Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2000/09/12
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 12:53 PM 9/12/00 -0500, Robert Jagitsch wrote: > >Case in point: a couple of weekends ago, I went to visit my parents. >We went out to an Italian restaurant and I was able to snap photos of >them with the Hexar very unobtrusively. All I had to do was focus and >compose, I didn't have to worry about the exposure. I just put the >Summicon 35 wide open and the camer chose the exposure. The shutter >and motor were very quiet; although not as quiet as an M, my parents >still never knew I was shooting photos of them. This would NOT have >been the case with an F5, not even close. > >-R It is my humble opinion, as well as decades of manual cameras and experience, that the Hexar's AE ability contributed little, perhaps nothing, to the picture taking experience and whether the exposures were good or not. As a matter of fact, AE in a restaurant can give you a worse "hit" rate than no AE. A reflected meter reads anything in front of it. Black jacket, white sweater, overhead light, etc. If you are in a restaurant, find a neutral subject in an average lighting situation, read it, set your camera, and you are done. Take pictures without changing the exposure. An AE camera will read that black jacket and give you much over exposure. It will read that white sweater or bright overhead light and give you gross underexposure. In these situations, the Leica M camera is the master of perfect exposures (the human brain at work) and stealthily quiet operation. So my humble opinion is, there really isn't anything that a Hexar can do that is "better" than an M camera. It does "different" things, not necessarily better things. Some of these "different" things can actually be a burden. Jim Jim