The Online Photographer

What's the Best All-Around Digital Camera on the Planet?

To run a blog like this you look at a thousand things, remember a hundred, and write about ten. Recently (I mentioned my birthday, and my age—I suppose it's related) I've been having more trouble keeping the threads alive in my mind. I let more things drop, and lose some things I meant to write about. Occasionally I even offend someone along the way. But I don't mean to. It's just that it's getting tougher for me to juggle it all in my memory.

So I awoke with a start this morning to the realization that I never continued the "Best Digital Cameras" postings! Arrrgh. Here's Part I, but it makes no sense without a Part II and maybe even a Part III.

Sorry about that. I'll get on it.

Dang.

Idle Q
Meanwhile, a question. Assuming there is such a thing—many will demur, with good reason—is it possible to pick, out of current offerings, one best all-around all-purpose camera? With everything in the best possible balance—image quality and printability, price and value, operational strengths, versatility and utility, dealer network and service, system, functionality, and user experience?

If you had to pick, which camera would you say that is? I have one in mind, but I'll hold off mentioning my notions of it lest I unduly influence others.

If you don't want to play, or think it's a stupid question, fair enough. So don't play. But I like this sort of mental exercise in connoisseurship. I think it can be clarifying, and hence possibly useful.

...Well, maybe that's rationalizing. It can be fun, is probably more like it.

What would you say? Assuming you had to pick one.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Pick one
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Featured Comments from:

Craig A. Lee: "Personally, my ideal camera would feature 52 weeks of paid vacation per year. That way I would have time to put interesting places, people, and things in front of it."

Computer Update (OT)

Since I have gassed on in the past about my computer shopping, I thought I would post an update.

After several months of running the 13" MacBook Air as my desktop computer, it became obvious that it was having a bit of trouble in that role. The trouble? The MacBook Air can get no air. Its tiny little stylishly miniaturized fan would kick on and dutifully make noise, but, without anywhere for air to flow amidst all the slender slimness and styleyness, the waferlike little wedge would just get hot and make noise.

So I've bought an Apple desktop computer.

This would have been easy, except for the fact that Apple does not really make desktop computers any more. Well, it sort of does, but not for people who want to use separate, third-party monitors like my lovely calibrate-able NEC. They make a Mac Pro which is not pro (more about that in a minute) and a Mac Mini, which was deliberately handicapped in 2014 to be worse than the one it replaced. The Mini in general is intended by Apple for ratty second-class citizens who had previously wandered lost in the purgatory of PC use, so it doesn't have to be any good, right? The desktops Apple wants proper Apple customers to use are the ones that come built into the back of displays...the iMacs. Otherwise, your Hobson's Choice is too little computer, or too much computer.

Since too much computer, from Apple, costs a lot, I ended up buying a late-2012 Mac Mini, my first-ever "used" Macintosh. (I have been using Macintoshes since the very first one in 1984.)

This was not easy. The competition for 2012 Mac Minis is fierce, because so many Apple customers actually need, you know, computers. (They seldom show up as Apple refurbs, for example.) The one I bought (from eBay, ye gads) is thoughtfully maxed out. It is a 2.6 GHz Quad-Core i7 with 16 GB of Crucial RAM and two hard drives, a 1 TB SSD and a 1 TB HDD, and a clean install of Sierra. The solid-state drive is a Samsung SSD 850 EVO, which seems to get good reviews. The other one is the spinning drive that came with the unit when it was new. I paid $1,009.

I also bought this:

...It's a 3D-printed replacement base for 2012 Mac Minis that has ventilation holes around the rim. The company that makes it is called Shapeways. The Internet says it lets the Mini run cooler so the fan kicks on less often. After abusing my poor weak-ass tiny-fan-having MacBook Air for several months it seemed like a good idea.

So I've bought an older computer to replace a newer computer. Then again, the Cubs won the World Series, Voldemort is president, and it was 71°F in February in Upstate New York the other day, so clearly we are in the Apocalypse and everything is backwards and upside down. So why not?

Why I'm grumpy about Apple
I'm a longtime Apple fan and I love Apple, but it makes me grumpy now.

There are three apocalyse-type signs that Apple has lost the narrative when it comes to stand-alone desktop computers. One was that the 2014 (current) Mini was deliberately crippled compared to its predecessor. Another is that Apple hasn't bothered to update the Mini and the Pro in years...not high (enough) profit areas; they're not that interested.

The third was the "trashcan" Mac Pro. You've seen it—a styley, miniaturized black cylinder, the price of which includes Veblen-Good inflation. I've heard it was good video workstation when it came out, but as a "pro" computer it's just wrong. Not a bad product, just one that does not take the preferences of its target market into account.

...And gives them something they do not need. "Pro" is a marketing word that has been applied to everything and anything (I think the most ridiculous application of it I've seen was to toilet paper, but there are more examples almost as bad), but the reason it has resonance is that the real meaning of "pro" is that it signifies that the people who use the thing, whatever the thing is, have a job to do, and have chosen the most versatile, capable, and effective tool available to do it with. The previous Mac Pro was oversized and came in a utilitarian aluminum box with big honking handles on it for moving it around. It was highly configurable and customizable; it had lots of room inside for whatever you wanted to put in it as well as for a big fan and liberal amounts of airflow. You could do anything you wanted to it, and hence with it. It was designed to be easy to repair.

In other words, a versatile, capable, effective, user-centered tool for making a living with.

By the time the 2013 Mac Pro came around, however, Apple had become a design- and lifestyle-oriented company, and it made the Mac Pro fashionable and petite. Apple also priced it out the wazoo to help the "Pro" appeal to wealthier customers, as also befits Hermès scarves and Louis Vuitton handbags.

Which, you'll note, are not called pro scarves or pro handbags. Maybe they should have ditched the "Pro" moniker and renamed it the Apple LaApple, after the Ferrari LaFerrari. It lost the workin'-for-a-livin' gestalt if you ask me.

So what about people like me who just need a computer? Well, I am supposed to use an iMac. There's no basic Apple computer in the middle that doesn't come attached to a display.

So how will this go?
Call me pessimistic, but I don't see this latest move of mine going well. I'm bad with computers, which is one reason why I've always used Macs in the first place. Buying an old computer as a new computer is something I've done only once before, when I bought a Mac Classic in 1991 or so. At least that "old" computer (basically an SE "Mark II") was a computer I could buy new. It was just old in that it was retro. That one turned out not to be a good buying decision. It lasted me only two years, when I switched to a Quadra 605. Buying a "new" computer without AppleCare is probably a fool's errand for me. I suppose in a few years I'll be back to an iMac again, with my tail between my legs, having bought myself a lot of hassle and lost a passel of cash in the meantime. Maybe I should have bought an iMac; after all, they're what I've used since the first one came out, and I fit the demographic. I just always wanted to own "separates," is all.

My bad, I guess, for wanting to think different.

Mike
(Thanks to Dave Reichert)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

This is going well.
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Featured Comments from:

Harold: "You're not alone in your thoughts about Apple 'Pro.' For example Lloyd Chambers and Marco Solorio."

Stephen Scharf: "Honestly, I think the 27" IMac is the way to go. Back in 2014, when I needed to replace by 10-year-old Mac Pro G5, I debated dropping six large for the new Pro, so in late 2014 I rather reluctantly bought the maxed out 27" 5K Retina iMac with 16B RAM and 3 TB Fusion Drive. I've been very happy with my decision; the iMac is fast and fully supports as a second display the same 27" NEC PA-series we both use. I still use my NEC for color-critical work, soft proofing, and printing, but the 5K display has completely ruined me for wanting to look at anything else. The display profiles up beautifully, is very close in color accuracy to the NEC, and the screen is to die for. Furthermore, a profiled display is stable with little drift. Looking at my images close at full size on this display is like looking at a 27" chrome. Lloyd Chambers has done testing of all the various Macs and says the Late 2015 5K Retina iMac is the best computer presently on the market for photography: the display gamut is even larger (P3 vs. sRGB), and the SSD drive enables the computer to be blazing fast when loaded up with 64 GB of RAM."

Edd Fuller: "It is quite amusing that you take a shot at 'ratty second-class citizens who had previously wandered lost in the purgatory of PC use,' while describing your experience with Apple, which sounds very unsatisfactory, not to say purgatorial."

Mike replies: Well, actually I was characterizing (or lampooning) Apple's own attitude toward its target market for the Mini, which is PC users who are switching.

Hugh Conacher: "This conversation is being had in all sorts of forums at the moment. Many of the video pros that I am associated with are moving to PC, as Mac no longer meets their needs."

shelley Stallings: "I have owned over 20 different Apple computers in the last 30 years. I did not need that many, just loved their products and often could not resist when they dropped a new one on the market. Most (90%) have been excellent machines matched with great OS. My favorites were the G5 Mac Pro aluminum tower, the first titanium MacBook, and my current MacBook Air combined with 27" iMac for desktop work. I have never been interested in the current black cylinder, but would buy one used at a great price just to add to my collection of 30th Anniversary, Cube, original Tangerine iBook, first titanium MacBook, first bondi blue iMac and Power Computing Mac clone, along with 14 others, some Apple II models including GS. Can't see why a 27" iMac wouldn't work fine for you Mike. You can use your favorite monitor with it along with the iMac monitor. Bang for buck is good and it is the system platform you are familiar with."

Rick Baumhauer: "I understand your frustration on some level, given your preference for your expensive monitor, but I'm not sure that buying used now was a better bet than waiting a bit longer to see what shakes out. We should be seeing (at minimum) new iMacs soon—possibly March, June at the latest. There may also be Mac mini and/or Mac Pro updates, as well—the latter can't be allowed to languish much longer (rumors suggest that the Trash Can had reliability issues that are forcing an accelerated rethink).

"I don't think it's quite fair to say that the 2014 mini was 'deliberately handicapped.' The issue was really a combination of Intel's complicated chip lineup at the time and Apple's desire to the keep the (low-margin for them) mini's production simple. In short, Intel didn't offer both dual-core and quad-core chips that shared the same socket design and also both offered the best integrated GPUs that Intel offered at the time. They would have had to: use two different logic board designs (not going to happen for production reasons); gone all quad-core (no good for lower-end pricing); saddled the lower-end dual-core models with slower GPUs; or drop the quad-core models in favor of dual-core across-the-board that all used Intel's better GPU. For the target market, they made the best choice they could. Unfortunately, Intel's following generation of processors didn't address this issue—the chips that used the same socket as the 2014 mini were still all dual-core, and didn't give enough of a boost to justify an update for a (comparatively) low-volume, low margin product.

"The 2014 mini did offer several meaningful updates: 802.11ac Wifi, Thunderbolt 2, lower power consumption, faster SSDs, elimination of the FW800 port, support for 4k over HDMI or Thunderbolt/Mini-displayport. For multi-threaded workloads, though, the lack of a quad-core option does sting. Unfortunately, that's a finite market that you happen to fall into.

"The Mac Pro situation has dragged on so long that there is clearly an issue beyond the usual economics of that line. The most plausible explanation is that the Trash Can was intended to be amortized over several years, but a reliability issue has forced them to go back to the drawing board much, much earlier than intended. The upshot of that is that we may get something closer to what its target market really wants—something more flexible and utilitarian. Time will tell."

Mike replies: Great comment. That explains a lot. Thanks Rick.

Open Mike: I Rock!

I turn 60 today. (But I hardly look a day over 59.)

I see turning 60 as a good thing. I think what it signifies is that I've transmogrified from an increasingly cranky, increasingly creaky, increasingly old- and worn-out-looking middle-aged guy to a really healthy, really energetic, really youthful-looking old guy. For a middle-aged guy I ain't all that, but for an old dude, I rock.

You can be pretty confident you'll make it through your first fifty years. Most people do (although there are, sadly, a few exceptions). But you can be pretty sure you won't make it through your second fifty years, because most people don't. There are exceptions there too. You just don't know when the axe is gonna fall, is all. I figure (being overly logical about it) that if I'm unlucky, I'll get another ten years; if I'm lucky, I'll get another thirty. So when I envision what's ahead, I refer to it as "the ten to thirty." That's how much longer I figure I have. Probably.

That's presuming I never visit England, where I would be hit by a bus.

My life expectancy at birth in 1957 was 66.4 years. For a male baby born today it's about 79 years, which is interesting because my life expectancy right now, according to one of those Internet life expectancy calculators, taking into account my age; sex; exercise habits; tobacco, alcohol and drug use; family history of disease; and social life, is virtually the same—78.8 years. Meaning that in 60 years I have managed to catch up to today's newborn.

In other ways, newborns are behind me; for instance, most newborns know very little about Photoshop.

Wait, wrong example...I know very little about Photoshop either.

The life expectancy calculator doesn't ask whether you could overcome the habit of a lifetime and look to the right to see if a bus is coming before you step into the street in the United Kingdom. That might lower my number.

Family history of disease is interesting. Despite its importance to us, it's something most people don't pay much attention to. I did learn recently that although both my paternal grandparents died of cancer, neither was an inheritable type—one was caused by environmental factors that no longer pertain and the other was a type that is now virtually 100% curable. That's both very sad to me and also good news, which is odd.

It's a good thing my life expectancy isn't 66.4 any more, that's for sure! Because I'm waiting for the X-T4, and I'm not sure six more years will get me there.

I'm getting more optimistic as I get older. Still, I'm not so optimistic that I am expecting to live to be 100. Centenarians are a fast-growing demographic; there were more than 53,000 of them in the U.S. in 2010, and about 316,000 in the world in 2012. But only one in every 1,000 centenarians reaches the age of 110, and in all of recorded history there are only between seven and 41 individuals (different authorities vary in their research, or their rigor) who have lived to be 115. Interestingly, a lot more people than that live to be 114, but die before their 115th birthday; eight of the last nine "oldest people in the world" in the Guinness Book of World Records assumed the lofty title when they were 114 and also died at before they reached 115. This is called the "rectangularization of the mortality curve," which is a highfalutin' way of saying that the graph line nosedives straight down toward the baseline, squaring off at the end. Scientists investigating this curious tendency have recently postulated that it has to do with an inbuilt limit on the number of times a cell can replicate itself. Unlike the entry-level Canon Rebel, which can replicate itself indefinitely.

If I'm going to live to be 114, though, I'm going to have to figure out how to make this blog appeal to younger readers.

You know, like 60-year-olds.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Give Mike a Birthday present! (And thanks if you already did)

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Featured Comments from:

Patrick Perez: "America's Finest News Source (tm) weighs in. Happy birthday, Mike!"

Oren Grad: "Clearly you need one of these now...."

Mike replies: What do you mean "need" one? Of course I still have one. Your fault, too.

But consider how appropriate my car just became...it's an Acura "ILX"....

Bahi: "Happy birthday–many happy returns! In college, I met an American who, a few days after we met, stepped in front of a red double-decker bus in London and was knocked over. He was fine (hardly a bruise) but the bus driver was probably never the same again. All he could say, over and over, was 'He just stepped right out in front of me! He never even looked! He just stepped out in front of me!' The American was, of course, looking quite carefully but in the wrong direction. Don’t let it put you off visiting, though.  :-)  "

Mike replies: Believe it or not, bus driver is one of the occupations with the highest stress level. Enormous responsibility, with potentially lethal consequences, but relatively little control. Someone can step in the way at any time and there might not be much they can do about it. Locomotive engineer, too, for the same reason.

James Weekes: "Happy Birthday. I exited my 60s last June and can say, with confidence, that it was my favorite decade in a life of good decades. Keep active, physically and mentally, and, in ten years, you will agree."

Anders Holt: "Gratulerer med dagen!  :-)  (Happy Birthday in Norwegian.) Looking forward to your next 60 years of life delivering this wonderful website and much more. All the best!" 

Mike replies: That's the first time anyone's ever said Happy Birthday to me in Norwegian. Takk skal du ha, Anders. But given that "shelf" at age 114 I was talking about, I think I should only promise 54 more years.    :-)

Seriously, thanks to everyone for the good wishes.

Fuji GFX Sneak Peek

Written by Stephen Scharf

Fujifilm reps were at Samy's Cameras in San Francisco today, so I had a chance to play and "shoot" with the much-anticipated medium-format Fujifilm GFX 50S.

As the camera was a pre-production model, we were not allowed shoot any images on our own cards, but I came away with some useful first impressions.

The GFX is everything I would expect a medium format professional camera to be; it's clear that it's extremely well thought-through and executed to a very high engineering specification. In the hand, it is about the size of a Nikon D810 or Canon 5D-series. As you may have read, it is surprisingly light, but it is also very well made and robust-feeling; the fit and finish are excellent. The front grip and thumb rest are comfortable and nicely textured, and provide excellent purchase for a secure grip. And if you're an Fuji X-camera user, the now-classic X-camera knobs and dials will immediately feel right at home. The menu system is clearly laid out, identical in organization and interface to the X-Pro2/X-T2.

In use, given that the sensor supports contrast detection-only autofocus, I found the AF to be surprisingly fast, at least as fast as a Fujifllm X-T1. The EVF and LCD are gorgeous, bright and clear with neutral, with accurate color, and the EVF has a very fast refresh rate with no perceptual lag. Having the joystick was very useful not only for AF point selection, but also for scrolling around the LCD when reviewing images or when zoomed in with manual focus to check critical focus. Something I found notable was that the shutter is quite special: upon actuation, it's very quiet and smooth and has feel that's to die for. Most importantly, it feels very well damped. You can tell that shutter shock is not going to be an issue with this camera.

There was a lot of interest in the new Fujifilm GFX 50S at Samy's Camera, San Francisco

Given the size of the lenses, they are surprisingly light, and bright, and made to a very high level of fit and finish. The autofocus performance is fast and quiet with no discernible aperture blade chatter. The aperture rings have just the right amount of stiffness in rotation, and the manual focus and zoom rings feel very nice, smooth but with just the right amount of resistance that allows you to precisely set the adjustment exactly where you want to. The overall impression is that the lenses are extremely well made, with superb functionality. The sales rep said that the next two lenses in the series likely be available late in the second quarter of 2017.

The strongest impression that comes across from using the Fujifilm GFX 50S is that it will be a real workhorse and a serious photographic tool. This is not a camera, though, to replace Nikon D810, Canon 1D or 5D series cameras designed for sports, photojournalism, or, for the lack of a better term, "general purpose" enthusiast photography. After holding, using, and shooting with the camera, it's clear it’s primarily intended for seriously "hard-core" advertising, portrait, editorial, commercial, automotive, and fashion medium format photography of the highest professional standard, as well as expert enthusiast outdoor, travel, or landscape photographers who truly understand what working with a medium-format camera really means, and who know how to get the camera to deliver what it's capable of.

Given Fujifilm’s excellent track record of fully thinking things through and the company's very high level of execution, the GFX will become the hub of what looks to evolve into a very, dare I say extremely, capable system for demanding professional and expert photographer applications. While the term "game-changer" is bandied about all to often, in this case, I fully expect it will apply with the new Fujifilm GFX system.

Stephen

©2017 by Stephen Scharf, all rights reserved

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Michael Perini: "Thanks, Interesting. One question that comes up is that given its target market as you describe, it is a market where flash synch and leaf shutter lenses as well as 16-bit color depth have been critical. Did Fuji address any of this? They certainly know how to make leaf shutter lenses. They seem to have gotten so much right—why stop short of a killer pro camera? I did read somewhere speculation about an electronic shutter, but I also read that there is no second curtain synch—another oft used feature. Any thoughts?"

John Camp: "Stephen said: 'It’s primarily intended for seriously "hard-core" advertising, portrait, editorial, commercial, automotive, and fashion medium format photography of the highest professional standard, as well as expert enthusiast outdoor, travel, or landscape photographers who truly understand what working with a medium-format camera really means, and who know how to get the camera to deliver what it's capable of.' Could he explain that a little more? I think a good percentage of the people here are pretty hard-core—but why would choose, say, a D810 instead of a GFX? Is the GFX slower, or more limited in certain ways? I'm about to upgrade some stuff in my Nikon system, but might not do that if the GFX proves enticing enough. Why would it entice any particular shooter?

Stephen Scharf replies: "Fuji knows all too well the requirements for many professionals for leaf shutter lenses to enable high-speed flash/strobe synchronization. Zack Arias hounded them mercilessly about this at Photokina, and it got to the point that everytime he stuck his head in a conference room with the Fuji GFX team, they said, 'Yes, Zack, we know...leaf shutter lenses!'

"Along these lines, the Fuji will release on the first day of sale the 'H Mount Adapter G' that will enable the use of Hasselblad H-mount leaf shutter lenses. Furthermore, they are also releasing the 'View Camera Adapter G' to to allow the GFX work as a digital back for 4x5 view cameras.

"When I used the term 'hard core,' I was referring to photographers working in professional market segments where medium format digital is de rigueur, i.e., the disciplines listed above. I'm thinking of guys like Markus Klinko, Knut Koivisto, Romeo Balancourt, Jan Gonzalez, Wayne Johns, and Zack of course. The kind of pros who work in very disciplined controlled shooting scenarios where there's no rushing, the setup for a single photo may take a number of minutes or more, etc. Deliberative is the word that comes to mind here.

"There are a lot of other professional applications where the GFX would not be the camera of choice because it doesn't meet what I would refer to as the speed, size, or responsiveness requirements: street, reportage, photojournalism-style wedding photography, sports, news and combat photojournalism, etc. I wouldn't want to use it for shooting arena football, and it wouldn't meet my needs for motorsports photojournalism, either (though the X-T2 certainly does) [Ed. Note: Stephen is a motorsports photojournalist].

"To answer John Camp, I can explain it a little more. It's very likely a good percentage of folks on TOP are 'hard core' and for those folks, I think the GFX would be excellent for outdoor, travel, or landscape photography if 1.) they print large (the superiority of medium-format files don't truly reveal themselves until you print at 24" or larger) and, most importantly, if they require or want to obtain the intrinsically different, and in many ways superior, manner in which medium-format and large-format lenses render images compared to smaller formats (i.e., 35mm FF and smaller). Folks that really want or need that 'medium format look.' Shooting medium format is not just about more megapixels or a larger sensor; its really about how the lens interacts with the larger sensor in fundamentally different ways than smaller format lenses. Medium-format and large-format lenses have some intrinsic optical advantages to them that help produce this 'look': angle of view, less problems with field curvature, they can separate different planes of focus with finer gradation, they can produce finer transitions of DOF, etc., etc. Not to mention the advantages in resolution, color accuracy, acutance, subtlety of tonal gradation, shadow and highlight dynamic range, etc. For a very good explanation of this, read Ming Thein's excellent articles 'That medium format "look": what is it?' and 'Format strengths: why do different sized media render differently?'

"The Nikon D810 is a fantastic camera; especially when used with superior optics like Zeiss Otus lenses. The GFX looks like it's going to be a terrific camera, too. But, as Mike was pointing out in his column the other day about the Sony A900, I think photographers have to have a very clear vision of what type of photograph they want to make and most importantly, why they want to make it, and then as Mike says, 'But be sure you go whole hog and really commit, too.'

"Words of wisdom."

Mike adds: Somebody is going to have to convince me why anyone needs leaf-shutter lenses on this camera. In the old days, the advantage of a leaf shutter was that it allowed flash sync up to the fastest shutter speed the camera was capable of...but what that mainly meant was that you could sync a Hasselblad all the way up to 1/500th, in the days when focal-plane shutter sync speeds were between 1/30th and 1/80th. It mattered then.

Near the end of the film era in professional photography, certain medium-format professional cameras with leaf shutters added one more stop, to 1/1000th, although the "real" (measured) speeds in most cases were, for various technical reasons, more like 1/750th or 1/850th. Then, focal-plane shutters got faster, and 1/250th flash sync became common in pro cameras. This was a big deal precisely because...it mostly negated the advantages of leaf shutters.

I get it that gearheads got conditioned over recent decades to expect at least 1/250th X-sync, and so it's commonplace to find them hurling invective and derision at any camera that offers (horrors!) a stop less. And sure enough. But is 1/125th really so limiting? What, does it mean they can't continue to use Speedlights as monoblocs or that they'll be forced to invest in a few ND filters?

Not feeling their pain here. On a mirrorless medium-format camera meant to be both relatively affordable and relatively portable, who in the target market really needs leaf shutters? I might be out of touch with today's professional world—no, I'll say that positively, I am out of touch with it—but I'd bet 97% of pros who would buy this don't actually need more than 1/125th sync 97% of the time. Well, clearly Zack Arias thinks he needs it, if what Stephen says is true. But for the 3% of pros and the 0% of advanced amateurs who really do need another four stops of sync speed for legitimate reasons, I'd be inclined to say "so buy yourself an H6D and quit yer griping." 

Quote o' the Day: Kenneth Tanaka

"Tanaka's First Law of Photography: Whatever you use there you are. That is, you will make (or try to make) the same photograph regardless of the camera in your hands. Cameras are merely writing instruments for the mind's eye."

—Ken Tanaka

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Richard S: "Absolutely true if you interpret it to mean that every photo you take is an expression of your inner self and the way you see reality. I think we can all agree that if you gave three people identical cameras and set them to photograph in the same location, you would get three radically different sets of pictures. By the same token if you give a single photographer three different cameras and set her to photograph a location, the pictures will all have the same underlying feel to them, and tell a consistent story both about the location and the photographer who took them."

[Ed. Note: In the Comments, Ken has responded to multiple commenters with a more nuanced explanation of his ideas. Because he's responding to many different people (and their comments are interesting too), the action is in the full Comments section for this post.

To reach our Comments section, either click on "Comments" in the post footer below, or click on the post title and then scroll down.]

Bluff Sunset

The weather and the light in the area of my new home can be amazingly beautiful. We've "enjoyed" a sinister heat wave here for the past week or so—it's gotten up to 63 degrees*, and day after day has been in the 50s. Our snow is gone and the days are sunny, or partially cloudy, and Springlike. It's extremely pleasant as well as naggingly frightening. Yesterday afternoon, walking the dog, the light was just astounding—the sun peeking through the clouds and playing off the lake, the air pearly with moisture. Like walking through some mystical fantasyland from a fairy tale. I've been lax; I should never go anywhere without a camera. Never. Anywhere.

One of the peculiarities of the area is that Keuka Bluff, which rises steeply more than 700 feet above lake level, is quite close, because the lake is narrow. It blocks maybe ten degrees up from the horizon. So from where I am, the sun "sets" behind the Bluff something like 15 or 20 minutes before it sets behind the curvature of the Earth. The light in those minutes is interesting—it extends the period of dusk. I've come to call this "Bluff sunset," and I've made a game of trying to detect, just from the change in the light, the moment of actual sunset. I've gotten pretty good at it.

Bluff sunset leads to some spectacular views, most of which I miss because I don't have an unobstructed view from my house. But yesterday evening I stopped the car at one of the few cleared areas along the two-lane highway up above me because I saw a patch of blue sky through some dark clouds. Here's the picture I stopped for...

...Not that big a deal. But once I was out of the car, I noticed that the ridge of the bluff to the South looked almost exactly like it was on fire, because the sun was approaching the ridgeline from above...

So I decided to wait around. Here's the sun "setting" behind the Bluff...

But then here's what I thought was really cool. For a few minutes after the sun itself disappeared but still before sunset, the clouds let some rays through from the other side of the Bluff...

Isn't that cool? It was just intensely pretty. I hadn't expected it at all.

I think people here drive right past sights like this. It's just ordinary. No big deal. Makes me wonder how much I miss around this area all the time.

Meanwhile, looking more to the North, you could still see plain blue sky past the clouds, because the sun was actually still above the real horizon.

Maybe somebody can fill in some of the terms I'm missing here...are there actual names for when the sun "sets" behind a mountain, or for when it sets below the theoretical horizon? I don't know any meteorological or astronomical terminology.

Anyway, it kind of made up for earlier in the day, when I'd seen that magical light at lakeside but didn't have a camera.

A micro-blizzard
A few weeks ago I experienced another amazing thing (did I write about this already? I can't remember). It was a mainly clear day and I was out in the back yard flinging the ball for Butters, and I saw a vast lump of bizarrely dark cloud mass start to loom over the Bluff; but I could see blue sky on either side of it. As it grew, it became obvious that there was snow falling furiously beneath it, and that it was headed straight at us and moving fast. The falling snow obscured the far shore of the lake behind a veil of undifferentiated gray, then moved across the lake, and before I knew it we were right under it, Butters and I. The light darkened dramatically and the sky above was dark, and we were buffeted by winds knocking this way and that, and snow was flying, falling in thick swirls. As the cloudmass continued to move off to the East, there were just a scant few astonishing minutes when I could look toward the waterfall in the southwest corner of my yard and see a virtual blizzard, with snow falling thickly and the sky a grim dark gray—and then turn around a hundred and eighty degrees and look out toward the lake, from the direction the snow-squall had just come from—and see nothing but sun and blue sky again, the far shore clear and sharp! A few minutes more and the cloud-mass was gone past the steep hills, and nothing was changed from before—a pleasant, sunny, clear, blue-sky day, only now there was a frosting of snow on the grass and the trees.

Less than half an hour more, and that was gone too. Just an isolated snow-squall barreling along from West to East, and we happened to be right under its path.

The Finger Lakes. I'll tell ya, it's a show.

Mike

*68°F today. Creepy.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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giulio croce: "That's the reason why I love photography. It forced me to look, and thus allowed me to see."

David Babsky: "Regarding 'a micro-blizzard,' when I first visited New York (in 1984, I think) the doorman at the Empire State Building—which was just about to close for the day—told me that sometimes it's bright and sunny down at street level, as it was that day, but occasionally, while that's happening down there, there's snow swirling right up at the top! Wow. I took the last lift skywards...and there, at the top, there was indeed snow falling, but the updrafts never let the snow drop as far as the street below. What a sensational delight!"

Steve Rosenblum: "I know what you mean by everyone there driving by these scenes as though they are routine. Lately, I have been trying to force myself of turn off NPR during my half hour drive to and from work, turn on my 'mindfulness,' and truly allow myself to be in the moment. I live in Ann Arbor and drive on an interstate-like highway to and from work through the suburbs of SE Michigan. One of the things I've noticed is that very often the sky looks really amazing. Here's the thing—I spend a lot of time in the Rocky Mountain West (Colorado, Montana, Utah). Out there in 'Big Sky' country, I always notice and pay attention to the sky because it does indeed look huge and dramatic. However, I have realized by actually trying to stay in the moment during my Michigan suburban commute that the sky here is often equally amazing looking. It's the 'frame' and my own expectations that are different. A sky framed by 14,000 foot mountains seems different than one framed by highway exits, subdivisions, and strip malls. After a lifetime of driving these routes I have trained myself to tune out during these times. But...when I pay attention, there it is! The same amazing sky with all of its variations of colors, clouds, and light. As Jon Kabat-Zinn said, 'Wherever you go, there you are.' Your friend, Steve (almost the suburban Buddha) Rosenblum."

Rod: "I live in Tasmania. A giant island on the cusp of several weather channels. We used to be known for our regular 'four seasons in one day,' but with weather patterns changing, it looks like we may be the stable place to live! I remember driving from sunshine at my house, 45 kilometers to a nearby mountain (Mt. Barrow), camping in two feet of snow and coming home to sunshine, in the middle of Summer. Not unusual, but becoming less unusual worldwide. Now we sit sit back and watch as wild weather batters the mainland (Australia)."

Bourquek: "I'm a lifelong fan of meteorology and astronomy, so I'm always looking up, and I encourage others to do so. Clouds are an amazing, ever-changing show. Some people don't even know if it's cloudy or sunny out...I guess we just live in different worlds. Not too long ago I located the planet Venus in the mid-day sky. With the aid of binoculars I was able to show it to a number of people. Who knew such magic was right over our heads.  ;-)  "

Open Mike: What Makes a Camera Good

Half of what makes a camera good is the camera. The other half of what makes a camera good is you.

No matter how great the camera, you will like it more, and it will be more valuable to you—and a better value, too!—if you get to grips with it. Buying the right camera is only half the battle; just as important is committing to it and using it a lot. The more you use it, the better it will be.

In that sense, the Sony A900 in my camera cabinet ended up being one of the worst cameras I ever bought. I had to have one at the time; it channeled the Contax RTSIII I also always wanted, and it was, when it came out, the biggest, mostest, bestest, meanest, and baddest.

Trouble was, I never used it much.

I keep it now as a sorrowful monument to a vanished $2,300 I foolishly turned from real cash into a memory. And it's not like that didn't matter—I've never had $2,300 to burn.

But it was my own fault, really.

Right around now is the tenth anniversary of the A900's first announcement. Can you believe that? It was a while before it shipped, and it wasn't discontinued until 2011, but we first heard of it early in March of 2007. The years they do get behind us, don't they, my brother, my sister?

Micro 4/3 has now caught up
Having used both quite recently, it's my judgement and opinion that the newest 20-MP chip in the latest top-o'-the-line Micro 4/3 cameras more or less equals the image quality of the Sony A900's full-frame, 24-MP sensor that was SOTA back in '07.

(As I wrote that, it occurred to me to check the DxOMark Sensor ratings...sure enough, they give the sensor in the A900 an overall score of 79 and the sensor in the new Olympus E-M1 Mark II an overall score of 80, nicely corroborating my purely subjective impression.)

There are differences, yes. The older camera still has slightly better resolution and enlargeability at base ISOs. But the newer, smaller sensor has better shadow noise and DR. (I'd take the sensor in the Olympus if I had to choose.)

Granted, development is unlikely to continue at the same pace for the next ten years as it did for the previous ten; growth in the industry is slowing. But small sensors are getting very good, and will surely get even better.

The popular push these days among hobbyists might be toward full-frame and medium-format sensors. But how smart is that? Go to Flickr and type "Olympus E-M1 Mark II" or "Panasonic GX8" into the search field and look at some of the pictures that come up. Look good to you? Great sensors are going to be getting smaller, not larger, in the long run.

It's not as much fun, I grant you, but the smart money might be to go against what's currently hot and settle on Micro 4/3 or APS-C, or even 1". All of those are good enough now, and they'll only be getting better in the future.

Back to the point...
In any event, if you do drop the bucks for the Hasselblad X1D-50c or the Fuji GFX-50s, the gleaming new medium-format mirrorless marvels, be very careful. Remember that the camera itself is only half of what makes a camera good. How dedicated you are, how hard you work, and how many good and great pictures you get out of it are the other half. How much you use it is just as important as whatever it is.

So go for it, my brother, my sister, if you really want to, and if you can. But be sure you go whole hog and really commit, too. Use that medium-format mirrorless marvel a lot, and it will be a good value. Get to grips with it, make it yours, take it everywhere, and you'll never regret the expense.

Otherwise...well, take it from me. You won't want that thing sitting there staring at you from the shelf ten years from now!

Cheers,

Mike

"Open Mike" is the editorial page of TOP. It appears only, but not always, on Wednesdays.

Link to this post: http://tinyurl.com/hwuz7tz

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No regrets
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Featured Comments from:

James Moule: "I have to agree. The sharpness that I am getting with my Olympus E-M1 Mark II and a high quality lens (such as an Olympus PRO or Panasonic Lumix/Leica) is simply stunning. A total surprise. And I usually shoot with a Sony Alpha 7RII and a Zeiss prime. As a point of reference, I always shoot raw, process in Adobe Camera Raw, and never sharpen (unless I am making a print)."

Moose (partial comment): "Re 'It's not as much fun, I grant you,' ohhh, but it IS more fun, really. The last several years since the E-M5 came out and I switched to Micro 4/3 have been the most fun in my photographic life—and the most productive of work I really like."

Hugh Crawford: "Re: 'Having used both quite recently, it's my judgement and opinion that the newest 20-MP chip in the latest top-o'-the-line Micro 4/3 cameras more or less equals the image quality of the Sony A900's full-frame, 24-MP sensor that was SOTA back in '07.' Not to nitpick, but isn't that sort of the same thing as 'Micro 4/3 is 10 years behind in quality'? I know what you mean, but I'm not so sure about what that bold subhead 'Micro 4/3 has now caught up' means."

Mike replies: Well, it speaks to another post I wrote, in 2009, "The Point of Sufficiency." That is, we won't have to keep chasing larger and larger sensors, because as time goes by, increasingly smaller sensors are going to be sufficient and more. Time is on the side of smaller sensors, not larger ones.

Hugh: "Time is on the side of smaller sensors thanks to Moore's law and the fact that the problems of small sensors are solvable in software. Time is on the side of large sensors because manufacturing keeps improving the yield of large sensors without flaws and there are some problems that are for the time being more easily solvable by brute force than finesse. It was much the same in the film era where 35mm started as a novelty format and became the de facto 'good enough' format thanks to advances in chemistry and the fact that the cost of optics cubes with size whereas the cost of sensors and film squares with size. Big cameras produce a different looking image than small cameras and the fashion for big camera artifacts will die soon I hope. I have a big interest in artifacts that say 'these are clues that explain how this image came to be.' I'm less of a fan of 'this image is full of signifiers of my equipment budget.' Of course the paradigm of one lens , one exposure , one image is a holdover from the chemical photography era and is about to be replaced whether we like it or not. I suspect that time is on the side of many tiny sensors."

Mike: I agree with that. It's always risky to extrapolate the future from current assumptions. But I do think the days of the single chip are probably numbered.

John: "Re 'Micro 4/3 has now caught up': I'm skeptical. I recently created a gallery wall in my home of many B&W prints from multiple cameras, including Micro 4/3. They confirm what I see in my other Micro 4/3 files: they have less depth compared to APS-C and FF. Granted, my Micro 4/3  body was a few years old and that technology certainly has advanced. But bigger sensors have advanced, too. Is Micro 4/3 sufficient? Probably. But only if you don't display side-by-side. Physics is on my side. I spent several years with Panasonic cameras, pursuing cheaper, smaller, lighter, and have many photos I like very much. But I now can't help but wish I had stuck with FF and had larger sensor version of all of those images."

Mike replies: I don't think we're really arguing. All I said was that the very latest, most up-to-date Olympus more or less equals the 2007 A900, not that an older Micro 4/3 won't be weaker in comparison to a more recent FF.

bencr: "The Olympus E-M5 reached the point of sufficiency for me. I bought it when it first came out and it is still my only (non-cellphone) camera. I use it 75% of the time with the 20mm ƒ/1.7 and the other 25% of time with the Panasonic 100–300mm for birding. For both scenarios I have my favorite settings and techniques and mostly don't notice the camera at all anymore—just the pictures."

Martin: "Re 'The more you use it, the better it will be': I agree wholeheartedly. How do I know that I don't use my camera enough? I get recurring episodes of temptation to buy new gear that evaporate whenever I spend more than a few consecutive days shooting with it. The best cure for GAS turns out to be 'getting to grips' with the great gear you've already got."

Steve Jacob: "The latest Micro 4/3 sensor is indeed very good. It falls almost exactly where you might expect. Slightly behind the latest 24-MP Sony APS-C, but not enough to matter. Equal to 2007 FF? Sure, but because 2007 is pre-EXMOR; it is antique in digital camera terms. I would be amazed and disappointed if it were not. But you only have to roll forward to late 2010 and the development of the Sony 16-MP APS-C EXMOR sensor (D7000, D5100, NEX-5N...) and you can see the beginning of a plateau. All the features of a modern 4T sensor were in that chip. Since that architecture emerged, improvements have been incremental. Sensors based on the same architecture included the one in your X-T1, so it is a venerable design, and still 'relevant' nearly seven years later. That's a long time in dog years. The D800 (2012) used an almost identical architecture, just expanded to FF, and the D810 (current) is a development of that with the dual-gain pixel architecture now also found in the A6500, X-T2 etc. This cuts read noise from about ISO800 and has improved high-ISO DR by a fair margin. Sony did very well with the A7RII 42-MP BSI sensor, but I shudder to think what it costs per unit, and all for a small improvement in SNR at higher ISO. Not surprised that camera is expensive. So yes, almost any modern sensor is a good step up from 2007, or even 2009. Since 2010, not so much. Its all a little bit predictable now."

Mike replies: You know more about this subject than I do.

Simon Miles: "For what it's worth I find my new E-M1 Mark II matches my Nikon D810 in print quality up to A2 (the E-M1 was close but was at its best at A3+). This is a big deal to me, as I don't print bigger than A2. In all other respects I prefer the smaller size, lighter weight, EVF viewing, native 4:3 aspect ratio and deeper DoF (I usually want more, not less) of the E-M1 Mark II. Of course, the D810 is better in absolute quality terms but, as Mike says, it all depends on your point of sufficiency. The E-M1 Mark II has now reached mine."

New Sigma Lenses

...Like Nikon didn't have enough troubles already.

Sigma seems determined to become the go-to brand for top quality at a fair(er) price...its Art and Contemporary series of DSLR lenses (one of which I reviewed not long ago) has just increased by not one, not two, not three, but four new lenses.

The new focal lengths are: the Sigma 135mm ƒ/1.8 DG HSM Art; the Sigma 100–400mm ƒ/5–6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary; the Sigma 14mm ƒ/1.8 DG HSM Art; and the Sigma 24–70mm ƒ/2.8 DG OS HSM Art. All are initially available in Nikon, Canon, and Sigma SA mounts. All are "DG" lenses that will cover full-frame (24x36mm).

The 24–70mm, because it's a workhorse lens for many photographers, is Sigma's third revision of its lens of this specification. This newest iteration is said to offer better construction and better image stabilization. Interestingly, Sigma claims it has been specifically optimized for better bokeh. Mark Mandl has provided a translation that communicates the meaning of the original Japanese text "球面収差をわずかに残すことでボケの描写にもこだわりました" from the 24–70mm's product page on Sigma's Japanese website: "The quality of the bokeh has been carefully tuned by leaving a trace amount of spherical aberration." (Thanks to Mark.)

Groundbreaker: the Sigma Art 14mm ƒ/1.8

The 135mm and 14mm primes both qualify as superfast—the 14mm in particular is claimed to be the fastest full-frame lens of its focal length ever made. 

They're not on sale yet and not available for pre-order, but here's a link to more pictures and full specs at B&H.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Jim Richardson: "To me the blockbuster lens in the new Sigma lineup is the 14mm ƒ/1.8 Art lens. For Milky Way photography this one is really important since you are limited in exposure time by star movement. This new lens means either you can halve your ISO for lower noise or double your effective exposure for richer star field rendering. Either way (assuming it's rendering of stars out at the edge of the frame) is decent to good we should start seeing a new generation of night sky photographs, similar to what happened when the Nikon D3 and the 14–24mm ƒ/2.8 Nikkor came along."

Here's Mine

Well that was fun! Thanks to everyone who uploaded a picture of their favorite camera yesterday. Sorry again it isn't easier to do; sharing pictures is fun, though—enough fun that it's worth doing once in a while despite the technical awkwardness with the blogging service I use.

So here's just one more, and from the uploads in the last post it seems like a lot of you are going to get this. My all-time fave:

It was an Exakta 66 Mod. II with an 80mm Schneider Xenotar MF lens, a medium-format, 6x6-cm square SLR film camera. This picture isn't of mine, although pictures of the one I owned were published in Darkroom Photography magazine in my review of it.

An odd choice? Very!

I bought it new in the 1980s after reviewing several much more expensive medium-format cameras for magazines—cameras I couldn't afford. After I reviewed the Exakta 66 I bought the review sample. It was quite cheap for a new medium-format camera at the time but on a teacher's salary it was still very expensive to me, and it took me a long time to save up for it. I had only the one lens and never bought the metering prism; I had only the unmetered flip-up waist-level finder like the one in this picture. I never bought the camera strap, even. It was a dedicated strap with a special attachment designed just for this camera (you can see it in this picture, a semicircular bracket under the camera that cradled it and attached via the tripod screw), and it was too expensive for me at the time—around $90 or $100 if memory serves. My budget for food was $60 a week then. So I used the camera without a meter and carried it around in my hand. I never shot anything in it but 120 Tri-X 400 with a K2 yellow filter.

It turned out to be my OC/OL/OF/NLM/OY camera...one camera, one lens, one film, no light meter, one year. Except it was more like 18 months.

Long history
The Exakta 66 was essentially a "vanity project" of the German/Israeli industrialist Heinrich Manderman, who bought the lensmaker Schneider-Kreuznach after the last of the Schneider family owners went bankrupt in 1982. Herr Manderman, who was born in 1923 and died in 2002, at one time also owned Rollei, B+W filters, Exakta, Miranda, ORWO, and Pentacon, among other companies. I believe his family still owns, or perhaps has an interest in, Schneider, but I don't know.

I was never able to speak to him directly, but the story I heard was that either Pentacon or Exakta was the factory where he got his first job, and the Pentacon Six was his favorite camera in his youth (which is right on theme). So he ordered the old Exakta works in Nuremberg to build a modern, updated variant of the Pentacon Six, and he had Schneider design new breechlock lenses for it. The result was the Exakta 66.

By name, the Exakta 66 was supposed to be a descendant of the Exacta 6x6 made by Ihagee in Dresden before WWII, but it was really a descendant of the Pentacon Six introduced in 1956.

The Pentacon Six had a long history as well, including some USSR knock-offs. This, for instance, is a Kiev-60, sometimes called a "Kneb" on forums because of the Cyrillic characters for "Kiev." A copy of the old Pentacon Six, it's a distant cousin of the Exakta 66. While not as nicely constructed, the Russians fixed the film advance, so the Kievs actually had fewer headaches with frame spacing than the German cameras.

Great camera? Not really
Although the Exakta 66 went through two refreshes, three models altogether (called "Mod. II" and "Mod. III," leading the first version to retroactively be called "Mod. I"), it never sold well. The reason is that it just wasn't a very good camera, unfortunately. Although "modernized," it showed its ancient roots in its flaws, which weren't subtle. The viewfinder showed considerably less than the negative would record, and it wasn't centered, either—the bottom of the picture in the viewfinder lined up with what you'd get on the negative but there would be considerably more "air" at the top of the image than you'd see in the finder, and half that much on either side. And the film advance mechanism was a weak point—frame spacing was often irregular, and sometimes failed resulting in overlapping frames. Film was not held flat very well in the gate, either—I occasionally lost a shot due to poor film flatness. In fact, I probably lost more shots with that camera than with any other camera before or since, including one great shot ruined by poor film flatness that still galls me even after all the intervening years.

The Schneider Xenotar MF 80mm ƒ/2.8 I had was the single best lens I ever used. It wasn't that the lens was so great, though, it was that I happened to get a good one, one that must have been at the very top of the sample variation. I tried several other copies of the same lens over the years and none were quite as good. My experience of medium-format lenses over the years, and enlarging lenses too, was that there was considerable sample variation. This was confirmed in a number of cases. You couldn't buy those things by the label; you had to buy by the specific individual sample. That was even true for Zeiss Hasselblad lenses until fairly late in the game.

The young have hopes
So why was this camera my favorite, then, if it had all those flaws? Well, I guess it has to do with memories of youth. For some reason, I took to the Exakta 66 like the proverbial duck to water. I knew just what to do with it immediately, almost subconsciously. As I say I only ever used that one film, and from the first I took to cropping every picture to a vertical rectangle. Why? I guess because it was hard to guess what would be on the negatives on the sides of the image. Because it didn't have a light meter, I decided to train myself to guess my exposures, and although this was a struggle at first, I worked hard at it, and found to my surprise that I got very good at it. In some cases my brain even metered better than a light meter would have, because I understood the scene better, whereas the meter would be assuming the scene was middle gray and would need to be compensated for. And I really liked the pictures I made with that camera. I curated a group show for the U.S. Park Service in which I included my own work, and it turned out to be the last time my work was ever exhibited. All my pictures in that show were taken with the Exakta 66. The show as a whole got good reviews, and while not every reviewer singled out my work, those who did said nice things.

The Exacta 66 was the camera that I owned as I transitioned from being a photographer to teaching and writing about it. So it was the last camera I used while I still assumed I was going to spend my life as a working art photographer. I'm better at the career I ended up with than I would have been at that career I left behind, I think, but, still and all, I have a certain amount of sentimentality for who I was then, and for the plans, ambitions, and hopes I had. As many of us do, for our youthful dreams.

So that's why it was my favorite.

I roamed on foot all over Washington D.C. with that camera, and did many portraits with it. I think having to carry it in my hand and working so hard with it played a part in my affection for the old beastie, too. What can I say? We bonded.

The usual fate
In those days I had very little money, and when I wanted or needed a new camera I had to sell the old one. I joined a photo studio in which all the other photographers shot Nikon and Hasselblad, and I couldn't use off brands or I wouldn't be contributing to the equipment pool. So my Contax and my Exakta 66 had to go the way of all cameras.

I've always regretted letting that one go, however, and to this day I wish I hadn't.

Mike

P.S. As for my favorite camera now, it's the one I'm jonesing to buy next...same as Peter Vagt's favorite. But it's going to be awhile before I can both a) afford it and b) justify it, and both a) and b) are going to have to pertain before I can get my hot little hands on one. But don't cry for me!  :-)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Andrew Lamb: "I had the Exakta 66, with an 80mm Schneider, when I was young and foolish. If I'm being honest, I think it appealed to my contrary nature. As I've mentioned before, I experienced focusing problems with it until I figured out that the focus screen had been installed the wrong way around. I can't remember how long I persevered with it for. Nowhere as near as long as you. It was a nice camera to use hand-held on location but the 1/30th sec. sync made it poor as a studio camera. As for the lens, I got great results with it in B&W (T-Max 400) but I was disappointed with it when using colour slide.

"All-time favourite camera? Another 6x6, the Super-Ikonta. Current modern favourite: the Sigma SD Quattro."

Mike replies: The slow sync was the proximate rationale for selling my first one--it was useless in the studio. I bought a 150mm telephoto for the Hasselblads, contributed in lieu of a few months of studio rent—never owned a Hassie body, but I could borrow those, and nobody else in the studio owned a 150mm. I tried to buy a second Exacta 66 sometime in the '90s, trying to recapture the magic of my period with the first one, and it, like yours, had the focusing screen installed upside-down. Took me a long time to figure that out, too—you don't expect a new German camera straight out of the box to have a problem like that!

Thomas Rink: "This brings back some less-than-pleasant memories from my youth. In 1985, the camera shop in the next town had a nice, pre-owned Pentacon Six TL with 50mm, 80mm, and 180mm Zeiss Jena lenses on offer. The entire kit was only 800 Deutsche Mark, which was within my financial reach (with a bit of stretching). But on the day I finally decided to go for it, I rear-ended a driving-school car; to add to the embarrassment, the car was from the driving school from which I got my license just a year earlier (which required, due to my ineptitude, an above-average number of driving lessons, of course). Gone were my savings, so no medium format for poor Thomas."

Mike replies: That is a sad story. So close, yet....

OK, So Show Us Your Favorite

So let's see a picture of your favorite camera, if you have one. (I know not everyone does, and that's okay.)

The TypePad Comments Section isn't set up to accept pictures easily, but here's how you can work around it:

First, you need your picture, no more than 470 pixels wide, saved as sRGB and on the Web so it has a URL. 

Then use this code in the Comment box here on TOP:

...But replace the generic address with the URL of your picture. (Leave the quote marks as they are.)

If your picture is any wider than 470 pixels, it will appear cut off.

(You can also just post a link, but fewer people will see it.)

I'll post mine tomorrow. It may surprise you!

Mike

UPDATE: By the way, here's a little tip to "find your place" in the Comments, in case you've looked through a number of cameras and would like to check back later to see what's been added. At the bottom of every person's comment is a time-and-date stamp in green. If you click on that, it will give you the URL for that particular comment in your browser's address bar. You can then bookmark that. On returning to that bookmark, it will take you to the point in the Comments stack that you marked, allowing you to pick up viewing where you left off.

UPDATE #2: For some reason people are having trouble linking pictures on Google Photos, SmugMug, Flickr, and some other sharing sites. I don't know why. In cases where the link hasn't worked I've just substituted a link to your image. —Mike the Ed.

John Krumm adds: "A tip to link to Smugmug in these comments: Click the share button, then pick the right sharing size (small if horizontal, up to large if vertical). Then you choose 'html' instead of the direct link. Copy and paste the code into your comment. This will put a nice copy of your photo here that links back to your gallery. Be sure to test it out by choosing 'preview' before posting."

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Ed. Note: There are no featured comments today, since everyone's pictures are in the main Comments section. By the way, to get to the Comments quickly on any TOP post, click on the post title and then just scroll down.

Camera 'Porn'

Not sure I like the term, but you know what I mean.

On Monday, I'm going to be asking for pictures of your favorite-ever camera. It can be anything—one you own right now, one from your closet, one you used to own, someone else's, an historical curiosity, a family heirloom. It can even be one you want but don't have yet. So, if you're able to, over the weekend you might want to work on making or finding a portrait of your favorite camera.

The pictures will need to be 470 pixels wide [sic...470 pixels wide], saved as sRGB, and posted somewhere on the Web (so that they have a URL. I won't be able to convert photos emailed to me).

Hold off for now—this is a heads-up for Monday.

Hope you have a very pleasant weekend. See ya next week.

Mike

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TOP Classic: 'The Trough of No Value'

I find this a particularly poignant picture. It's preserved in the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress; I found it on page five of Michael L. Carlebach's excellent American Photojournalism Comes of Age (one of my favorite books about photography, by the way).

It shows the photography staff of the newspaper The New York World in 1909. Or at least we can assume the man on the left and the man on the stairs are photographers, since they're shown with cameras. I direct your attention, as Michael Carlebach does, to the wall at the back of the room that also displays the clock. Know what those are? They're negatives—the newspaper's photographic archive. The hundreds of cases you see there in neatly-shelved rows contained thousands of negatives of newsworthy events, people, and places, collected at considerable expense by the paper and with great labor and sometimes risk by the men in the picture and their cohorts.

When the newspaper folded, all those negatives were thrown away.

Value fluctuates
People sometimes ask me what the best method of preserving their pictures is, and my somewhat flip but I believe trenchant answer is, "be famous." One of the problems of historical preservation is that people only tend to preserve things that are valuable. And the problem with that is that value fluctuates over time.

Most of you are computer users. Ever thrown away a perfectly good computer simply because it was old and worth nothing? Early computers are beginning to be collectible even now, but what do you think a pristine, mint-condition, working Apple 128k Macintosh, vintage 1984, will be worth in, say, 2109, or 2209? It doesn't take a great leap of imagination to think of such a thing being worth the equivalent of tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. But I threw one away once.

The problem is that many kinds of objects go through a period in their potential lifespans when they don't "pencil out"—they're not worth keeping or preserving because they're not worth any money. Here's an approximate graph of the typical value of many types of objects. The x-axis is time and the y-axis is value; the horizontal line is $0.

For some objects, what pertains would more accurately be called a trough of low value, not no value—remaindered photo books and certain old cameras come to mind—because they never actually quite reach zero value. But other objects might accurately be graphed considerably below the $0 line—those would be things that are worth nothing but that require maintenance, expense, or storage space to keep and preserve. My great-grandfather's sailboat, for instance—a gorgeous 29-foot sloop made of cedar and mahogany that was originally built for Civil War General Lew Wallace, the author of Ben-Hur. It's currently being stored at considerable annual expense by a cousin who's into historic preservation, but it's worth no money in its present unrestored condition. Graphed, I imagine it would fall well below the $0 line.

My favorite example of the Trough of No Value comes from a former acquaintance whose back room had a high, narrow shelf running all the way around it, about a foot below the ceiling. Arrayed on the shelf were dozens of kids' lunchboxes from the 1950s and '60s. He told me that not only are such lunchboxes collectible now, but that they're actually fairly hard to find. Time was, of course, when most every schoolkid had a little metal lunchbox (poor kids "brown-bagged it"). But the kids grew up, the school lunch program got started, and who wanted to keep old lunchboxes around? They weren't useful any more. They weren't worth anything. And, since they were almost all used for their intended purpose, many were damaged or worn by use (I vaguely remember owning one that was rusty and had a dent). People naturally threw them away. The "trough of no value" for lunchboxes was long and harsh. That's why they're not so common today as you might guess—because not that many made it through the trough. (By the way, the inset photo is a corner of Allen Woodall's Lunchbox Museum in Columbus, Georgia.)

Even great treasures can go through a trough of no value, too. Consider that Vincent Van Gogh used to trade finished paintings for new tubes of paint—and the art supplies merchant was doing him a favor because he took pity on him. The paintings were worthless at the time.

Craftsmanship is a preservation method
That's why "being famous" is a great way to preserve your work—because value is the #1 preservative for old objects. But want to know another? Craftsmanship. One of the great hazards of survival through time is the lack of a market and a lack of trade value, but another is simply shoddiness. (I have to chuckle whenever I read yet another description of American frontier log cabins as having been well crafted or sturdily or beautifully built. The much more likely truth is that 99.9% of frontier log cabins were horribly built—it's just that all of those fell down. The few that have survived intact were the ones that were well made. That doesn't mean all of them were.) It's not just that things that are poorly made deteriorate more readily, it's also that they signal their own worthlessness. Or, in the case of an archive of photos, they might actually hide their own worth. I have in mind making a book of my best 35mm black-and-white pictures, for instance, and I have it in my head which pictures would be included. But if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, nobody else will ever be able to extract that book out of the great mass of my hither-and-yon mess of negatives.

Sometimes, even when something has no monetary value, people will keep it just because it seems like it's too beautiful to waste. The expression people use is one I'm sure will sound familiar to you: "it seems a shame to throw it away." Well, why should it seem a shame? It's because people also value what other people value, and if something is beautifully made and carefully encased—honored, you might say—then it projects or advertises its own value: it will be obvious to people who come across it that someone—at least the person who made it!—valued it at one time, so maybe they should value it, too. Book dealers are very familiar with this, because of the frequency with which members of the public bring in beautifully bound but worthless books. (The corollary must also be true, that very valuable books are thoughtlessly discarded all the time because they don't look valuable. But that doesn't bear thinking about.)

If your work is beautifully printed and matted and housed in a clamshell box or a custom album, I think it's more likely to project value, less likely to be discarded, and more likely to make it to the far side of the dreaded Trough of No Value. Something to think about, huh?

Mike
(Graph by James Bishop)

[Ed. Note: This post was originally published eight years and a few days ago.

If you're interested in the subject of how objects survive, I can recommend a quirky but highly imaginative little book called The Same Ax, Twice by Howard Mansfield. The title came from an old farmer Howard met who boasted that he had used the same ax his whole life. Howard asked him if he hadn't ever had to replace the handle, and the farmer answered yes, the handle had been replaced three times, and the head had been replaced twice, but it was the same old ax.

The book is rather a wild ride, with a very expansive interpretation of the concept of "restoration," but it's also quite memorable.]

Original contents copyright 2009 and 2017 by Michael C. Johnston. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Gary: "When I'm not taking photographs I make and restore furniture. The antique furniture market is currently struggling in a 'double trough.' After peaking in the 1990s it has been steadily falling in value for nearly twenty years. Those very few pieces of antique furniture that can genuinely be described as 'museum quality' continue to set record auction prices, but the vast majority just grinds down in value year after year.

"Some pundits are starting to think the unthinkable, that antique furniture prices may NEVER recover. They point to the fact that in the West we're living in smaller urban spaces that struggle to accommodate the larger scale of many antiques. And they suggest that 'hygiene' factors are also at work, in a world of BMW and iPhone perfection we won't now tolerate the wonky legs, sticking drawers, and general mustiness that characterises antiques.

"Whatever the reasons, here in the UK I regularly see mid-market antique furniture that is now so cheap it is being broken up and the mahogany, walnut, and rosewood components sold to hobbyist furniture makers and luthiers."

Mike replies: That's odd and sad. I have five antique pieces of furniture, three of them family hand-me-downs, and I know the approximate provenance of four of them. And about "iPhone/BMW perfectionism," the two things I bought most recently were both reclaimed...one a table made from an old cast-iron industrial stand (original purpose unknown), and one a stool/end-table that is basically a giant oblong chunk of barn beam, refinished. It came from Montana. Perfect, it is not! And yet for what I wanted where I have it it's...well, perfect.

William Tyler: "The trough of low value is essential to the later high value. If all those old lunchboxes had been saved, none would be worth much today. The trough creates scarcity, an important component of value. The scarcity principle is also the reason for limited editions."

Patreon Update (Blog Notes)

I just sent a "mass email" as a test to all the TOP supporters on Patreon, and I think I got the information wrong—I asked people to add my personal email address to their Contact books to avoid the Patreon emails being routed to their spam or trash folders. But apparently the email comes from Patreon, so that's the address you should add to your Contacts.

If you are a Patreon contributor to TOP, you might want to check that you got an email from me.

It's been a lot of fun watching the ranks of supporters swell this month, and I'd like to thank everyone. We're now only one person short of 400 supporters, which is within sight of half of the goal I set. That's after starting at 162 on February 8th. I never thought we'd get so far so fast. 

If you're wondering what this is about, a few weeks ago I asked people who are sending regular contributions through PayPal if, as a favor, they would please cancel their PayPal pledge and re-up through Patreon. Patreon allows me to keep track of people and pledges much more easily.

Naturally, anybody else who would like to contribute to TOP through Patreon is encouraged to do so as well! Just click here. And thanks again for your support.

Mike

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On the Scene of One of the Greatest Photo Shoots in History

I had never seen this before, although you might have—it was published in 2013. A wonderful short by the Goddard Space Flight Center about the shooting of "Earthrise," undoubtedly one of the greatest photographs ever made. The video recreates the making of the shot in wonderful detail.

Gave me a lump in my throat. I'm not sure how you can be human and not be moved at least a little by that sight.

I filed this under "Shooting Techniques," but the lessons are pretty simple...know where the color film magazine is, and, of course, "be there."

Lovely.

Mike
(Thanks to Michel)

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

Ten, nine, eight...
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Hernan Zenteno: "Wonderful moment. 'Hurry!'  :-)  "

Tom: "250th at 11 and be there."

Todd Gustavson, George Eastman Museum: "Mike, I though this would be a nice addition to your story—an image of the Hasselblad HEC from the Museum's collection."

Mike replies: Thanks Todd! Very nice.

David Zivic: "What I liked most about one of the greatest photos ever taken: it was handheld with available light. There wasn't time to stage the shot and it was a moving target with a time-sensitive opportunity. The camera was loaded with the wrong film. It was taken through a closed window with no way to clean it on the outside. The people nearby were helpful, but still distracting. I also liked the he used the best available camera with him at the time for the shot."

Report From Dubai: Capture One Will Support the Fuji GFX After All

There's been no official announcement, so this is another rumor, but a member of the GetDPI forums, gerald.d, was at the Fuji launch event for the GFX in Dubai, and apparently the Fuji reps indicated that Phase One will be supporting the GFX after all, despite rumors to the contrary that were circulating last December.

"At the end of a presentation given by Zack Arias," gerald.d writes, "I asked him whether he would miss Capture One if he moved from Phase One to Fuji. He said he didn't know whether the GFX would be supported, and looked at the Fuji guys. They said that it would be supported when the camera is released. I challenged it, they confirmed."

Here's a video (go to about the 47 minute mark) of Zack Arias asking the Fuji rep and then announcing that Phase One would support the GFX.

If this turns out to be true it could help the penetration of the GFX among professionals. Regardless, it will be interesting to Fuji folk to see which raw converter will be able to handle GFX raw files earliest.

Mike
(Thanks to Stephen Scharf)

Stephen Scharf adds: "There's been some rather nasty back and forth about this at GetDPI, but the person at GPP in Dubai who answered the question by gerald.d to Zach Arias that the GFX would have Capture One support was Francois Koumyoujian, Fujifilm Product Manager, Electronic Imaging Products, Fujifilm Middle East. Given that this information came directly from a Fujifilm GFX product manager, does lend it at least some level of veracity, I would think. I certainly hope it proves to be true, and would not be too surprised if it was."

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Daniel K: "As a full-time digital tech in Los Angeles, I am curious to see if the Phase One support will be full tethered support or just the file being supported in C1. If I can recall correctly, there have been previous instances where the camera is not supported for tethering, but raws are supported (usually in the case of new DSLR releases where tethered support comes in at a later date).

"I was actually lamenting about this issue earlier today with a client I was teching for and we both agreed that if Phase One continued to exclude other medium format manufacturers, they'd render themselves obsolete. The cost of investing into a Phase XF system is absolutely ridiculous considering the camera isn't even complete yet (I spent 15 hours testing out the XF for a couple upcoming shoots and concluded that anyone who currently owns the XF is paying them to be a beta tester for it). Speaking with a smaller rental house I work with quite frequently, the owner was telling me that the cost of investing in the XF (1x digital back, 2x bodies, one or two copies of each lens) couldn't really be justified at this point in time. In addition, there are not as many XF's in circulation amongst the rental houses, so support for the camera leaves a lot to be desired.

"While the Hasselblad H[x] camera + Phase One digital back combo is the go-to in my industry, if the rumors of the Fuji GF sensor being the same as the one in the IQ250 and that it will be supported in C1 are true, this may be the camera that revitalizes the industry, as camera upgrades have become more and more lackluster between generations (see Canon 5D Mark III and Mark IV)."

Stephan: "Given that Capture One still doesn't support compressed RAF (that's one year after the X-Pro2's introduction), I wouldn't hold my breath on that one...."

Dave: "I think the Fuji GFX will bring about the democratization of medium format."

Random Excellence: NASA

This image is of a Cibachrome (Ilfochrome) print sold at auction on Valentines Day. It was part of a group of either 22 or 30 prints—the listing is a bit unclear—that were part of an exhibit entitled "Sightseeing; A Space Panorama," which opened at the Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in 1985 and subsequently toured to 65 institutions all over the world. The exhibit was seen by more than by six million visitors. The prints were sold by Swann Auction Galleries in its "Icons & Images: Photographs & Photobooks" sale two days ago. The pre-auction estimate for the prints was $15,000 to $25,000 and the actual hammer price, comfortably exceeding the estimate, was $43,750.

I've always liked this photograph (which an art school friend referred to as "Couch Potato in Space") and at first I was worried that I had posted it on the blog before—but the one I was thinking of was a different image, in this post on the anniversary of the moonwalk in 2009.

Mike

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Dave Levingston: "Back in 1969, when I was a newspaper photographer, we had an open house at the paper and one of the features was a moon rock which came with a Marine Corps guard and a pretty woman in a shiny silver mini-dress. As part of the preparations I helped install a set of those Cibachrome prints throughout the newsroom. Many years later the newspaper built a new building and those prints went in the dumpster when they moved."

QT Luong's Magnificent Project

Reviewed by Geoff Wittig

Landscape photography is one of those pursuits that sound easy. I mean, how hard can it be to take a gorgeous photograph of Mount Rainier or Half-Dome, right?

...Until you try it, that is. Even the latest digital cameras lack a ‘sublime’ button. Translating a perfect moment in an achingly beautiful location into a photograph that conveys more than a pale echo of the experience is surprisingly difficult. It generally requires multiple visits to a site just to earn a chance at catching it in perfect light, with foliage at its best, or a waterfall at full flow. Easy familiarity with gear and technique are essential to avoid wasting a 15-second opportunity.

I live within 25 miles of two spectacular State parks. I visit and photograph them frequently, trying to catch a bit of the magic in the form of a print. After more than 20 years and countless visits, I’d say I have maybe 20 to 25 photographs I’m completely happy with. I have lots more near-misses, and thousands of frames that deserved swift deletion. And this in my backyard, at sites I’m intimately familiar with.

This is a long-winded expression of my admiration for QT Luong’s accomplishment with Treasured Lands: A Photographic Odyssey Through America's National Parks. Over the course of more than 20 years, Dr. Luong visited every one of America’s extant 59 National Parks, and photographed them in depth. On large format film. The simple physical effort required boggles the mind. The consistently high quality of the photos is striking; hundreds of fine photographs, and no ‘filler’ shots.

Quang-Tuan Luong, known as QT (Tuan to his friends), born in France of Vietnamese parents, was a high-level scientist before arriving, through his interest in mountain climbing, at his passion for photography. He also runs the Large Format Forum (LFF), the primary online resource for LF photographers. Portrait by B. Squires.

The foreword is written by Dayton Duncan, who partnered with Ken Burns to film the PBS Television series "The National Parks: America’s Best Idea." Duncan notes that their team traveled with Tuan Luong to some sites, and came to use some of his images as part of their project.

QT's introduction explains how he came to this intense photographic survey of the Parks. Like the late Galen Rowell, Luong backed into landscape photography from mountain climbing. Growing up in France, he found climbing the Alps the only way to experience wilderness. Traveling to the U.S. for a career in computer science, the National Parks were a further revelation, and he eventually left computer science for full-time photography after embarking on his project to photograph every National Park.

The book is organized by region. Each section begins with an introduction describing the geology and biomes of the region, followed by beautifully reproduced color plates from each park. The large images are followed by a map of the park showing where each photograph was taken. This is followed by thumbnails each accompanied by narrative text including trail access, weather, and engaging anecdotes about taking the photographs. You can see this as a generous invitation to try your hand at shooting these sites yourself.

Some of the photographs are well-known motifs, such as wildflowers below Mount Ranier, or Yosemite Valley in winter. Sunrise under Mesa Arch is my personal bête noir and, yep, it’s here. But most others are unique images, and all are beautiful. The visual æsthetic is one of vivid (but not neon) color, meticulous sharpness, and classical composition. I’m quite familiar with Badlands National Park, and can attest to how difficult it is to reach the sites Luong photographed in the southern Stronghold unit of the Park on the Pine Ridge Reservation. And that’s just one park; Luong photographed the other 58 too, just as deliberately. The entire book is a testament to the virtue of obsession.

Physically it’s a very fine piece of work, printed on heavyweight semi-matte paper with gloss varnished photo-reproductions. The text is set in a small point size of digital Baskerville font, but it remains quite readable. Inside the heavy dust jacket, the book itself is covered in a panoramic reproduction of giant sequoias, a very nice touch.

I was tempted to include a few images, but it’s probably better just to direct readers toward QT’s very nice website for the book, as it includes an excellent viewer for browsing through the chapters.

I'm aware of at least five other relatively recent photo books explicitly covering America's National Parks. Each has its virtues and some very nice images. Clyde Butcher's Celebrating America's National Parks is a treat for those who love black and white. But all of them pale in comparison to the remarkable depth and breadth of QT Luong's project. Every one of the parks is gorgeously rendered, from the giant Alaskan parks to the tiny "pocket parks" in the east, and the ancillary information is a delight. I can't recall any other photographer including detailed notes and maps demonstrating how to reach every one of his or her subjects, including the most remote locations. Pure catnip for landscape photography hobbyists.

Highly recommended.

Geoff

©2017 by Geoff Wittig, all rights reserved

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Ken: "I'll second this review—not that it needs seconding. We ordered the book a couple of months ago—it was out of stock—and it just arrived about a week ago. It's a magnificent overview of the national parks—and well worth the price."

RubyT: "I have learned from past experience that if a book featured here lists 'one left' I must buy it immediately, so I did. National Parks are my charitable focus this year, so this recommendation was perfectly timed."

Joe Decker: "An exhibition of prints from this body of work has been making the circuit as well. I caught it in the San Francisco Bay Area, and the prints hold up to the incredibly fine standards you'd expect from the work. Highly recommended."

Dave Van de Mark: "One November morning many years ago, I found myself racing up to 70mph on roads in darkness I probably shouldn't have been going above 25 on, and then hiking furiously to near exhaustion, just to reach Mesa Arch minutes before the beginning of a lovely sunrise. Knowing my gear at the time—like the back of my hand—had me ready in time, and I was rewarded with some exposures I feel very good about. But I nearly knocked myself out getting them and know just how lucky I was, what with the weather and light all being with me. The timing was on me but just barely! This makes me appreciate immensely the effort QT Luong had to make to capture the magnificent photos Geoff describes. Geoff's review makes me really want this book."

David Evans: "$40, I thought. That's a very good price for such a book—at the official rate it's £32. So I look on Amazon UK. £51.89! I suppose I will buy it, but I resent that someone is making an awful lot of money out of me."

Mike replies: Think about what you're saying for a sec. Tuan worked for 20 years with a 5x7 view camera and traveled to 59 National Parks in 27 States, packing his gear to numerous wild and remote locations. For every picture in the book there were probably at least three rejects and quite likely many more than that. Can you imagine how much work and expense that represents? The book has 456 pages and copious amounts of spot-varnished color illustrations. Finally, are you aware of how much it costs to ship 7.2-lbs. books across the Atlantic in bulk so Amazon UK can stock it in its warehouses? That cost is not trivial. All that, and you're being exploited? You're going to begrudge an extra £19.89 on a book that you yourself say started out at "a very good price for such a book"?

You're plenty tight with a twenty, man, is all I can say.  :-D

GUY PERKINS: "I think Mike that your response to David Evans is a little strong, and frankly unfair. We in the UK routinely pay more for identical products than you pay in the USA. And that is the same whether that product has been made and shipped from the Far East, from the EU, or from the US. It needles us. And to try and justify a £20 excess the price just on transport costs, when Amazon ships gazillions of product by container daily, is not on. What you say about the amount of work and skill the book represents is true, but you can't apply that argument to us over here while enjoying a bargain price yourself."

Mike replies: I've long noticed the "gouging" of your entire nation—you do pay more for comparable products. But that's not something I can do anything about, and I don't think it's something that Tuan should take the blame for. He'd like for his books to sell, I'm sure. I still think it's a pretty good bargain despite the tariff, but then that's not up to me—you (and David) have to make your decisions rationally and for yourselves.

Sorry about the situation, though. It's not fair and I've never seen it explained satisfactorily.

Tom Bell: "Excited. Live on Dartmoor National Park here but never been to your great parks. Just ordered it."

Dave Karp: "I too participate on QT's Large Format Forum. His LF Home Page [AKA LFphoto.info —Ed.] was a godsend when I first entered into the large format world. I still refer to parts of it regularly. We large format photographers owe him a great debt. I have met QT only once, at a gallery showing of Ray McSavaney's beautiful work. QT is a heck of a nice guy, generous (what a gift that Large Format site is), and a heck of a photographer. His national parks book is a treat."

QT Luong: "Thank you to Geoff and all the commenters for the kind words. Regarding the value of the physical object alone, please compare to the book that Aperture released to celebrate the National Park Service centennial, with pricing quite typical for photo books. [Smaller, less than a third as many pages, less than one third the weight of Treasured Lands —Ed.] It gives some perspective to the third Amazon customer review of Treasured Lands: 'I would have paid triple the price to add this book to my collection.' By the way, said customer acted on his words by subsequently purchasing a limited edition.

"Note also that Treasured Lands is from the same printer who produced Salgado's Genesis. Regarding the price outside the US, if you look at my own signed/limited offerings, I charge $12 for shipping to the US and $66 for shipping to the UK. Those are my actual costs via USPS Priority Mail."

Nikon Lets the Bleeding Show

Nikon has released three worrying notices in quick succession, most notably a "Notice of Recognition of Extraordinary Loss" that announces losses totaling more than a quarter of a billion dollars over the last three quarters of 2016.

More than half of that comes from the "Result of Solicitation for Early Retirement," meaning buyouts for 1,143 employees, most aged 40 and older.

Announced but not to be: the Nikons that never were

This follows the unusual announcement that the company will not be producing the three Sony-cloney "DL" cameras that were announced about a year ago. They've been cancelled and won't be coming to market. Development of the three cameras had been troubled with technical problems, and apparently Nikon no longer thinks that particular direction will generate revenue, so it's cuttings its losses. The high-profile product cancellation underlines the other bad news.

Possibly most worrying is the document "Revision of the Financial Forecast for the Fiscal Year Ending March 31, 2017," which indicates worse performance in 2016 than the already pessimistic predictions.

Around the Web
There's a good summary of the news at Slashgear. For the financially literate, here's a quick take of the financial situation from Nasdaq.

In his article at DSLRBodies, Nikon gadfly Thom Hogan says "there’s no 'core philosophy' to what Nikon is doing. It’s all about cost management, for the most part. Yes, you have to manage costs, but that’s a lot easier to do if you produce the right products." Regarding the financial news, he notes that "there’s nothing in anything Nikon has announced that will tell us the pain is over," adding the prediction that "Nikon is about to become a smaller company. Possibly far smaller."

Mike
(Thanks to Kevin Purcell)

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John Krumm: "People were wringing hands over Olympus just a couple years ago during their financial scandal, and further back when they canceled the Four-Thirds system and switched to Micro 4/3. Now I hear some people say that Nikon needs to be more like Olympus.

"My guess is they will work it out. As a Pentax owner, I worry more about Pentax!"

Jim: "This is sad news. One of the few lessons I have learned from a life in business is that you can't starve yourself to prosperity."

Mark Walker: "I sell cameras. Nikon have lost hugely in the market from where I sit. They haven't respected their customer base. There has been a shameful rapid succession of 'upgrades' as well as the virtual public beta testing of production models: I believe there are still contested class actions pending. Canon seem to be faring better, and my perception is that the pro market has made a substantial shift in their favour.

"I don't have any bias against Nikon, I've used enough of their products and have too much respect for what they have achieved. But, they seem to be like a lumbering dinosaur getting shredded by the mirrorless raptors and they haven't responded with any form of dynamism, swatting away with 'upgrades.' Maybe they will contract to the mid and high range, but, they will need to be nimble and unless 2017/18 sees something radical in the lineup that will actually sell, well...who knows? It is difficult to understand where they are going and that has to be worrying."

Eamon Hickey (partial comment): "Nikon is now forecasting a 9,000m yen (that's 'nine-thousand million yen') net loss for fiscal 2017, or about 81 million dollars on 750,000m yen (6.8 billion dollars) in sales. That's about a 1.2% net loss. Not good, for sure, but Nikon's very strong balance sheet can easily handle a small loss like that. Nikon has been nicely profitable for the past six years (in both cameras and, to a lesser extent, lithography equipment), thus the strong balance sheet.

"Nikon does have long-term challenges in a shrinking camera market, no doubt. And the whole DL fiasco is, well, a fiasco. Just terrible business performance. And not the only bad show from Nikon recently. But it's important to keep things in perspective. Nikon is financially strong; it is coming off many years of making lots and lots of money (unlike nearly all other camera companies besides Canon); and there is time to adjust."

Paulo Bizarro: "In my opinion, Nikon just joined the 1-inch sensor compact camera market too late. Sony started it, followed by Canon and Panasonic. How many more such compacts can the market sustain? Sure, the DL 18–50 seemed nice on paper, given the focal length range. But, again, too late. Better take the loss now, than a couple of years down the road. Similar story to the Nikon 1 MILC system: has the best AF in the segment (or had at the time), but not enough to make a dent in a market dominated by the big electronic companies (Panasonic, Sony). Fuji was able to make a difference by basically betting in a coherent MILC ecosystem, rather than spreading their resources. Nikon's prestige comes from SLR and DSLR systems, and they have some great recent products there (D5, D500, 105mm ƒ/1.4 lens). Venturing outside of the comfort zone seems risky for them, because they are being reactive, rather than proactive."

Canon Might Kill the 6D

Rumors are swirling* that Canon, which had originally intended to introduce a 6D Mark II in 2016, might be killing off the model altogether.

Why? Well, it's speculation still, but there have been indications of an all-new Canon camera model on the way, and the rumor mill has quickly spun that into a full-frame mirrorless. This is unsubstantiated, although it does seem relatively logical. And the Canon 6D is Canon's entry-level full-frame SLR, and a full-frame mirrorless to compete with Sony's very successful A7[x] series would presumably cross-cannibalize with the 6D. So Canon might put the 6D update on the shelf on order to give the new camera a better chance.

The Canon 6D "Mark I," introduced in the Fall of 2012 and still current

It's also possible that Canon will make its mirrorless camera larger-than-FF, AKA "medium format," to join the Hasselblad and Fuji medium-format mirrorless models...and prevent those brands from making inroads from that front.

Rumors have circulated regularly of a Canon medium-format camera for many decades now. The first one I heard about was in the mid-to-later 1980s, when it would have been a film camera. And no doubt Canon has done due diligence over the years with mock-ups and prototypes; the details would mostly be proprietary, though, so full disclosure is impossible.

Another unsubstantiated rumor...an industry legend, who is gone now, once told me that his friends at Canon privately confessed to him that Canon was only afraid of one company, and it was "not Nikon, and not Leica." That company was Fuji. That was surprising at the time, because that was way back when Fuji essentially just dabbled in the camera market. As we all know, Fuji isn't dabbling any more. So that might support the idea of a FF+ sensor mirrorless camera from Canon, as it would answer Fuji. Japanese companies traditionally pay the most attention to what their Japanese competitors are doing...and not what we consider their Japanese competitors, but what they consider their Japanese competitors.

This is probably pretty far out yet, in any event—if there's one thing that seems fair to generalize, it's that Canon does not move as fast as some more nimble companies...such as...er, well, Fuji. But either a full-frame or medium-format mirrorless model from Canon, if either proves to be true, would be very big news indeed in our little corner of the World.

Mike

*Here's one.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Speed: "A Canon medium format camera would require a whole new set of lenses. Lenses that wouldn't work on their APS-C cameras, their full frame cameras or their cinema cameras. I think you need to analyze Canon based on the markets that they serve such as professional wedding/portrait/school, studio, advertising, architecture/real estate, video advertising/marketing, broadcast (news, feature, documentary), on-line video and so forth. When Canon moved into cinema it was priced right, their existing lenses were a powerful feature, and the 5D Mark II had put their foot in the door. By the way, there is a big price gap between the 6D to the 5D Mark IV. Plenty of room for something new and different."

Jack: "One thing that mitigates against the notion of a Canon digital medium format is the question of where the sensors are going to come from. Canon has pretty much used exclusively its own sensors in its DSLRs. Furthermore, Canon's dual-pixel sensor technology is fundamental to PDAF on Canon mirrorless (at the moment). The thing is, as far as I know Canon's never made a chip-making machine (stepper) capable of making chips that large. Few steppers are—about the only option is Nikon's venerable NSR-4425i stepper from the late 20th century, only available pre-owned. Either way, whether buying Sony sensors like everyone else is doing, or buying used Nikon steppers, Canon would have to go out-of-house for digital medium-format sensors. Well, unless they've decided it's worthwhile to build their own wide-format stepper, which I really doubt."

ADDENDUM from Jack: "I've learned that Canon does indeed make steppers that can produce medium-format-sized chips. Their new FPA-5510iX can go up to 56x52 mm. That's big enough for a 645-sized frame (56x42).

"So I'm going to go way out on a limb and suggest that if Canon ever does go medium format, it might be 645, not the 'almost 127' of current medium-format sensors (excluding Phase One)."

Verve: "The 6D is so good and so reasonably priced that I bought two of them, and they have serve me well. I sincerely doubt that Canon will kill the 6D. I fully expect a 6D version II will follow the original."

'Amazon Basics' Flash Update

By Darlene Almeda

I decided I wanted to try those $28 Amazon Basic Flashes Kevin Purcell wrote about in the "Cheap As Chips Flash" post a couple of weeks ago for one of the courses I teach. Here's a quick update of our progress.

I received two of the flashes this week. Because I do not want to put these flashes on my camera hot shoe (because of circuitry malfunction concerns), I purchased a couple of Phottix Trigger Kits (link below) to get the first flash to fire. I figured that if the second flash did not fire with the onboard slave, then the second Phottix trigger should do the trick.

I also purchased a cheap softbox for the main light.

The gear after unboxing, prior to setup

Yesterday one of my classes and I tried them out. The first flash out of the box started up and fired as needed. The second flash did not; some button lights lit up, but I could not set the settings as needed—they were frozen. After leaving the flash on for about a minute, it appeared to work and its slave did fire from the first flash.

We proceeded to do the test run with a couple of students individually. Simple portrait setup with one flash on face and second behind for rim lighting/background separation.

The author setting the f-stop. Photo by Amy Connors.

All went okay (power was surprisingly good with the AA batteries), until the second student took the portrait seat. The back flash then balked again and would not fire with its onboard slave. We turned on the Phottrix trigger and it fired every time. Turn off the trigger, and no flash.

Anyhow, Amazon has a 30-day policy for returns and refunds, so the flash that faulted is headed back to Amazon.

Chelsea. First test, before the second flash stopped working

We will do this again this week when the replacement flash shows up, because my students like playing with cameras and flashes. I'll write in more detail about possible lighting setups next time.

Everything we used was purchased from Amazon, although I think I got the last two Phottix trigger kits they had in stock—here's a link to the manufacturer's website. We used a Fuji X-Pro2, Fuji 56mm APD, the two Amazon Basic Flashes, the Phottrix Ares Transmitter/Receiver Trigger Set, and an Altura Photo Softbox Flash Diffuser for shoe mount flash.

Darlene

©2017 by Darlene Almeda, all rights reserved

Darlene Almeda is a photographer and educator. Here's her website.

Original contents copyright 2017 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Under the Bridge: "Good info. I've been curious about these flashes. What do you think of the color temperature? I use some vintage Nikon flashes (SB-24/SB-28) and they play nicely in manual mode with all of my digital cameras because of their low trigger voltages. I would love to mix in a cheap flash with an optical slave, but I want the color temperature to match the Nikons. I've been contemplating an old SB-26 for a $125, but $30 is such a tempting price. Does anybody know the trigger voltage for these flashes? I haven't been able to locate that info."