Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2011/12/16
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Having lost my darkroom and, by now, probably my darkroom skills, I no longer consider film, and therefore a fair collection of pocketable cameras, e.g. Rollei 35, are now paper weights until sold. So, what to do for the camera one always has with one--no, I don't have an iPhone and no intention of getting one. Before deciding to invest in a full-frame digital camera, I bought Lightroom and a "junk" camera, a Nikon Coolpix S610 to help me decide whether I would be happy in the digital world. Then came the decision as to which camera, and as I wrote before, remembering how much I loved my M6, I took the hideous financial plunge and bought an M9 body. Recently, I started brooding about the fact that I should start having a camera with me all the time, and am emotionally incapable of risking even cosmetic damage to a $7K device. Besides, the M9, while light, small, and handy, is just not, to me, a wear it all the time camera. What to get? Most cameras that produce RAW are expensive enough to cause marital problems and I don't think any could be called pocket size--possibly one of the Ricoh models, but I'm damned if I'll pay that price for a camera that doesn't come with a viewfinder. Finally, I started to reconsider that miserable little Nikon. It took about an hour to find all the menus, disable almost all automatic features, and get its behavior to approximate that of a film point and shoot. So, the only auto feature I left in is color balance, since that would minimize the amount of color adjustment needed in LR. Next, I set it to do only center-weighted focus, with a focus lock, which is also an exposure lock, when the shutter release is pushed to a point of resistance. It took me a long time to discover the menu for setting ISO manually. I then was pleased to see that ISO value always shows on the screen. Also shutter speed and stop show when the release is pressed to the resistance point. ISO change is the way to control shutter speed because the stop range is small. So, with all of these settings, the camera becomes usable! Finally, there is a macro mode, which will be helpful with flowers. I was surprised at how low the noise level is at ISO 3200--a bit better than the M9 at 2400. A tribute to the near death of this year's fall colors is here: http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/herbk1/Last+fall+colors.jpg.html -- Herbert Kanner kanner at acm.org 650-326-8204 Question authority and the authorities will question you.