[Leica] Rockport Leica Seminar - M8 Impressions

[davison_m at msn.com (MARK DAVISON)]

I also had an opportunity to shoot the M8 for a few hours at Rockport.  My 
impressions mostly follow Richard's.  A few additional comments:

I have been using Lightroom beta 4 for processing groups of photographs.  I 
found I had to do a lot of tweaking with the DNG files coming from the M8, 
but they do look nice after some work.  When I shot DNG + JPG, the JPGs look 
quite good, so Lightroom really is not respecting the in camera processing 
settings.  I did not have the Leica provided Capture One converter available 
to me.

I tried using manual exposure on a cold morning, and my stiff finger kept 
hitting the on-off switch and turning the camera off when I was trying to 
set the shutter speed.

Samples can be found at

http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/MarkEDavison/Rockport+M8+samples/

These are all jpgs produced from DNG originals via Adobe Lightroom.  In a 
few cases I had to do further compression via Photoshop CS2 to come in under 
the 5 MB limit.  The panorama was quickly stitched together in 
Photoshop--there are a few stitching glitches remaining.

Overall I find the M8 a marvelous camera.  It is tuned towards very high 
resolution rather than noise suppression.  The color and dynamic range 
available from the DNG files is very good, but there is a tendency towards 
overly magenta shadows in skin tones that I found hard to take out with 
Lightroom beta 4.  I've got an M8 on order.

Mark Davison