Leica M8 / Summilux 35 ASPH / ISO 2500

[Dante_Stella]

My friends got their band back together for its first gig in about a decade, and they asked me to shoot it.

My conclusion is that people must just love to gripe about ISO 2500. I think I like it, particularly the way the grain comes in like on film. I am attaching the grainiest frame I could find; if you look through the gallery, the grain at normal web sizes is pretty negligible. The dynamic range, though, gets a little bit pinched. And if you do color, well, yuck.

These were shot at f/1.4, mostly on manual, with shutter speeds from 1/60 to 1/125 second. Conversion via Lightroom.

Gallery here.

Knaves page here.

 

[Pherdinand]

some of the shots are pretty good!
this one however, i really dislike, sorry
my cheap gsn with neopan 1600 and diafine would do quite better, imo.
This is a comment on the technical qualities delivered by the gear you used, only. Nothing personal.

 

[pstevenin]

I do not totally agree with Pherdinand, as I've shooted numerous bands an theatre scores with M6TTL+ 35 Cron or 50 Lux pre-asph using either TMAX 3200 Neopan 1600 or even a one stop pushed HP5, and I do not have that amount of details on the shadows.

I guess also Dante you didn't shoot with an IR filter, flare resistance is quite good. I always screw it off when I plan that kind of session, otherwise I get severe spolight reflexions. And yes, dynamics is quite scarce...

 

[Pherdinand]

neopan1600 at e.i. 2400 in diafine. Just for comparison.
You can judge the light levels.

disclaimer: This is not an anti-anything reply. Just a discussion on the started topic.

 

[maddoc]

neopan1600 at e.i. 2400 in diafine. Just for comparison.
You can judge the light levels.

disclaimer: This is not an anti-anything reply. Just a discussion on the started topic.

Haven't seen such good low-light photos yet, amazing !

 

[Pherdinand]

thanks, guys
Actually, my example is not fully consistent with my previous comment, since these two were shot with the konica hexar (af version), not the gsn. (Gsn cannot go above e.i. 1000.)
But the film+development is as i wrote.

 

[hlockwood]

My friends got their band back together for its first gig in about a decade, and they asked me to shoot it.

My conclusion is that people must just love to gripe about ISO 2500. I think I like it, particularly the way the grain comes in like on film. I am attaching the grainiest frame I could find; if you look through the gallery, the grain at normal web sizes is pretty negligible. The dynamic range, though, gets a little bit pinched. And if you do color, well, yuck.

These were shot at f/1.4, mostly on manual, with shutter speeds from 1/60 to 1/125 second. Conversion via Lightroom.

Gallery here.

Knaves page here.

Being a B&W-only shooter, if I were contemplating an M8, these shots would put me over the top.

Harry

 

[tmfabian]

Just a little addon to what the good Dante started. This was shot at ISO 1250 in near pitch black conditions with a handheld 1 second exposure. People i think just like to gripe in general.

 

[Dante_Stella]

Pherdinand, I'm still waiting for that shot with the GSN! 🙂 But I'm not holding my breath - having shot a GSN for a couple of years, one big hangup was not being able to lock down the exposure consistently from shot to shot - something of a problem where the camera could bite down on a 30-second exposure or blow through one at 1/500, depending on whether that cell was seeing mostly shadows or being blinded by overhead spotlights. Nor is bracketing easy or straightforward. Shooting a band like that would have been pretty hit or miss with the Yashica.

Neopan 1600... It's tolerable in a normal developer like Xtol (although at 16k, it's really pushed a bit). And yes, I've done it in Diafine. What I experienced was more base fog and compression of the tonal scale on the negative (pretty close to the same thing as with Plus-X). Diafine makes it possible to print many otherwise unprintable frames, but with quite a few films, it's only if you are willing to dial up the contrast.

Honestly, though, although I like the two pictures you posted, they don't tell people a whole lot about how Diafine and Neopan handle huge brightness ranges (although they do speak volumes about the extreme flare resistance of the Hexar AF lens). If you imagine out the street lamps (the point light sources in the background), I'm guessing (since I wasn't there) that this scene probably does not have a massive range from light to dark; in other words, it's all shadows and therefore closer to a normal scene than a situation in which your subject's head is being lit by a spotlight ten feet away.

Later,
Dante

P.S. Is that beach at den Haag?

 

[Dante_Stella]

I guess also Dante you didn't shoot with an IR filter, flare resistance is quite good. I always screw it off when I plan that kind of session, otherwise I get severe spolight reflexions. And yes, dynamics is quite scarce...

Actually, I did use a UV/IR, and it was fingerprinted. I bet it would have been better had I cleaned the filter!

Cheers
Dante

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Just a little addon to what the good Dante started. This was shot at ISO 1250 in near pitch black conditions with a handheld 1 second exposure. People i think just like to gripe in general.

I agree. Besides the point that it's causing some prohibitely-expensive GAS :bang:


Here's a shot of mine with that other Summilux, the 50mm f/1.4 pre-asph, with the M8 at ISO 2500:



Once you figure out how to let that shadow detail come up nicely, it's certainly workable. The big "secret" is to either work with DNG files, or JPEGs with all the image settings set to "off" or "soft".

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

Here's another one:


M8 + 50mm f/1.4 Summilux pre-asph E46 @ ISO 2500


I think I also shot this as a straight JPEG in-camera.

 

[Pherdinand]

I do have some neopan at 1000 with the gsn, i will dig them out for you 🙂
Not concert shots, though. You are right, it can become too contrasty scene for anything but the eyes, and i use an incident meter if situation allows. My point was, with equipment of the caliber of M8+Summilux asph i would expect better than neopan in diafine and a cheap fixed-lens rf.
My issue with the gsn is not the meter (which i found difficult to cheat) but the mystery of the actual shutter speed, and the max E.I.

All-shadows was on the beach of Barcelona, in this case. Once or twice i did sleep on the beach close to the Hague (illegally) but the event was not recorded 🙂

 

[Pherdinand]

ok, here's the neopan at 1000 from the gsn:

and enlarged a bit through a microscope:

here's another one that was shot in daylight and heavily magnified/cropped:

and here's a concert shot, on delta 3200 at 3200, shot in an old contax iiia and a sonnar 50/1.5 with handheld metering before the show (excellent concert, but forgot the guys' name🙁 )
(approx. 42x magnified, depending on your monitor size)

 

[iridium7777]

i didn't look through your set of pictures, but the one you posted i wouldn't have. it looks like crap with the vertical sensor noise lines running through the whole right side of the image.

this is the one where after you look at it, convert it to b&w, you just admit the sensor limitations of your camera and click the "trash-it" button. there's nothing film-like about it. sorry, just one man's opinion, and no, i don't own an m8.

My conclusion is that people must just love to gripe about ISO 2500. I think I like it, particularly the way the grain comes in like on film.

 

[Dante_Stella]

I don't know what you are looking at, but there are curtain folds behind. And sensor noise would be running from the left to the right in a vertical frame.

i didn't look through your set of pictures, but the one you posted i wouldn't have. it looks like crap with the vertical sensor noise lines running through the whole right side of the image.

this is the one where after you look at it, convert it to b&w, you just admit the sensor limitations of your camera and click the "trash-it" button. there's nothing film-like about it. sorry, just one man's opinion, and no, i don't own an m8.

 

[iridium7777]

but there are curtain folds behind

well never mind then...:bang:

 

[Gabriel M.A.]

I don't know what you are looking at, but there are curtain folds behind. And sensor noise would be running from the left to the right in a vertical frame.

BTW, Dante: if the lighting in the original shot is replete with Tungsten lighting, I recommend leaving the White Balance untouched, with saturation as low as possible and contrast to low or "linear", and do your B&W processing from there.

I've found that the noise gets nasty when you try to do the opposite when converting to B&W; also, in Lightroom, you may want to turn the Luminance noise reduction low, but the Color noise reduction high -- this brings out a nice "grain" feel in B&W without "blotchiness".

Just my twopence. 🙂

 

[tmfabian]

Ok, so this one doesn't really count in the super high ISO range but it does demonstrate usability in low light situations.
50 summilux pre-asph wide open at 640 ISO

 

[Pherdinand]

the camera sensor records a certain intensity for the red,green and blue channels. When tweaking the white balance, you tweak the relative intensity of the three channels. In order to get blue and green out of a tungsten-illuminated scene, the blue,green channels have to be tremendously amplified compared to the red channel (since there is not much blue light from the beginning!).
Whenever electronic amplification happens, noise increases.
For black and white end result, it does not really matter what the colour temperature of the scene was unless you want to emphasise the brightness of a certain colour - orange of the tungsten illumination is suitable to start with.

This is to explain a bit on Gabriel's excellent advice on doing BW from digital capture.