[Leica] An epiphany and a terminal fall color.

[ricc at embarqmail.com (Ric Carter)]

you answered your frustration well

happy shooting

ric


On Dec 17, 2011, at 1:27 AM, Herbert Kanner wrote:

> Having lost my darkroom and, by now, probably my darkroom skills, I no 
> longer consider film, and therefore a fair collection of pocketable 
> cameras, e.g. Rollei 35, are now paper weights until sold. So, what to do 
> for the camera one always has with one--no, I don't have an iPhone and no 
> intention of getting one.
> 
> Before deciding to invest in a full-frame digital camera, I bought 
> Lightroom and a "junk" camera, a Nikon Coolpix S610 to help me decide 
> whether I would be happy in the digital world. Then came the decision as 
> to which camera, and as I wrote before, remembering how much I loved my 
> M6, I took the hideous financial plunge and bought an M9 body.
> 
> Recently, I started brooding about the fact that I should start having a 
> camera with me all the time, and am emotionally incapable of risking even 
> cosmetic damage to a $7K device. Besides, the M9, while light, small, and 
> handy, is just not, to me, a wear it all the time camera.
> 
> What to get? Most cameras that produce RAW are expensive enough to cause 
> marital problems and I don't think any could be called pocket 
> size--possibly one of the Ricoh models, but I'm damned if I'll pay that 
> price for a camera that doesn't come with a viewfinder.
> 
> Finally, I started to reconsider that miserable little Nikon. It took 
> about an hour to find all the menus, disable almost all automatic 
> features, and get its behavior to approximate that of a film point and 
> shoot. So, the only auto feature I left in is color balance, since that 
> would minimize the amount of color adjustment needed in LR. Next, I set it 
> to do only center-weighted focus, with a focus lock, which is also an 
> exposure lock, when the shutter release is pushed to a point of 
> resistance. It took me a long time to discover the menu for setting ISO 
> manually. I then was pleased to see that ISO value always shows on the 
> screen. Also shutter speed and stop show when the release is pressed to 
> the resistance point. ISO change is the way to control shutter speed 
> because the stop range is small. So, with all of these settings, the 
> camera becomes usable! Finally, there is a macro mode, which will be 
> helpful with flowers.
> 
> I was surprised at how low the noise level is at ISO 3200--a bit better 
> than the M9 at 2400.
> 
> A tribute to the near death of this year's fall colors is here:
> 
> http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/Last+fall+colors.jpg.html
> -- 
> Herbert Kanner
> kanner at acm.org
> 650-326-8204
> 
> Question authority and the authorities will question you.
> 
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