[Leica] Light metering with the Leica M9

[roark.paul at gmail.com (Paul Roark)]

Marty Deveney <benedenia at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've found Leica's histograms harder to come to terms with ...

As a practical matter, they seem to work.  I wait a few seconds for
the test shot to be processes, and then hit the "Play" button and then
the "Info" button.   You can then adjust the exposure as needed to get
the histogram to the right edge, but not clipping.

As I understand it, the M9 histogram is actually the Jpeg histogram.
As such, you have some extra you can pull out of raw file with
"recovery," which taps into the fact that one of the R, G or B
channels may not have been blown out.  The MM, however, does not have
that extra margin of safety.  So, with it, you have to be very careful
that the histogram is is not clipping (hitting the right side of the
graph.  The issue with the MM may be that you'd want a 1/16 or an inch
or so gap between the apparent histogram end and the right side to be
sure there are not small area of brightness than just don't show up
enough on the graph.

But, again, the bottom line for me is that with the use of the
histogram, I never have a problem.  It simply works.

Paul
www.PaulRoark.com