I really think the ideal travel companion is a Leica M film body and either a 35/90 combo or just the 50. In my case, it would be a Leica M2 with 35f2.8 C Biogon and 90f2.8 Tele Elmarit M.
While I'll go for the digital body over the film body for travel (no need to lug around and care for fresh or exposed film, and I'm never going anywhere that I'm not going to have access to power to charge batteries at least once every five days ...
🙂, I agree with your ideal kit to a great degree. When I've traveled with more, it always turns out that that's what I use the most anyway.
I've taught a lot of film photographers the basics for successful digital photography over the past decade. Hopefully these thoughts will help you too. Getting started with digital processing isn't hard, you just have to wipe your mind of "how you used to do it with film" and learn it afresh.
The digital medium is
similar to film in the coarse mechanics of taking photos, but its characteristics as a recording medium are different. You've spent a lot of time learning film: what the films do, how to expose them to get the results you want, how to process them if you do your own processing, what to tell the lab if you use a higher-end lab to do the processing, how to print negatives if you shoot negatives, etc. With that information in your head already, you can leverage a good bit of it but some assumptions you just have to let go and start fresh with.
First off, you have three choices:
1- Capture with JPEG mode and get finished images out of the camera directly. (Sounds like this is what you've been doing with the Fuji.)
2- Capture with JPEG mode intending to tune and tweak the images in an image processor before calling them finished. (I did this for years before I bought my first digital camera that saved raw format files!... with cameras that were a LOT less capable than your M9 too.)
3- Capture raw format to give you the most control and the full capabilities of the sensor in post processing. (Capturing JPEG+raw can give you the best of both worlds, at the inevitable expense of having to manage more files, learn more about processing the images, and make more decisions AFTER making the exposures rather than before. Of course, you can turn on raw processing with the other two choices too ... It's all a matter of intent.)
For each of these choices, you
a) configure the camera appropriately
b) learn what to do while making exposures in terms of settings and adjustments
c) learn what to do after making exposures in terms of image processing
What image processing software should you use? Use what came with the camera: Lightroom in this case. There are a bazillion debates on which of the dozen or two potential choices is "best" for one thing, one camera, or another, on the specific workflow you need to follow, etc etc. It's a waste of time worrying about all that stuff right now as the nuanced ability to understand all that stuff takes solid experience and learning time in at least ONE image processing app and ONE good workflow to have enough information in your head to see any differences. Lightroom is a good choice, and it works with JPEG, TIFF, PNG, and PSD image files (as well as a couple of movie formats) pretty seamlessly. What you do with image processing software is far and away more important than the specifics of what any particular app does, particularly at the beginning.
The third choice, raw to image processing in post, is the most similar to working with film and negatives if you do your own work from a theoretical perspective in that you make only basic decisions when your making your exposures (focus, aperture, time, framing, and when to push the button in essence), and you concern yourself with how to render the exposures later.
The second choice is actually a little harder to work out for your first try at this stuff than the other two because you have to understand the limitations of the particular recording medium, the camera settings and how they affect it, the limitations of JPEG images with respect to editing, and how to edit JPEGs after the fact. This is made harder because JPEG images do not provide the range of adjustment and such that raw files provide. YET it is actually what MOST people do: look at all those bazillion smartphone users out there, this is their workflow, aided by really slick, very automated little apps that do the job so efficiently.
The first choice should be very familiar to you if you have ever been a slide shooter and just sent your film to a photofinisher for processing. You learn the settings in the camera and make adjustments on the fly so that all you do is work within the known constraints of the capture mechanisms and pop your finished work out at the end. Since you've been doing this with the Fuji, the simplest place to start is to set up the M9 to do JPEG+raw and then go play with the JPEG settings until you get a feel for what the camera does and how to get as close to what you want out of it directly. Know that you can go a lot further as soon as you start importing your results into Lightroom, but if you get satisfying results straight out of the JPEG engine in the camera, you KNOW that raw processing is going to be pretty easy too.
I usually recommend people do this first for a while, simply because it helps them do the most important first thing first ... Learn the camera thoroughly. If you can get good, finished quality results directly out of the camera's JPEG engine for the majority 85% of the average photos you want to make, you've just cut your workload down to the 15% of the hard ones and don't have to waste any time or energy learning how to process the easy ones.
🙂
For option 1, set the camera to sRGB color space, btw. It's the default in most cameras and it's what you want to have set if you're outputting finished products. It makes no difference whatever to the raw files. From there, just play with picture taking and the controls. Beyond exposure controls (ISO, aperture, shutter) and picture (framing, releasing the shutter), you have white balance, saturation, contrast, and sharpening to keep you entertained for a bit, also film modes on the M9. Punch them all around in an orderly way and see what you get out of all of them. I figure about 2000*careful test exposures over the course of a week or two in batches of 100-200 per session is enough to get a really good feel for what the in-camera processing can and can't do. (Remember that spent at least that amount of time and a lot more money getting the basics of your film knowledge down, so no complaints...! ;-)
Reading all these files into LR is easy, and LR provides very good tools for sorting, grading, studying, and analyzing what you've done. Don't even bother opening the Develop module ... You can do all of this in the Library module. And you're not adjusting or rendering, you're trying to learn the camera. (You might want to use a Slide Show to play your exposures automatically for you if you've done test sequences that make that an easier way to see what's happened frame by frame.)
Tip: set a slide show to run each frame about 5 seconds, with 1.5 second transition time. You can set star ratings or even simple Pick or Toss flags while a slide show runs. This forces you to look closely and quickly at every image and make a decision as to whether it worked or not, you can compare them in detail later at your leisure.
Tip: I'm not going to teach you how to use LR. Google "Julianne Kost Lightroom" and find the Lightroom tutorial videos that Adobe pays her to create. They're excellent, cover all the basics and into advanced topics. Watch a few of the basic ones to get into the flow of the app and you'll be way ahead of people who try to figure it out on their own. Most of the problems I hear about from people who "don't like" Lightroom are a fundamental lack of understanding about how the app works; it's all 'in the manual' that Adobe offers by way of these videos.
Okay, so at this point you've learned your camera thoroughly and can get pretty decent average photos straight out of it most of the time. If that's all you need, stop there and don't bother yourself too much with raw processing for a while. Do a project or two, make a nice book ...
🙂
If you're impatient like the rest of us, though, you'll jump into option 3. Remember: this is like option 1 except that you put most of the rendering decisions AFTER the fact of making a good exposure. You still need to set ISO, aperture, shutter, focus, framing, and hit the shutter release. But you can be pretty casual about white balance and all the other stuff since a raw file is raw ... it depends on the image processor to bring it to life in rendering.
Tip: Again, go watch a few of the videos on image processing. It's not hard, and once you get the flow of it, you'll see ways that you can shortcut the process in very efficient ways. For instance, you can organize and group your photos into similar lots and 'rough in' the correct adjustments on all the photos in a group at once, or work intently on one photo, then copy those settings to a bunch of similar photos one at a time by pasting them, etc etc.
Thinking about option 3 a bit deeper, what I said about getting exposure and focus right first is just as important for digital as it is for film becomes clear. You can never really "fix" wrong exposure beyond a limited latitude, and you can never really fix poor focus, or missed framing any more than you can with film either. Basically, you want to be able to set up the raw processing defaults so that MOST of the work just rolls in raw and rolls out finished JPEGs with as little work as possible. It isn't easy, but it isn't hard either ... It's the same old challenge of doing good photography but with a different recording medium and a different set of tools.
You can't say whether you like it more or less than the film world until you've learned it well enough that you're proficient with both, IMO. If you reach that point and find you really really dislike working with the software and computer, and really love getting your fingers into the developer and fixer, well, do what you like and what makes the photos you want.
I love it all.
🙂
G
