M10M exposure bracketing defective?

[cjl]

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I’ve been using Leica M’s since the M8 for landscape work as, early on, Leica was the only maker offering full frame IQ in a relatively light and compact package.  I recently acquired an M10 Monochrom and am very impressed by its image quality.  I do have one complaint, however.  All the M’s I’ve used previously had reasonably convenient settings for exposure bracketing.  In the M10 generation this critical function for landscape work has been relegated to the drive mode menu item.  I could live with that except that it appears the camera does not remember its drive mode setting and each time I turn it off and on again (which you need to do often to conserve the reduced battery life) I find the drive mode has reverted to single exposure.  Worse, even after you select exposure bracketing, there appears to be no way to combine that with the shutter delay function.  So I have had to keep the shutter button mashed down manually through the three or five shot sequence (thereby ensuring camera shake even on a tripod and ruining any potential exposure blending in post). This makes absolutely no sense, so I am wondering if I am just missing something in the manual or settings, or if my camera is somehow defective.

Edited September 10, 2020 by cjl
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[LocalHero1953]

The SL2 cannot set shutter delay and exposure bracketing together either. It irritates me, especially as the hyper-res multishot mode DOES have the option for shutter delay. 

[cjl]

That is even more surprising since the SL line is marketed even more explicitly for work outdoors.  This couldn’t involve more than a small firmware tweak.  I wonder why Leica has written off landscape and architecture photographers, two decent-sized customer bases which often need to work with extreme exposure ranges.

Do drive menu settings on the SL also revert to single exposure after powering off and on, or is this a defect only in the M10s?

Edited September 11, 2020 by cjl

[Bill W]

In edition to the M10M I own the Hasselblad X1D. It initially had the issue where if you used the exposure bracketing setting which was very good, you could not set a shutter delay as well. They finally fixed this and it is an option you can set. 

[cjl]

Following up on my earlier post on making exposure bracketing without camera shake work with the M10M, I pass on the following in case it may be of use to others here:

Since Leica removed the exposure bracket with shutter delay function from the M10 line, there appear to be only two ways to take a bracket without shutter shake.  One is to screw a shutter release cable into the camera shutter button the old fashioned way.  Works like a charm.  The Fotos app also appears to be able to select any drive option and trigger it remotely over wifi.  However, no matter which drive mode you select on the app’s Settings screen, when you switch to the app Remote screen, the camera itself switches to single shot mode.  You can still use the app as a remote for other drive settings, but only if you follow a particular sequence:

1) start up wifi on your M10M and connect with Fotos on your mobile device;

2) activate the app’s Remote screen;

3) on the M10M, select exposure bracketing in the drive mode menu and activate that by pressing the Menu button (the Fotos remote screen freezes once you start pressing the camera’s physical controls);

4) switch the camera again into LV by pressing that button or half-pressing the shutter button, which then reactivates the app’s Remote screen; and 

5) trigger the bracket sequence in the app Remote screen.  

 If you want to take additional brackets, you need to keep the camera on and the app’s Remote screen active; if you switch to another Fotos screen, when you then return to the Remote screen the camera will reset itself to single shot mode again and you have to repeat the above sequence from step #3.  I haven’t tested this on any other M10 series body but this may be the same on all models.

It would still be great if Leica could give us back the delayed shutter-exposure bracket function in a future camera firmware upgrade, but meanwhile hopefully they can correct this in Fotos.  

I passed this unusual behavior on to Leica’s software team and received the following reply; nice to see that Leica is at least listening:

Thank you for your request.

With Leica FOTOS only single shot mode is possible at the moment.

I forwarded your feature request to camera and Leica FOTOS product management for future improvements.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen/Kind regards

Edited September 16, 2020 by cjl

[cjl]

While Leica's software engineers were tackling the complicated problem of perspective distortion correction (a cool and very welcome solution especially for landscape and architectural photographers) they still haven't fixed the much more basic problem that prevents shutter delays from being combined with exposure compensation, or even keeping shutter delay as the active drive mode after the camera is turned off (key functions that landscape and architectural photographers need even more).  However, there is a kludgy workaround at least for ensuring shutter delay remains the active drive mode.  The interval drive mode IS persistent: select that as the drive mode and it remains active between shutdowns.  In the Interval settings, set Frames to 2 and Interval Time to 00.00.02.  With your camera on a tripod, press and release the shutter; the first frame will be exposed immediately but the second will be 2 seconds later, reducing camera shake. For longer lenses for which shutter shock could be a bigger concern you can input a longer interval between exposures.  This obviously wastes SD card space, but otherwise appears to be a work-around until Leica gets around to fixing this.