Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/08/02
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Hi Ted, As much as I respect your opinions and even more so your work, I have to disagree with you on this one. Shutter lag IS an important consideration when choosing a camera if you take "decisive moment" type pictures. I am right now looking at your picture of Pierre Trudeau sliding down the handrail that you so kindly sent to me last year; I very much doubt that this picture could have been made with a modern electronic camera. By the time the shutter tripped, Trudeau would probably have been all the way down (assuming that you had spotted the scene at the same moment as you actually did). I agree with you that of course one does not think about the shutter lag before taking each picture, but certainly one of the virtues of the Leica (and other mechanical rangefinders like the Voigtlander line) is the extremely short shutter lag. You may have never thought about it before reading about it here on the LUG, you bought your Leicas for other reasons, but it is precisely the virtual absence of shutter lag that has allowed you to just ignore it all those years! If the Leica M7 really did have a shutter lag of 100ms, then I would not have bought it. And I am sure that you would have noticed that somehow your pictures shot with it are not quite up to the standard you have set with your earlier M bodies. Fortunately this is not the case, the M7 shutter lag is on par with the 10-12ms of earlier M models, so can continue to happily ignore the issue... Kind regards, Nathan Ted Grant wrote: > I can never fathom being concerned about ms delay as I'm always far more > concerned at capturing the magic moment with nothing else interfering with > my finger reflexes! Do you folks concerned with this actually think about > it as you're tripping the shutter? > > As in, "OK now we're coming up to what I think will be the big moment, > therefore I should start to squeeze down on the shutter release 100ms before > it actually happens to capture the peak action." Do you really do that? Or > even think that way while shooting? > > Hell I'm so busy concentrating on the light, eyes and the action of > capturing the moment, I'm not even thinking about anything else. But gee > whiz maybe for 50 years I've been doing something wrong all this time and > all those sport action pictures I did were flukes! ;-) > > So please explain to me "in real time meaning " just what this ms thing has > to do with real photojournalistic photography and just how it can be > applied, don't forget to please do so in common sense logic for successful > photographs. > > Thank you. > ted > > -- > To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html - -- Nathan Wajsman Herrliberg (ZH), Switzerland e-mail: wajsman@webshuttle.ch mobile: +41 78 732 1430 Photo-A-Week: http://www.wajsman.com/indexpaw2002.htm General photo site: http://www.wajsman.com/index.htm - -- To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html