DezFoto Posted October 11, 2016 Share #21 Posted October 11, 2016 Advertisement (gone after registration) I just don't understand why they don't let us, the people who are paying large amounts of money for their cameras, make a decision whether we are willing to accept "quality loss" or noise in our images from long exposures or not. I use my D700 (the most versatile camera I've ever owned) for exposures past 30 seconds. It should be a menu item to turn it off. I think Leica gets away with these kinds of things because their customer base is casual photographers. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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steppenw0lf Posted October 11, 2016 Share #22 Posted October 11, 2016 Exactly, so a professional like you better stays with professional gear like the D700. Good luck. A professional like you can probably not afford it, but a casual photographer like me has several cameras for different purposes. And needs not to loose time complaining about what one system cannot do. Some craftsmen also think that since they bought a (expensive) hammer, they can now fix anything with it. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
DezFoto Posted October 11, 2016 Share #23 Posted October 11, 2016 Exactly, so a professional like you better stays with professional gear like the D700. Good luck. A professional like you can probably not afford it, but a casual photographer like me has several cameras for different purposes. And needs not to loose time complaining about what one system cannot do. Some craftsmen also think that since they bought a (expensive) hammer, they can now fix anything with it. Thanks for the hostile reply! I'm assuming your offended by my use of the term "casual photographer". There's nothing wrong with being a casual photographer, unless you're really that insecure in your artistic abilities that you somehow feel that a label like that diminishes your perceived abilities. I am a professional photographer and a casual photographer. 1) To point, professionals don't spend money on several cameras if they can help it, hard to stay in the black that way, but most are forced to if they work in more than one discipline. I have 3 camera systems for "pro" work, the rest are for casual/personal works. 2) I have several expensive hammers: Hasselblad H, Leica M, Leica Q, Nikon digital, Nikon film, Sony RX1r, Sigma DP, Contax G, etc. 3) I'm sure your comment about the D700 is a crack at it not being "professional" in your eyes, but it's good in low light, focuses quickly and I have a blimp that fits it, so for me it works well on film sets and I've never had a producer say "Geez that guy's D700 isn't pro enough, we should have hired someone else" 4) I'm sorry that I get to make a very good living on photography and still have enough time to voice my opinion on the internet. 5) It's a simple firmware option, it really shouldn't be a big deal to add it in but then again, with people like you blindly defending seemingly arbitrary decisions on their part, why would they! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
FlashGordonPhotography Posted October 11, 2016 Share #24 Posted October 11, 2016 Interesting arguments! I opened this in another thread ---> http://www.l-camera-forum.com/topic/265418-long-exposures/ I appreciate that L are only wanting to see the goody-goody side of their camera by building in corseting restrictions, the ones which some engineer thinks are 'best'. But, we customers have a right to 'see the dark side' and judge ourselves what we like. I frequently take pictures (D700 / D800) in extreme environments, some long exposures (>100 min). The LE pics from the very cold environments are fine (for me!) without LENR; the ones from hot environments are borderline, and benefit from the LENR dark frame... PITA wait! The real answer is to open the camera firmware interface to public use; my filius is into this with Canon cameras. The solution is a simple BASIC or PYTHON interpreter that, for example, allows.. take pic_1 (parameters provided either automatically, or by operator) take pic_2 (parameters provided either automatically, or by operator) take pic_3 (parameters provided either automatically, or by operator) BEEP 3 times (the camera can now be dismounted -- display message on screen) take LENR_frame subtract LENR_frame from pic_1 to produce refined pic_1 subtract LENR_frame from pic_2 to produce refined pic_2 subtract LENR_frame from pic_3 to produce refined pic_3 BEEP 10 times (the camera can now be switched off / used again) BTW... using scripts enables exposure time >> than the 30s offered by the camera FW. Another interesting use case is taking a number of dark frames and subtracting them; one can learn a lot about the sensor quality (over time) ;-)) Yes... I know some of the above can be achieved in PP, but I would prefer to use the camera's own facilities to reduce platform complexity / sources of error. Anyways... there is always the new Hasselblad! -g- Opening firmware is like running Linux. Sure there are 6 guys who are doing it but it's not a really viable solution for the rest of us. I don't have the time/patience/skill to do this stuff myself. I just ask nicely and hope Leica will do it. Maybe magic lantern will have a go. Leica have historically been a shop but recently have opened up a bit. Lots of new stuff added to the SL in FW2.0. That followed a beta test by some forum members. Leica do read this forum and you can even email them directly if you want. Gordon Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmahto Posted October 11, 2016 Share #25 Posted October 11, 2016 At least you can do a long exposure... (us M240 owners can't ) And SL is going to get firmware fix for optional dark frame noise reduction (somebody said).... what about us M240 owners? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pico Posted October 11, 2016 Share #26 Posted October 11, 2016 We have discussed open source, or at least source built upon a development platform we can dissect. It probably will not happen for a number of reasons including Leica's developer contracts, but especially because the market of appreciation for hacking Leica's firmware is so small. Leica has changed firmware development platforms at least once while I cared to hack. I'm petered out. If we have so many clever people here, maybe one will make a breakthrough. Not holding my breath. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramarren Posted October 11, 2016 Share #27 Posted October 11, 2016 Advertisement (gone after registration) Personally, I have zero interest in writing software for my cameras. I prefer to exploit what they have, not develop them further. It's a different endeavor. As I said at the top of this thread, DFS should be able to be disabled and enabled. Just that would do enough. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pico Posted October 11, 2016 Share #28 Posted October 11, 2016 Personally, I have zero interest in writing software for my cameras. I prefer to exploit what they have, not develop them further. It's a different endeavor. For the rest, ramarren is a former Apple engineer. Godfrey, I'm just a bit disappointed. But I'll recover. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmahto Posted October 11, 2016 Share #29 Posted October 11, 2016 Personally, I have zero interest in writing software for my cameras. I prefer to exploit what they have, not develop them further. It's a different endeavor. As I said at the top of this thread, DFS should be able to be disabled and enabled. Just that would do enough. It is not a question of whether I can write software or not. Opening the software allows others to accelerate the development and fix issues much faster than what Leica could do themselves. Unless they have army of developers like in Apple, they should be better off taking an open approach. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
DezFoto Posted October 11, 2016 Share #30 Posted October 11, 2016 And SL is going to get firmware fix for optional dark frame noise reduction (somebody said).... what about us M240 owners? I'm not sure it would matter as much for us M240 owners, since the camera's longest exposure time is only 30 seconds (why even have a bulb mode?). Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmahto Posted October 11, 2016 Share #31 Posted October 11, 2016 For the rest, ramarren is a former Apple engineer. Godfrey, I'm just a bit disappointed. But I'll recover. Oops... I just made a reference to Apple in my comment above.... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmahto Posted October 11, 2016 Share #32 Posted October 11, 2016 I'm not sure it would matter as much for us M240 owners, since the camera's longest exposure time is only 30 seconds (why even have a bulb mode?). It does matter to me in extreme use case. I have used M240 to take pictures of meteorite showers (taking 20 sec repeated shots over couple of hours) with good success. But I am missing the meteorites streaking across during dark frame capture. I would have captured twice as many shooting stars. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
DezFoto Posted October 12, 2016 Share #33 Posted October 12, 2016 It does matter to me in extreme use case. I have used M240 to take pictures of meteorite showers (taking 20 sec repeated shots over couple of hours) with good success. But I am missing the meteorites streaking across during dark frame capture. I would have captured twice as many shooting stars. Oh yeah, that's good point. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramarren Posted October 12, 2016 Share #34 Posted October 12, 2016 For the rest, ramarren is a former Apple engineer. Godfrey, I'm just a bit disappointed. But I'll recover. pico, that's just a hair misleading. I was a software engineer at NASA/JPL and at Molecular Design, but my work at Apple has been development tech support, technology management, quality assurance, and technical writing. While all of those positions carry the engineering work forward, I never wrote code for Apple other than as samples for the engineers I was assisting and in the course of testing new things that I was documenting. By the time I was in a position to influence anything even in a small way, I was far more aligned with design and requirements efforts than with implementation. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
ramarren Posted October 12, 2016 Share #35 Posted October 12, 2016 It is not a question of whether I can write software or not. Opening the software allows others to accelerate the development and fix issues much faster than what Leica could do themselves. Unless they have army of developers like in Apple, they should be better off taking an open approach. The code required to operate a camera, no matter how complex, is much much MUCH smaller than that required for operating systems, development platforms, development tools, graphical user interface libraries, and user-centric apps. You certainly don't need an 'army of developers like in Apple'... I strongly doubt that there would be any realistic, practical advantage to making a camera an open source platform for development. Too few people knowledgeable enough (or even interested enough) to write code for it, many possibilities of 'bricking the box', and an insufficient user base that's willing to experiment with software from an unknown supplier on their expensive cameras. I could be wrong, but that's my feeling. I certainly wouldn't be adding firmware from any old hacker to my $8000+ camera system, ever. I'm chary enough to add Leica's firmware updates developed by people who have full access to the hardware development team ... ! Can you name any successful embedded systems products, by any vendor, that are the foundation of an open source development platform? I can't think of any... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
scott kirkpatrick Posted October 12, 2016 Share #36 Posted October 12, 2016 Can you name any successful embedded systems products, by any vendor, that are the foundation of an open source development platform? I can't think of any... I think HP made some steps on that direction about 10 years ago. They swiftly disappeared. More recently there are starting to be open mobile platforms with cameras. But for all the reasons cited I think we are better served by arguing for more open beta testing than for open firmware. scott Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmahto Posted October 12, 2016 Share #37 Posted October 12, 2016 The code required to operate a camera, no matter how complex, is much much MUCH smaller than that required for operating systems, development platforms, development tools, graphical user interface libraries, and user-centric apps. You certainly don't need an 'army of developers like in Apple'... I strongly doubt that there would be any realistic, practical advantage to making a camera an open source platform for development. Too few people knowledgeable enough (or even interested enough) to write code for it, many possibilities of 'bricking the box', and an insufficient user base that's willing to experiment with software from an unknown supplier on their expensive cameras. I could be wrong, but that's my feeling. I certainly wouldn't be adding firmware from any old hacker to my $8000+ camera system, ever. I'm chary enough to add Leica's firmware updates developed by people who have full access to the hardware development team ... ! Can you name any successful embedded systems products, by any vendor, that are the foundation of an open source development platform? I can't think of any... You may be right on that. I was thinking in the line of Leica relying on DNG so that they don't have to develop their own RAW processing software (every other camera manufacturer have their own proprietary format and software). At least they could outsource this task (if not open source) or provide APIs so that others can write software. I don't know whether market is small but it is certainly high end and could be profitable. I guess people can pay $$ for additional functionality (such as switching off NR, intervelometer, different JPEG processing control, Focus bracketing for macro .... to name a few). Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
pico Posted October 12, 2016 Share #38 Posted October 12, 2016 Can you name any successful embedded systems products, by any vendor, that are the foundation of an open source development platform? I can't think of any... Not foundation open source, but there are some pretty good camera hacks as well as supplemental modules. I use a hacked Panasonic GH1. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
jmahto Posted October 12, 2016 Share #39 Posted October 12, 2016 I have also used Canon A3200 (P&S) with CHDK hack for RAW output, timelapse etc with good success. With external RAW processing, it's output was better than iPhone 6 even in low light and it has zoom (up to 120mm equiv) as well. It is always there somewhere in the bottom of my camera bag taking no space and adding no extra weight. The ultimate backup camera when everything else fails. I would love a hackable Leica. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
conger Posted October 13, 2016 Share #40 Posted October 13, 2016 I just don't understand why they don't let us, the people who are paying large amounts of money for their cameras, make a decision whether we are willing to accept "quality loss" or noise in our images from long exposures or not. I use my D700 (the most versatile camera I've ever owned) for exposures past 30 seconds. It should be a menu item to turn it off. I think Leica gets away with these kinds of things because their customer base is casual photographers. Agreed Dez... The D700 was a cool platform for all that I threw at it, especially the night time lunacy I do. Though technically superior, the D800 does not cut it so well. Had I waited for the D810.... Hmmm! BTW... the sensor physics say that the new Hasselblad should offer more attractive long exposure noise performance (larger pixel size), I am reading about the camera warming up when it is thrashed. This would lead me to believe I should bear that in mind when I test it. One of the better experiences is taking (Nik) photos when it is COLD; noise goes down... but zonal noise patterns become visible. Ohh well, you cant win against physics... not always! -g- Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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