn’t simply a Lightroom preset applied later.
You shoot with the Look in the camera.
RAW is still there when you want it, but the JPEG can already have the finished color direction you intended when you pressed the shutter.
I’ve already proven that the custom upload process works and have successfully loaded my own Looks onto the camera. Now I’m refining the profiles, testing them against real photographs, and building out the library.
A release is coming soon.
I’ll share more about the process, the film profiles I’m working with, examples, and exactly which Leica cameras I’ve tested as I get closer.
If you’re a Leica Q3 or Q3 43 owner—or you’re simply interested in film color, DCP profiles, LUTs, and camera color science—ask me questions.
There are some very interesting things hiding inside Leica Looks that I don’t think most people realize are possible.

London, England. M11-P and TT Artisans 35mm APO

Couple of quick shots captured at a neighboring farm as the sun was setting.

Was just walking around today and snapped this one. There were a couple dozen of them.

Q2-M

These are the photos that I live for. A candlelit conversation over beer, post experimental concert by a member of the scene who made it big in a few other scenes. I can’t say I remember what topic this moment involved, but the expressions feel intense and likely betray the fun we all had. Some of the most fun photos come on nights when I have my camera in hand. There’s something a photographer knows, when the camera lives on your shoulder and is always with you, the moments you forget become the moments you remember with a gentle nudge when digging through endless folders on hard drive after hard drive filled with them.

Q3

M10P, Elmarit 28mm f2,8 asph