A few thoughts on time stamps

George Jardine (a Lightroom export) wrote A Few Thoughts on Time Stamps, how he manages time stamps and deal with timezones.

It is a personal thing, and my personal choice is using UTC in the camera and timezone in the library to have the local time (local to the location of the picture). This raise a problem in Ligthroom, but it works in Aperture. And it matches with geo tagging using GPS traces.

The Online Photographer: Shooting with a Fuji X100

The Online Photographer has a guest post by Robert Plotkin: Shooting with a Fuji X100.

Plotkin has a lots of gripes against the focusing system:

The imprecise focusing takes an unusually long time. It is like waiting for a cashier to incorrectly manipulate an abacus and hand you the wrong change.

He also have issues with the usability. But in the end:

Shooting the Fuji X100 is like driving a vintage Ferrari: bugs in your teeth, pebbles ricocheting off your goggles, double-clutching straight cut gears, applying opposite lock to correct a slide — and coming out of the corner neck-and-neck with a soccer mom in a black Escalade of an SLR.

Read it thoroughly. I still want to get one.

Leica factory visit

The kind people at Luminous Landscape have an article about a Leica factory visit in Solms, Germany (by Nick Rains).

These [Leica S2 and M9] are hand made products — quite literally. It’s why they are desirable in the first place and the process can only proceed so fast. I’m told it takes 8 hours to assemble an M9 body and having seen the care and precision with which they are assembled, I can certainly believe it.

This should explain why the quality is at the top along with the price.