Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1999/10/19
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]From: Dan Post <dwpost@email.msn.com> Sent: Tuesday, October 19, 1999 15:30 Subject: Re: [Leica] By the light of the Leica glow... > I really like your site. Thanks! > ... If you know what you are doing, the M6 or even > the MR on my old M3 will give good results! Agreed. The problem is that I didn't know what I was doing when I got the M6--or, more specifically, I had no applied the theory to practice in many years. After getting a number of substandard rolls, I finally got the hang of it, and my stuff seems to be properly exposed now. I do need the meter, though--I'm just not good at guessing exposure without any kind of meter reading at all, except if I can get the Sunny 16 rule to work. > When I was in the photolab, I was constantly amazed at the > number of rolls that I processed which were taken with 'state > of the art' SLRs with multi segmented, 256 square matrix, > artificial intelligence control metering systems with > computers and fuzzy logic, eye following focus, and whiz-bang > motor drives-and the damn things were PITIFULLY exposed! I dunno. I went from an FG with its simple metering (which I recently discovered is off by two stops--no wonder I've had so many bad rolls throughout the years with that camera!) to the F5, and the F5 has never let me down. > On the other hand, there was one lady who loved the Fuji > Quicksnaps, and 90% of her frames were well enough exposed > with what amounted to a box camera with a pinhole aperture > to give some really nice images! She took most of her shots in sunlight, right? > One of our best customers had a Nikon F5 with about $20,000 > dollars worth of lenses, but was helpless when he knocked > his camera off the "PROGRAM" setting, and had to get one > of the salesmen to reset it for him! All that money, and he never read the manual? It's pretty hard to knock the F5 out of program mode by accident. > Those who depend on their cameras to make all the decisions > are often cruelly disappointed. I haven't found all-auto cameras to be any more or less reliable than my M6. At least the F5 and the M6 both seem to yield good pictures 99.9% of the time. -- Anthony