Poor man's Zone system for M8

[stevme]

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I'll be outside tomorrow photographing a rally/protest. I anticipate cloudy skys that will form part of my picture.

 

I took my CV 15 outside over the weekend and took some test photos. I first measured a neutral gray area (some concrete on a bridge), figuring that as the area I most wanted to be correctly exposed. I also brought my light meter with me and took an incident reading. Both gave me a f/8 a 125/sec, with a 160 ISO.

 

I then proceeded to take photos from wide open to f/22 at a constant shutter speed. When I opened the frames in Lightroom, I discovered that my "properly" exposed f/8 - 125 exposure did a great job on the bridge, but much of my overcast sky was washed out. I discovered, as I proceeded to each image, with ever smaller f stop, that I got the image with most overall information at three stops (f/22) darker than the indicated exposure. In other words, I had properly exposed sky at this reading, but was able to bring out the shadows using either an exposure adjustment or reducing the black level (or both) using Lightroom basic controls. There have been comments in this forum previously on the amount of detail that can be brought out in shadows using the M8.

 

So my plan for tomorrow is to pick the subject I want to be exposed, and stop down metering by two stops, just to be conservative, and lose a little sky. It is a kind of poor man's Zone system.

 

Any comments or suggestions? I am trying to take advantage of the M8's wider range at darker levels.

 

Steve

[stephengilbert]

Sounds good. I haven't tried it, but there was a recent thread with a photo of a dark tunnel, followed by processing that brought out a surpising amount of detail.

[farnz]

Steve,

 

I underexpose by 2/3rds of a stop as a matter of course and that's normally enough to hold all but the brightest highlights.

 

If I'm shootiing in low light I'll normally underexpose in preference to increasing ISO because it produces less noise after the shadows are recovered. I'm amazed by how much shadow detail can be recovered from M8 images.

 

Pete.

[ChrisC]

Steve - Sounds overcompensated to me. My standard exposure compensation is -1 stop with aperture priority metering on the M8. With a cloudy sky that would typically be less than -1, possibly even 0 compensation, whatever it takes to not have blown highlights.

 

..................Chris

[sean_reid]

One thing to keep in mind is that when one boosts the level of the shadows, he or she will reveal not only the detail in those shadows but also the noise. The closer a shadow area moves from pure black to middle grey, the more noise it can reveal. Of course, this depends on both ISO and upon how much one raises the shadow levels. And some may not mind the resulting noise. I tend to mind it because it tends to be inconsistent with the noise level of the rest of the frame.

 

I used the Zone system at times when I worked with film, esp. large format, but with digital capture I use the histogram instead, being sure to hold detail in those highlights that I want detail in.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[scott kirkpatrick]

The thing we don't realize is that the zone system was based on the fact that by varying the development of film we could vary the contrast without changing the look of the film's grain very much (within +1 to - 2 stops, and not for ASA 1600+ stuff). In digital the best approach seems to be to think of it like color slide film -- expose not to lose the highlights, using the histogram to roughly check this, and post-process to bring detail out of the shadows, changing contrast by selecting a different curve at that stage.

 

There was a thread a few days ago comparing different approaches to pulling detail out of the shadows -- let the highlights go, vs compress the tone scale in the middle of the range... But in all of this there is a point where detail becomes noise. Each one-stop increase in ISO selected on the camera simply raises the noise floor by one stop, although in-camera noise smoothing (not in the M8!) may disguise this somewhat.

 

From that thread, I took away the thought that a valuable on-camera chimping tool would be the ability to redevelop the thumbnail that we see on the LCD at various shifts in overall exposure, viewing a new histogram with each revision. This wouldn't affect the DNG file, but it would provide a check on whether meaningful detail is waiting to be brought back from the highlights or up from the shadows. This is not likely to happen with a firmware revision -- the camera can write a DNG file very quickly, but I can think of no action in which it reads it back into the processing section where thumbnails and jpegs are created, and probably this part looks only at a small strip of image at any one time. So the data path this would require probably does not exist at present.

 

scott

[luigi bertolotti]

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Steve, why your decision to compensate in the taking moment ? Me too have experienced that 1-to-2 stops closer does render better the shadows, but I also found that the LR function of exp. compensation is really working fine: not any kind of distorsion of the color balance... the effect is so "right" that some day I'll try to test in practice the difference, say 1,5 stop on M8 vs. 1,5 stop in LR... wouldn't be surprised the result is identical.

This picture has specific problems of its own (macro, a difficult color) but anyway is one where I tested that a certain underexposure is useful in detailing shadows.

 

Auto exposure, no correction in LR

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Auto exposure, 1 stop correction in LR

[stevme]

Thanks for all the comments. I'm off to shoot. At least I'm worrying about the right things. I'll try one-stop compensation and then check the histogram. I hardly ever chimp, but this might be a good time to check out the first few exposures. There was a thread a little while back on CV 12 vs. CV 15 with lots of images. I thought the exposure on almost all the images was great across the whole luminance range.

 

Thanks for the comments. I think it would be worthwhile to have some of the real pros here expound on their exposure techniques with the M8, if they would be willing to do so.

 

Steve

[eronald]

Thanks for the comments. I think it would be worthwhile to have some of the real pros here expound on their exposure techniques with the M8, if they would be willing to do so.

 

Steve

 

 

You have to experiment, and check the histogram every few shots, and should expect some issues, and you will always be adjusting the exposure in post on the Raw.

 

Let me be blunt: The M8 metering sucks. This is a recipe for disaster, even with digital. If you really want to make sure the exposure is ok, I would recommend the use of an external *incident* light meter which can double as a flash meter when needed, Sekonic makes some nice cheap ones. A model which has a spot function might be even better.

 

Alternatively use another camera, which has a decent meter to meter for the Leica. Or just use another camera.

 

 

Edmund

[luigi bertolotti]

You have to experiment, and check the histogram every few shots, and should expect some issues, and you will always be adjusting the exposure in post on the Raw.

 

Let me be blunt: The M8 metering sucks. This is a recipe for disaster, even with digital. If you really want to make sure the exposure is ok, I would recommend the use of an external *incident* light meter which can double as a flash meter when needed, Sekonic makes some nice cheap ones. A model which has a spot function might be even better.

 

Alternatively use another camera, which has a decent meter to meter for the Leica. Or just use another camera.

 

 

Edmund

 

That's a strong statement : "M8 metering sucks" ; are you defintely convinced on this ? I have used for years a unmetered Leica M4, so carrying with me an external meter is a sort of habit: in my first tests with M8 I made some comparisions with my usual Gossen (reflective light) and saw normal coincidence of metering (+- 0,5 stops for "normal" scenes) , then I discovered that the good ol' "f16 rule" is not so far for the M8 metering behavior, then I found that Lightroom compensation is finely tuned... at the end decided that for the first time in my life, I'LL CARRY NO METER: I also found that spotting 2 or 3 areas with the TTL metering of M8 (if you are not in hurry) can give you some good info when you prefer not to use the Auto exposure mode ("poor man's zone" ?): repeat, are You really so straight on M8 meter as an unusable tool ? I seem not to have seen many complaints on this in the forum... but I agree that digital has made the ethernal "metering question" a completely different problem.

[wattsy]

Let me be blunt: The M8 metering sucks. This is a recipe for disaster, even with digital. If you really want to make sure the exposure is ok, I would recommend the use of an external *incident* light meter which can double as a flash meter when needed

 

I can't agree Edmund. The M8 metering is nice and simple and does the job very well. Once you get a feel for how it handles particular lighting situations, the M8 meter is very reliable and second nature. I used to carry around an incident meter when I was shooting predominantly film but managed to wean myself off it by learning to understand the characteristics of the (very simple) meters in my M6 and M7 bodies. With the M8 I will often chimp the first couple of shots in a given situation (if I have time) but the meter is usually pretty much spot on.

[jaapv]

Let me be blunt: The M8 metering sucks. This is a recipe for disaster, even with digital. If you really want to make sure the exposure is ok, I would recommend the use of an external *incident* light meter which can double as a flash meter when needed, Sekonic makes some nice cheap ones. A model which has a spot function might be even better

 

I agree that it is slightly less subtle than the spotmetering on for instance the M6, Edmund. But in general I would think that a combination of the M8 meter plus basic exposure technique would produce correctly exposed images in more than 99% of the cases.

What it will not do, I'll grant you that, is to do a multi-field matrix metering, compare that with hundreds of standard images in its memory and come up with the right exposure without any user input-most of the time. For studio work I could not agree with you more, but I doubt that that is the main use of the camera.

 

Maybe your camera's meter is off?

[larry]

Edmund,

 

Sorry, but I need to jump on the bandwagon here, too. The word "sucks" isn't very descriptive and only indicates to me that you're frustrated with the meter. I'll grant that it's certainly not the most versatile or accurate meter in all situations, however I find its simplicity to be a blessing that fits well with the character of the M8. I've learned to work around the meter's shortcomings and produce good exposures.

 

Larry

[sean_reid]

I've had no problems with the M8 metering at all but my way of working has always involved a lot of manual exposure control, informed (some times) by the meter. For my work, the M8 metering is as useful as anything I get from our EOS cameras.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

[teehas53]

My experience with the M8 metering has also been good overall. With any digital camera, the ability to chimp the histogram on the spot gives great flexibility at the moment of capture to correct exposure variance. Really no reason for not getting pretty close, unless maybe if you're working very fast.

 

What Sean says about noise is also true, and should be kept in mind. I've dragged an amazing amount of shadow detail out of underexposed M8 files, but they are very noisy at that point. If this doesn't interfere with the "look" of the image, then it's not a problem. But they aren't even close to the detail available in a well-exposed shadow area. "Expose to the right" is the digital mantra for good reason. Of course, this has to be balanced with the need to NEVER clip on the highlight end.

 

As with film, there is no substitute for a properly exposed (for the purpose of the image) original capture. Lightroom and others are amazing pieces of software, but one has to know the limits and compromises.

 

T