Which M to get?

[hansvons]

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5 hours ago, chris_livsey said:

You mustn’t use a light meter, you have to know exactly what, to weigh the light

Any cinematographer who must deliver results would say that this is utter BS. Only as a self-reliant artist you can afford to lose that precious million-dollar shot. 

[hansvons]

6 hours ago, chris_livsey said:

 

Edited October 7, 2023 by hansvons

[105012]

6 hours ago, chris_livsey said:

Bresson on light meters:

You mustn’t use a light meter, you have to know exactly what, to weigh the light. A cook doesn’t take a scale to know how much salt you should put in a cake. The salt you put to give, to enhance the sugar. It’s intuition, it’s instinctive, and it’s the same thing.

An Interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson from 1958 | PetaPixel

 

 

I print my own negatives in my darkroom. All taken on M3’s without a meter and the negatives print well. So this rings true for me…

[lencap]

An interesting discussion, and one that doesn't have a specific answer.  I owned the M7, M-A and M-P primarily with a 50mm, sometimes with 35.  No 28 and nothing longer than the 50.  I also mounted Summicron speed lenses, lower weight, no blind spots when composing.  Each had their pros and cons, but in the end I found that the lack of a meter did make a difference on the "keeper rate" of the images.  I sold the M-A.  I then got tired of film shortages, high development and printing costs, and the limitations of composing with a viewfinder that wasn't always properly calibrated.  I went to the SL body expecting Nirvana, and sold all the film bodies and M lenses.

And here I am several years later and wondering why I did that?  I still don't have a coherent answer.  I did learn one important thing - Leicas are addicting.  Selling any of them seems like a good decision at the time, but in the end you crave it again and find yourself scanning "For Sale" listings.  

So, if you have the means, keep what you have, add what you want, and consider it "hobby expense".  At least it's not golf, and you didn't have to pay a membership joining fee and monthly dues.  Incidentally, the film bodies I sold a few years ago have all doubled or more in value, and the lenses have held value or appreciated.   I guess the photography gods are tying to tell me something.  If I were to reenter M body film photography I'd likely get the new M6, no particular reason, just a new camera with warranty and improved rangefinder.  And I'd likely move to the Summilux lenses to get the "bokeh" for those special shots. i 

Having said all of the above, the SL2-S is a remarkable camera, and to me the most flexible body of all.  Yet, despite the technical excellence of the SL APO lenses and the camera itself, somehow it's less "special" when shooting for the pure enjoyment of the moment.  There is something about film that stirs the imagination and heart, not unlike the feeling of vinyl records and a real "phonograph".   Leica's Peter Karbe created APO SL lenses that have MTF charts suggesting near perfection, but art isn't about perfection (in most cases) it's about emotion.  If M body film cameras stir that emotion, you'll be far happier shooting with them regardless of the technical merits of your gear or shooting style.

 

 

[105012]

6 hours ago, chris_livsey said:

Bresson on light meters:

You mustn’t use a light meter, you have to know exactly what, to weigh the light. A cook doesn’t take a scale to know how much salt you should put in a cake. The salt you put to give, to enhance the sugar. It’s intuition, it’s instinctive, and it’s the same thing.

An Interview with Henri Cartier-Bresson from 1958 | PetaPixel

 

 

I print my own negatives in my darkroom. All taken on M3’s without a meter and the negatives print well. So this rings true for me…

[williamj]

What Henri said and what Henri did is often not the same thing. Ishu Patel, who worked as his assistant in India in 1966 said he carried a small light meter in his pocket and that he mainly worked out of direct sunlight using combinations of 1/60 or 1/125 and f5.6 or f8.
 

If you work in the shadows of buildings with Tri-X with those settings you get well exposed negatives.  
 

I bake bread and cake for fun and I measure everything and I don’t know anyone who bakes cake or bread for a living who uses salt or sugar by intuition. 
 

Of course if you shoot a lot you don’t need to measure light for each sequential exposure, if the light hasn’t changed, and so after a while you might start guessing exposure and start saying you know your light. 

Edited October 8, 2023 by williamj

[chris_livsey]

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11 hours ago, logan2z said:

Sounds wonderful in theory, but HCB's negatives were apparently very difficult to print, so perhaps his intuition/instincts about light were not really that great 

"Apparently" look at some of the books that have contact strips reproduced, I would be happy with those exposures, and yes there will be "errors" but I contend that having the exposure set for the prevailing light. and yes having some faith in latitude, which patently would not work with colour reversal, so the camera comes up to the eye and the exposure made in one movement with perhaps a focus tweak, and again I call as witness another photographer who seemed to manage this OK a chap called Gary Winogrand, without looking at a needle or lights and adjusting maybe a stop is street heaven. 

I absolutely agree with light measurement and exposure adjustment by the most accurate route that works for you in a studied landscape or similar situation is the gold standard it isn't to say "sunny sixteen" should ALWAYS be used but like all techniques it has its place and for Bresson/Winogrand type work it is a habit to cultivate.

In the context of the thread the discussion is around integrated light measurement or not, you can though always take the battery out 🤣

[chris_livsey]

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10 hours ago, hansvons said:

Any cinematographer who must deliver results would say that this is utter BS. Only as a self-reliant artist you can afford to lose that precious million-dollar shot. 

Any cinematographer working in controlled environment would say that and Henri would I suspect concur, working the street live with a, dare I say it, a decisive moment is radically different photography and uses radically different techniques. 

Anecdote: Recently at York Minster they were filming for the Netflix Royal series you should have seen the gantry lights outside to shine though the stained glass several pantechnicons and maybe eight lighting gantries and all that was just outside, I suspect they were using a light meter inside for good reason. Outside with an M2 I grabbed a few frames and used sunny sixteen, the negs were fine and I suspect the so was the cinematography using a rather different technique.

Yes, Henri needed "sunny sixteen" to capture his "precious million-dollar shot" because that was the right technique for that situation.

 

Edited October 8, 2023 by chris_livsey
added anecdote and image

[Smudgerer]

Any photographer / Cine photographer worth their salt will use all the tools available to expose correctly in any given situation, eye, experience, intuition, advice and yes even a meter or two as well. After a shoot there’s nothing worse than an incorrectly exposed negative.

[chris_livsey]

42 minutes ago, Smudgerer said:

After a shoot there’s nothing worse than an incorrectly exposed negative.

There is, missing the shot altogether.

Dare I say because of messing with a light meter 😉

[Smudgerer]

3 hours ago, chris_livsey said:

There is, missing the shot altogether.

Dare I say because of messing with a light meter 😉

Well, after some 30+ years as a DP in the US and Europe and numerous locations around the world on dramatic, episodic and documentary work in film and also digital capture  there wasn’t a shoot that I did not use an incident and a spot meter with my readings backed up by secondary readings by my gaffer………one did not “mess” with a light meter, it was, is, an essential tool of the trade.

[chris_livsey]

11 minutes ago, Smudgerer said:

Well, after some 30+ years as a DP in the US and Europe and numerous locations around the world on dramatic, episodic and documentary work in film and also digital capture  there wasn’t a shoot that I did not use an incident and a spot meter with my readings backed up by secondary readings by my gaffer………one did not “mess” with a light meter, it was, is, an essential tool of the trade.

Why are we becoming obsessed with mixing the very different disciplines of still and motion photography?

What applies in one does not necessarily transfer to the other, I will concede Bresson assisted on motion picture shoots early in his life but in the comment I quoted he was plainly talking about still photography in uncontrolled "street" situations.

[Anbaric]

I'm sure Cartier-Bresson liked to judge the light by eye and it's certainly a skill worth cultivating but, as noted above, by the 60s he also carried a light meter, and he would later use metered cameras like the CL, the M6, and even the Minilux.

A few years ago (well, maybe 20) I got pretty good at judging exposure, to the extent that one day it started bothering me that my Nikon's meter seemed to be consistently reading a stop out - I'd forgotten that I'd loaded (DX coded) 800 ISO instead of my usual 400, so my eye was in but my brain was out! With a manual exposure camera like most Leica film bodies (even the metered ones) it's handy to be able to do this, because you can set the shutter speed and aperture to about the right place even before you raise the camera to your eye, you have more confidence in not metering every single shot when the light isn't really changing, and you can more easily spot when something is wrong (like forgetting to reset the ISO dial when changing to a different speed film). But I don't think there's any particular virtue in never using a meter, whether it's hand-held or built-in. It can be particularly hard to judge exposure in lower light conditions or deep shadow. They make meters, and include them in most recent cameras, for very good reasons.

[Greenhilltony]

On 10/7/2023 at 12:13 PM, VanDooglz said:

a 35mm meterless cameras make zero sense because you're either constantly missing on proper exposure (and relying on your tolerance for meh results)

On the contrary, I would never allow any aperture-priority mode of any camera to take control of my final exposure. They are all built upon the unreliable reflective metering mode, especially those Ms in film era. They suck at any slightly complicated lighting conditions.

[hansvons]

On 10/8/2023 at 3:13 PM, chris_livsey said:

Why are we becoming obsessed with mixing the very different disciplines of still and motion photography?

What applies in one does not necessarily transfer to the other, I will concede Bresson assisted on motion picture shoots early in his life but in the comment I quoted he was plainly talking about still photography in uncontrolled "street" situations.

There's for sure a difference between motion picture photography and street photography in many cases. However, I was more than often in the situation to shoot scenes in the streets with available light, and making an informed exposure decision was essential to my job.

 

On 10/7/2023 at 6:39 PM, chris_livsey said:

You mustn’t use a light meter, you have to know exactly what, to weigh the light.

I revisited this thread and was wondering why I wrote the expression "utter BS" (what I usually wouldn't do) and figured that it was rooted in the wording of the original quote, "You mustn't use a light meter, ..." which somewhat implies that it is verboten to use a light meter, which, of course, is utter BS. I guess it's a language thing, as the negation of "must" means in other European languages, "You don't need to ..." And with that, I don't see any discord.

 

[lmans]

On 10/7/2023 at 4:25 PM, lencap said:

 

And here I am several years later and wondering why I did that?  I still don't have a coherent answer.  I did learn one important thing - Leicas are addicting.  Selling any of them seems like a good decision at the time, but in the end you crave it again and find yourself scanning "For Sale" listings.  

 

 

 

Lesson learned for many....once you have a Leica....keep the Leica. No sell...never. 

To return to light meter or no light meter issue.... it is up to you. I have a MA and a M6, one having light meter and the other not. I usually always pull the MA out to shoot. One doesn't really need a light meter if you just know the light and the sunny 16 rule and , in my case....I shoot BW. As someone else mentioned with Henri, he usually shot the shadows and 5.6 or F8 works out well. I have to admit, that I do own a Sekonic Twinmate as well as a Voigtlander VC11 with one of them in my pocket. Just don't use em much.

[chris_livsey]

21 hours ago, hansvons said:

There's for sure a difference between motion picture photography and street photography in many cases. However, I was more than often in the situation to shoot scenes in the streets with available light, and making an informed exposure decision was essential to my job.

 

I revisited this thread and was wondering why I wrote the expression "utter BS" (what I usually wouldn't do) and figured that it was rooted in the wording of the original quote, "You mustn't use a light meter, ..." which somewhat implies that it is verboten to use a light meter, which, of course, is utter BS. I guess it's a language thing, as the negation of "must" means in other European languages, "You don't need to ..." And with that, I don't see any discord.

 

Yes, it is of course a translation and perhaps we are pivoting on differences between must and should, these are used often as having the same meaning.

I will quote when correcting Standard Operating Procedures, part of my job, where they are used incorrectly, that "when I leave my house to go to work or park my car should I lock it or must I lock it?"

 

[wattsy]

On 10/8/2023 at 2:13 PM, chris_livsey said:

Why are we becoming obsessed with mixing the very different disciplines of still and motion photography?

Seems to be the way of the world nowadays (at least when it comes to online discourse). People seem to want to talk over each other. No nuance or actually reading the other person's point of view.

I would have thought your point that a dodgy exposed negative is better than no negative at all is a self-evident truth but I guess this is the Leica forum.

[dpitt]

On 10/8/2023 at 1:25 AM, lencap said:

And here I am several years later and wondering why I did that?  I still don't have a coherent answer.  I did learn one important thing - Leicas are addicting.  Selling any of them seems like a good decision at the time, but in the end you crave it again and find yourself scanning "For Sale" listings. 

...

Exactly. Leica is addicting and M stuff double so. Also it keeps its value, certainly if you bought it used. It is lots more fun than the money on my savings account, and it has beaten inflation and standard interest rates over the last 10 years.

On 10/8/2023 at 11:49 AM, chris_livsey said:

There is, missing the shot altogether.

Dare I say because of messing with a light meter 😉

Or because of messing with AF.

My primary concern is capturing the moment. So I try to be prepared with exposure or shoot in A mode if available.

I hate posed shots. With tabbed lenses you can often focus before lifting the camera to the eye. Or you can pre-focus on an area and wait until your moving subject enters the scene. Maybe I am old fashioned and I could do better with a modern pre-shooting system that is basically filming at 60 fps but that feels to me like bringing a machine gun to a shooting competition. It gets the job done, but where is the fun (and pride) in that? Any M user must have some masochistic inclination, otherwise you would be better of with the auto anything solutions of today. On the contrary, my satisfaction level increases with every limitation that is added...🤔 Maybe I should take out my Barnacks more often, in stead of my 'modern' Leica M9.

 

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Hallo,

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[a.noctilux]

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while waiting to obtain the "best", we let the opportunities fly away.

 

To-be-more-precise, just take one M + lens then start NOW photographing.