Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2002/08/02

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Subject: Re: [Leica] M7 shutter lag (or lack thereof?)
From: Nathan Wajsman <wajsman@webshuttle.ch>
Date: Fri, 02 Aug 2002 11:33:34 +0200
References: <Pine.GSO.4.05.10207301618560.7324-100000@mucho.2alpha.com> <001901c2383c$f70cce40$633f4d18@gv.shawcable.net>

Hi Ted,

As much as I respect your opinions and even more so your work, I have to
disagree with you on this one. Shutter lag IS an important consideration when
choosing a camera if you take "decisive moment" type pictures. I am right now
looking at your picture of Pierre Trudeau sliding down the handrail that you so
kindly sent to me last year; I very much doubt that this picture could have been
made with a modern electronic camera. By the time the shutter tripped, Trudeau
would probably have been all the way down (assuming that you had spotted the
scene at the same moment as you actually did).

I agree with you that of course one does not think about the shutter lag before
taking each picture, but certainly one of the virtues of the Leica (and other
mechanical rangefinders like the Voigtlander line) is the extremely short
shutter lag. You may have never thought about it before reading about it here on
the LUG, you bought your Leicas for other reasons, but it is precisely the
virtual absence of shutter lag that has allowed you to just ignore it all those
years!

If the Leica M7 really did have a shutter lag of 100ms, then I would not have
bought it. And I am sure that you would have noticed that somehow your pictures
shot with it are not quite up to the standard you have set with your earlier M
bodies.

Fortunately this is not the case, the M7 shutter lag is on par with the 10-12ms
of earlier M models, so can continue to happily ignore the issue...

Kind regards,
Nathan

Ted Grant wrote:

> I can never fathom being concerned about ms delay as I'm always far more
> concerned at capturing the magic moment with nothing else interfering with
> my finger reflexes!  Do you folks concerned with this actually think about
> it as you're tripping the shutter?
>
> As in, "OK now we're coming up to what I think will be the big moment,
> therefore I should start to squeeze down on the shutter release 100ms before
> it actually happens to capture the peak action."  Do you really do that? Or
> even think that way while shooting?
>
> Hell I'm so busy concentrating on the light, eyes and the action of
> capturing the moment, I'm not even thinking about anything else. But gee
> whiz maybe for 50 years I've been doing something wrong all this time and
> all those sport action pictures I did were flukes! ;-)
>
> So please explain to me "in real time meaning " just what this ms thing has
> to do with real photojournalistic photography and just how it can be
> applied, don't forget to please do so in common sense logic for successful
> photographs.
>
> Thank you.
> ted
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html

- --
Nathan Wajsman
Herrliberg (ZH), Switzerland

e-mail: wajsman@webshuttle.ch
mobile: +41 78 732 1430

Photo-A-Week: http://www.wajsman.com/indexpaw2002.htm
General photo site: http://www.wajsman.com/index.htm



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To unsubscribe, see http://mejac.palo-alto.ca.us/leica-users/unsub.html

Replies: Reply from Ted Grant <tedgrant@shaw.ca> (Re: [Leica] M7 shutter lag (or lack thereof?))
In reply to: Message from Peter Klein <pklein@2alpha.net> ([Leica] M7 shutter lag (or lack thereof?))
Message from Ted Grant <tedgrant@shaw.ca> (Re: [Leica] M7 shutter lag (or lack thereof?))