V-Lux (114) problem

[stuny]

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On my second day of shooting with my new V-Lux (another generous gift from Barbara) I had an interesting problem: I took several shots which were well exposed and then suddenly they were all underexposed. I overcame that by using exposure compensation (quite a lot of it), but prior to that it was not an issue. I would guess this was the result of hitting various buttons - or at least I hope it was. Of course the printed manual was no help since it is greatly abridged. The downloaded, much larger manual didn't help either, but then I may have missed it

 

Ideas?

[pop]

Stuart, may I suggest to show one of the underexposed ones here, with all the meta data intact? They might contain clues to the unexpected settings.

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[stuny]

Philipp -

 

Excellent idea. Here are a before and after example:

 

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[ShawnK]

I had couple of slightly under exposed, so I changed the metering mode and was back to normal. Scroll thru' your metering mode settings, that might do the trick. I hope.

[stuny]

Shawn -

 

Thank you for the idea, but when I tried it nothing unexpected happened. It must be something else.

[waloszek]

Hi stuny,

 

I found the following values in the EXIF data (using GraphicConverter):

 

Not underexposed:

Shutter speed: 1/100 s

Aperture: 4.0

ISO: 1250

 

Underexposed:

Shutter speed: 1/80 s

Aperture: 1.0

ISO: 160

 

(Both have exposure compensation -1)

 

So you should check your ISO values. Moreover, an aperture value of 1.0 looks strange to me. Maybe, something went wrong with the camera. As a last resort, you might want to reset it to the factory settings.

 

Best regards, Gerd

Edited December 29, 2014 by waloszek

[ho_co]

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Stuart--

I don't have the V-Lux(114) but I have noticed that the Pana-Leicas seem to take literally the set Minimum Shutter Speed, even when that leads to underexposure.

 

Might that be the cause of the problem?

 

Just guessing, of course.

[stuny]

Gerd - Thank you. the -1 was the setting when I started up the camera. since this happened I've increased exposure quite a bit.

 

Howard - If it wasn't for the fact that the underexposure suddenly happened I'd think your idea might be related.

[pop]

I have run both pictures through the EXIF viewer and have made a synopsis from the results. The most striking difference is the F-Stop (1:1 vs 1:4). There is the gain control which may be caused by the differences in the ISO settings, and there are some other settings which may or may not be correct.

 

underexposed.pdf

 

As it's quite unlikely that the V-Lux is equipped with a Noctilux, I'd think the failure might be related to the implausible F-Stop.

[Northwest Wanderer]

Stuart,

 

If you are experimenting and just learning the various settings you may want to go to the SETUP selection and toggle down to RESET. That will return the settings to the original settings as delivered. Take a picture and see if it looks better.

 

Also, you could pull up an image that is not exposed correctly then press DISP until the image data appears.

 

Whenever I run into a similar situation I take an additional image in AUTO and compare the data.

[stuny]

Thank you, all. Bill's suggestion to reset to factory settings did it. Based on Philipp's last comment I did look at the lens engraving to confirm that it is not a super zoom Noctilux. It isn't.

[wlaidlaw]

Not a V-Lux but I took my wife's C112 to Taiwan as my pocket camera. I got quite a few wildly underexposed images pretty much at random. I don't know if there is something that confuses the exposure module in these Panaleicas. I switched for a while to taking that camera's version of RAW to get photos, which would have more footroom to make recovery of the underexposed images easier but Capture One does not recognise the particular version of DNG (RWL) which the C112 uses, forcing me to use Lightroom (which I dislike), so went back to JPEG. I found that using aperture priority rather than programme mode seemed to give more consistent exposure and that spot was again more consistent than multi metering.

 

Wilson

 

PS Should have added that in the latest version of Capture One (Version 8.1 Pro), Phase One have now added support for .RWL files.

Edited January 12, 2015 by wlaidlaw