Please help: M9 Exposure Problems

[parasko]

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Jamie, you have misunderstood...

 

...I know all meters think everything is grey. My point is that I am exposing for an object in the scene comparable to 18% grey and I am still experiencing way-off exposures. So I'm not sure what difference it will make to +1 and aim for highlights or -1 and aim for shadows, when the camera is having problems with 0 and exposing for an object which I am selecting as the greypoint...but I'm willing to give it a try!

 

....locking exposure and recomposing using aperture-priority is faster for me than manual +meter...ymmv!

 

 

LOL! I work too fast for aperture priority, because the auto-fool in the camera has no idea what is grey or not, but thinks everything is. Manual, even with a meter, is much faster and means less post production.

 

You really should try an incident meter. Meter once; shoot away, as long as the light doesn't change (and it doesn't that much; you'd be surprised) you don't change your exposure.

 

Anyway, placing the values you want with the M9 meter will absolutely not affect noise levels that much in normal ISO ranges from 80 to 2000 on the m9.

 

Remember, don't try to hold speculars or other useless highlights or you're underexposing; only meter for the ones you care about and place them above grey.

 

The meter trick works for making shadows dark too; if you want to preserve the effect of shadow then meter the shadows and pull the exposure down.

 

The auto-meter gets this "wrong" by design...it's designed to be great if you're shooting a grey card

 

PS--all the $8K plus cameras require a lot of work. The difference is, they repay the work with results

[Jamie Roberts]

Jamie, you have misunderstood...

 

...I know all meters think everything is grey. My point is that I am exposing for an object in the scene comparable to 18% grey and I am still experiencing way-off exposures. So I'm not sure what difference it will make to +1 and aim for highlights or -1 and aim for shadows, when the camera is having problems with 0 and exposing for an object which I am selecting as the greypoint...but I'm willing to give it a try!

 

....locking exposure and recomposing using aperture-priority is faster for me than manual +meter...ymmv!

 

Ok. So your next step is totally clear: shoot a gray card and see if your camera is on or off. If you get the right exposure, then you're obviously mistaken in what you assume is gray equivalent If the camera is "off" then you either need to send it in or allow for a compensation factor when you shoot.

 

Finally, I'd also check against an incident meter.

 

You are different than I am; I personally find it very very hard, without a gray card, to know what a 12-18% gray is in a colour scene, 99% of the time. It's a lot easier--for me--to simply place the tonal values where I want them in the final shot instead of guess about average luminance or let the meter do its thing

 

One more thing, it bears repeating. LR currently seems to have some issues with blackpoint and the M9. C1 doesn't; use the shadow slider in particular (or make your own contrast appropriate curve).

[tobey bilek]

I most often use "sunny 16" with digital just as Idid with film. Normally what happens is the shadow portion of the histogram is just off the left end and the highlights are with in the right side. A perfect exposure for transparencies or digital. Some will tell you to push the exposure to the right as far as possible. and bring back in post process. I have seen a website where this theory is disproved.

 

Back to my advice, A reflected light meter and an in camed is part of thet type, gives different readings depending on subject reflectance which tends to make darks brighter and highlights darker pushing to middle grey. You need to learn to compensate for this or use an incident meter which will give you cosistently even exposures regardless of subject reflectance.

 

Leica is set up for higher contrast and resolution in a raw file. If you don`t like the higher overall and micro contrast, use a different system or 1960 vintage lenses avoiding any newer than 1985. Use fill in light or HDR or psuedo HDR or take pics in lower contrast light.

 

Expose your 160 iso files just as you would expose iso 160 slide film and you will get perfect exposures with proper highlight rendition.

[wilfredo]

Wow! A wealth of information! Thanks you guys!

 

you have all at least encouraged me not to sell the damn thing just yet ....geez...so much work for an 8K camera...makes shooting with slide film a walk in the park!

 

Cheers.

 

If you have another camera that reads properly, do some comparisons. If your new M9 doesn't measure-up to your satisfaction, sell it and be happy. At the end of the day, you need to be happy with your investment, nobody else does.

[mweiner]

Jamie Roberts wrote:

So my advice? ignore the histogram because it lies; get an incident meter and use it till you get the light OR just point your M9 meter at the most significant highlight you want to hold and overexpose +-1-2 clicks of the shutter or aperture. Sometimes that thing you're pointing to is not "white," remember, but it often is

 

Jamie, I have learned a lot from your posts over the past year or two so please help me understand this:

 

If one points the meter at the highlight one wants to keep, the meter will have it in Zone V, and to move it to Zone VIII (lightest tone with texture) where one wants it, my understanding is that one would overexpose by 3 stops. Instead you are saying to move it 1-2 clicks which would be 1/2 to 1 stop. Possibly you meant to say 1-2 stops. Still, that would be significantly less than 3 stops. Since you know what you are doing, I'm sure 1-2 clicks (or stops) works in real practice so please help me understand the inconsistency between your practical recommendation and the Zone system.

 

Michael

[OlivePress]

Are you looking at your histogram? Is it turned on to display for every preview....?

Are you exposing to the right? See article here Expose Right

You then adjust exposure in Lightroom, C1 or whatever you are using.

[Jamie Roberts]

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Jamie, I have learned a lot from your posts over the past year or two so please help me understand this:

 

If one points the meter at the highlight one wants to keep, the meter will have it in Zone V, and to move it to Zone VIII (lightest tone with texture) where one wants it, my understanding is that one would overexpose by 3 stops. Instead you are saying to move it 1-2 clicks which would be 1/2 to 1 stop. Possibly you meant to say 1-2 stops. Still, that would be significantly less than 3 stops. Since you know what you are doing, I'm sure 1-2 clicks (or stops) works in real practice so please help me understand the inconsistency between your practical recommendation and the Zone system.

 

Michael

 

Hi Michael--

 

Good catch! In my original post I said 1-2 stops, actually. So there it is; I was just being conservatively mistaken in saying 1-2 clicks

 

And yes, that is still a stop under where the zone system says, in theory, you should be placing highest details. In practice, it's a little safeguard for me with bride's dresses, the non-total spot nature of the M8, and making sure I have enough detail to print.

 

The camera's meter itself isn't always a perfect either; I pretty much determined with my M8 and an external meter that the camera's meter, in tests, would produce the just under the right RGB values with about a 2 stop increase. For the way I post-process for print, that's just about right, but honestly you could push it more for a perfect exposure.

[larryk34]

I've also had to learn how to expose for the highlights (i.e., point somewhere else that's brighter so it closes down a bit, then keeping the shutter release half closed, shift back to my shot. Keeping it permanently compensated by -2/3 doesn't always work well enough. I also have a Panasonic G1 now and just learned how to use it's highlight warning feature. When you review a photo just taken, blown highlights are shown in black and blinking on and off. Great feature to have. But then I noticed that by serioiusly overcompensating by say

-1 1/3 or even -2, the problem is solved. The image on the screen is darker, of course, but it also looks much better. This leads me to believe that selective compensation with the M8 is probably working well and may also need to go up to -2 or -3 in some situations.

[diogenis]

Jamie, a few comments of yours before, you said that histograms are factored from Jpeg images. How can this be, since I'm only using Raw with my camera? What's the problem for Leica to indicate when it's sensor is about to reach blown highlights (>=255) or blacks (<= 0) even before shooting? I am not really interested into the distribution of them in the picture, but distribution also helps.

[lars_bergquist]

Hi Michael-- [ ... ] And yes, that is still a stop under where the zone system says, in theory, you should be placing highest details. In practice, it's a little safeguard for me with bride's dresses, the non-total spot nature of the M8, and making sure I have enough detail to print..

 

Remember that the Zone System was created for film, with its long overexposure 'shoulder'. In the darkroom you could as a rule tickle out detail in diffuse highlights that were two or even three f-stops overexposed. You cannot do that with digital; the response is not an s-shaped curve but a straight line, and when the pixel is full, it stops abruptly -- 'blows out'.

 

Besides, Ansel got the whole thing wrong. But that is another story entirely.

 

Lars Bergquist

The old man from the Age of Film

[250swb]

Neverthless Lars, I think the concept of the Zone System once learned (it was the first thing taught me at college many years ago) has the abiltity to re-invent itself for digital as a relatively simple way of pre-visualising the scene. Particularly so when dealing with contrast as opposed to simply nailing the correct exposure.

 

One thing I'd query Jamie about though is when he says

 

You are different than I am; I personally find it very very hard, without a gray card, to know what a 12-18% gray is in a colour scene, 99% of the time.

 

when he should be looking for 18% reflectance, not a colour or tone of gray. This is why making your own gray card is hit and miss because you can't just spray a card with auto primer and even though it looks the same gray, it won't necesarily reflect the light in the same way as a Kodak card. Whether new theories say its 26% reflectance or the traditional 18% doesn't really matter, because either value still relies on testing all your variables so they come together in the end, as per the Zone System.

 

Anyway, I've always used two things to determine a mid reflective tone when I don't have a gray card. One is short green grass, which reflects 18% gray, and the other the palm of my caucasian hand. I just wondered if anybody else had been taught, or found, anything else?

 

Steve

[Per P.]

Folks,

This is a very valuable discussion for me and I am grateful to the contributors. I just returned from Easter vacation in Yorkshire, England where the sky was predictably grey much of the time. Including a third of sky over a horizon and two thirds of green valleys in various degrees of shadow was very difficult.

 

These are obviously not arty landscape photos but holiday snaps. Sometimes family takes priority but I still want to do a proper job with the photos. Would you still expose to avoid blowing out the sky and live with the dark landscape parts?

 

And btw what is your best method for bringing out that shadow detail in Lightroom? For these I mostly used the Lightroom graduated filter to lighten up the lower parts.

 

Thanks, Per.

[parasko]

More good advice since my last reply...

 

1. Use a grey card to test M9 exposure

2. Compare metering with another camera.

 

I won't have time to do either until the weekend (why didn't I think of this before ) but hopefully this will eliminate the notion of a faulty camera (please no!) or just inaccurate technique on my part (likely ).

 

I don't have Capture One unfortunately so it's Lightroom or CS4 for file processing.

 

Cheers.

[Jamie Roberts]

Jamie, a few comments of yours before, you said that histograms are factored from Jpeg images. How can this be, since I'm only using Raw with my camera? What's the problem for Leica to indicate when it's sensor is about to reach blown highlights (>=255) or blacks (<= 0) even before shooting? I am not really interested into the distribution of them in the picture, but distribution also helps.

 

Hey--even though you're only using RAW, Leica is still making a JPEG to display for you as a preview It's why it takes so long to review some of the images; there's processing from the RAW file taking place.

 

So your histogram is actually measuring a JPEG made from the RAW file, and therefore not accurately telling you where your highlights have really fallen or how much shadow detail you really have. Many is the time I've seen the blinking blown out warning on the M8 but know from testing that the highlights aren't blown in the slightest; only in the way that Leica has interpreted the RAW file.

 

The problem is that a RAW file is a totally different beast than a picture you want to preview (different gamma and luminance, monochrome till it's interpreted, and linear to boot).

 

So even when you're only saving RAWs, your camera is still showing JPEGs

[Jamie Roberts]

Remember that the Zone System was created for film, with its long overexposure 'shoulder'. In the darkroom you could as a rule tickle out detail in diffuse highlights that were two or even three f-stops overexposed. You cannot do that with digital; the response is not an s-shaped curve but a straight line, and when the pixel is full, it stops abruptly -- 'blows out'.

 

Besides, Ansel got the whole thing wrong. But that is another story entirely.

 

Lars Bergquist

The old man from the Age of Film

 

Lars--couldn't agree more, and that's why I have my own safety zone that isn't quite the full range the camera is capable of making There's a lot more latitude in the M8 / M9 files than a lot of folks believe, but Lars is right--once the image is clipped it's clipped

[Jamie Roberts]

{snipped}

when he should be looking for 18% reflectance, not a colour or tone of gray. This is why making your own gray card is hit and miss because you can't just spray a card with auto primer and even though it looks the same gray, it won't necesarily reflect the light in the same way as a Kodak card. Whether new theories say its 26% reflectance or the traditional 18% doesn't really matter, because either value still relies on testing all your variables so they come together in the end, as per the Zone System. {snipped}

 

Steve, I'm not looking for a colour but a value that represents 12 to 18% gray reflectance and I find that hard to do (and in truth I don't do that at all, because, as I said, the light falling on the subject is more interesting to me than the light reflected by the subject).

 

Short green grass is not always available, and will reflect differently based on the light falling on it, of course. My hand has a measured value that's different from a gray card as measured by my meter, but it's certainly handy...

 

But honestly, guys, though I know how to do it, I can't remember the last time I took time away from my subject to meter my hand! LOL! I don't need it if I know where the highlights are I want texture in (or shadows), and I almost always do: I'm pre-visualizing what I want before I push the shutter It really is that easy and that hard... if you've never tried this technique you owe it to yourself to "free" yourself from autoexposure, which is almost never what you want

[Jamie Roberts]

{snipped} Sometimes family takes priority but I still want to do a proper job with the photos. Would you still expose to avoid blowing out the sky and live with the dark landscape parts?

{snipped}

 

Per, in many ways photography is all about controlling dynamic range--compressing it, actually. From the toe and shoulder n film to the highlight and shadow recovery sliders in PS, from dodging and burning in the darkroom to selective exposure in Photoshop, you're really trying to get to a printable image.

 

If that printable image needs to have texture in the all-but-brightest parts and detail in the all-but-black parts, then you need to capture in a certain way and compensate in other ways.

 

In digital, as Lars pointed out, you need to hold the (meaningful or significant) highlights because once they're gone they're gone in digital.

 

So you've got it right: you capture for the highlights and print for the shadows... If you want detail in the sky then yes, preserve it in capture and bring out the shadows in post. Note that this is going to be easier to do at lower ISOs, because you have more range of shadows there!

 

I can't speak to Lightroom, because I don't use it, but in all modern raw converters there are lots of ways of bringing out shadow detail...curves, shadow sliders, and so on... For landscapes, you could also combine multiple develops from a single raw into a single shot (using layers in Photoshop).

[lars_bergquist]

Neverthless Lars, I think the concept of the Zone System once learned (it was the first thing taught me at college many years ago) has the abiltity to re-invent itself for digital as a relatively simple way of pre-visualising the scene. Particularly so when dealing with contrast as opposed to simply nailing the correct exposure.

 

This is possibly not the right place for a technical essay about the conceptions and misconceptions behind the Zone System (some of them added by other hands than those of St. Ansel). So if you want to hear about it, do a vote. I'll listen if it is a Yes by acclamation, and our dear Moderator does not strike me dead.

 

Anyway, I've always used two things to determine a mid reflective tone when I don't have a gray card. One is short green grass, which reflects 18% gray, and the other the palm of my caucasian hand. I just wondered if anybody else had been taught, or found, anything else?

 

Steve

 

That is exactly what we use an incident meter for.

 

The old man (74) from the Age of Film

[Jamie Roberts]

{snipped}

 

That is exactly what we use an incident meter for.

 

{snipped}

 

Exactly.

 

BTW--I, for one, would love to read what you have to say on the zone system's inadequacies I'm sure the mods would allow it as an extended discussion of exposure in any case!

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[Per P.]

Jamie, Thanks a lot. Very good information.

 

Lars, I'd be interested. The Mods could move the discussion if they so desire. Thanks also to you for useful informatio with a classic Scandinavian sense of humour

 

Per.