246 Exposure (...and Nocti thought)

[VictoriaC]

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I bought my 246 as soon as it was available but I still don't use it even half as much as my 240 and yet I do convert a lot of my colour work to B&W but anyway... One of things I noticed Thorsten Overgaard write about is the issue of overexposed files on the 246 and he suggests shooting with camera set to -0.3 EV which I do but even then I still find I am toning down the highlights a lot in Lightroom and also increasing black or contrast.

 

Does anyone find that files are just too grey or pale for them? Have you adjusted your EV permanently?

 

Oh and FWIW I have a whole bunch of lenses including the Nocti 95 but I find that the Lux 35 FLE is my most used lens ...sometimes the Lux 50. I love the Nocti look but find I only use it when I specifically take a camera out in the evening and know it will be very low light situations.

 

The main post was really about exposure not lenses!

 

Thanks.

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[erudolph]

FWIW, I keep the 246 at -.7 EV and by default apply a medium tone curve when importing the files into LR.  For me, this produces good looking files.

[fotomas]

I have the 246 since January. Still I'm trying to find the right procedure for the files. I use the classic metering mode and find the files come out quite dark if you expose for the high lights (no correction used). So I always have to increase the shadows and the contrast a lot (use C1).

More then the exposure brothers me the tonal translation from colors to gray-tones. Found skin-tones quite to dark. Analog I would switch to another film. Here I only can use bw-contrast filters. With yellow, what worked fine in analog in such cases, skin tends to get to bright. Yellow-green looks at the moment best to me, but not as nice as TRI-X. Maybe this is related with the exposure, since if you expose that the skin-tone looks good the highlights are probably gone.

[Joshua Lowe]

I typically keep the camera set to -0.3 EV, sometimes -0.7 when there's high contrast (buildings casting long shadows in late afternoon but the sky is still bright, for example.)

 

I pretty much always have an ND filter or a yellow color filter on.

 

I also tend to get better results when shooting full manual rather than aperture priority.

 

Most of the blown highlights I encounter are light sources or points of light reflecting off of metal objects, windows, etc.  I don't really care about those.  It's when the entire sky gets blown out when shooting in the late afternoon shadows that can be annoying.

[fotomas]

Good advice. I also shoot nearly always fully manual. With the automatic the lights are often gone, so that you need to use a correction factor.

[Akaki]

I am working with ND 3 stop and 6 stop, helps a lot, also yellow.  my opinion is that MM 246 is a new stile of image in photography, I try to go out of clishes from the historical texture of photography, with MM it's possible. Noctilux is also a new generation of the lenses which has big artistic capacity. whit this pare you can have a lot nice surprise. 

[BBHewee]

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I just spent a weekend with my 246, where I shot most pictures at -0.3 or -0.7. So easy to bring out shadows, files are super rich. Spot metering is not the most accurate but it just takes a gut check. 

[Belle123]

Might help to refer to the histogram when taking shots.  Once blown highlights, info is lost.  But the shadows you can really bring out in post processing.  I am not afraid to underexpose at all with this camera.