A Digital Monochrome Dilemma

Keith said:
My opinion would be that if you can afford to buy a dedicated monochrome camera do it for the emotional reasons and keep logic and physics out of it. Life is too short to vacillate over such things! 🙂
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Thanks Keith (long time, ‘eh?)

I’m not vacillating - at least not yet. That’s because I’m yet to receive the funds 😂

For now, I’m just pushing ideas around and letting them stew in my head. Maybe they’ll be cooked by the time the funds arrive 🤞

…Mike
 
mfunnell said:
Thanks Keith (long time, ‘eh?)

I’m not vacillating - at least not yet. That’s because I’m yet to receive the funds 😂

For now, I’m just pushing ideas around and letting them stew in my head. Maybe they’ll be cooked by the time the funds arrive 🤞

…Mike
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I just think that if you have an itch that needs scratching and you can do it ... why not! :D Good to see you back here. :)
 
jsrockit said:
You could always split the $... buy two things. The Pentax K3 Monochrome goes for $2199 and you can buy a few awesome (and small) lenses for less than $500 each.
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That's something I certainly have in the mix of "things I might do" when I think on actually executing this "not yet a plan"...
Freakscene said:
The K-3 iii M is a good choice, with the proviso that to get along with the K-3 iii M you need to like SLRs and be willing to engage with a (potentially new) complicated user interface. I bought (so far!) the 15, 21, 35 and 70mm HD Pentax Limiteds for much less than the cost of one used Leica lens. The design approach and performance aims are different to Leica, but I like them a lot, particularly the 35 and 70mms.

Oh, and that you can get one. I gather they are very thin on the ground.

And (draw breath) given your ‘shaken, so blurred’, you’ll find that the implementation of vibration reduction in the Pentax really helps for hand held photography. You can photograph anything you can see (which is less than with the Leica . . . ).
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Thanks for reinforcing the idea of the Pentax SLR. I've been looking at what I actually do when doing post-processing on photos originally taken, quite deliberately, with the intention of converting them to B&W later. I've been doing that over the last couple of days and paying attention to how that processing has gone. To a surprising (to me) extent, I'm working the mix of colours I use to get just the conversion I want to emphasise some parts of the photo and de-emphasise others.

To such an extent that I'm now re-thinking this whole idea. I certainly do not want to end up trying to recreate what I do in colour conversion by having to faff-about with filters when using a mono-only camera. Perhaps I'd be better off "testing the waters" with the Pentax, rather than diving in headfirst with an expensive Leica (which seems the only other option).

The two photos I'm thinking of (taken yesterday and today) are:



I'm wondering whether I'd get results I find as pleasing (to me, YMMV) if I had an interpretation baked-in by use of a mono-only camera.

Certainly food for (re?)thought...

...Mike

P.S. I'm actually pretty fine with hand-holding at low shutter speeds (I've had decent results). Nonetheless, I have come to appreciate image stabilisation, whether in-body or in-lens (the Canon way) so that's also a consideration in the mix.
 
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With the M Monochrom: the amount of detail in the shadows is incredible. Highlights are more easily clipped. Use a color filter just like on a film camera.

Straight Export:

L1005046_100crop by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr

What was recorded.

G5046_100crop by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr

If you are primarily shooting Monochrome- just get the dedicated monochrome camera.

Just go with it.
 
I have considered buying an M monochrom, but in my case I probably do too much color work to make it really worthwhile. The other thing that gives me reason for pause though, is that I have both been told and read, that because the monochromes do not have color channels this means that there is much less scope to retrieve blown highlights than with a color camera. This worries me as I hate blown highlights - I find this phenomenon very jarring and discordant when they appear in my images. Of course, I suppose I can reduce this risk by under exposing the images as I presently do anyway with normal color cameras, then correcting in post, but I am not sure whether the lack of color channels would also compromise the ability to pull back detail from under exposed shadow areas. The critiques never discuss this aspect. Hence my concern.

One thing I can say though is that there are some cameras which seem to have some secret sauce with regard to black and white. When I am in the mood to shoot black and white I will usually set my camera to shoot in JPG and RAW formats and also set the JPG images to monochrome. I find that Panasonic cameras produce especially nice in-camera JPG/BW images in this way (and of course I still have the RAW images to fall back on and convert in post if I am unhappy with the BW versions). But I seldom am unhappy with Panasonic BW results, - they have in-camera software which allows me to emulate color filters for example, and these do a pretty good job of reproducing tones that seem fairly authentic and look good to the eye (and I have a pretty critical eye in such matters.)

So there you are. If I had all the money in the world I would buy a monochrome and use it when I feel the urge coming on. But I am not altogether convinced yet, that it would produce results sufficiently different from those I can produce in post using a RAW image or better results than those which some cameras which can produce using firmware. Having said this of course this comes from a position of partial ignorance based on lack of experience of monochroms.
 
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First-Hand Knowledge: it is easier to recover highlights from a color camera when converting to monochrome. Typically one or two channels saturate, not all three. So- when converting to Monochrome, and doing an interpolation of the RGB channels- you essentially get a higher saturation count. I wrote my own monochrome conversion algorithms for the M8 and M9. You still get spatial conversion artifacts. Which I hate- so I have the M Monochrom and the M8 and M9. I wanted to see how far I could push the conversion process.
 
Sonnar Brian said:
First-Hand Knowledge: it is easier to recover highlights from a color camera when converting to monochrome. Typically one or two channels saturate, not all three. So- when converting to Monochrome, and doing an interpolation of the RGB channels- you essentially get a higher saturation count. I wrote my own monochrome conversion algorithms for the M8 and M9. You still get spatial conversion artifacts. Which I hate- so I have the M Monochrom and the M8 and M9. I wanted to see how far I could push the conversion process.
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I’m not sure I get all of that (I’ll have to think about “spatial conversion artefacts” some more :unsure:) but at least I get most of it. From some of my reading, I’m getting that protecting highlights is key with pure-mono digital - which, I’m guessing, can run hard into “expose to the right”😱

I think I can handle most of that. It’s the trade-offs between the flexibility of conversion from colour vs some resolution, work-flow etc. advantages of mono-only which are making me think.

I’ll conclude, well, something 😂

For now, though, just reading up, thinking about it - and going out and practising - is its own reward as well, no matter what I end up doing. A good ramp back into photography after a work-induced blockage.

…Mike
 
Sonnar Brian said:
First-Hand Knowledge: it is easier to recover highlights from a color camera when converting to monochrome. Typically one or two channels saturate, not all three. So- when converting to Monochrome, and doing an interpolation of the RGB channels- you essentially get a higher saturation count. I wrote my own monochrome conversion algorithms for the M8 and M9. You still get spatial conversion artifacts. Which I hate- so I have the M Monochrom and the M8 and M9. I wanted to see how far I could push the conversion process.
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The key is not to blow important highlights in the first place. That would be proper exposure. :)

Some scenes have a greater range of lighting dynamics than the medium, whether film or digital, can record. With such scenes, you have to pick what's important and what's not. You then let what's not important go, and try to be sure that it's not a significant part of what you're making a photograph of.

The 'bottom end' of the Leica M10-M recording range is much cleaner than the bottom end of any color camera I've worked with, including the M10-R. So if you pin the important highlights to Zone 8 or 9, and then bring up the Zone 2 to 5 range in rendering, the blown highlight issue is rare.

G
 
The highlight weighted metering in the M11M retains detail in everything apart from specular highlights. The MM, Typ 246 and M10M have, well, simpler, metering, to put it kindly. The Pentax K-3 iii M metering preserves highlights really well.

All these Monochrome digital cameras have way, way, way more shadow detail, which can be brought up easily enough, than you will ever need. In the 246, well, mine anyway, you might run into banding in lifted shadows before you have lifted them as much as you’d like them to be lifted.

If the colour information is necessary for your workflow, don’t even think about this monochrome camera. Filters, particularly orange and red, shift the focus way more than you’d expect, which is ok with live view but can be a real problem on the MM. Yellow works well, and the Leica, Heliopan SHPMC or B+W MRC filters provide a nice increase in the controllability by cutting areas that are often part of what blows out. Whatever Calzone says, none of these are made out of Schott S8612 glass (I have measured their transmission spectra) and they still let some UV and almost all the IR through, which has occasional strange effects on your photos. IR contamination in Monochrome is hard to pin down until you’ve seen it a lot. The Pentax has autofocus that works really well and manages shift, as does using live view on the Leicas. I almost spent as much on filters as I did on lenses when I bought the Pentax (exaggerating).

IMG_2754.jpeg
Typ 246, 75 Summicron. There is a lot of banding in the shadows in this photo.

IMG_2760.jpeg
Same camera, lens, ISO. Hardly any banding. No idea why.

IMG_2763.jpeg
Typ 246, Hexanon-M 50mm f2, B+W medium yellow MRC filter. I have other photos taken of this scene with other cameras. None of them show the spider web near the top centre as clearly.
 
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The Type 246 Monochrome used 12-bit values, as did the Kodak 760m. Kodak had the same problem with banding.
Leica chose to clip the low-order 2 bits of the image, the original M Monochrom is 14-bits. That makes a big difference in monochrome images as they are not interpolated.

I have a set of lenses that are optimized for use with color filters on the M monochrom. I set them to account for the color shift when using an Orange filter.
 
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Sonnar Brian said:
The Type 246 Monochrome used 12-bit values, as did the Kodak 760m. Kodak had the same problem with banding.
Leica chose to clip the low-order 2 bits of the image, the original M Monochrom is 14-bits. That makes a big difference in monochrome images as they are not interpolated.
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I understand, but its manifestations under shadow manipulation are weirdly inconsistently apparent. I have a Kodak 760m, it still even works and I can still get batteries for it that work.

Rendering video from the 246 is a really unspeakably strange experience.

IMG_2761.jpeg
 
I run all of my M Monochrom images through a Fortran program that applies a Gamma curve and outputs a DNG file using 16-bit values. Many people spend a lot of time post-processing the images as they tend to be flat as recorded. Leica bundled Sefx2 with the camera. I wrote code to batch process DNG files and apply the curve. Converting the pixels to 16-bits means that all 14-bit values get mapped to a unique 16-bit value, no "collisions" that would reduce resolution.

GAMMA by fiftyonepointsix, on Flickr
 
Out to Lunch said:
My two cents: Whenever the cash arrives on your doorstep, focus not on cameras but on lenses. Cheers, OtL.
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I have always been inclined to think "camera bodies come and go, but lenses are forever". So it's probably what I'll be doing if I decide not to proceed down the "monochrome only camera" path.

...Mike
 
I have no intention of spending more and more! You want great BW on digital? Get and old camera with CCD sensor. I use mainly a Minolta G-600. Small sensor camera. Good for 20x30cm prints! New is not better! image not touched, straight JPEG!PICT0973.JPG
 
Freakscene said:
The highlight weighted metering in the M11M retains detail in everything apart from specular highlights. The MM, Typ 246 and M10M have, well, simpler, metering, to put it kindly. The Pentax K-3 iii M metering preserves highlights really well.

...
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You've posted some lovely photos! Thank you!

I don't need a sophisticated metering system that does scene evaluation or weights the readings. I need a simple metering system with a clearly defined pattern and accuracy, that's all. I can do the weighting in my head and make adjustments as long as I trust the values that the meter provides. I discovered this ages ago ... I do better with limited area or heavily center-weighted metering than with any evaluative system.

In fact, I'd have to say I always get my best exposures when I use an incident light meter or 1° spot meter for tele work... ;)

G

"Just the facts, camera. Thank you."
 
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