This is the kind of style that the M240 does well, imo. If you allow for the weird color, the output of the M240 can look a bit like a still from a movie. It has a smoothness and a tendency to output movie-like colors, that one can appreciate or not. 🙂
To me it seems less “real”, “organic”, “analog” or “film-like” than the M9/M8, but I do appreciate how it can create it’s own little movie-world with a picture.
Pieter, although I don’t disagree with you, I should point out that the lighting here was horrendous and if I had been shooting this with the M9, I would have likely converted to B&W. As it turns out, I didn’t mind the output of the M240 here.
Peter, while the emotion is interesting in this picture, my own experience with the M9 in “horrendous” low-light lighting is not that the colors would necessarily turn out to be worse than this. Interestingly, Alex Webb in a recent video on Youtube, on his shooting in markets in Korea says, that he likes the combination of ambers and blues that one gets with the M9 is indoor scenes lit by a mixture of daylight and tungsten light. I’m sure that you are familiar with the M9 low-light technique of “Shooting at ISO 640 and pushing in Lightroom 5,” on which I started the following thread on RFF:
Actually, many of the night scenes in pictures shown in that thread are lit by fluorescent light, which, in very dark streets, often creates beautiful colors. However, there a a few shot in light as bad as difficult as in your picture, yet the M9 handles it well using the aforementioned technique.
Hi Mitch,
Thanks, yes, I am very familiar with the technique. In fact, I rarely shot above ISO 640 with my M9, choosing instead to “push” during post-processing. The the low light performance of the M9 is under-appreciated for sure.
However, you need to understand that this image was shot at ISO 3200 and was pushed to ISO 6400 during post-processing… therefore, I stand by my assertion that the M9 would have struggled with this amount of “pushing”.
Yes, Peter, I’m was one of the people who signed on to the open letter and wish we had had ten times as many signatories. And, yes, indeed, the M9 often struggles and consents to this amount of pushing only with kicking and screaming — in that it relies on the noise reduction of Lightroom 4 or 5 (specifically “Process 2012”) to facilitate this type of pushing, with which I’ve pushed some M9 shots 4 stops, to an “effective ISO” of 10,240.
As mentioned in the thread I linked above, it was Jim Kasson, on his blog “The Last Word,” who did the technical testing and explanation of this technique. On his blog he also published the results of using the same pushing technique with the M240 — but starting at ISO 1250 rather than at 640 because of the better high-ISO handling of the M240. However, he ran into an issue of green banding under certain conditions, and I haven’t followed where he came out on that. incidentally, Jim has done some good color work with the M240, although I’m not sure whether he has dealt with skin tones. You may be interested in contacting him to get his experience on this.
Hey Peter: I took liberty with your image and would like to make a suggestion for you to try. If you notice the individual on the right, he has a white shirt collar just below his neckline. Pick your white balance on the shadow in that collar and notice how it cleans up the flesh tones. I just experimented with a screen shot. Give it a try and let me know if you like/don’t like the results. I’ve found that with my M files that are captured in lousy lighting, picking a WB point in this area usually does good things to flesh tones. A decade ago, I worked for a prepress organization and they would always WB from shadow areas of a collared white shirt.
Hi Chris, thanks. I know about manually spot-setting the WB, and I tried that initially, but I found it altered the rest of the colours to something that I didn’t like. As for the crazy skin tones, this time it wasn’t the M240’s fault — that’s just the way the lighting was rendering them in the church.
>> As for the crazy skin tones, this time it wasn’t the M240′s fault — that’s just the way the lighting was rendering them in the church.<<<
Peter, this is a point of prime importance for night photography. As you say, neutralizing the colors, in a shot lit like this one, could produce "natural" skin tones, but what is natural in D50 light, is not what we see when highly colored light is falling on the subject — not to speak of creating really weird colors in the rest of the scene. I've been looking at a lot of night shots lately and find that people often neutralize the colors excessively and "lose the plot" as to how things really look under artificial light at night.
Exactly. Thanks Mitch.
Not sure which would the main advantage of the 240 over m9 in this case (inside a church) — iso capability or the silent of the shutter. The latter no doubt a huge improvement IMO.
I’d say the silent shutter. No one reacted at all, which is great.
Prosophos 
Very nice capture Peter!
Thank you Gage.
This is the kind of style that the M240 does well, imo. If you allow for the weird color, the output of the M240 can look a bit like a still from a movie. It has a smoothness and a tendency to output movie-like colors, that one can appreciate or not. 🙂
To me it seems less “real”, “organic”, “analog” or “film-like” than the M9/M8, but I do appreciate how it can create it’s own little movie-world with a picture.
Pieter, although I don’t disagree with you, I should point out that the lighting here was horrendous and if I had been shooting this with the M9, I would have likely converted to B&W. As it turns out, I didn’t mind the output of the M240 here.
Peter, while the emotion is interesting in this picture, my own experience with the M9 in “horrendous” low-light lighting is not that the colors would necessarily turn out to be worse than this. Interestingly, Alex Webb in a recent video on Youtube, on his shooting in markets in Korea says, that he likes the combination of ambers and blues that one gets with the M9 is indoor scenes lit by a mixture of daylight and tungsten light. I’m sure that you are familiar with the M9 low-light technique of “Shooting at ISO 640 and pushing in Lightroom 5,” on which I started the following thread on RFF:
http://www.rangefinderforum.com/forums/showthread.php?t=134867
Actually, many of the night scenes in pictures shown in that thread are lit by fluorescent light, which, in very dark streets, often creates beautiful colors. However, there a a few shot in light as bad as difficult as in your picture, yet the M9 handles it well using the aforementioned technique.
Hi Mitch,
Thanks, yes, I am very familiar with the technique. In fact, I rarely shot above ISO 640 with my M9, choosing instead to “push” during post-processing. The the low light performance of the M9 is under-appreciated for sure.
However, you need to understand that this image was shot at ISO 3200 and was pushed to ISO 6400 during post-processing… therefore, I stand by my assertion that the M9 would have struggled with this amount of “pushing”.
Please keep in mind, I’m a fan of the M9 (perhaps you’ve seen my Open Letter to Leica http://photographsbypeter.com/2013/11/16/an-open-letter-to-leica/) 🙂
Peter.
Yes, Peter, I’m was one of the people who signed on to the open letter and wish we had had ten times as many signatories. And, yes, indeed, the M9 often struggles and consents to this amount of pushing only with kicking and screaming — in that it relies on the noise reduction of Lightroom 4 or 5 (specifically “Process 2012”) to facilitate this type of pushing, with which I’ve pushed some M9 shots 4 stops, to an “effective ISO” of 10,240.
As mentioned in the thread I linked above, it was Jim Kasson, on his blog “The Last Word,” who did the technical testing and explanation of this technique. On his blog he also published the results of using the same pushing technique with the M240 — but starting at ISO 1250 rather than at 640 because of the better high-ISO handling of the M240. However, he ran into an issue of green banding under certain conditions, and I haven’t followed where he came out on that. incidentally, Jim has done some good color work with the M240, although I’m not sure whether he has dealt with skin tones. You may be interested in contacting him to get his experience on this.
Hey Peter: I took liberty with your image and would like to make a suggestion for you to try. If you notice the individual on the right, he has a white shirt collar just below his neckline. Pick your white balance on the shadow in that collar and notice how it cleans up the flesh tones. I just experimented with a screen shot. Give it a try and let me know if you like/don’t like the results. I’ve found that with my M files that are captured in lousy lighting, picking a WB point in this area usually does good things to flesh tones. A decade ago, I worked for a prepress organization and they would always WB from shadow areas of a collared white shirt.
Hi Chris, thanks. I know about manually spot-setting the WB, and I tried that initially, but I found it altered the rest of the colours to something that I didn’t like. As for the crazy skin tones, this time it wasn’t the M240’s fault — that’s just the way the lighting was rendering them in the church.
Peter, this is a point of prime importance for night photography. As you say, neutralizing the colors, in a shot lit like this one, could produce "natural" skin tones, but what is natural in D50 light, is not what we see when highly colored light is falling on the subject — not to speak of creating really weird colors in the rest of the scene. I've been looking at a lot of night shots lately and find that people often neutralize the colors excessively and "lose the plot" as to how things really look under artificial light at night.
Exactly. Thanks Mitch.
Not sure which would the main advantage of the 240 over m9 in this case (inside a church) — iso capability or the silent of the shutter. The latter no doubt a huge improvement IMO.
I’d say the silent shutter. No one reacted at all, which is great.