[Leica] Leica MDigital

[pklein at 2alpha.net (Peter Klein)]

Ted:  "Chimping" is indeed a waste of time in many cases.  But there is one 
big difference between your "Women in Medicine" shoots and digital 
shooting.  Digital has a more limited dynamic range than negative film.  If 
you shoot at 400, you've got the speed of Tri-X, but the latitude of Velvia.

In those operating rooms, if you blew an important highlight, you could 
just burn it in.  The overexposed Tri-X retained enough information to get 
a little texture.  Not so with digital.  When you hit the maximum value of 
bright, that's it.  The ceiling.  Not only that, but one or two color 
channels may blow while another  doesn't, which leads to funny color shifts 
and ugly "splats" at the edge of highlights.

So you have to be careful not to blow highlights at all costs.  But, if you 
go too far in the other direction, you end up with muddy, noisy shadows, 
and these are much uglier than their equivalent on film.  Sometimes you 
have to end up with the latter, because it's the only way to get the scene 
on film.

Shooting RAW gives you more latitude, and there are tricks that help, but 
the basic physics of the sensor still applies.

Some digital cameras meter more cautiously than others.  My Olympus E-1 is 
fairly conservative, so I can relax a bit more than a Nikon owner.  My 
friend's Nikon DSLRs tend to blow highlights often unless you really think 
about compensation.  His Epson RD-1 handles highlights better than any 
other digital camera I've tried.  From what I've seen of other's pictures, 
the Canons are somewhere in between.

Under contrasty conditions especially, having a "hysterectomy screen"  :-) 
or one that makes the overexposed portions go blinkety-blink is a 
godsend.  The trick is to use it once or twice and then not worry about it 
until conditions change again.

I must say that when I shoot digital for a week or two and then go back to 
my M6, I feel much more relaxed about shooting. I can rely on a lifetime of 
instincts, and the film's latitude gives me some wiggle room.  Then the 
bill from the lab comes, or I'm faced with scanning lots of frames, and I 
want to shoot digital again.  :-)

--Peter

At 12:26 PM 9/3/2005 -0700, Ted wrote:
>I still haven't got a clue, nor do I look at it, the "Historectomy screen"
>;-) because that's just another diversion from shooting the action of the
>moment. I suppose for the rock & ferner, peeling paint shooters it's a great
>exposure asset. But when I made the thousands of frames for "Women in
>Medicine" book using M7's set for AE lock I never checked exposures other
>than the shutter speed flashed in the view finder as I made the shot. And
>quite frankly the exposures roll after roll were on the mark, quite amazing
>really in the consistency.
>
>So the histogram is just another thing in the camera for folks who like to
>fiddle. ;-) Yeah I know someone's going to regale me with the added benefits
>to using it for critical exposures... OK fire away. :-)