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Different perspective on EV, ISO, Compensation (Mark's posts merged)


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Hi Sean, I know that not everyone works the same, and wouldn't want it any other way, and in difficult light I frequently adjust ISO between shots or subjects.

 

But what made me incredulous was that people seemed to want to be able to adjust ISO and WB with the right hand alone without lowering the camera (and therefore without any visual feedback). Is that something you need for your work?

 

I don't ever adjust WB because I only shoot RAW. But, yes, I definitely would like to be able to adjust ISO on the fly with eye to the finder and my index finger over the shutter. Here's a wedding scenario:

 

Bride is in dark room

Bride exits to sunlight

Bride enters limo, travels in limo (with myself or my photographer wife)

Bride exits limo (sunlight), enters building (dim) exits to garden (sunlight)

 

In that case, for example, I'm riding the ISO from 400 - 3200 constantly on the Canon and 160 - 1250 constantly on the Leica. And these events all happen at warp speed.

 

Many possible examples in PJ shooting also. These days, many of us ride the ISO "dial" like a shutter speed dial.

 

As I'm not a JPEG shooter (wire shooters often are) I don't know what speed they need for WB but it may be similar for a camera that's not good at AWB.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

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To my mind this is something that happens when your have brought the camera to your eye and semi-depressed the shutter. You are now ready to fire and any adjustments that need to be made must happen without you having to detach from your subject, lose your focus and your shooting position -left hand controlling focus and supporting the camera and right hand ready to fire.

 

Exactly.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

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Mark was successful in casting it in that light. "My way", "your way", etc. really had nothing to do with why I asked the forum if they would want to see a specific proposal implemented. People reading all this are going to have to think through what's going on here and draw their own conclusions.

 

Debate on this, by the way, was never stifled. I just asked that the survey thread remain a survey and that the discussion form a different thread. There are reasons for that which I can not discuss.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

Some of these web-blog-chat softwares have a "poll" function, and this would have been a little less cloying and "sorry, but I can't discuss why I require only YES votes"-like.

 

( ) I own the M8, and approve of these suggestions

 

( ) I do not own, and approve of these suggestions

 

( ) I do not approve of these suggestions, and own the M8

 

( ) I do not approve of these suggestions.

 

I did not read this latest "survey of interest" or feature suggestion as a turf war; however, to post to a forum with the "Discussion Thread" method, rather than a Poll to simply gather the numbers Sean(or Robert, et al.) seek was a poor decision... or is the anonymity of a numbers-only poll not effective for Sean's ND-wrapped intents? A bit like entering your favorite Stube/Pub and finding many of your common tables empty with a card marked "Reserved": a public place influenced by a private membership.

"Human, all too human" ;)

 

I get it, having the EV and ISO more readily available... the "old-fashioned" method of opening up or stopping down changes the DOF and sometimes focus. As for "fluidity", well, that's not at issue here, with good points supporting arguments for more or less button function or activation. Using the shutter button for more than it's present use, I can't say... for me it serves to "wake" from standby, engage the light meter, exit the back-panel functions, and release the shutter.

 

I haven't got the "see digital" yet, so using external ISO and EV controls while shooting don't have a place in my workflow... but that may change... to proffer this as a "do it by feel" with hardware that has no tactile beginning or end point of the scale(something I miss with the shutter speed dial of my film Ms), is a tad silly... unless you've a "tap twice and say 'There's no place like home...'" function too ;)

 

rgds,

Dave

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I don't ever adjust WB because I only shoot RAW. But, yes, I definitely would like to be able to adjust ISO on the fly with eye to the finder and my index finger over the shutter.

 

<wedding scenario snipped>

 

Thanks for the scenario, Sean. Suddenly it seems like a long time since I've been to a wedding!

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for future generations of M's: you have the review mode set to hold-histogram, you make an exposure, check the screen quickly, move to the arrow keys and increment-de-increment LIVE on the screen to see brighter darker of the image you just shot:p shutter accepts change for next picture.

 

That sounds interesting, I wonder if it's actually workable since my problems (and hence my desire to have quicker access to the adjustment settings) are not in adapting to the light of the scene that I just saw, it's the light in the next scene that I'm not quite prepared for.

 

--

@Sean:

thanks for the description of an actual situation - I think it helps immensely to hash these things out in relation to real life lighting problems.

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Some of these web-blog-chat softwares have a "poll" function, and this would have been a little less cloying and "sorry, but I can't discuss why I require only YES votes"-like.

 

( ) I own the M8, and approve of these suggestions

 

( ) I do not own, and approve of these suggestions

 

( ) I do not approve of these suggestions, and own the M8

 

( ) I do not approve of these suggestions.

 

 

First of all, yes and no votes were and are fine - of course. There are both in the thread. Let's not start a myth. Off-topic was and is anything other than a poll response. The survey was to know the response to a specific set of firmware changes.

 

I think its more effective, if communication and not instigation, is really your goal, to avoid prejorative terms like "cloying" - that just takes things off on a tangent. Andreas and I were talking part way through and there is, indeed, a poll feature on this site that I didn't know about. So, next time I do a poll we can do it as an actual electronic poll. The categories above would be about right but we'd also account for prospective owners.

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Being the OP I like to summarize:D

 

I have tried to do this a few times but they seem to be ignored in the toe-to-toe. There is not much point to this if we don't actually think about the ideas.

 

<snip>

 

So my opinion (which is all I can give) is that the crux is do you want to involve the left hand, take it off focus and camera support? Once you decide this, the rest is elementary. I believe I would prefer to keep my hand on focus because I can rescue a poorly exposed picture but not an out of focus picture. I think it boils down to that.

 

I'm with you 100% here and I look forward to the opportunity to give this a try sooner rather than later. I don't imagine any of this is written in stone since we're talking firmware changes not hardware changes, so there's also no reason to assume there won't be an ear open for improvements once a larger group of people put it into practice. We've got to start somewhere, and this seems like a good place to me.

 

[As an aside, I'd like to thank both Robert and Sean for sticking with this, I've found the discussion of improving access to nested settings and how it affects the use of the camera to be very productive and I appreciate the time you both have put into it.]

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<wedding scenario snipped>

 

Thanks for the scenario, Sean. Suddenly it seems like a long time since I've been to a wedding!

 

I will say that I once had much less respect for wedding photography than I now do. Everything happens yesterday and there's no reshoot. Good documentary wedding photographers really need to be on the ball and a responsive camera is a huge asset.

 

Cheers,

 

Sean

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I'm with you 100% here and I look forward to the opportunity to give this a try sooner rather than later. I don't imagine any of this is written in stone since we're talking firmware changes not hardware changes, so there's also no reason to assume there won't be an ear open for improvements once a larger group of people put it into practice. We've got to start somewhere, and this seems like a good place to me.

 

[As an aside, I'd like to thank both Robert and Sean for sticking with this, I've found the discussion of improving access to nested settings and how it affects the use of the camera to be very productive and I appreciate the time you both have put into it.]

 

thanks

 

well I don't know the implementation scheme but as I said much earlier, I thought perhaps a fork in the firmware might happen with these features added in a beta for testing. The primary firmware fork would continue unchanged and eventually after testing and feedback the beta could go master and the two forks merged. This way you keep a "stable" (:eek: ) firmware version available for those who do not wish to experiment or take the risk whatever it is, and the beta is clearly beta for those who do. This is pretty normal for open source software releases. It also means that firmware releases don't have to schedule around all of the new features, if the stable firmware team has an improvement to camera stability or find a bug and squash it they can put that out in the stable firmware as an update without testing against the beta which is beta anyway. the beta side could get the same changes but minus the testing time. Hey, its beta, you take your chances.

 

I think this might allay fears that the core concerns with the M8 firmware are not going to get sidetracked by this new feature set. Development could go on unabated.

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I am afraid I agree with Dave. It was not an even-handed survey.

 

There was no encouragement (at the least) to vote no and even if you did and wanted to qualify the reasons for that you were told to go and start your own thread.

 

Now we do have a second thread and is interesting to note that Sean is very present in this thread defending his corner, but no-one is allowed in Sean's thread defending their corner.

 

Jeff

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Dear all,

 

a forum is not designed for a survey but for discussions.

 

I already agreed with Sean that next time we use another application (I used it already in the German forum for a survey).

 

Please leave the survey thread a pure survey and continue discussion here without any personal insults.

 

Thank you

Andreas

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I'm going to jump in even tho I know I shouldn't:D

 

Being the OP of this thread I started it to discuss everything about the proposal and alternatives. I have no idea at all about the discussions Sean had with whomever at Leica so my imagination is that the changes he outlines were hashed over with Leica and he was told that a future firmware was going to feature them. Then maybe one or two firmware releases and nothing happened, so he started the thread to apply some pressure to Leica to show there was support for at least trying them out-

 

And I think that is all that it is, lets try something like this proposal in a beta firmware and then we can have a better discussion about whether or not it works as advertised from all of us who will actually be using the stuff in our work.

 

In some ways I regret starting this alternative thread because it might have been a case of cart before the horse. These firmware changes are not absolute, at least that is my imagination, they would be subject to review and feedback not in the abstract as we have been doing, but in the concrete which would be more useful, and then a thread like this could start with proposed changes or alterations.

 

You have to start somewhere. It would be very hard to get any large group (diverse) to agree on one proposal from scratch, but easier to at least debate the merits of an existing scheme.

 

the forum is entitled to feel however they like about the tone or direction of a survey thread, and it is obvious (to me) that Sean is caught between a scroll wheel and an NDA:D

 

Look at it this way, it would be nice if we all could sit down with Stephen Lee and tell him exactly what we think should be done but that is not going to happen. But what can happen is we can get a beta firmware with one idea implemented and actually try it out. This is the kind of thing that only happens in open source software, and we are talking about a proprietary company, so I feel lucky to have the opportunity to actually be involved at least on the level of expressing an opinion.

 

to me all the rest of the tone and semantics of thread management and personal conflicts involved here are simply background noise I try to filter out so that I can look at the merits only. that is what I ended up trying to do with this thread, look at the assumptions and implications of the proposals, and try to generate not so successfully my own idea. I really don't care who came up with the idea or who is advocating it, it is just about the button pressing folks:D and how we might like to change it.

 

you can see that a survey thread with 250 mostly positive responses is going to get somewhere with Leica and a thread with 250 alternatives is not. It would have been nice if we could have had a "Process" where we narrowed down alternatives in some sort of democratic way and presented that to Leica. We all know from experience with Government that that would mean us not seeing ANYTHING for at least another year...as a process like that takes time. We also know that starting a Process on this forum is like herding cats:D because we are all different.

 

Can we at least stick to expressing opinions about the ideas and not the politics?

 

I know...I'm a dreamer...

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So Sean was attempting to do a poll using the wrong software. Trying to keep a discussion to the rules of a poll is like herding cats. Wrong tool for the job. I don't think that warrants the responses here.

 

There has been no shortage of discussion on this subject. This thread being a discussion thread about how it might work and not a poll on a specific suggestion has had plenty of ideas agreeing, augmenting and contrary to Sean's ideas. So I don't see a problem, anyone here can put up a poll or start a thread on some different method. Everyone has the same access to the forum tools, it's not Sean's or anyone else's job to provide you with a platform, you already have one in the forum.

 

The important thing is Leica implements some workable version. In any case if Leica implements this it will do it in a fashion that Leica thinks best. They are not sitting around waiting for Sean to tell them what to do. He is one of many sources of feedback for Leica. Sean's take on this is as far as I'm concerned pretty much on target and I'm happy he's taking the time to get Leica's attention on the issue.

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by the way, let us not forget that a key part of what makes a two-handed system (e.g., Canon's) workable is that it is on a camera used nearly 100% in autofocus/autoexppsure mode. A two hand ISO/EV setup would work fine for people with three hands....

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Sean has just anounced on his survey that Leica has decided not to add this functionality to the firmware. My suspicion has been all along that the firmware is not going to change much in the camera and the camera you bought is the camera you've got until a new model comes out. That's to bad. There were some things that are doable that could have improved the camera - but then the M8 I've got is still preferable to me to any DSLR.

 

I'm still running the firmware from 2 versions ago and as it works fine I'll probably be running it until there is a firmware release that actually improves something in the day to day operation of the camera. I do hope that Leica is at least taking all this on board for the next model. But who knows. It took Epson (who would have bet on Epson !) to come out with the first D-RF. Leica seems to be reacting to events when they absolutely have to rather then making history these days so I'll take what I can get -a usable digital M, not quite what I would like but for my purposes better then any of the alternatives.

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