I 'm deeply grateful for all your different comments; I realize that in my 73rd year I've still got a lot to learn & I'll return with some important questions when I'm back from Cairo mid January . . in the meantime have a blessed Christmas & New Year!

Lilia: the photographer is demonstrating a new camera, and this picture is to show its capabilities in low light. So it is quite okay to comment on the performance of the equipment. We are not criticizing the photographer who has made an interesting picture.
This site is a showcase for Leica cameras and lenses, and I think we all want to show the best that the equipment is capable of - here is not a good example, despite it being an interesting picture. I think that BrianBryan already knows he is a good photographer and so do we all and perhaps would welcome some insightful comments on the performance of the A7r and Noctilux 50 as posted.

Can we please praise the photographer for the fantastic facial expression and body language that he captured?
Superb!
Everything else is secondary.
Lilia

I think many of us are interested in what this can do. In an attempt to be objective about the image, I have examined it closely and find it very poor quality for ISO 1600. This is the result of oversharpening and reduction in the tonal range, so that there is posterization. My NEX-5 pictures show no noise at ISO 1600, whereas this picture has noise overall. Click on the blue button with the four arrows to see the details at full size. Her face is covered with black dots, the result of oversharpening, and her face is posterized. Her hair looks like strands of string. And there are artifacts in the white spheres in the OOF areas. The OOF areas are smeared. So all in all I think that the picture here has been mangled by the software, and doesn't represent what the camera can do. Let's see the original capture - a crop at 100%.

Very impressive indeed!