[Leica] Lusting for an M9

[mark at rabinergroup.com (Mark Rabiner)]

Let me just say that I also treat digital shooting like its slide film
exposing for the highlights or in other terms placing them carefully and
letting the shadows pretty much fall where they may as they can invariably
be brought up later.
I only like to say this at this point because to me basic point like this is
not a clear consensus yet out there.  If I mention this on the list I'll get
plenty of argument. But I've been shooting like this for years and I feel
very secure in it.

But I've never shot medium format digital.
And I've heard  though that in medium format digital work its somehow
basically different. And that its more important to place shadows and the
highlights can be delta with later.  How or why that could be different I
cant guess as you treat small format film exposure the same as you'd treat
large format filim.
 As you're experienced in medium format work, Paul perhaps you'll  know if
that dichotomy really exists. Now I'm looking up dichotomy .... Yep! Right
word!


Mark William Rabiner



> From: Paul Roark <roark.paul at gmail.com>
> Reply-To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>
> Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2011 17:26:37 -0700
> To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>
> Subject: Re: [Leica] Lusting for an M9
> 
> Michiel Fokkema <michiel.fokkema at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Do you think the M9 high iso perfomance is any good?
> 
> 
> I find it ironic that Leica uses CCD technology, which excels at its
> native ISO, but is not as good at high ISO as CMOS technology.  For a
> landscape shooter like me, CCD is ideal.  But for street/available
> light shooters or wherever extremely high speed is needed, CMOS might
> be a better solution.
> 
> CCD must do its amplification after the signal is transferred off  the
> sensor, and that transfer is where  lot of noise seems to be acquired.
>  So, I wondered how much difference there would be between a neutral
> gray that was amplified in camera compared to one that is amplified in
> Photoshop.  To explore this, I set the M9 exposure manually for
> neutral gray at 2500 ISO and took a shot of an frosted/opal glass over
> the lens (totally smooth, out of focus image).  I then moved the ISO
> back to 160 and took a shot at the same exposure settings.  The 160
> ISO image was near black when initially opened (ACR 3.x, with black
> slider all the way to the left).  But when curves were used to take
> the 160 ISO gray up to the same level as the 2500 ISO gray, the noise
> levels in the images were essentially the same.  See
> http://www.paulroark.com/BW-Info/CCD-iso-v-curves.jpg
> 
> While the in-camera amplifier does ultimately help the image quality
> with even darker values, the message from the experiment is, I think,
> rather important for those of us who shoot M9s.  I don't bracket much
> any more.  Rather, I set the exposure for the highlights like I used
> to do with slide film.  I manually "expose right", checking the
> histogram often, and just let the low values fall where they may.
> Amplification in PS is, over the ranges of values I've recently run
> into, good enough that HDR is not needed and would not accomplish all
> that much anyway.  This is very different than the style than is
> needed for CMOS, and I prefer it to HDR and bracketing.
> 
> Paul
> www.PaulRoark.com
> 
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