The Online Photographer

Baker's Dozen: Leica Lenses (Call for Work)

Glad you enjoyed the "Baker's Dozen: Smartphone Photographs" on Saturday.

We're trying for two-week intervals, so the next one would naturally be presented on Friday, November 24th...but that's the day after Thanksgiving in the U.S., AKA "Black Friday," famous as (usually) the 11th- or 12th- or 13th-biggest shopping day (or so) of the year. So I think I'll post the next Baker's Dozen portfolio on the Monday following. That's "Cyber Monday," a day that might not be quite as popular as Boss's Day (a so-called "Hallmark holiday") but is better known than May 13th, International Hummus Day.

But I digress.

For the next Baker's Dozen, we're asking for pictures taken with Leica lenses.

Here are the specs:

• Send 1–3 JPEGs but no more
• 800 pixels wide
• sRGB
• Tell us who and where you are
• Don't forget the techie details

Send them to me at m c j o h n s t o n a t m a c d o t c o m. VERY IMPORTANT: please use the subject line:

bakersdozenleica

...Exactly like that. The last thing I want to do is scold, but near the end of the submission period I will search my oceanic email stack for messages with "bakersdozenleica" in the subject field, and if your email doesn't come up then I probably won't see your picture(s). So it's important to use that exact subject line. I (a sentient human) won't be looking out for your email; my Mac (a heartless machine) will be. So close is not good enough.

It would be great if you could say a few words about your lens. A picture of the lens itself is not required, but can't hurt. I think I am likely to give a little more weight to pictures taken with lenses that are interesting, unusual, exotic or aristocratic in some way, but don't let that stop you if yours isn't. Pictures taken with any Leica (or Leitz) branded lens of any vintage is eligible. A digital snapshot of a physical print is also okay.

Be creative. That should put you ahead of the game.

Don't forget that subject line. Spread the woid!

Mike

[UPDATE: While Panasonic/Leica lenses are certainly valid for the call, I've already got two I'm definitely going to be using and I'm unlikely to select any more than that. Might select one more. But no more than one more. Just thought I'd tell you in case it might influence your selection decision.

If it's any consolation, Panasonic lenses will feature in a future Baker's Dozen. —MJ]

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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John Robison: "This is where the essential honesty of contributors must be assumed. I was quite shocked at myself because for a brief moment I considered sending in some random photo, claiming it to be shot through Leica glass (I own no Leica lenses). I cannot imagine what possessed me to entertain such a thought for even that brief moment."

Mike replies: Yes, no juvenile games, please! With our medium here people will not be in a position to critically examine files and fooling people (or me) by being dishonest would not be a terribly slick trick. We're just having fun here.

Thanks for pointing this out John.

Nigel: "I have a Leitz Wetzlar projection lens...cost £6. Does that count?"

Mike replies: Thanks for pointing this out too. Early on, "Leica" (Leitz camera) referred to the cameras, and some of the lenses were branded Leitz but not Leica. I changed the post to allow Leitz-branded lenses as well.

Steve Smith: "Re 'International Hummus Day': Houmous—another word Americans can't spell!!"

Mike replies: Actually it's spelled حمص بالطحينة, ḥummuṣ bi ṭaḥīna, which means chickpeas with tahini, tahini being a condiment made of roasted sesame seeds. The dish originated in the Levant, which is the region East of the Mediterranean. The Turks use one "m," but the dialectal word transliterated into Roman characters is ḥummuṣ, and it's spelled "hummus" by the Encyclopædia Britannica, Merriam-Webster's Dictionary, and Wikipedia, and "hummus" is the preferred spelling of the Oxford Learner's Dictionaries, which is the only one I found that gives "houmous" as a secondary alternative spelling. So I'm comfortable with "hummus."

Never poke an Internet researcher with a stick.  :-)

scott kirkpatrick: "הומוס or hummus only needs one 'm'-like letter in any of its natural languages. The 'mm' is doubled to keep the vowels before and after it short in languages that don't know better, like English.

Mike: Doesn't הומוס mean humus, i.e., organic matter in soil? That what Morfix ("the leading online Hebrew-English and English-Hebrew Dictionary") says. At least, that confusion would constitute another good reason not to spell it with one "m" in English.

scott: "My Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary includes humus as organic matter, and doesn't say anything in either direction about hummus. It's a curious omission, as Israel could not function without hummus."

Jeff Markus: "הומוס a few bars and we'll fake it."

Mike: Jeff wins the Herman Krieger award for best/worst pun not by Herman! Good one, Jeff.

Baker's Dozen: Smartphone Photographs

For this fortnight's "Baker's Dozen" readers' portfolio, I asked for smartphone photos, and got as many as I thought I would...lots and lots. I have to apologize to the many people who sent great shots that I won't be using today. If it's any consolation, I thoroughly enjoyed seeing everyone's pictures and reading their comments. Great fun for me.

With several avenues wide open for exploring, I thought I'd concentrate on showing some of the things I think people particularly use smartphones for.

To make a colorful beginning, macro shots! Lots of people are finding that the tiny sensors (with their extreme D-o-F), excellent lenses, and SOTA processing are ideal for photographing things close up. Depth-of-field (D-o-F) is proportional to focus distance—all else equal, the farther away the plane of focus, the greater the D-o-F. The closer the object distance, the narrower the D-o-F (more bokeh, in other words). Another way of saying this: if you have three inches of D-o-F when focused on something nine inches away from the sensor, you'll have 30 feet within the D-o-F when you're focused on something 90 feet away. Specifics can vary, but that gets the principle across.

Tiny sensors and the very short focal-length lenses that are "normal" for the formats make macro photography pleasant. This would have been a very difficult shot to make with a FF DSLR. Peggy Collins, 58, of Lancaster, Antelope Valley, in Southern California shot this orangelicious poppy using a Samsung Galaxy S5. It's far from her only camera, though—she's been a serious photographer for decades (a Pentax shooter mainly) and is a part-time pro.

The inset picture is me cheating on the "baker's dozen" limitation by sneaking in an extra example of a nice shot that utilizes large D-o-F. It was taken by David O'Bryan, 49, of Mechanicsville, Virginia, on an iPhone 6+.

Rick Forgo's nighttime street scene is a perfect example of what I was talking about the other day in the "No Such Thing As Image Quality" post. Mature artists understand the properties of the materials and equipment they're using and apply them with sensitivity to best effect regardless of what those properties are. This is a wholly successful shot, regardless of how well it does or doesn't conform to the "ordinary and usual" notions of IQ. Rick, who is 34 and lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, took it with an iPhone 4s, and says, "it's one of my favourite shots regardless of the camera used."

Here's a "particularly pleasing conjunction" (Huw's words), taken of Stonehenge from a slow-moving car in traffic where the road narrows. So what does this show us about phone cameras? That they're an excellent way for kids to enjoy photography! It was taken by eight-year-old Harriet Hitchin, who lives in England. Her father Huw reads TOP. Aside from being one of the youngest photographers ever featured on TOP, Harriet is obviously also one cool kid:

Note the shirt in the picture on the left! Love it. Father and daughter obviously have fun with photography together. Thanks to both. And nice shot, Harriet.

Continuing with the impromptu "daughter" theme, Bruce Greene's painterly iPhone 5 shot of his daughter in a restaurant illustrates what I think is another exceedingly important aspect of phone cameras: they're fun to play with. Not that you can't play with other cameras, as I should know, but I often find myself playing with the phone's camera in situations where I wouldn't ordinarily be taking pictures, just because I can. And play can be very good for creativity.

Full caption: "A loadmaster from the Tennessee Air National Guard's 164th Airlift Wing directs an all-terrain forklift onto a C-17 aircraft at the Kentucky Air National Guard Base in Louisville, Ky., Aug. 29, 2017, to support rescue operations in Texas following Hurricane Harvey. More than 30 Kentucky Air Guardsmen and 90 tons of equipment are being airlifted from Louisville to Houston to stand up an aeromedical evacuation and air cargo hub. (U.S. Air National Guard photo by Lt. Col. Dale Greer)"

Switching gears, I think Dale Greer's dramatic news photo here illustrates very well what is conventionally meant by "the best camera is the one you have with you"—a role that phone cameras play for many people in many situations. Dale works as a public affairs officer in the Kentucky Air National Guard and frequently shoots news coverage with several D750 Nikons. On the day he shot this, however, he says "...my focus was assisting local news media who were covering the deployment of Airmen from our base for Hurricane Harvey relief operations. Thus, I was not packing my customary 20-pound load of camera gear; I only had an iPhone to shoot photos." Good thing he had that along—his photo went on to receive wide national distribution, including on network news programs. And of course TOP.

Anthony Reczek, Moon Over Nubble

Here's another example of not as good being better: lifelong New Englander Anthony Reczek, born and raised in Vermont, actually had his big Canon and a tripod along on this night, and took a picture of this scene with it, but says that "there's something about this smartphone shot that rivals the cleaner/clearer results of the 'better' camera and lens." Anthony recently returned to playing music (in nursing homes) after retiring from a career as a psychiatric social worker.

Burdette Parks illustrates for us the old "what if you see Elvis stepping out of a flying saucer?" principle: sometimes cool things you couldn't invent just happen in front of your eyes, and beg to be photographed. "This is a shot I grabbed during a rehearsal for a play we're doing here in November. The show is Sylvia and the young lady is playing a dog that has an operation in the course of the play. Coincidentally, her pet was visiting us at rehearsal and had just come from the vet. An unposed moment captured due to the quick availability of my phone." Burdette is 72 and lives not far from TOP Rural Headquarters—in the Adirondacks here in Upstate New York, about halfway between the villages of Tupper Lake and Saranac Lake.

Above: Ridley Scott. Below: Ridley Scott.

Continuing the doggie theme (because dogs make life better), Tim Bloomquist, 55, of Des Moines, Iowa, can't understand why people keep asking him why he named his dog Ridley Scott: "He looks just like him!" Well...except I'd have to say Ridley Scott's ears are just a little bigger than Ridley Scott's.

Of course, given the number of pictures on Facebook (slightly less than infinity—for the time being anyway) and the ease of texting pictures (or sending them the old-fashioned way, by email), the Number One use of smartphone cameras is doubtless for taking pictures of friends and family and sharing them. Kurt Holter of Frederick, Maryland, sent us this charming shot of his 91-year-old mother Facetiming with her soon-to-be one-year-old great-grandaughter near Christmastime last year. Kurt's brother, wife, and daughter were all sharing the moment with her. None of them noticed him taking a picture with his iPhone. Kurt's been a full-time photographer since he started out with a newspaper in 1976, but he says, "in all of my years as a photographer, this is one of my all-time favorite pictures."

Another of the undoubtedly interesting aspects of phone cameras is that you can get them into places normal cameras won't go—or won't go without a little more care and work. When Saturn was going to be occulted by the moon on April 17th, 2014, Marcelo Guarini prepared his small but optically excellent backyard telescope and waited. Holding his iPhone 5s up to the eyepiece of the telescope by hand, he took both this still photograph and also a video of the event. The telescope enlargement is around 120X.

I've seen phone pics taken through microscopes, too, and I've used mine to photograph through the viewfinders of larger cameras to show readers the layout of the viewfinder.

Of course, you can just use a phone for photography, too. TOP reader Giuseppe Pagnoni, a researcher and professor of neuroscience at a university in Modena, Italy, took this at a traditional wedding in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico, of a group of women dressed up in their tehuana clothes waiting in line for their turn at the Ladies (Damas) restroom. He says he wishes he had used the Lightroom app to shoot raw (because of course we photographers are never satisfied and always want more). But he had his Ricoh GR with him at the time: "Sometimes you just prefer to use the phone because of the instant feedback and manipulation possibility." Besides the GR, Giuseppe also has a Fuji X100, and he says he recently made the "unreasonable" purchase of a Leica M6 with a Summicron 35mm, which he blames on me (the OC/OL/OY thing). Okay, I'll take the blame.

...And then there are apps, which are endless. Margaret Rainey of London, United Kingdom, took this picture on a rainy day in her native Glasgow, in Scotland, while playing around with the Slow Shutter app, which, she says, "is something I never do on my 'proper' camera, so this would not have been taken otherwise." I like it.

In the inset (yes, I'm cheating again), another shutter effect: a strange rubber propeller captured by Frank Petronio, who is 57 and reports that he lived after taking this. I can't even begin to explain why his phone created this effect; he didn't say if it was accidental or deliberate. But now I want to go up in a propeller plane.

And one more for good measure: Kristine Hinrichs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, happened across this sand graffiti while taking a break from traveling in the Pacific Northwest. A sweet shot she says is one of her most enduring.

•

Again, I just want to thank all the photographers featured here and everyone who submitted work. This one was painful; I had to leave so many nice shots out. Sorry again to be late with this—it took me longer to compile than almost any other post I've ever posted on TOP, about 12–13 hours. There were just so many submissions and so many different ways I could have organized it.

The next Baker's Dozen will be posted two weeks from now (well, with any luck) on Friday, November 24th. I'll post the call for work on Monday. Hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Mike

"Baker's Dozen" (13) is a new feature we're trying out. Readers answer a call for a particular kind of work, and then Yr. Hmbl. Ed. chooses a dozen to post along with one extra one for good measure.

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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Giuseppe Pagnoni: "Elated and humbled at the same time to be featured among such good pictures! While I wish I would have taken the picture with the Ricoh GR I had with me, mainly because of the high-contrast scene, it's kind of telling that sometimes we just prefer to use the phone: as pointed out before here, it must be the tempting combination of instant examination on a good screen (much better than camera LCDs), quick post-processing of the files, and sharing on the web.

"On the topic of image quality, I found that capturing raw images with the iPhone in Lightroom mobile really makes a big difference: even if you just export straight to JPEG, the output file has very little of the frosted-glass, plasticky artifacts that the heavy-handed noise reduction and sharpening algorithm of the iPhone (and most other cell phones) produce—you hardly notice them on the phone screen, but they become obvious (and jarring to me) once you open the file on your computer. Sometimes, I further process the file with the RNI Films app, which has a good selection of filters based on actual film emulsions and scanned grain and is often successful in removing the elusive 'digitalness' of the phone pictures (although I feel I should eventually grow out of this type of nostalgia).

"So, thank you very much for this. I am loving the baker's dozen idea and looking forward to the next variations on the theme!"

Blog Notes

• Hate to say it, but being realistic I'm not going to get the Baker's Dozen post finished today. I didn't start working on it quite early enough. I will post it by tomorrow. It's a lot of work—just lots and lots of submissions and tough decisions. There were a lot of ways I could have gone with it. It's great, though. It was a blast for me to hear from so many readers and see so many quirky pictures.

• Just out of curiosity, did you enjoy Stephen's three-part GFX review? He's interested in maybe doing others. Not very many readers "reviewed his review." Tell me what you thought.

• Does anyone have any opinions about the Microsoft Surface Book 2 released today? I'm not used to this...M'soft products that make the Apple-y region of my brain go "uh-oh."

• Meanwhile, back at the ranch...Fall ended today here at TOP World HQ. We awoke to the first snow of the season. So beautiful. Sic transit....

Mike

Stephen Scharf responds @TOP readers:

Thanks, everyone, for the input on the reviews. I enjoyed writing it, so it was fun for me to do this 3-part review. I'd also like to thank Mike for serving as my editor; his suggestions, guidance and advice were invaluable in writing this series. Writing is a lot of work, so personally, I really appreciate the efforts our humble editor puts in every day for creating the quality of content at TOP that keeps so many of us coming back, day after day, year after year.

As a Six Sigma Black Belt professionally, I take all input, both positive and "constructively critical" as opportunities for continual improvement, or "kaizen" in Fujifilm terminology. The goal for me personally is to make some contribution, however small, to the wonderful community-at-large at TOP.

I'd be interested writing more reviews, and, in particular, I liked the suggestions from a number of folks of reviews of a camera that I've used for quite a while. I'm with everyone on the notion that the most useful reviews are ones based on real-world, long-term use.

Along those lines, I could write a review of the X-T2, which is a camera I've put through the ringer for over a year, including hard-core use for motorsports photojournalism. I know a number other TOP readers use the X-T2, so it would be fun to have them share their comments and experiences. Another camera I'm interested in reviewing is the (relatively new) Fuji X100F, comparing and contrasting it to the X100T, both of which I own.

Other ideas would be the Sony A9, A7R Mark III, Panasonic G9, etc. I would prefer not reviewing big, heavy, DSLRs, well, 'cause, I've been there, done that...13 years of shooting Canon 1D series was quite enough, thank you very much.

Maybe we could do a poll and the gang can vote on what they'd like to see next. If it's something I don't own, I'm happy to rent it and an appropriate lens.

Cheers, and thanks again for the input.

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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Nick: "For me personally the GFX review was unnecessary. Plenty of review sites out there. I visit TOP for the non-review content."

Rob Stone: "Stephen’s review of the GFX was the most comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of this camera that I have read to date. His writing, informed by a background in R&D, manufacturing and marketing provides depth and insight to what this product has to offer the professional photographer. My wife and I are fine art photographers. We are finding it increasingly rare to find an equipment review that provides what we need to know when making a decision about whether or not this tool is the one that will do the job that we need to accomplish. This is journalism that is a value-added proposition for me as a reader and as a professional photographer when evaluating equipment that I require to deliver a finished product to our customers. I would definitely like to see more reviews of this caliber from Stephen."

Open Mike: Joni, Genius

Three screensavers of Joni Mitchell, from her website

Robert Plant, who used to be the vocalist for a folk-metal band called Led Zeppelin, recently noted that vocalists are "one-trick ponies." I think what he meant was that they're stuck with one instrument...their own voices. Amy Winehouse might love Tony Bennett and vice versa, but neither could sing like the other.

And sure enough, the match of any particular voice to any particular one of us seems to require a certain alchemy. It's almost a matter of chemistry, as fickle and personal as romantic chemistry. John Lennon ruined his voice with ill-advised scream therapy in 1970 (something you wouldn't think a rock and roller would have any need for), but before that it got to me like few others, and Bob Marley could practically sing the phone book and pull me in.

We're idiosyncratic, too. Hendrix was a guitarist who sang, and it worked, but I never could understand why Stevie Ray Vaughan didn't hire a vocalist for his band like, say, Robin Trower did. It was once a commonplace for blowhard conservatives to rant about how Dylan can't sing, even before he couldn't (believe me on this point—I went to Dartmouth in the '70s), but Neil Young, whose voice is fingernails on a chalkboard to some, is my favorite musician in rock. I don't mind his voice at all.

Creativity and invention
Neil's fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell (the Taylor Swift of the baby boom generation, for you younger people) was one of the greatest artists in the world—of any kind—in the 1970s, with a stretch of eight albums—from Clouds in 1969 to Don Juan's Reckless Daughter in 1977—that represented an almost unparalleled sustained high point of creativity, invention, and mastery in the singer-songwriter genre. But, personally, apart from a memorable drug-fueled late-night encounter with The Hissing of Summer Lawns in a coed's dorm room, I never engaged with her very deeply in the day. The problem for me was, first, that her voice never particularly meshed with me; and then, later on, I felt her artistry was gradually let down by the fact that she was never a particularly happy woman. She was always realistic and always thoughtful and honest, which is suited to young people during the search for individuation and intimacy. It's just that as she got older she sounded increasingly like someone who was never particularly fulfilled as a person. The young confessions, so honest, turned into distanced observations.

I've been trying to catch up with her lately, because there's a new biography out. My first favorite among her albums has always been Wild Things Run Fast, featuring a painting of her, by her (looking strangely vacant), on the cover. Wild Things was on the downslope of her great run, after she had identified jazz as a suitable field for her genius and had tried to turn in that direction, but it was another attempt to make a more rhythmic album connected to the pop music of the moment.

Wild Things was a gateway drug to jazz for me, and I still love the songs—has anyone ever given better advice to someone with a crush than "Be Cool"? Her medley of "Chinese Café" and "Unchained Melody" achingly unchains the melody three quarters of the way through, and her observations in that song have a poignant melancholy worthy of Billie Holiday or Edith Piaf. The album ends with her gorgeous mashup setting of 1 Corinthians 13:1 that never fails to move me—I could say of it what Ron Rosenbaum said of "Amelia," that "it's a certain kind of song, one that seems to activate some sort of hard-wired emotional cell cluster in my brain, I'm (unscientifically) convinced. Songs that do for me what crack does for other people."

Wild Things was never highly popular, despite the blandishments on its behalf by David Geffen and the world tour Joni undertook behind it. Her Taylor Swift moment had passed by then, and her popularity, once fanatical and dependable, had begun its long downward ebb.

Court and Spark, my other longtime favorite among her albums, was the one everyone liked. It was an immediate critical and popular success and has always been her best-selling album. True Joni Mitchell fans will have a different favorite, most often Blue, or Clouds or Ladies of the Canyon, but Court and Spark is her most accessible work. "Help Me" followed by "Free Man in Paris" is among the most soaring one-two punches on records, and her version of the famous and much-recorded "Twisted" became definitive. (I could write a whole post on "Twisted"—it consists of adroit comic lyrics written by Annie Ross in 1952 (in the video, that's Count Basie on the piano and Tony Bennett on the couch), added to an instrumental of the same title composed by the doomed Wardell Gray in 1949. Annie Ross said of it, "the title was [sic] infinite possibilities"—one of which was macabre, in that poor Wardell Gray, a lush saxophone stylist, was discovered in the desert outside of Las Vegas in 1955 with his neck broken—and the murder, probably mob-related, was never solved. In fact it was never accepted as a murder, as if healthy young men just turn up with broken necks sometimes.) Among the infinite possibilities, Ross decided on a hilarious tale of an unrepentant analysand. Joni Mitchell made it hers, and made it immortal. Her instincts were sure—the line about two heads being better than one made a perfect album ending.

The new book is by David Yaffe, a humanities professor at Syracuse. It's reportedly somewhat hagiographic, as celebrity biographies inescapably are. Mitchell used her long list of often very famous lovers as both "muse and nemesis," in the words of Sibbie O'Sullivan, and she could be both grandiose (excusable) and abrasive, crass, and vindictive (less so), and sometimes outright zany (as when she sometimes insisted she had an inner black male self). She is 74 now, unmarried, and divides her time between her 80-acre ranch in Sechelt, British Columbia, and her home in L.A. Like Lennon, she was less than responsible about caring for her primary instrument—her voice—which deteriorated due to her four-pack-a-day cigarette habit. She has suffered health problems since 2015, and the world sends its love.

But artists aren't about the artist; they're about the art. I'm eager to see what light David Yaffee has to shed on that. Joni Mitchell's art has influenced everyone who's heard it. Book's in my queue.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of TOP. It's supposed to appear on Wednesdays, but dang, this stuff doesn't write itself. It's not hard to write, it's just hard to know what to say. Really takes it outta me sometimes.

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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ken White: "I enjoyed Joni’s music in the '60s and '70s and felt somewhat embarrassed by that fact. Then one night I found myself in a bar in Nevada City, California listening to solo guitarist perform of 'A Case of You' to a mostly empty room. Somehow that experience allowed me to hear her music with different ears. She is still in regular rotation in my house. Best wishes to Joni, always."

Richard Reusser: "I decided Joni might be worth exploring after my (very late) exposure to 'The Last Waltz' on DVD. Her performance mesmerizes me every time I re-watch. Great post. Music and photography are like wine and chocolate."

Andrew Lamb: "She’s one of the all-time greats. Not sure if I’d want to meet her. She comes across as tricky. She’s also a good example of an artist who ruthlessly mines everything for her art. Everything is copy, especially ex-lovers. Blue is my favourite, by the way."

Ron Braithwaite: "This is amazing timing. I've been listening to the new(ish) Joni Mitchell anthology, The Studio Albums (1968-1979) pretty steadily for the past few days (with occasional interludes of Gil Scott-Heron's new(ish) I'm New Here). Joni has been one of the main players in the soundtrack of my life, first finding her in 1969. Thanks for bring this up and for your insight: 'But artists aren't about the artist; they're about the art. Joni Mitchell's art has influenced everyone who heard it. Don't know about you, but book's in my queue.'"

Mike replies: Alas, not that recent: Gil died in 2011. My favorite was his album with Brian Jackson, Winter in America, thanks to my Dartmouth roommate Bruce Jackman.

Benjamin Marks: "Court and Spark has long been a favorite here. Growing up, we had an uncle in the music business and every year he would select some popular music as gifts for us. My parents could not have been less interested in popular music...at least not after the American Songbook era (Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn singing). But in 1974 my uncle walked through the door with that album and knowing nothing else about the singer, we took to Joni Mitchell like ducks to water. We kind of evolved with her as her work got more complex over the years. Court and Spark was such a favorite that we memorized the songs with the skips and pops in our copy of the album. Years later, I replaced that scratched up album with a CD and oddly the tracks didn't sound quite right without the defects we had introduced. I have a recent boxed set of remasters sitting next to my CD player. Good music just doesn't get old."

JG: "At first, I loved Wild Things Run Fast—both for its music, as well as its sound quality (I have a white-jacket test pressing of the LP made with 'Quiex II' vinyl and it sounds quite a bit better than the standard vinyl pressings)—but over time, I came to hate it. That's because my boss at the time—the late, great HP [Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound magazine —Ed.]—loved it even more than I did and played it so often while reviewing stereo equipment that I eventually burned-out on it. (I'll bet it has been at least two decades since the last time I listened to it.) Accordingly, my favorite of her albums is Blue and as coincidence would have it, I was actually listening to it as I read your piece. 8^) P.S.: You might also enjoy reading Sheila Weller's book Girls Like Us, which covers the backstories about Carole King, Carly Simon, and Joni Mitchell."

Mike replies: Ahh...so then you could live without that white-jacket test pressing, is what you're saying? Hint, hint?  :-)

Chris Y.: "Honestly I keep coming back to her first album Song to a Seagull. Get it in vinyl and drop the needle on that thing. (I've just recently learned thanks to this moment Mitchell is having, that the guitar she is using on it is a 1956 Martin D28. It sounds like a Steinway.) She used ethereal tunings, almost Shakespearean lyrics, and as you noted, a worldly and heartbroken voice that completely redefined what the folksinging art form could be. With that album she raised the bar to the moon. Anyone discovering her now, especially musicians, should go back to that record and decide for themselves whether she was the Taylor Swift of her time, or something much more. This was her coffeehouse time, hypnotizing small audiences of cognoscenti in small smoky rooms, in town after town. Her work since then has ranged from unique to incomparable, but I always go back to the beginning for the deepest draught...."

John McMillin: "From 'Amelia' to 'Refuge of the Roads,' the Hejira album set the gold standard for me. Just thinking about these songs starts my scalp tingling, as if my hair follicles are antennae connecting me with some distant broadcast of truth, emotion and beauty. Jaco never played so lyrically, with this kind of restraint. Soon, in this fertile crescent where folk collides with jazz, Pat Metheny and Lyle Mays would be in her band for a short while, bringing them to my ears for a lifetime of musical wonderment and awe. Joni played and recorded with an all-star band of other top jazz players, and her tunes are still favorites for jazz covers and interpretations. So it's almost impossible for me to imagine my musical universe without Mitchell's projects and collaborations...not to overlook her songs and lyrics, which are as exquisite, witty and profound as the best instrumental work of her collaborators."

Medium Format Digital

...Just wanted to briefly give my own answer to yesterday's "Thought Experiment" question, although it feels a bit like mounting the bully pulpit—that is, my answer is no more valid or interesting than yours, or than anyone else's.

That said, I think I agree with cdembrey, who wrote, "Medium-format digital and iPhone X is the perfect camera combo for me. I like here-to-infinity D-o-F, and wide and wider are the only lenses I use. X and X1D sound like all I'd ever want/need"...except that I'd go with my iPhone 7+ and the GFX.    

In my case, though, that's sort of an "on paper" infatuation. I'm currently finding attraction in the idea of splitting my customary one-camera-to-do-everything approach into two cameras that counterbalance each other, embracing the iPhone as one of them and then finding the idealized counterpoint to it that's as far away from it as possible. And, unlike others, I think you can pretty easily see the quality of the GFX sensor in JPEGs—just look the camera up on Flickr and browse around, and don't pay so much attention to sharpness, which is sort of the photographic equivalent of sugar, a nutrient-free "masking agent" for other, more nutritious properties. Heh. I kid. But I think you can at least sense the effortless DR and tonality and the excellent color depth from online samples, just as I think you can pretty easily intuit the quality of the Leica S lenses and sensor from online JPEGs as well. No, they don't give the whole story, but use your experience—from limited evidence, you can sometimes sense differences you can't actually prove.

But it's a moot point for me. I can't afford medium format digital anyhow. And as John wrote, "To me, what prevents me in real life from even buying used MF cameras is the speed with which they lose value as FF keeps upping the ante." The more expensive the camera you buy, the higher the need to get a great deal of use out of it, because otherwise you'll be throwing that much more money away when you churn your old equipment for new. Digital cameras aren't an investment except in terms of the use you get out of them. The higher the cost, the higher that bar. So if a GFX is a stretch for your bank account, just know that you're going to have to commit to it and use it a lot over the next handful of years for the investment to pan out.

Also, I'm confronting a changed shooting environment here in the Finger Lakes. My opportunities are different here. As I've pointed out before, I "see" pictures in smaller angles of view here—smaller bits of the visual surround—meaning that my response has more to do with lenses than with cameras. As a response to my specific environment, rather than to any theoretical equipment infatuation, it's probably more important for me to get a good telephoto zoom than to go for more improvement in the sensor.

Especially with smaller sensors getting so good. As I've said several times, I love the results from the new 20-MP Micro 4/3 sensor.

And then there's the X-T2...

...I like to step back and consider things holistically every now and then; look at things with more objective distance. For example, I mused to a friend this morning, talking about film cameras, "Do you ever get the feeling that no one ever quite made a sufficient medium-format camera? One with no bad habits, no issues, no gotchas? I’ve tried a wide variety of them, up to my 6008AF, and sometimes it feels like nobody ever got everything quite right at once. Except maybe for those who managed to bond with a Rollei TLR, which doesn’t include me but did include a lot of people, from Vivian the nanny to Milt Rogovin." He replied, "Yeah, medium format is the ultimate tease."

From a similar position of backing off and contemplating from a distance, considering everything, I've also been musing that the Fuji X-T2 might just be the best camera I've ever used. It's really quite remarkable how a thorough and comprehensive review and refresh of many different details has transformed an already-good camera (the X-T1, which has been my main camera for three years or so) into a much better camera. More than any other "iteration" or "Mark II" (or Mark [x]) I've ever experienced, the changes have transformed the camera into something essentially different: the improvements add up to more together than the sum of their parts. I'm quite enamored of the X-T2 and find myself just wanting to get to know it better. All things considered, the X-T2 is probably objectively a better fit for me than the GFX.

But let me find a pot full of money and, in the words of Indiana's bumpkin poet laureate, James Whitcomb Riley, it would be "Katy bar the door."

So that's it for me at this point. I should also point out that Panasonic Micro 4/3 cameras entice me almost exactly as much as the Fuji GFX does! Probably my favorite system of all the ones I don't use.

And there's news on that front this morning, of course. Which I'll get around to eventually.

More anon—your bumpkin blogger,

Mike

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Dennis (partial comment): "I don't think I've ever used a digital camera—or heard of one, for that matter—that's been satisfying enough to think that I could use this camera for a decade or two. They all have something that begs for improvement after using them for a while. I think a handful of people have found cameras they've gotten along with (just as some undoubtedly did with medium format) and a couple of cameras (Nikon D700 comes to mind) have more than a few fans, but I don't know that anyone has made anything close to a 'just right' digital camera."

Stan B.: "Just about anyone would love to have any of these fine medium format cameras. Problem is, they are specialty cameras only some of us would use on a regular basis, due to: size, weight and handling; specialty cameras with prohibitive prices...."

Gordon T Cahill: "I am in the fortunate and ridiculous position of owning three currently available mini-medium-format cameras. The Pentax 645Z, Leica S (Typ 007) and Hasselblad X1D. MiniMF ruined 35mm for me. I can clearly see the difference from my unloved A7RII to these cameras. The differences are nil on screen and then you hit the print button and magic happens. It's wonderful and addictive.

"Currently I'm in a honeymoon phase with the X1D. I just took it on a two week holiday to Cuba and it was perfect for that trip. What I really lust for is a mirrorless upgrade to the S. Those lenses are something else. If the Leica could organise longer exposures than 60 seconds and eliminate LENR I might not have bought the Hasselblad. I still love the Pentax but she's a brute for travel. But she was relatively cheap and the wide zoom is still the best on the market. I'm now so addicted that I struggle to use any smaller format. It's only when I need long lenses or tilt shift glass that I reach for something with a puny little sensor.  :-) "

Thought Experiment

As an idle question / thought experiment, if you could comfortably afford a medium-format digital camera, i.e. Fuji GFX, Hasselblad X1D, Leica S, or Pentax 645Z, plus a reasonable amount of the goodies you'd like for one, would you want one? Or do they just amount to another siren song? Just curious.

(I think I'll give my own answer in the comments.)

Mike

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Rodolfo Canet: "Indeed, yes, oh yes! Don't ask me why. I don't need it at all, I'd be able to use it very rarely, but if I really could afford it, I'd buy it. The best, the most expensive. Lust, just lust. Remember, I don't want happiness, give me euphoria!"

Ken Bennett: "Yes, I would get the Fuji if money were no object. My primary camera is the APS-C Fuji X system. I also have a Canon 5DX 50-megapixel DSLR body along with several other Canon cameras and a bunch of good lenses. I end up using the Fuji for 99% of my assignments and all my personal work—the Canon is better, but not enough so to overcome the size and weight advantage of the smaller Fuji cameras. The results I've seen from the Fuji MF camera suggest that it would be a good alternative when image quality is paramount. In the old days we had a wide choice of formats and chose based on the type of shoot and the desired results—in my case 35mm for sports or reportage, MF for magazine portraits and corporate work, 4x5 for architecture and landscape. Having an 'affordable' digital MF camera would restore that choice, I think."

Scott Reither: "I am using and loving the Fujifilm GFX. This camera has me more excited than any camera I've used over the past 20 years, including the Pentax 645Z which I sold in order to afford the Fuji. As a landscape photographer, medium format is well worth the stretch and I much prefer to work with the larger, slower system. I wouldn't trade the GFX for the Leica or Hasselblad. The PhaseOne might be tempting—if someone was offering to give me one—but, that's certainly beyond the realm of reality for my budget. Fujifilm has won me over."

Victor Huang: "Based on past experiences with owning several digital backs, such as the Hasselbald CFV-50C, Phase One's P65+ for Contax 645, not to mention most of the recent Leica and Fuji digital cameras, the choice was quite obvious for me. I wanted a system that is backed by a company with financial staying power as well as a decent roadmap for lenses. The Fuji GFX fits the bill. Mea culpa, I am no pro, none of these toys are necessary. I justify it because I have the means and photography is pretty much my only hobby. So as soon as the GFX was available, I bought one. Of course, the ease of adapting all the medium format lenses I have is an extra bonus!"

RubyT: "I wasn't interested until I read today's GFX review. I guess it's a good thing this is out of my price range."

matthew: "Getting one in my hands would do me as much good as the dog that caught the car."

Duncan: "Not even a siren song for me. I'm happy with my Micro 4/3 gear. I don't need the extra weight or pixels."

Ken: "Nope. Too big for travel/hiking, lenses too short for wildlife, and a likely thief magnet. I don't use a studio, minimize tripod use whenever possible, and I rarely print (and even more rarely print bigger than about eight by 12 inches). For me personally, medium format doesn't even amount to a 'siren song' as it has no real appeal. For now, even if its cost wasn't an issue (it is) I'd stick to my crop sensor Fuji (for travel) and Nikon (for wildlife) cameras."

Jack (partial comment): "Yes I would like one! But then as you know I have one. The Leica S and a few goodies. I bought into the system when the amount of resolution allowed huge enlargements which I needed. I haven’t compared a print from a full frame camera of similar resolution to see if a modern full frame is as good, but I suspect the lenses of the Leica might be better anyway. A better question is if I didn’t have a medium format would I want one and which one? Yes I still would ... I prefer an optical viewfinder and the Leica S viewfinder is wonderful. Everyone should look through it to see the difference. So a mirrorless solution is not for me."

Paul Weimer: "Given that most of what I shoot are landscapes...you bet I'd get one if I could afford it."

Bob Johnston [no immediate relation to Mike]: "Yes I would have one in addition to my Fuji X-T2. Most people who are not 'loaded,' as we say over here, try to choose one camera that will do everything. Which means that they get a camera which does most things, but only tolerably well."

Martin: "Honestly the biggest windfall I could receive in my photographic life is time and freedom to go shoot. If I could get those goodies I'd sell them and use the money to take some time off from work and shoot."

Michael Carrithers: "I’d take the Fuji in a NY minute. Being able to work handheld and get such quality in prints? Zowie."

howard: "Yes, I would want one...a Hasselblad X1D with a complement of X1D prime lenses. And I bought it. For me and the slow, deliberative style that I shoot with, the X1D is the Goldilocks of cameras—and I have owned most of them, from a Pentax 67, to a Hasselblad with a Phase One back, to a Sony A7RII, to a Nikon D800E. The X1D is perfect. It is the digital equivalent of my favorite camera, the Mamiya 7. Beautifully designed and built; smallish, light, portable; superb lenses; streamlined and elegant user interface with none of the clutter of Japanese DSLRs; and beautiful files that I can work and print large."

John: "I’d get the Hasselblad because it's the smallest of the choices and thus most likely to actually be used. To me, what prevents me in real life from even buying used MF cameras is the speed with which they lose value as FF keeps upping the ante. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure I could convince myself it’s worth 'investing' in."

cdembrey: "Medium-format digital and iPhone X is the perfect camera combo for me. I like here-to-infinity D-o-F, and wide and wider are the only lenses I use. X and X1D sound like all I'd ever want/need."

Fujifilm GFX Review, Part III

The Fujifilm X-T2 (APS-C) and GFX 50S (medium format)

-

Reviewed by Stephen Scharf

Part I
Part II

I rented a Fujifilm GFX 50S and the GF 32-64mm ƒ/4 zoom lens for a few days over a long weekend, including at my last professional motor race of the year, the Go Pro Grand Prix of Sonoma Indy Car race. To get a feel for the camera in a real-world setting, I used the GFX at the race for atmosphere, paddock, and pit lane photos at the race. I also used it for some landscape and architectural photography.

This is the third part of this review and is comprised of final impression and conclusions.

Final impressions
As far as I am concerned, when it comes to photography, it's all about the print. Per many of the comments from TOP readers in Parts I and II, one cannot really get a sense of this capabilities of the Fuji GFX from simply viewing small, low-res images on a computer display. So I spent the last few weeks making, viewing and reflecting on (no pun intended) prints made from the GFX to serve as a context for my final impressions. [Stephen, who I know to be a skilled printmaker, is sending me some prints, and I'll write a separate post giving you my impressions of them. —MJ]

For one thing, most displays have a pretty limited bit depth (most don't even have a 10-bit native LUT) and as such, can't really display all the information present in a printed 16-bit file. For another, it's really only with larger prints that one can start to get a sense of what GFX 50S is really capable of. Given that I have an Epson 3880, the largest prints I could make were 16x20 inches, but it was at least a starting point for reference and represented an improvement over viewing the photographs on a computer screen. Just to put things in perspective, though, it's when you start to print at 24x36 or larger that you really start to see the benefits that a medium format camera brings compared to APS-C or full-frame.

The other points where medium format cameras such as the GFX have advantages are in tonal gradation, acuity, and lens performance. While the Fuji GFX 50S doesn’t have an absolute resolution higher than some FF cameras, with a pixel area of 5.3 μm the area per pixel is approximately 30% larger than, for example, a Canon 5DSR, which means that for a given exposure the Fuji is going to capture more signal relative to noise. And more signal translates to more exposure latitude and a broader tonal range as well as potentially higher color accuracy. As mentioned in Part II, the ability of medium format to capture luminance variation across a broader range means, as Ming Thein has insightfully pointed out, greater control over how the highlights roll off in medium format.

Additionally, lenses designed for larger-format sensors have to make fewer optical compromises than lenses for smaller sensors, and generally suffer from less distortion and field curvature. These lenses also provide a finer degree of control over the range of depth-of-field and greater separation or distinction between the plane of focus and the out-of-focus areas of an image.

This provides us with more editing headroom, more control over the tonal range and depth-of-field, and as such, impacts how "natural" an image looks, particularly in a print. I liken this sense of naturalness to audio reproduction, where a first-class turntable playing a well-mastered and pressed LP or a high-resolution (e.g., 24/192) D/A converter renders a sonic presentation that sounds considerably more natural and musical than most 16/44 Redbook CDs played on a consumer-grade CD player. It can be tough to put into words, but you definitely know it when you hear or see it.

All this adds up to more "information" in an image, as well as more control by the photographer of how that information is edited or displayed, particularly in the print.

I wasn't able to compare prints from a Canon 5DSR or comparable FF cameras to a Fuji GFX, but I've spent quite a bit of time making and examining prints of the photographs presented in Part II. Black-and-white conversions were made using the Fujifilm Acros film preset from the RAW image in Lightroom, and printed on Epson Premium Luster paper using the Epson 3880's Advanced Black and White mode rather an ICC paper profile. "Norris Canyon Road" was the first photograph I took with the GFX that really started to give me a sense of what was medium format was all about. When printed, the tonal range—and, importantly, the camera’s ability to hold subtle gradations of tonality from the whites to the blacks—is impressive. The clouds have a soft, natural, look; the hills, fencing and pasture reveal midtones with highlights, midtones, and detail with subtlety yet clarity, and the quarter-tones and shadow regions of the trees and barn still reveal detail, texture and pattern.

The San Jose City Hall photographs possibly represent even more of a challenge, as the luminosity ranges from specular highlights that print near paper-white to blacks that are close to the Dmax of the printer's inkset. The photographs encompass quite a broad tonal range and, in some areas, a large amount of high-frequency detail, but, in viewing prints, one can see that the camera holds detail from the very brightest non-specular whites to down into the shadows towards the deep blacks. Gradations of tonality, surface, pattern, and texture are finely resolved, and the prints have the "silvery" quality of a silver gelatin print. Areas of windows, walls and doors that upon initial viewing appear to have no detail clearly show shadow detail and texture upon close examination under good lighting. I've sent three of the black-and-white prints to Mike, and hope that he will provide his insights and comments about them for the gang. [I will. —MJ]

The default color profile for the GFX, like the Fuji X-cams, is based on Provia, a film well-known for its accuracy and neutrality. I didn't make many color prints from the Indy Car race, but those I made were very accurate with respect to color, accuracy, saturation, and contrast, with gobs of detail—very Provia-like in color (even though Provia is a slide film).

Conclusions
The Fuji GFX is well-designed, beautifully made, and easy and intuitive to use. Its light weight and excellent ergonomics made it easy to shoot handheld, and, as I mentioned in Part I, the camera just gets out of the way of the photographer and lets you concentrate on your work rather than fiddling with the camera. The camera's operation and functionality just "falls to hand," so to speak, and, for a medium format camera, I found it to be responsive and snappy in use. Any camera that can lock focus and capture a racing car at speed is responsive enough for almost any real-world application in which one would use a medium format camera. The viewfinder and LCD viewing systems are just gorgeous in use, with accurate color and very fast refresh rates. An added plus is that, like the X-Pro2/X-T2, when shooting using the black-and-white film presets, you see your image and exposure in black and white as well. Most importantly, I literally never thought about the fact that I was using an EVF or, more to the point, that I was missing an OVF, when photographing with the GFX. In my opinion, EVFs have advanced to the point where they are more practical and useful than OVFs.

At the end of the day, medium format cameras all about image quality, or the attributes commonly regarded as image quality, and the GFX delivers those attributes in spades, with exceptional resolution, dynamic range, color and white balance accuracy, tonal range and gradation, editing headroom, and the control over distortion and the planes of D-o-F that medium format lenses bring.

An added plus using the GFX is that the metering and white balance is so good, so accurate, and the dynamic range so broad, that very little editing was required. Ninety-five percent of the time, if I had to do any editing, it was simply to tweak the black and white points of the histograms—and that, folks, was pretty much it. Standard sharpening and printing at 240 DPI for these photos yielded prints with very high level of detail without pushing either the image or printer to their full capabilities.

When the GFX 50S was announced at Photokina in 2016, there were a lot of expectations for this camera. Fujifilm was sending a message to the rest of the industry that it was fully committed to mirrorless and that it was "gettin' serious." Since its advent in the market, the GFX system has seen both rapid and widespread adoption by professionals and advanced amateurs as well as support from a surprisingly large number of third-party manufacturers.

Based on the camera's design, functionality, amazing image quality, flexibility and ease of use, and its continual development into a fully-fledged system with new lenses, accessories and recently, lighting systems (e.g. Profoto), I think it's destined to become a reference standard for many photographers as well as for the industry as whole. At a price of $6,499, it's difficult to think of this camera as an excellent value for money, but, if you get what you pay for, a camera with the capabilities of this one is an off-the-charts value proposition. The GFX delivers what it promises.

For me personally, I loved using and shooting with this camera. It immediately felt right at home. It was light, snappy, and fun to use. If you can afford to buy one, or have the opportunity to rent one, do so, and enjoy—but be mindful, as this camera has absolutely ruined me compared to anything else I've shot with when it comes to image quality.

I look forward to using the GFX again, and encourage anyone interested to do so as well.

Stephen

A scientist by profession and a photographer by avocation, Stephen Scharf has been a professionally accredited motorsports photojournalist since 2003. He’s currently one of the track photographers for Sonoma Raceway, covering all their professional motorsports and racing events for photojournalism, PR, and media purposes. His photographs have been published in numerous newspapers in the SF Bay Area, including the San Francisco Chronicle, as well as various motorsports websites and magazines. His work also includes landscape, architectural, urban exploration, fine art and documentary street photography.

©2017 by Stephen Scharf, all rights reserved

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Fujifilm GFX 50S

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All the Prints Have Shipped

Reader Micha Drögemüller's print arrived safely in Hamburg,
Germany—"blurry snapshot as proof," he writes

Just a note to say that Gordon has finished shipping all the prints from our last Print Sale. The sale was a big success—~234 sold, almost half to non-U.S. TOP readers.

Please allow 10–14 days for yours to arrive if it hasn't already. If it hasn't shown up by then, please contact Gordon or me. We do have a small number of copies in reserve if any go missing or get damaged in shipment, so you are safe.

On the Sale front, I'm currently hoping to put together a sale of two superb books, one from The Nelson-Atkins Museum and one from Yale University Press, before the holidays. Supplies will be relatively limited but both books are standouts. We're a-workin' on it.

Thanks to everyone who bought Gordon's print!

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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TDE: "Received mine. It is just lovely, so much vibrancy and depth in the print. And very well packaged, too. (I've received some other prints in the past year or so that had slight crumples in the corners, but no way that could have happened with this one.)"

Benjamin Marks: "I have some wooden ledges (less than a shelf, but more than a sconce?) in our dining room that I use to prop my own photos up against the wall. The purpose is to live with an image for six months or so and see whether the image can still inspire and engage at that time. If it does, I have a winner. If it doesn't...well let's just say that most don't. Gordon's picture has been up since it arrived. It has never failed to draw the eye. I am so pleased to own it; particularly that I can see it every day. Thanks to both of you for putting this out there. There must be karmic points awarded for increasing the quotient of pleasure and beauty in this world. What's the news phase? Now, more than ever...with gratitude, Ben Marks."

Big Weekend

Well, after saying I was going to take the weekend off, we had a pretty big weekend here.

First, I noticed that most of the comments to Friday's "Around the Web" post were about Lightroom replacements. It's a problem of blogging that sometimes a discussion gets going under an unrelated post, making those comments difficult to locate later for new visitors. (Not that it's ever really easy in a blog with "literary" rather than literally descriptive post titles.) However, since it was apparent that a LR-replacement discussion was getting going, I went ahead and put up a "titled post" on that subject...

...Which has gotten 113 comments so far, all of them thoughtful and some very much so.

Normally I "Feature" certain representative comments, to make it easier for people to enjoy a few of them without wading through the whole comments stack. (I once encountered a photography article at NYT.com that had more than 3,000 comments, making it rather difficult to find the good ones. I tried to read them all. It took a while.) With the LR-replacement post I opted not to do that, the reason being that everyone uses different cameras and has different needs and aims, so the comments that are useful to me, for instance, might not be useful to you, and the comments that are useful to you might not be to someone else.

And then I spent the weekend investigating raw converters and image editors on my own, for my own needs. I had been curious about DxO's offerings, but lately I've mostly been using the X-T2 and DxO doesn't handle .RAF files, so that was that for that.

Then, a commenter named Rob (here's his website, and I hope linking to it here does him a little good!) reminded me of Photo Ninja, from PictureCode, which I still had from back when I briefly owned a D800. I updated it, and Eureka! Not only does it have a built-in profile for the X-T2, it even recognized the lens, and the conversions are excellent. After opening bunches of files and doing lots of looking, I concluded that Photo Ninja does a better job with .RAF files from the X-T2 than ACR does.

ACR v. PhotoNinja: ACR on top, PhotoNinja on the bottom. Both will be 100% if you double-click on them. Unfortunately, the blog software muddies and darkens images posted here just a tad, reducing the apparent distinctions.

Oddly, this is the same conclusion I reached when I first used PhotoNinja with the D800: I felt PhotoNinja did a little better job, but I liked the controls in ACR better (or was more used to them) so I kept using it anyway. (ACR really is a good little application, even if 'tis but an app-within-an-app.)

Your mileage will vary, of course, depending on your cameras and your tastes.

Marketing misstep?
I think it made sense for Adobe to go to the cloud/subscription model with Photoshop. First, Photoshop is very expensive, and a whole lot of people pirated it; and second, power users who really need it really need it, and don't see any problem with paying for it monthly. It doesn't matter so much to those users when updates are made willy-nilly, whenever Adobe feels like it rather than when they (the users) feel like updating, because if you use it all the time you tend to know it well and changes aren't that difficult to adapt to.

I don't think the same conditions pertain to Lightroom at all. Many users of Lightroom are hobbyists and enthusiasts, on down to occasional and casual users. Their work habits are more fragile because they tend not to master their software as thoroughly or use it as much, so on-the-fly changes to control layouts and look-and-feel can mess them up and frustrate them more easily. Plus, they simply may not use the software enough to make a monthly fee seem worthwhile. You probably never go a month without opening LR, but I bet a lot of people who own it do. The idea of not "owning" their software, not having it safely ensconced on their own hard drive on their own computer, seems more Big-Brotherish and threatening to such users. The feeling of helplessness in the face of an overwhelming corporation is only slightly less unpleasant than actual helplessness.

Plus there's the fact that Adobe is clearly just minting money. Its profits are enormous. People who argue that software is a tough business and Adobe is just doing what it has to do to survive are not making a compelling argument when it comes to Adobe in my view. It's like pitying Microsoft or Facebook.

So my personal opinion (definitely a little guy's view) is that it was smart for Adobe to go to a CC model for Photoshop but not so much for Lightroom. And that's why so many alternatives to Lightroom (before this weekend I had never even heard of ON1, Darktable, or Luminar) are coming to our attention all of a sudden: in some cases, smaller companies are reading the market—and the feelings of the typical user—better than Adobe is, and are sensing an opportunity to snitch a small but meaningful-to-them slice of Adobe's enormous, rich pie. Adobe, meanwhile, is so surfeited with lucre, and so corpulent and torpid as a result of it, that it hardly seems to care.

Interesting weekend!

Mike

UPDATE: Below are the same 100% details processed in Iridient X Transformer. Both are 100% after you double-click on them. Below those are the entire image files (with Iridient Trial Version watermarks) so you can see where the details came from.

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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grigoris: "Your last sentence made me Google four words. Not that it was necessary for me to understand the specific meaning of 'surfeited, lucre, torpid or corpulent' but for sheer curiosity. Bravo! I like your posts even more for moments like these! P.S. English are not my mother tongue."

Thomas Rink: "My take on this: I'm a software engineer, and the software produced by my employer is rented to the customers, not sold, similar to what Adobe does. So I'm used to this business model, and I'm fine with it—even more so since the monthly fee is reasonable in my opinion. Nevertheless, I am now going to evaluate other raw converters. Reason: I fear that the current flavor of Lightroom (based on the local file system) is going to be discontinued in the near future, and storing my files in the cloud is not an option for me. Digital photography is fine in theory, but this computer and tech stuff is a royal pain."

Jim: "When I ran my own high tech company, I had a member of our Board of Directors who had systematically acquired all the companies in a very small tech niche. One meeting he announced he had just acquired the last competitor. When he was asked why he wanted all of them, he declared 'A little monopoly goes a long way!'"

scott kirkpatrick (partial comment): "Decoding Fuji X-Trans color arrays is only part of the problem of supporting Fuji's raw files. Fuji also introduced a proprietary lossless compression scheme with the X-T2 and X-Pro2. Adobe appears to have paid Fuji for software to decompress it. Others chose not to pay, and some of those cracked the code themselves, which took about a year to become generally possible. Sandy McGuffog (AccuRaw), another one-man shop with a day job, was one of the first to study the complications of rendering X-Trans images. He's done a few comparisons of the major tools, reporting the results on his ChromaSoft blog."

Gordon Lewis: "I have been following this discussion with great interest. The main takeaway for me is that the more things you plan to use a particular digital imaging application for, the more important it is to choose carefully. The time you invest in using it is far more valuable than the cost of the app itself. For example, if you were to invest a hundred or more hours using Lightroom to tag and catalog your images or apply image edits, switching to a different app could mean losing every single hour of that investment. Imagine starting over with tens of thousands of images. Using a newer app from a smaller company has risks of its own. Said company could be here today, gone a few years from now—and along with it, any support and updates you might hope for. It all makes me envy those who can simply shoot JPEGs, stick them in folders, and call it a day."

LR Replacement Photo Editing Software

Defensively, I'm putting this up as a separate thread so people can post to it. Many of the comments on the previous post are about LR replacements, and I thought it would be more useful (at least to TOPosterity) to collate all of that information in one place under a proper post title.

So, have you either bought or switched to another photo-editing app than Lightroom (LR) or Photoshop (PS)? Or are you thinking about doing so?

Tell us what you bought, what you like, what you considered or are considering, or which way you're leaning. If you made a relevant comment on the previous post, please re-post it here (moving comments from post to post is something I can't do on the back end).

Fuji X-T2 processed in Photoshop CC. Taken yesterday from
the dock belonging to the association across the street from me.

I'll start—I've used Photoshop for 24 years, but dislike the idea of the CC version (PSCC) even though I have it and pay rent every month. Not saying it's a bad idea, I just don't like it. It doesn't appeal. It has anti-appeal.

I'm considering DxO + Affinity now. I don't need software help for DAM (digital asset management, i.e., "management tasks and decisions surrounding the ingestion, annotation, cataloguing, storage, retrieval and distribution of digital assets" [A.J. van Niekirk]), because I keep files in folders according to the quirky way my brain remembers them. At this point I mostly use Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), in which I do most corrections, and I can do a few things in Photoshop I can't seem to figure out how to do otherwise. And I have some plugins for Photoshop I don't want to lose, chiefly Nik Silver Efex 2. Of course, ACR aside, I use only about 2% of the capability of Photoshop. I use PS6 (paid full price) more often than PSCC, but now PS6 doesn't seem to want to open X-T2 raw (.RAF) files even though I installed all the updates. That could be operator error somehow, as I'm not a ninja with computers, but generally I'm seeing the handwriting on the wall lately, big 'n' bold: switcheroo coming soon. Or, er, SWITCHEROO COMING SOON.

You?

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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

[Ed. Note: I've decided not to post Featured Comments for this post. I think you might want to delve into the full Comment stack yourself, skimming for the ones you might get something from. The problem is the same as it is with editing software itself: everyone's needs are different and everyone's solutions are different. I'll just say that many of the comments are very interesting, collectively as well as individually. Thanks to all.

One thing I'd like to add is that I often see reviews and comparisons of raw conversions online where I just don't agree with the posters from a holistic aesthetic viewpoint. For example, many comparisons of ACR and a well-known competitor with .RAF files conclude that the competitor is "clearly superior" but, looking at their own comparisons, I sometimes think they're missing the forest for the trees, or more specifically for the finest twigs of the trees at 100%. Caveat emptor—don't forget to ignore the things you're told to think and look for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Your values and aims might be different from the testers'. The luckiest photographers are those who have strong tastes about how their work should look and go after that look with gusto, or embrace it wholeheartedly, even if it's far from standard.]

Around the Web on a Friday (44th Week of 2017)

• Mystery man: Without doing any searching, can you guess who this fellow is? Hints: he was born in 1885, and his son was an epochal musician who was virtually synonymous with a particular well-known musical style, deeply venerated in the country of his birth and beloved worldwide. (We've obscured the last name in this JPEG.) For the answer, read on.

• Annoyed at Adobe? What Michael Reichmann called "the Photoshop tax" seems to some people to be getting more onerous. With the latest shift in Lightroom to a CC (Creative Cloud) monthly subscription model, it's not hard to foresee a future in which you're consigned to storing your own archive not on your own hard drive (or not only on your own hard drive), but on the amorphous "cloud." Where, of course, your pictures will be safe in perpetuity, we say sarcastically.

Should you happen to be thinking of jumping ship, Greg Scoblete at PDN Online has a survey of "14 Great Image Editing Programs for Still Photographers." (We've been thinking of switching to Capture One ourselves. Not easy, though: we've been using Photoshop for nearly a quarter of a century*.)

• Next up: Next Friday's "Baker's Dozen" post here at TOP will present 13 smartphone photos submitted by readers. I've already received several hundred entries, and there are many gems. To give you a leg up (but do not send these yet) our next "Call for Work" will be for "a picture taken with a Leica lens." Acceptable will be pictures taken with any Leica-branded lenses, from a classic 1920s collapsible uncoated Elmar, to an early 1.5-MP original Digilux pic, to a Mandler-designed, Solms-built Summicron, to a Panny/Leica, to one of the stupendous Leica S lenses, to an R lens adapted to a Canon DSLR, to a macro shot taken with a reversed Focotar. You may submit JPEGs, or digisnaps of physical prints. Points for creativity! And presentation. And you're welcome to include a portrait of your lens itself, although it's not necessary.

The only other requirement will be to tell us something—at least one thing—about your lens: its history, or how you got it, or how much you like it, or what other people have said about it, or who designed it, or who used to own it, or anything else interesting and fascinating—not all those things, just something or other. Again, please do NOT submit these until the call for work appears in the coming week! You'll need to know the subject line for your email or we will certainly lose it in our Brobdingnagian email stack.

• The cavalry to the rescue: Speaking of image processing software, some good news. DxO has purchased the orphaned Nik Collection and is promising to continue to develop it. As you probably remember, Nik was acquired by Google in 2012 because it coveted Snapseed for mobile devices and because it wanted to encourage photographers to use Google+. Later, Google made the rest of the Nik suite available for free, which we all liked, and then discontinued it, which we didn't. Pessimism about Nik's future was justified at that point, so DxO coming to the rescue at this late date, like the cavalry coming over the hill with bugles blaring at the absolute last minute in an old Western, is welcome news. DxO has already integrated U Point into DxO PhotoLab, and will most likely continue to integrate the useful old Nik plugins into its software. (Maybe we should switch to DxO OpticsPro instead of Capture One.)

Sheryl, Christian mom, hates rap, 5 kids

• Doggone: See if you recognize anyone you know in these ten common types. If you really like these, you can follow your nose (and the links) for more (lots more). Ten was enough for us, but they're pretty amusing.

• Die Welt ist seltsam: The picture at the top of this post is a rare surviving photograph of Captain Norval Sinclair Marley, a white British Jamaican of Syrian Jewish heritage. His son, Nesta Robert, had his first and middle names switched around by a passport official who thought "Nesta" was a feminine name, making him Robert Nesta Marley, known the world over as Bob.

Norval Marley, who might or might not have been an actual Captain, was 41 years older than his black Jamaican wife Cedella, Bob’s mother, who he married when she was 18. Norval provided for Bob but seldom saw him. He died in 1955 at the age of 70 when Bob was ten years old.

• On the lens front—sortakinda—there's a big controversy in the art world about that Leonardo (da Vinci, not DiCaprio) that's scheduled to be auctioned off this month. It's been causing a lot of excitement among people who thrill to the news of large sums of money being spent, because it's the last Leonardo in private hands and is expected to sell for approximately the GNP of a small, impoverished African nation. Paintings of saviors of the world shared something of a mannerism in Renaissance Italy in that the savior was often depicted holding an orb, representing the world He saved; Leonardo's orb, like those of numerous other painters, appears to be glass, but he didn't paint it with the image refracting through it the correct way. That's odd in that Leonardo—prototype of "The Renaissance Man"—was a famously fastidious observer and also one of the world's leading experts on optics at the time. Leonardo's most recent biographer, the admirable Walter Isaacson, has chimed in on the issue. (As an aside, a book dealer and voracious reader we knew once told us that Walter's biography of Ben Franklin was the best book he had ever read.) We can't know the truth, but the issue is creating a lot of chatter.

• Follow TOP on Twitter! @TheOnlinePhotog. We only bug you very occasionally.

• Lightning fast: Canon Camera has announced a one business day turnaround for equipment repairs for CPS Platinum and Cinema members. (Gold and Silver level members will have to wait a little longer, but not much longer.) In the event your equipment can't be repaired that fast, CPS will send you a loaner until the repair is finished.

CPS, for those who might not know, is Canon Professional Services, the professional support arm of Canon. Not just anyone can join; entry criteria are strict and you must apply and pass muster. But CPS (and NPS) are among the reasons why professionals prefer to go with the big dogs. When a problem arises, you just call Canon's 24/7 professional hotline (the hotlines are based in the same continent you are.) One business day turnaround is said to be the fastest ever guaranteed to professional customers.

• Unsettling: The always delightful cartoon xkcd, one of cartoon-maven Ctein's favorites, weighs in on the lifespan of digital assets. We dasn't pilfer it to reproduce here, lest lawyers be unleashed on us, but you should see it. Will today's equivalent of that tattered old carte up top of Ziggy's granddad survive?

UPDATE: Not only does xkcd not send lawyers to hunt you, they encourage bloggers to embed the cartoons. Here you go.

• Sony Q: Dan Watson at HuffPost says that the Sony A9 is really the A7III. We might agree, except that soon there will doubtless be an A7III. Some people don't like how these cameras handle, but we're not amongst 'em. They're very nice little cameras that handle fine.

Michael Marten, Porthcawl, Glamorgan, 17 May 2007.
Low water 12 noon, high water 8 pm.

• Prince of Tides: British photographer Michael Marten has produced a dazzling document of the miracle of tides, certain to be an eye-opener for those who have never lived near an ocean. We're told the book is sold out, sad to say. We loved it—a simple idea that was doubtless very difficult to reify and is visually extremely rich. Wonderful project. Do not miss.

• Nine decades: Re Leica lenses, William Fagan of Macfilos compared pictures from a very old Leica and a very new Leica made 90 years apart. His findings might surprise you.

• Best (for now): DxOmark, the French software ninjas who evaluate sensors, have declared the Hasselblad X1D to have the best medium-format sensor, granting the camera its first published sensor rating above 100. (DxO doesn't evaluate the system, just the sensor. Its ratings, although suspect in some quarters, are scientifically sound.) The once iconic Swedish company Hasselblad is now owned by the Chinese drone manufacturer DJI. [UPDATE: Note that DxO doesn't evaluate Fuji cameras and, for no good reason, failed to test the Pentax 645Z.]

• Selfie fatigue: Many millennials (members of the generation that reached maturity early in the 21st century) remember Bill Nye the Science Guy. Apparently many of them bug him to take their picture with him; watching the trailer for his new movie, we were startled to hear him say, "I was asked to talk about selfie fatigue...I'm pretty sure it shortens your life." Does it? He should know, he's a science guy. Now we know why we seldom take selfies. (We use the editorial "we" in Around the Web posts, as you no doubt have noticed. However there is no one in here but us chickens.)

• Don't Kodak St. Peter: So if you get too many selfies taken and the inevitable happens, take your camera with you, but remember to take the photographic advice of the venerable Mark Twain:

"Upon arrival in heaven, do not speak to St. Peter until spoken to. It is not your place to begin. You can ask him for his autograph, there is no harm in that. But be careful, and don't remark that it is one of the penalties of greatness; he has heard that before. Don't try to Kodak him—Hell is full of people who have made that mistake. And leave your dog outside. Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out, and the dog would go in."

—Mark Twain, quoted at the end of Ken Burns' American Lives profile of him. (We transcribed this, so the punctuation might not be correct. The emphasis is ours. In any event, we believe the quote itself is a pastiche, most likely all drawn from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. In it, we hear Sam Clemens's own weariness about being "Kodaked," not that much different from Bill Nye's.)

That's it for TOP for this, the 44th week of the year. If there were too many links in this to chew in one sitting, take a bite and come back over the weekend for more; Yr. Hmbl. Ed. will be fighting burnout by staying away for two whole days, a formerly unfamiliar habit known as "taking the weekend off." I still moderate comments all weekend though. Blogging for a living, much like what Mark Twain said of old age, is not for the faint of heart.

Listen to some Bob Marley over the weekend (maybe this, on this! Ha! Snuck vinyl in again, at the last minute!), and join us again on Monday. All are welcome, always.

Mike
(Thanks to Rich Szmyd, Jim Bullard, a commenter named John, xkcd, Nick Hartmann, Gordon Brown, and other friends o' TOP.)

*But still hardly know anything about it.

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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Robert: "Aperture met most of my needs and I expected it to keep making progress. What a disappointment when it was abandoned. When it was developed it seems as though it was key to re-establishing Apple but the landing of the iPhone led to a new future. As an ex IT person, iCloud and its equivalents all go against my nature i.e. letting it drift off forever or maybe never around the World, out of my control. LR therefore seemed like a good alternative but monthly payments also go against my nature. It would be good if the discussion of alternatives could continue."

Mike replies: I was very interested in Aperture when it came out, but I had been through the Apple-as-Lucy-holding-the-football thing before with their software, and I resisted switching to it because I was afraid it would end up discontinued. And sure enough. Apple is not good about protecting its users who adopt its software. Once burned, twice shy.

We should, indeed, discuss this subject in a different post, one dedicated to the topic. It's a hazard of blogging that important topics often come up piecemeal, and good, informative comments about a certain subject are made but then get lost in the shuffle. It has happened twice in the past few days—the subject of slide/neg rephotography with pixel-shift cameras came up under the A7RIII post, and the subject of LR-replacement editing software came up under this one.

I will start specific threads about both these topics next week, so we can discuss each of them more thoroughly.

Phil: "About that xkcd #1909: go to the source and see the alt-text! Right now! Go here and hover your mouse over the cartoon. I'm not just saying this because I'm a librarian. Really, I'm not.  ;-)  "

GKFroehlich: "Did not know the person in the photo at the top of the post, but the hint 'born in 1885,' and the fact that he's sitting on horseback, made me sure it was Dave Brubeck's father. He was a cattle rancher in northern California, and was also born in 1885 (or 1884, according to some sources). Now I shall go listen to a few Marley tunes, and a few Brubeck tunes...."

Mike replies: Good guess.

Dave Brubeck got a somewhat suspect reputation back in the day because he was a) not black in a field in which many of the very top people were, b) too popular in a field in which many of the top people weren't, and c) suspiciously often the favorite jazz musician of preppies and white Ivy League types back in that quaint time when racism still existed in the USA (satire alert). But he's seriously great and I absolutely love him.

If you still have a way of playing CDs, or a way of ripping them to your hard drive, he perfect introduction to Brubeck and one of the outstanding music bargains on all of Amazon is this 5-CD set for only $17.90. It includes two of Brubeck's best records (the evergreen bestseller Time Out and the even better Time Further Out) and the other three are excellent. Did I mention it's only $17.90 for five outstanding CDs? The sound quality is superb to boot.

Steve Higgins: "Re 'Acceptable will be pictures taken with any Leica-branded lenses,' does that include the one on the front of my Lumix LF1, presumably the same as the one on the Leica C (type 112)?"

Mike replies: Yes, because it's branded Leica, that is, it says "Leica" on the front.

Sony A7RIII (and a Related Opportunity)

The new Sony A7RIII

As you know if you're interested, Sony recently did a refresh on its leading full-frame stills camera, addressing shortcomings identified by the market and taking the opportunity to add a few features.

The main improvement of the A7RIII is the processor, which increases speed and throughput pretty much across the board. Low-light focussing and focus tracking are also improved.

An incremental improvement in the effectiveness of the IBIS is also claimed, although those tend to be hard to quantify in actual use (and sometimes even hard to notice).

The main physical features that have been improved are the battery, which is claimed to offer more than 2X better life, and the addition of a second card slot, not a small matter in a 42-megapixel camera; and the main feature that's been added is called "Pixel Shift Multi Shooting," Sony's variant on the technology pioneered by Olympus (and that you can get in much less cutting-edge form in the E-M5II for $900) and also offered in the super-bargain Pentax K-1. Pixel shift is the kind of thing elicits a sort of quasiorgasmic gaaaaaah reaction from geeks'n'dweebs who revel in theoretical technical capability, but that, in practice, is pretty severely limited by what that master of understatement Lloyd Chambers calls "strict limits on applicability." It does offer the equivalent of 169-megapixel composited images, but that's only a) for still lifes with the camera locked down hard on a sturdy tripod or, better, studio stand; and b) when your lenses and the rest of your chops are well honed too; and it assumes c) you need rilly rilly large prints. If you actually can use it, it would be utterly awesome. Otherwise, having it is kind of like kids with 700-horsepower Hellcats who just use the motor to burn up tires in parking lots impressing their bepimpled littermates.

Kind of on the expensive side at $3,200, but let's face it, it's best to have the camera you really want, whether you need it or not: it makes photography more gratifying. (But look hard at that do-everything K-1 if Pixel Shift is the main thing that's giving you GAS.)

Gaaaaah, save $500
The real opportunity here might be the fire sale prices on the 28-month-old A7RII, which, astonishingly, is still capable of taking pictures, crippled though it is by advanced old age and yesterday's features. Does a rose that has begun to wilt still smell good? It's up to you to evaluate. I'll just point out that was launched at $3,200, and now costs a perfectly reasonable-for-what-it-offers $2,398. That's $800 less than when it was news, and $500 less than what it cost a few weeks ago before the A7RIII came out. It's probably still useful if you shoot like most people do. I'd get one with the reasonably priced FE 24–105mm ƒ/4 G OSS lens, adding the tiny 35mm ƒ/2.8 to make a compact combo for carrying around.

Pros will jump on the new one, of course. It's fantastic that Sony is continuously improving this wonderful and popular family of cameras, unstinting in its generosity with its latest updates.

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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Peter Wright: "One of the things that is well within the 'strict limits of applicability' for the pixel shift capability on my Olympus E-M1 Mark II is its use as a digital 'scanner' of my film negatives and slides. It is far, far, faster in use than my dedicated film scanner which now sits unused. With the right lens and technique, it provides excellent resolution and tonality. Ironically this digital improvement makes my film work more enjoyable."

Oskar Ojala: "I haven't felt I needed more image quality after the Nikon D800. Using the A7RII offered me a surprise though: IBIS combined with excellent high ISO quality. I'm working more and more hand held, even for subjects that are traditionally tripod based. It has been very refreshing.

"What tempts me with the A7RIII is not anything with image quality; rather, it's about speed of operation, AF and the ergonomics of the controls. Being able to work fast with very sophisticated AF and low blackout times is also refreshing; shooting rapidly changing situations becomes more doable. But you're right in that the A7RII was never a better deal than now; it has a superb 42 megapixel sensor in a body the size of an '80s SLR and has well-rounded features so it can be used effortlessly for many kinds of photography. And with a 35mm ƒ/2.8 it's a fun camera."

Peter Mc Convill: "I've always felt that one of the great mistakes people make when considering a newly introduced camera is to compare it to the model that immediately preceded it. Few people I know actually upgrade every release; rather, like me, they jump on every second iteration. Therefore as someone whose original A7R (which, let's face it, had some flaws since introduction) is getting a little tired, the A7RIII is a no-brainer for an update. It will be about four and a half years per upgrade by the time I pick up the III, and spending about $3k that often is hardly bank-breaking."

Mike replies: Plus, if you upgrade less often, you're more likely to find the improvements noticeable and be pleased by them. More pleasure where cameras are concerned is usually good.

Random Excellence: Els Vanopstal

Photo by Els Vanopstal, from her website

I was delighted to learn a few days ago that in the first photograph I chose for last Friday's "A Baker's Dozen: Large Format Contact Prints" (right), the model is none other than Belgian photographer Els Vanopstal, an accomplished photographer herself. 

In her formal work she works within a very narrow range, but she is the master of it, finding variation and modulation both emotional and visual. She uses color with great sensitivity.

In a more documentary and personal vein, she also shares on her website the moving and tragic story of her partner Christophe, who died of lymphoma.

Great respect to Els. When I chose Johan Verhulst's picture to lead off that post I had no idea the woman in the picture was she. As often happens on the Web it was a chance encounter, and it was a pleasure to find the world of her art through that tiny window.

Thanks also to Huw, who recognized Els in Johan's picture.

Have a look at her work if you get a chance.

Mike
(Thanks to Els for permission to publish her photo, as well as to Johan and Huw)

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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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Els: "You are too kind, Mike.  :-)  Thank you for the feature. And of course also thanks to Johan and Huw!"

Allan Graham: "Well...time out on a frantic Friday morning...and this has just stopped me dead in my tracks. Sublime and profound."