After having played successfully with Magic Lantern on the EOS M yesterday, I waited for some streaks of good weather to go outside shooting today.
What lens to take? Well, I thought being more versatile, mounting the 18-55mm zoom would be a good idea. Take the bag? Leave the bag? At the end I took the bag with me, with all accessories.
That was a good one, I can tell you!
Found myself a nice motif for the first shot, framed it and pushed the shutter release... and... nothing happened! Ergh?! Pushed playback, yes, that was the last shot of yesterday... hmmm! Let's turn the camera off and on again... ohhh... it would not turn off! Consequently, I removed the battery and repeated the exercise, actually to the very same result... What is going on?!
Still I wanted that shot. Suspecting that ML could have to do something with the problem, I changed the memory card (luckily I decided to carry the bag w/ all accessories!)... and... boooom, the shutter went, and I got my shot.
Strange, I thought, changing back to the ML card, this time with the 22mm prime. All was fine, could do some regular shot and use the extra ML features.
Ah well, just a mishap, back to the zoom lens... NO! Is it image stabilization that prevents taking images? Switched that off... Did the camera take any pictures? NO!
I ran out of ideas and after some additional testing I concluded, Magic Lantern does not like the stock zoom lens of the EOS M. This might be more a problem to ML than it is to me... People who bought the EOS M with the stock zoom (typical option in The Netherlands) might be disappointed by Magic Lantern. And they may have a point to be!
Why am I not feeling as bad about it myself?
Well, as much as I would have liked everything to work, I did buy the EOS M for one particular reason: astro-photography.
Pretty decent low light performance of the camera, combined with the possibility to write scripts to control it, those were the reasons for me. As a secondary aspect, I considered the EOS M as a companion when shooting with the Rebel XT. Concerning everyday P&S-stuff, the Lumix LX7 remains my favorite!
Let's return to the topic! Depending on what you're doing in astro-photography, you might want to have either a very fast lens, or the greatest magnification possible (which usually goes along with a rather slow aperture).
I am the proud owner of a "comet catcher". In my case this is a 6 inch f/5 Fraunhofer refractor (150mm opening, 750mm focal length), which is considered a very fast telescope. As a side remark, I also posses a 6 inch f/8 refractor.
Very obviously, the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 does not really have the edge in astro-photography. So, what can a 22mm f/2 lens do for us?!
Well, it can collect light very easily, in particular with a long exposure intervalometer, as provided by magic lantern.
In a later post I will go into details of techniques in astro-photography. For now, I would like to conclude that I am disappointed that the stock zoom lens in combination with Magic Lantern causes the EOS M to not trigger.
Update:
Actually, it seems that the effect is known as "shutter-bug" and there are 2 workarounds available, see:
http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=8825.0
