Strap

CANPIS leather strap from Amazon
I like brown leather straps and have used several over the years, most of which cost over $100. I’ve found there’s no reason to pay 100 bucks for a single strap of leather. This Chinese strap from Amazon looks and feels great and only costs about $20. I bought two and have them on both my M10 and Q2.

Bags

Here are my two favorite bags:

ONA Bowery
Great for carrying an M body and 2-3 lenses. It can even fit my Q2, M10 and 2 lenses. Looks great and doesn’t announce to people that you’re carrying around camera equipment. I love sling bags because of how easy it is to switch lenses, but there isn’t extra space to carry things like water bottles, sunglasses, etc.

Peak Design Everyday Backpack V2 20L
Great for carrying all of my camera gear, plus my tripod (see below), plus other things like water bottle, food, laptop, sunglasses, etc. This is currently the bag I use more often because when I take pictures I’m usually traveling and need to carry a lot of other things.

The side zips make it almost as easy as a sling bag to switch lenses. The downside is the compartments are designed for SLR/mirrorless lenses and are comically large for rangefinder lenses. But this is still the best backpack I’ve found for carrying my Leica gear.

Tripod

Oben CT-3535 Carbon Fiber Travel Tripod with BE-208T Ball Head
The most popular professional-quality tripods are complete overkill for Leica users since our bodies and lenses are vastly lighter. They’re also so large and heavy that it’s difficult to justify bringing them most of the time.

I’ve found that the best tripod is the one I have with me, and I bought this one because it was the smallest and lightest full-size, high-quality tripod I could find. It’s significantly smaller than the Peak Design travel tripod. I love that I can easily carry it with my backpack (see above) and it weighs just 2.5 lbs. Its carrying capacity of 9lb is plenty for my gear and I’ve found it to be stable enough for long exposures. The only downside I’ve found is that it only gets about 5ft tall.

Honestly, this is one of the most useful photography purchases I’ve made. I’ve gotten a lot of pictures that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible, because this tripod is so portable that I can actually have it with me for the duration of a trip.

Macro filter

If you have an M camera with liveview and wish that you had the option of focusing closer than 0.7m, I recommend trying a macro filter. Before I bought my Leica Q, I bought a +3 diopter filter for my 35 summilux for about $30. With this attached, I could take food pictures in the 30-50cm range. Image quality was excellent as long as I stopped down to f/2.8. I don’t think hardly anyone uses these filters but it’s a much cheaper way to add macro capability to an M camera than buying a specialty lens or an extension tube (or the macro filter that Leica offers for $450). You can calculate how many diopters you’d like using the calculator at this link.

Computer

My previous favorite computer for photography was the 5K iMac, primarily because of how incredible the display looks. I now use the new M1 MacBook Air, so I can stay on top of my post processing while I’m traveling.

This computer is absolutely amazing. Even while editing 47MP Q2 DNGs, Lightroom Classic runs beautifully smooth. From a photo-editing performance standpoint, there’s no significant benefit to using a more powerful machine such as the new 14” MacBook Pro.

Despite its incredible performance, the M1 MacBook Air is ultra-portable, has amazing battery life, can be charged with a tiny 30W power supply, and doesn’t even have a fan. It’s revolutionized how I edit my photos. The only downside is there are only two USB-C ports and you will need an external SD card reader.

I recommend getting the base configuration (8GB RAM, 256GB SSD) which can be bought new on Amazon for about $900. Then use an external SSD for storing your library. I also recommend buying a screen protector, since the screen gets damaged way too easily.