cl: did i choose wisely?

[gteague]

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Just now, lct said:

The Leica adapter is the only one allowing to trigger focus magnification with the top wheels.  I would not have purchased the CL without that. Otherwise i only use M and LTM lenses so i have no experience with L lenses at all sorry.

ah! so i wouldn't even get the ability to magnify at all without the adapter then. as i found when trying to shoot my cat, without the magnification i couldn't be sure i got the actual eye in focus since the peaking hit all around it and on the whiskers. but i guessed right on the shot i posted. on shots with a flat surface the peaking alone would work fine. 

/guy

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[lct]

3 minutes ago, gteague said:

ah! so i wouldn't even get the ability to magnify at all without the adapter then. 

You could do it with the arrows but not the top wheel.

[gteague]

4 minutes ago, lct said:

You could do it with the arrows but not the top wheel.

so happy to have this forum. i don't think even half of all  this is in the manual. and the manual needs updating to keep up with the firmware, but if the cl is going away, i guess there won't be much more updating of firmware or docs.

this lens is nice and crispy when i hit the focus right. it's already taking me back 30 years to the days before autofocus. i hated those years!

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[gteague]

so, win some lose some. someone earlier said you get no exif with a non-coded m lens. i wasn't even going to check, but i took a look and indeed you don't get anywhere near full exif, but except for f-stop, it's plenty adequate for basic needs. someone said they needed it to identify the lens, but it shows the focal length if not the actual lens info. this is plenty for 95% of my needs.
 

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Edited April 24, 2020 by gteague

[gteague]

i took my walk during magick hour this evening and shot with manual focus for the first time since probably the nikon 8008 in the 80s. i only have the one eye and it's not that great, so i was pleased that out of two dozen shots i didn't have to discard any for focus issues. i only used the magnification for a couple or three shots as it slows me down and is a little awkward, but i'm happy to have it when the peaking dots just overwhelm everything. i tried setting the peaking at /low/ and /high/ and i couldn't decide if one mode was better than the other in actual practice, at least in this lighting.

i did notice that the exposure meter seems to have underexposed up to 50% of the shots. i hadn't noticed that behavior before. not by much, perhaps up to 2/3rds stop in some cases. in any case, this was quite an enjoyable nostalgia trip shooting manual focus with a leica lens. to be honest, i expected a little better quality from it, but the sigma 70mm macro bested it at times in sharpness shooting the same image in the same light. that sigma is just cut your throat sharp. but, as expected, in other shots the leitz had better depth and contrast. 

this shot is b&w hc with all the settings cranked to max. needs cropping as well, but the exposure here is near perfect. i shot all the images at f2.8 and f4.0 and the shutter speed hovered around 1/60th. can't remember the iso.

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  Edited April 25, 2020 by gteague

[wda]

5 hours ago, gteague said:

i took my walk during magick hour this evening and shot with manual focus for the first time since probably the nikon 8008 in the 80s. i only have the one eye and it's not that great, so i was pleased that out of two dozen shots i didn't have to discard any for focus issues. i only used the magnification for a couple or three shots as it slows me down and is a little awkward, but i'm happy to have it when the peaking dots just overwhelm everything. i tried setting the peaking at /low/ and /high/ and i couldn't decide if one mode was better than the other in actual practice, at least in this lighting.

i did notice that the exposure meter seems to have underexposed up to 50% of the shots. i hadn't noticed that behavior before. not by much, perhaps up to 2/3rds stop in some cases. in any case, this was quite an enjoyable nostalgia trip shooting manual focus with a leica lens. to be honest, i expected a little better quality from it, but the sigma 70mm macro bested it at times in sharpness shooting the same image in the same light. that sigma is just cut your throat sharp. but, as expected, in other shots the leitz had better depth and contrast. 

this shot is b&w hc with all the settings cranked to max. needs cropping as well, but the exposure here is near perfect. i shot all the images at f2.8 and f4.0 and the shutter speed hovered around 1/60th. can't remember the iso.

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Guy, referring to your under-exposure, meter the area of importance,  half-pressure,  reframe, shoot.

[jaapv]

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Even better: display the histogram in the viewfinder and set one wheel to EV compensation. If you keep your thumb on the wheel you can get optimal exposure for each shot lightning-fast. I find it can run up from -2 to +2.  Important if you shoot JPG.

[wda]

1 hour ago, jaapv said:

Even better: display the histogram in the viewfinder and set one wheel to EV compensation. If you keep your thumb on the wheel you can get optimal exposure for each shot lightning-fast. I find it can run up from -2 to +2.  Important if you shoot JPG.

There are several ways to skin a rabbit, as the saying goes. My objection to using EV CORRECTION is that it is very easy to forget you have made the correction, when in a hurry. It is much easier when using a dedicated control wheel, often provided on Pana Leicas. Even the histogram can be overlooked during a grab shot.

Edited April 25, 2020 by wda

[Le Chef]

I think if you consciously use the Exposure Control setting wheel then you will constantly check the histogram to see if it maps exposure the way you want it to. It’s only a problem if you don’t check the histogram.

[jaapv]

2 hours ago, wda said:

There are several ways to skin a rabbit, as the saying goes. My objection to using EV CORRECTION is that it is very easy to forget you have made the correction, when in a hurry. It is much easier when using a dedicated control wheel, often provided on Pana Leicas. Even the histogram can be overlooked during a grab shot.

You won’t forget it as you are watching the histogram. And it is a dedicated control wheel. 
The problem is that EV comp is viewed as a semi-permanent setting which is a mistake IMO. It is particularly valuable as a continuous exposure control guided by the histogram. 

[gteague]

is it possible that in /A/ or /M/ mode the lcd doesn't work the same (i.e., show the image as it will look in the jpg) as in /P/ mode? because before i got the summicron lens i used the tl lens and shot the exact same images in the same light using the same exposure technique and it's only been the last 3 days with the summicron in /A/ mode that i've noticed any underexposure. i mean, it's not by much--at most 2/3rds of a stop--and if you shoot raw i doubt you'd notice it. and i've noticed that at times the lcd goes dark when i'm changing aperture or exp comp and then it usually recovers itself in a second or so. it seems to effect the images where there's about 1/4 or 1/3rd sky in the frame, but these are taken during magick hour and the sky isn't that bright and sometimes it's overcast.

and if i only viewed them on the computer, there's really no problem unless there's a lot of dark area where you can barely make out detail, but when you upload the jpgs to places like facebook which compress the crap out of the dynamic range and  boost contrast, they look dark. when i get a chance i can go back to the tl 23/2 in /P/ mode and shoot the same things for comparison.

here's an example i took yesterday and actually underexposure acted in my favor a little to capture the dust the mower was throwing up. but the overall look is darker than i wished as i'd like to have more detail in the trees. and i'm sure i could have edited it to my liking if i was willing to edit for such a 'throwaway' photo which was only going to be used on my facebook timeline.

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  Edited April 26, 2020 by gteague

[jaapv]

As I said, shoot by the histogram and EV comp to get consistent results. Light transmission is different by lens, there can easily be ½ stop difference. An f-stop is a mathematical value which does not take the light loss in the glass into account, reason that the Cine industry uses t-stops, which do. The EVF or LCD is a particularly unreliable tool to judge exposure. That is what the Histogram is for.

BTW, shadow recovery is vastly better in raw.

[gteague]

9 minutes ago, jaapv said:

As I said, shoot by the histogram and EV comp to get consistent results. Light transmission is different by lens, there can easily be ½ stop difference. An f-stop is a mathematical value which does not take the light loss in the glass into account, reason that the Cine industry uses t-stops, which do. The EVF or LCD is a particularly unreliable tool to judge exposure. That is what the Histogram is for.

yeah, i can't make heads nor tails of those histograms. all they do is take up valuable framing space. now on the gh5 and the s1 there's a video tool called a waveform and even though it takes up more space than a histogram, it's crystal clear what is happening with your exposure.

and yes, after i read all the entries yesterday, i set my cl to /M/ with the histogram and played around in various scenes trying to predict the outcome and seeing how different settings affected the histogram and if i tried to do this in real time i'd never shoot another  image. it's like playing space invaders where the aliens are overwhelming you!  

/guy

Edited April 26, 2020 by gteague

[jaapv]

It is an essential tool, and quite simple. Not much of a learning curve really, and it makes a vast difference in the quality of your photography.

https://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-read-and-use-histograms/

 

https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/histograms.htm

[gteague]

btw, i've quite enjoyed shooting in manual focus mode the last 2-3 days. it's amazing how your muscle memory comes back so that your left hand goes to the focus ring as you're raising the camera to your eye. i haven't done that since the 80s or 90s when autofocus came out.

and the cl focusing aids are pretty good, although not as good as on the panasonic gh5 and s1. in normal magnification there's too much dot density and setting it to /low/ or /high/ doesn't seem to affect much of anything. but when you magnify the image there's only a very few dots and out in the sunlight they're very easy to miss, thus the magnification isn't as useful as it could be because the image doesn't ever actually come into focus---you have to depend on the peaking dots.

but out of the 4 or 5 dozen shots i've taken over the last 3 days i've only missed focus like 2-3 times. which, with my eyesight, is truly amazing. and it is enjoyable and nostalgic to work further down the chain trending to fully auto which i've been guilty of, but mostly because i'm impatient, most everything i shoot is only for internet use anyway, and my bad eyesight.

/guy

[gteague]

tks for the links. ken rockwell is sort of iffy though--he's like bipolar, sometimes he's great and other times you can tell he's pandering to generate clickbait. but he says:

"The best way to evaluate exposure is to look at the picture, not a histogram. Histograms are a way to measure exposure more objectively for those who can't see very well. Histograms don't replace your eyes and experience. "

and i don't think he means physically see well because i don't. i think he means those who can't previsualize and i've had over 55 years experience in visualization and pre-visualization and judging how the final image will look. you can't use the zone system if you haven't mastered this.

and if you can see the difference in the histograms between the 1-stop under and normal out in the sunlight when you're trying to capture an image that might change underneath you, you're a better man than i am, gunga din. there's no way i'd be able to see this tiny difference on the tiny cramped histogram on the cl.

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thus this could be why i don't find the histograms that useful--i suspect they'll only show me what i already know and take up a huge chunk of my time doing it. i realize that for those who can read them like a book there isn't much of a time penalty.

/guy

Edited April 26, 2020 by gteague

[jaapv]

Well, Ken is not above a bit of BS but in this case he probably means that there is no correct exposure artistically speaking, which is true. Low key and high key are the obvious examples. That does not mean that we shouldn't have control of the technical parameters, quite the opposite. In this case, having the histogram live in your viewfinder and the EV control at your fingertip makes the process so much faster and convenient than the spot-meters or incident-light meters of yore.

As an aside, the best histogram I know is the Monochrom M9, as it emulates the zone system. Unfortunately it cannot be real-time

[wda]

35 minutes ago, gteague said:

yeah, i can't make heads nor tails of those histograms. all they do is take up valuable framing space. now on the gh5 and the s1 there's a video tool called a waveform and even though it takes up more space than a histogram, it's crystal clear what is happening with your exposure.

and yes, after i read all the entries yesterday, i set my cl to /M/ with the histogram and played around in various scenes trying to predict the outcome and seeing how different settings affected the histogram and if i tried to do this in real time i'd never shoot another  image. it's like playing space invaders where the aliens are overwhelming you!  

/guy

You can choose to see the histogram,  or not. No need to clutter your screen if you don't need it.

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[lct]

Don't worry i've never used a histogram (what's that beast ) in all my life. Your EVF is WYSIWYG so it is easy to get the results you want if you have a bit of experience. You said 55 years, that should do it .

[gteague]

1 minute ago, jaapv said:

Well, Ken is not above a bit of BS but in this case he probably means that there is no correct exposure artistically speaking, which is true. Low key and high key are the obvious examples. That does not mean that we shouldn't have control of the technical parameters, quite the opposite. In this case, having the histogram live in your viewfinder and the EV control at your fingertip makes the process so much faster and convenient than the spot-meters or incident-light meters of yore.

no argument there. the honeywell spot meter was so popular due to adams' recommendation of its use for his zone system they were hard to find even though i worked at a camera store. luckily minolta came out with a comparable one which was more versatile as it was basically an incident/reflected meter you could add a spot finder to. can't remember the model number.

/guy