Low-light photography with the M9

[Susie]

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Advice sort, please.

My local camera club is organising a trip to photograph fungi in a local ancient woodland.  I made a trial of the kit I am proposing to use, which is my M9 with a Visoflex 1, bellows and the 12cm f/4.5 Summar lens all mounted on a tripod, with which I have had success in normal lighting conditions.  However, in the woodland, the canopy reduces the light levels considerably.

When does the trade-off between long exposures and increasing the ISO come into play?  I believe many in the club, using more modern kit, use wide apertures and focus stacking to achieve short exposures and adequate depth of field, but the other day I was having to use exposures of six to eight seconds at ISO160, which is the M9 base ISO.

Any idea, anyone - other than replacing my camera!

Susie

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[renarou]

Flashlight..

[pedaes]

I like the flash option!

I am sure there are club 'experts' who will make it ten times more difficult than necessary.  The colours will look great off the CCD sensor - especially the 'red and white' ones!

Good luck and enjoy!

[Al Brown]

22 minutes ago, Susie said:

When does the trade-off between long exposures and increasing the ISO come into play?  I believe many in the club, using more modern kit, use wide apertures and focus stacking to achieve short exposures and adequate depth of field, but the other day I was having to use exposures of six to eight seconds at ISO160, which is the M9 base ISO.

It is a CCD (waht you have) vs. CMOS (what modern cameras have) problem. Yet, you do not have to be at base ISO. M9 will work just fine even at ISO 800 😊

[Dazzajl]

There is nothing wrong with using a 6, or even 60 second exposure. As long as the tripod is nice and steady, your shots are going to look wonderful.

Long exposure and low ISO would be my choice of how to shoot.

[LocalHero1953]

When I had a M9, ISO 800 was as high as I would go for night street scenes. Anything in light shadow above this ended up banded. But that was before modern AI denoise tools!

Edited October 18 by LocalHero1953

[Sparkassenkunde]

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You might also use a small led light, they are available in very compact sizes and different power versions. They are pretty cheap and the batteries last for a while. They might also be recharged by power banks . There are many different form factors, be it a cube, a pad or a stick and they are available in bi-color or RGB variants. If I would have your mission I would certainly bring some of these lights to the woods  

[jankap]

See Digital Post processing, post 1.🫠

[3D-Kraft.com]

As the fungi are pretty static, you have every time you need for a long exposure at base ISO.

If you want to add some light with a flashlight, you can do somekind of "light-painting" which may look more interesting than "flat" light from a flash unit. I would prefer light from tungsten or halogen light bulbs. The light spectrum from LEDs is usually not balanced enough.

[Susie]

Thanks for your suggestions, guys.  I did, in fact, play about with a couple of rechargeable LED camping lamps, which helped a lot.  Paul's suggestion f going up to 800ISO would certainly help.

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These little fellows were only about an inch or so high.

The main problem with long exposures is that any movement (caused by the slightest breeze) at all will degrade the image.

Edited October 19 by Susie

[Dazzajl]

You clearly chose well, that looks fabulous 

[Greenhilltony]

Do it like push process in film. Shoot raw at ISO640, underexpose 1-2.5 stops, pull it back in LR. Better than shooting at ISO higher than 640.

[AceVentura1986]

5 hours ago, Greenhilltony said:

Do it like push process in film. Shoot raw at ISO640, underexpose 1-2.5 stops, pull it back in LR. Better than shooting at ISO higher than 640.

Yeah, I shot an ME for ten years and came to the same conclusion. The CCD is very ISO invariant, meaning that there’s no real ISO signal gain in the camera hardware, it’s all software based. As such, I always shot in raw with highest in-camera ISO being 800 and would then adjust exposure in LR and apply noise reduction if necessary. I found I could push the exposure 1.5 stops to 2500 better this way than natively in hardware. Beyond 2500 the ME was very limited and images would just fall apart, unlike the counterpart M9M which I could easily adjust three and maybe even four stops. Of course, YMMV. 

[douglas ball]

If you use Lightroom and have a fairly fast computer, I find that the Denoise works very well especially when your file sizes are only 17-18 MB to start with.  With Denoise applied your file becomes around 36 -39 MB. That is why I like to shoot there M9 because I can use Denoise without getting 65MB or 100MB with the case of an SL or S1R. 

Denoise will make your image shot even at ISO 2000 look like it was shot on 4x5 film.  But a warning, it takes a fast computer.