This hand held  picture was made of some roadside vegetation whilst I was walking down a country road in Waitpinga on an  early morning poodlewalk with Kayla in the late winter of 2022. 

This  was a low light situation as we were walking along the road around  sunrise to avoid the traffic.  The above picture of a tree trunk was made around the same time as the bark abstracts  I'd shown on  an earlier post on Leica Poetics. 

 Low light  is a situation  that  the top end full frame digital cameras could easily handle. It was one of their  strengths  especially when they are coupled with the denoise algorithm  in post processing software, such as Lightroom.  As we were walking along the road  I wondered how well  a  film camera would be able to handle this low light situation -- the sunlight had yet to lighten up the trees.

This is what I was exploring. 

After making the picture Kayla and I then  wandered into, and walked around,  the local  bushland.  In the process I  made this photo of an old pink gum log lying on the ground: 

In these slow light situations film is at its  limits when the rangefinder  is being hand held.  It  has  to  rely on a shallow depth of field,   a good lens and steady hands.   

So is there any benefit in continuing to handhold a rangefinder film camera in low light situations? Can it do something different to digital--eg., produce a poetic image?