20 Pell St., Chinatown
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I’m still marveling at the Monochrom’s image quality and I find myself trying to challenge the M9 in similar lighting conditions, trying to push dynamic range… From the 280 shots I have to judge from, the mono does seem to have a dynamic range advantage, but its really hard to tell without having a fair side-by-side comparison. I wrote in a previous post that noise levels up to ISO 800 are comparable, which seems true for shots with a fill flash. Available light shots, like the one posted above, tell a different story. This shot was taken with the M9, solely for the purpose of comparison to the monochrom, and while the highlights on the right are not totally gone, they need considerable tweaking in Lightroom. In reality, the MM seems to truly have a 2 stop advantage over the M9 in terms of noise…
here a detail screenshot of an ISO 800 shot in comparable lighting conditions – Leica M9 on the left, Leica Monochrom on the right
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that being said, a commenter pointed me to Yamasakiko Ji’s work, which reminds me how much I actually love film grain (next to the fact that I’m scanning old negatives for contact sheets/reference) and upon a little research I came across the Canon Demi EE17 half frame camera, which looks pretty sweet and I’m giving it a shot on fleabay.
copyright: photo by Yamasakiko Ji click for source