[Leica] IMG: Friday Flower

[Herbert Kanner]

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/DSCF1598.jpg.html <http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/DSCF1598.jpg.html>

In a way, this is cheating. The flower did not come from my backyard. It did not come from a neighbor’s garden; it came from a neighborhood grocery store. These flowers, displayed for sale, are a minor challenge: it is hard to find one not so thoroughly and tightly packed with neighbors that a single flower is hard to shoot.

Anyway, I was just trying out manual focusing with peaking and am disappointed with the result. In addition, I’m getting really pissed off with that Japanese junk—referring to the firmware, not to the physical camera, which in general has been superb. Example: I wanted to use Macro. Well there is a mode called “silent” which suppresses flash, the speaker which gives various toots, yaps, and simulated shutter clicks, flash, focus assist light, and for some reason that defies explanation, macro mode. So, I first have to hold down one button for ten seconds to unlock a lock (not ever mentioned in the manual), which unlocking permits me to hold down another button for another ten seconds to disable silent mode!!! Then I can set macro mode and take the picture. 

Well reversing this little action proved next to impossible. No matter what I did, the toggle between optical and electronic viewfinders did not work, and the display in the viewfinders was incomplete. I have set it to show battery status, focus distance and depth of field shown graphically, and the usual: shutter speed f number, exposure compensation, ISO, and the focus rectangle. And the lever on the front should toggle between EVF and OVF. After interminable minutes of fooling around I decided the quickest thing was to do a reset of the shooting menu and then set it up from scratch—this is not too bad because once I set RAW, many of the defaults are either what I want or are irrelevant. Mainly, I have to set check marks on boxes for what I want to show in the two finders. It took me a while to realize that this was really the fastest way to restore it to be a working camera. JAPANESE JUNK. Just what idiot specified this interface?????

Cheers, y’all

HerbBoe




Herbert Kanner
kanner at acm.org
650-326-8204

Question authority and the authorities will question you.