Boxing with a Leica M Part 2 - Ringside

[kuvvy]

Great shots Nick. You've done a good job shooting sport in low light like this. I've just been reading the book 'Ringside' by James A Fox. That too has some nice shots but if I'm honest I much prefer the look and quality of yours. Well done.

Paul

 

[benji77]

This is superb. Well done!

 

[Scheelings]

I don't care for the digital look one bit though. Plastic, too much contrast, lacking in texture and dimensionality.

Do you really think film would have greater texture depth and dimensionality in those lighting conditions?

Low light affects film far more than digital these days.

My experience of working in this environment is that you basically have to go high contrast B&W for the best effect.

Presumably he was working at an ISO level that doesn't exist for film so making any kind of comparison is pointless.

 

[porktaco]

flat out awesome. muay thai is a fantastic thing to watch.

 

[froyd]

Fantastic photos. Froyd - on what basis do you think it does not put the new m in good light?

Meaning they don't showcase the sensor's ability because of the high contrast, clipped-highlights look of these images. I expect the M240 sensor can do better, but for this subject, this type of execution was a great choice. I could smells the sweat in the arena from looking at the images!

 

[Nick De Marco]

Thank you for all the many kind comments. I'm pleased with this short series too and will take some more at the next show.

I am particularly interested in the discussion about the M's performance in these conditions. I think I agree with all the points made above, but especially the last one by Scheelings.

Basically, the real problem here is that (i) is was very low light and (ii) the light as it was was very high contrast - spot lights against black backgrounds. I shot at 1600 iso mainly, but some were still underexposed and had to be pushed often half a stop. I have taken a series of black and white photos in Rome with the M earlier, which I shall publish soon, where the black and white I thought worked very well and did not look artificial at all. I think the real difference here is conditions - not the poor performance of the M.

Whilst I agree that some of the photos have a bit too much of a 'digital' look to them than what I personally prefer, in fact this was an occasion where I felt I needed the M. I shot with a film M the same day, pushing Tri-X to 1600 iso. Only one photo was usable. The M coped much better as a tool than film for me in these conditions. Also, I have now made some A4 prints of some of these photos. They look good, crisp, clean, maybe a little too clean, but one thing is you don't see any digital noise - I don't think I could have got that quality from the M9, and I'm not sure my 5D MkII (which I have used for this sort of thing a long time ago before) would have done as well.

Finally, I tries out the MM for a while and whilst that would have been even better for this sort of thing in terms of high iso performance without noise, it seemed to me that the images were even more digitally clean and required even more PP to make them look like film (which is my preference). I had minimal PP on these shots. I did add a bit of 'clarity' in Lightroom and some of the Alien Skin Tri-X filter in Photoshop.

All in all, I think the M was the best camera for this job, and will be the one I choose again for the next show I do.

Nick