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Fun with the Leica M Monochrom

Wow, such great work since I last looked/posted here!

Here's another Berkeley park, Indian Rock. It was one of our favorites as kids, and now it's especially popular with rock climbers for urban practice.

Few kids are allowed to play here now, except with an accompanying adult. I guess it's come to be regarded as 'too dangerous' for children.

Kirk

28 Cron (2 files stitched)

Indian Rock by thompsonkirk, on Flickr
 

jlm

Workshop Member
kirk:

nice shots; personally i would have cranked up the contrast a bit, maybe added some clarity, used a film-ike curve with lowered toe and raised shoulder (Capture 1 lingo) to get some more snap with all that texture
 

airfrogusmc

Well-known member
Also zone system lingo (LF film....)

Way over simplified but in the zone system you expose for the shadows and process the negs to control the highlights. Shadows (toe) and shoulder (highlights). With digital there really isn't a shoulder or a toe. The chart looks more like a straight line. With film the toe starts with the first perceived density on the film over film + fog. If you use a densitometer to measure and plot the densities with most film & dev combos it looks like a curve. At the shoulder the silver gets dense and starts to block up and thus creates another curve. The rest of the chart (gamma) would be pretty much a straight line. In theory those things don't happen the same way with digital. It is pretty much a straight line entirely. So these terms come from film. I think these would make fine full range prints.
 
Thanks for understanding/explaining. Yes, these files are made for printing, and in my 'scapes, as opposed to my street stuff, I'm looking for a full 'zoned' print.

And thanks for input, jlm, but that would be your style, not mine. I'm aiming at the look you're trying to 'fix. '

Kirk

Perhaps I should explain: there are lots of ways to use an MM, but IMO the most interesting use its own potentialities, and not those one might achieve with film or with another camera/sensor. One of these is that it can achieve a long tonal range with emphasis on the midtones, the tones that previously required a larger format. In this series my aim is in that direction.

I appreciate that many MMers want their images to look film-like in tonality, contrast, etc., and want to enjoy the high-ISO potentialities; so 'your intentions may vary'; that's great!
 
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Another PS: the MM is in a way quite adaptable to the Zone System - by working backwards. In the ZS you expose for shadow detail and develop for highlight detail; but with MM you do the opposite - expose to keep the highlights from clipping, and then 'develop,' in post-processing, for the shadows. Theres so much shadow detail in MM files! You can bring out shades of dark gray that any other small digital camera would have reduced to salt-and-pepper noise.

Tony Kuyper has developed some software to let you pick out a narrow range of tones for expansion/contraction (though his 'zones' don't quite match Ansel Adams'); and similar tools appear at the very bottom of the Silver Efex Pro screen.

The bigger problem is to unveil more tonality in the highlights. As Airfrog explained, there's no rounded-off shoulder in digital highlights. This is where the Kuyper and Nik software can help, by expanding the Zone VIII region and lowering the left side into a curve.

Again, I'm not recommending this to anyone else, but it's one of the MM's potentialities. Having used hand-held Leicas for 40 years, I was surprised to find myself buying one of those things called a 'tripod' to hold the camera for this more laborious kind of work. At first I thought my MM might be offended by being used as if it were a small view camera, but it doesn't seem to mind. No Decisive Moments this way, but lots of tonal gradation and fine detail.

Kirk
 
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Another PS: the MM is in a way quite adaptable to the Zone System - by working backwards. In the ZS you expose for shadow detail and develop for highlight detail; but with MM you do the opposite - expose to keep the highlights from clipping, and then 'develop,' in post-processing, for the shadows....
The bigger problem is to unveil more tonality in the highlights. As Airfrog explained, there's no rounded-off shoulder in digital highlights. This is where the Kuyper and Nik software can help, by expanding the Zone VIII region and lowering the left side into a curve.
...
FWIW, there´s a new entry on Luminous Landscape today, that goes into these issues.
 
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