Tina:
Lovely photos. The "Window Textures" shot shows what the camera can do,
tonally. The "Jasmine" shot points up digital's Achilles heel, as Dawid
notes. The photos of Tom and "Barn Kitty" are low-contrast subjects that
don't tax the camera much.
I think that in photos with appreciable contrast, MM users are going to
have to apply some variant of a reverse S-curve to get something
approaching film-like highlight tonality. You might try that. The question
is, if you go for more highlight gradation, how much you can pull up the
shadows before you get the Muddy Uglies or True Grit. And yes, some
careful testing with the Minolta spot meter might give you a good roadmap
to where things fall on the MM sensor. It's still a digital sensor, so
there is that absolute highlight ceiling rather than film's long "toe."
Make your own toe and see if the price you pay in the midtones is worth
it.
It's kind of like doing Ansel Adams' work again, except that the curve
tool is your developer. And like slide film, you *have* to expose for the
highlights.
There are aspects of the MM look that are very film-like, but at the same
time, the look is quite digital too. Part of it is the linearity and
dynamic range limitations, as Dawid says. Another is that the grain
appears in different tones with different proportions than with film, with
more in the shadows and less in the light and middle tones.
Another thing I've noticed is that available dark pictures with the really
good high ISO cameras are often *too* good. You don't get the same visual
cues that tell you that the picture was taken in dim light. I wonder if
some of those wonderful indoor Noctilux shots of yours from the Honduras
village would be as effective with a "better" digital M.
It may be that none of this matters. It's just another "look," and it has
a beauty of its own. As people get used to it, the differences may not
matter except to die-hards like us.
All that said, the MM is tantalizing, even though I'm not a candidate
unless I win the lottery. I've been pretty happy with my M8 B&W
conversions, which I do with individual custom mixing of the color
channels for each photo. It would be so nice to get more high ISO, more
dynamic range, sharper "grain" that has the texture of fine film grain in
a print, but at ISO 2500.
And *that* said, if I had more time, I would probably still be shooting
B&W film some of the time. Silver molecules just deal with light more like
our vision does, and silicon does its own thing.
I'm very interested in the OM-D. It checks a lot of my "I want" boxes, but
I keep hesitating. I keep asking myself, do I want another computer system
disguised as a camera that has oodles of features and takes higher-quality
high ISO than I ever could with film, but with the loss of something very
basic. The digital M cameras, for all their foibles, give you back some of
what other digital cameras take away, but not all.
--Peter
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