Personal ramblings on photography
Fujifilm has unveiled their current lens roadmap. While the lineup is already pretty much comprehensive, a few additions are scheduled for this year, notably a 80mm f/2.8 Macro prime lens, and two X-Mount cinema lens.
2018 will see some ultra-wide and telephoto primes.
As I mentioned back last April, my X-Pro1 failed badly.
It cost me over CAD$600 but I got it back from Fujifilm a week or so after. Kudos to Fujifilm service. At the same time they cleaned up the camera and replaced the back screen glass that had a scratch as well as some of the body.
But 2016 hasn’t been very photographic for me as I haven’t really taken a lot of pictures. I used to carry my camera bag to work, and this year I didn’t. Nor did I post here.
Once upon a time, there was the Leica M8. Then there was the M9. Then Leica called them M, with some obscure “Typ” number next to it. Now the new M-series is the Leica M10. At least that’s logic.
The Leica M10 is the latest installment of the Leica legendary rangefinder camera, digital, using M-mount lenses. Still pricey, still high-end, still with its own style.
Key features:
Yes they removed the video mode that was on the M Typ 240. Another new things: Leica added a control wheel for ISO were the film rewind would (there was nothing on the previous digital M). Also, the preliminary tests show a sharp increase of the image quality.
Last Saturday as I was wandering around in a park in Laval, QC (northern suburb of Montréal) my X-Pro1 decided to stop working, shutter stuck closed — the camera turn on but doesn’t respond to anything ; it will respond to the firmware flash mode triggered by [DISP] + power on. A quick search lead to other people with the same problem and with a a claim of a $500~$800 (USD?) servicing cost. When a X-Pro2 cost CAD$2000, it might be a no-brainer.
The camera is now in the shop, in the hands of Fujifilm Canada technicians, and I should know soon.
In the mean time, back to shooting with the Canon 5DMkII. It is even more sad that my 2005 Canon 20D still work.
The Elephant in the digital darkroom talks about how Film is coming back to Hollywood:
It’s an inexpensive archiving system, a highly effective means of preserving the motion picture heritage. Archived 35mm film stock remains stable for centuries under proper climactic conditions. With digital, however, the film industry is discovering that its core assets, its digital motion picture masters, aren’t as permanent as the film stock they’ve replaced.
I have always thought the same about still images, that under the guise of looking more convenient, that digital wasn’t as good as an archival medium.
What about the shoe boxes with pictures from your family members?
What about those lost rolls from unknown artists that happen to be an historic treasure depicting everyday life, like for example: Vivian Maier ?
This is the digital conundrum: we shorted the photographic workflow, we make it “easier” for the photographer, we make sharing more pervasive, but we also made the archival life shorter. Between the cloud services that disappear, recordable CD/DVD that disintegrate over the years, the hard drives that crash, the stolen phones, there is a lot of uncertainty whether your photos are safe or not and whether future generation will see them or not.
I wish good luck to the archivists of our future.
FINALLY, Pentax (Ricoh) announce a full frame DSLR.
Pentax is finally in the full frame DSLR game. Ricoh today announced the new Pentax K-1, a camera that it claims “offers innovations not available in any other DSLR.”
Not sure about the “first in a DSLR” gimmicks though, nothing ground breaking from this camera except that it takes K-Mount — a decade later. As mentioned on twitter by @lamlux, the innovation is HDR on knob….
WEX photographic hands-on review:
On paper, the K-1 continues the long-held Pentax tradition of delivering an excellent and well-rounded feature set at a reasonable price – very reasonable when you consider the asking prices of similar models at launch.
We’ll see.
In 2010, Craig Mod wrote the GF1 field test — 16 Days in the Himalayas, a very compelling essay advocating Micro4/3 cameras, with the Panasonic GF1 and the 20mm f1.7. And what a gorgeous location. Later in November he wrote Seeing prime, an essay reviewing the Lumix 14mm f.2.5 and photography with a prime lens.
The in December 2013, not necessarily and change of heart but more like evidence of the shift of the whole industry Cameras, Goodbye where the iPhone quality reach the one of bigger cameras that don’t have the online features — something that the author found important. A testimonial about camera phones, with the iPhone spearheading, taking over the compact camera market.
Then come his essay The Leica Q where he took the Leica Q on a field test for six month:
I now understand the limitations of this photographic instrument, of which there are few. And I trust and enjoy it more than any other camera I’ve owned.
Yes, even more than my iPhone.
Read the whole essay — six month of use in the field is quite long enough to have a definitive opinion. It feels that Leica managed to make an attractive camera priced not too insanely above of the Sony RX1 (+ EVF to compare). This echoes quite well the early reviews back in June.
Our friends at DigitalRev TV went to the Fujifilm factory tour. Let’s watch it:
DPReview went to the Fujifilm factory in Sendai. In pictures.
David Lam show us his rig for digitizing negative using a digital camera and explain the rational behind his choices.
Back in June, Petapixel had an article about DIY film scanning with LEGO and an iPhone, an interesting alternative approach.
At a time where film scanners are mostly things of the past – where the new models are a niche segment in which flatbed scanners reach the quality that the traditional film scanner used to have, where the old models are abandoned by their vendor whose software was so mediocre that it doesn’t run on modern PCs and where the high quality machines are so expensive, it feels like the best way is to actually use these digitizing devices called digital camera that are quite common. Everything is in the setup.