Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/07/30

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Subject: Re: [Leica] M7 shutter lag (or lack thereof?)
From: Mike Quinn <mlquinn@san.rr.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Jul 2002 21:17:08 -0700

Nah. I just punch the shutter button and pray. :)

Ted Grant is the guy who's been known to spend the day before the event
trying out his gear on the race cars so he can judge when to push the button
to get the shot. 

The common sense logic is:  when you punch the button and the autofocus
decides to spiff thing up a bit, adjusts the lens in, and then out, until
it's just right and then trips the shutter two seconds later, your decisive
moment may have passed.

That's bad.

Is the difference between 10 ms and 100ms meaningful?
Well, a car traveling 100 mph goes about 15 feet in 100 ms and only 1.5 feet
in 10 ms. A bicycle traveling 33 mph goes 5 feet in 100 ms and 6 inches in
10 ms.

Most of my exposures are of much slower stuff. Still, the difference between
10 ms and 100 ms is the same as the difference between a shutter speed of
1/100 sec (10 ms) and 1/10 sec (100 ms). If those differences are meaningful
to you, then the delay may be too.

If you are experienced enough to judge the delay it doesn't matter (much).
If you aren't, or haven't adjusted to your equipment's limitations, or
prefer 1/100 sec to 1/10 sec, it can.

You can learn those limitations by taking a thousand shots and studying the
results, or you can learn them by testing and measuring. It's OK as long as
you do it somehow.

Mike Quinn

Ted Grant wrote:

> 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.

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Replies: Reply from Ted Grant <tedgrant@shaw.ca> (Re: [Leica] M7 shutter lag (or lack thereof?))