The Online Photographer

Is Canon On To Something Here? The Elusive Fun Factor

Canon EOS RP and RF 35mm ƒ/1.8 IS lens.
Photo courtesy Canon Ireland.

In the previous post I asked my old friend Josh Hawkins (former camera store manager, longtime photojournalist) how he likes his new Canon EOS RP (at $1,299, the lowest-priced full-frame camera ever at initial pricing) and this morning he answered:

"I’m really enjoying it. I’m used to using Canon in live view a lot. Focus at ƒ/1.4 is much better in live view, so it’s a really small step for me to use it all the time. I’m a much more flippant photographer with the RP. I think that’s good for me right now. I’m just having a lot of fun with it. I used it for several weekends with the RF 35mm ƒ/1.8 IS ($449), and I was really delighted with that lens. Far more than I should be. It’s got an excellent flavor/mojo/vibe, call it what you will. A lens that cheap shouldn’t feel that good. It is completely oversized for a 35mm ~ƒ/2 though. I’m now trying my 50mm Leica Summicron DR, and other things in my closest, and having a good time with that. I miss focus with the DR constantly but it’s a lens with great mojo that I’ve never gotten comfortable with before. Again, just having fun taking fun pictures for me. It’s a good space to be in."

I spent a few hours last night poking around the Web reading the conclusions of reviews of the RP, and here's my meta-analysis summary report:

It might not technically be the greatest camera with the latest features, but it's a lot of fun to shoot with and the reviewer enjoyed it

That's all the reviews I read in a nutshell.

So my question is, how did strange concepts like being a lot of fun to shoot with and enjoyment somehow get separated from our notions of what a great camera is?

Think about that for a minute.

Shouldn't those things come first? Or at least be equal?

Consider what Tim Bradshaw wrote the other day when I wrote about modern cameras being too complex:

"Thank you for reminding me why I never want to buy another digital camera. Today I took out my Pentax 67 II for the first time in, I think, two years. I think I had to check to see which way the exposure compensation dial worked, but that was it: the rest of it was muscle memory, down to the use-the-self-timer trick to avoid having to carry a shutter release cable. And its not a camera I ever used that much. I have two digital cameras, and every time I swap to the other one I have about a day's worth of nausea trying to work out which of the several hundred parameters I left in some odd state (even though I never do that). At least the menu system on the Ricoh makes sense. I am done with this absurd, useless complexity."

I keep my ear to the ground in this hobby, listening for hoofbeats. And although few people come right out and say it, I think there's a lot of frustration out there with the diminishing fun-factor amongst the evolutionary dead-ends of ultra-competitive geeky specsmanship. Mastering stills/video hybrids has gotten to be like a university course in a subject you don't like, and over every outing looms the possibility of a pop quiz.

I'm sure Canon's engineers aren't paying much attention to the RP any more. It was built to the brief and they've moved on. They're no doubt beavering away building the S1R killer, the upcoming Canon FF mirrorless flagship über monstercam, which will be an insanely complicated camera-like product that, like a Mercedes, will have 87 onboard computers and, like Photoshop or Microsoft Word, will be impossible to fully understand or master. And all the review sites will say it's a "great" camera but it's got 987 features and it needs three more, and this feature is measurably but not noticeably poorer than the Z7 and that feature is measurably but not noticeably poorer than the A9 so it's not perfect, for some angels-dancing-on-a-pinhead forum-disputation value of "perfect."

If Josh is right and the RP is a lot of fun, I wonder how such a thing happened. Canon certainly isn't in the business of providing its customers with fun. Is it possible that they've built a great camera accidentally? As in, they tried to build a small-and-simple "Digital Rebel" version of the new R mount for the much pooh-pooh'd entry level, beginner, price leader, backup-body tier of the perceived market, and they came up with something that's actually fun and satisfying to shoot with? How else did such a thing happen, except inadvertently?

Meanwhile, they've actually built a good camera for once—one about which a longtime camera buff and everyday shooter like Josh can say "I’m just having a lot of fun with it." Could be they're on to something. I just wonder if anyone realizes it.

I want to live in a world where fun to shoot with and I enjoy this is valued more highly than diminishing-returns OCD levels of time-stamped techy perfection that will fade in a few years, if not months, like the bloom on a cut rose.

Do yer research
I want to know what I'm on about, so I'm gettin' my peeps to send along an RP and one of those 35's Josh likes. I'm not a big Canon guy, and FF doesn't hold any allure, but I have a feeling I ought to check this out for myself.

Mike
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Original contents copyright 2019 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.

B&H Photo • Adorama

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

Bob Keefer: "Fun is essential in any pursuit. I took my most recent job when, as I told the boss, it looked like a fun place to work. The fact she agreed that fun was important sealed the deal. Back to photography: Fun is what has kept me shooting with Pentax DSLRs lo these many years. Their cameras feel good in the hand and are fun to shoot with. I mean, who really needs perfect autofocus?"

robert e: "Yes! Now that you say it, fun really was the thing for me with cameras like the Olympus XA, and the quality missing from so many cameras that passed through my hands. Sadly a headline we never see on those camera-measuring sites: 'The most fun camera you can buy today,' or 'The most fun cameras ever'...."

Josh Hawkins: "It's good to know I can still sell you cameras...kind of. There was actually a point on one of my camping trips where I was shooting with the RF 35mm where I started wondering what your opinion of it would be. I've got experience with lenses but not like yours. I'll be interested to hear your thoughts on both items."

Ned Bunnell: "Josh has the right attitude. We’ve definitely lost sight that first and foremost photography should be fun.

"I was very fortunate to attend three workshops with Charles Harbutt in the early '70s. In my opinion he’s underappreciated as one of our great photographers and teachers in the past 50 years. He made a point in each workshop that if you don’t feel a little rush every time you see one of your prints come to life then you probably should find another hobby. He also soundly admonished anyone who asked if the camera made a difference.

"I’m sure if Charles were alive today he’d have a lot to say about how technology has not made us better photographers.

"I could never match Charles’s insights or way with words. However I think the problem with technology today is it has made us far too serious about what’s in our bag. For the vast majority of us, photography should be personal, fun and simple...which can be easy to forget if you’re obsessing over the latest and greatest.

"Sorry for the diatribe, but here’s another example of why the fun or simple joy in photographing is apparently not an accepted attitude if you are 'serious.' I went to a Peter Turnley workshop in Cuba in 2014. I only brought my little Ricoh GR, while the other attendees came loaded for bear with multiple bodies and lenses. Peter instructed everyone they only needed one camera and that if they were going to use a zoom lens, tape it down so you were only shooting at 28mm or 35mm. When he got to me he smiled a little and said I was OK.

"I know most attendees looked at me wondering why this old guy had only brought what looked like a nondescript point-and-shoot camera. I had a blast walking the streets of Havana, the GR hanging unnoticed at my side. I think by the end of the week a few of the attendees realized my little camera wasn’t really a toy. The problem was and still is that many folks don’t take the GR seriously. (Note: this is not a plug for the GR. It could be any camera that allows you to effortlessly get the technology out your way so you can just take pictures.)

"Fortunately, I carry as little gear as possible with me these days and focus instead on maximizing the joy that I still get when I see a photograph and depress the shutter. And if that means you don’t consider me a serious photographer, I couldn’t care less. Thank you, Charles."

[Ned is the former President of Pentax USA and has always been a dyed-in-the-wool photography enthusiast. —Ed.]

Mark Sirota: "I can very much relate to this. We spent spring break this year in your neck of the woods—Watkins Glen, Corning, Ithaca—and all I brought with me was a Nikon FM2N with a 50mm ƒ/1.4. And it was fun in a way I was really not expecting...I loved having only two controls, focusing manually through a bright, effective ground glass, and being selective with my shots. Got nothing exciting out of those two rolls, but I've got dozens more in the freezer that I had been contemplating throwing out, and now I think I'll shoot them. Haven't had that much fun in a long time.

"This isn't the only film camera I shoot with—I do shoot 120 in a pinhole camera more frequently than 35mm. But that doesn't have the same fun factor. My big question is, had the camera been mechanically identical but digital, would it have been that much fun? Hard to say."

Curt Gerston: "Fun has become my top criteria for a number of years now. I figured out ultimate speed or image quality wasn't what I wanted (I chased that for a while, though). So, yeah, pump up the fun factor on our cameras please!"

John Krumm: "For me, fun photography has come down to a wide to normal small prime, and a body set to manual. I use manual so much now it's second nature, and the small primes keep my cameras light enough (though I would welcome a lighter K1). When this Canon system came out I found it appealing immediately, and it was because of that affordable prime lens."

Gerard Kingma: "Re 'Canon certainly isn't in the business of providing its customers with fun'—and yet, I had the exact same experience that Ned Bunnell describes, but with a Canon M2. The whole photographic world p*sses on the Canon M system, and perhaps deservedly so, but I had the honor of attending a week-long workshop with Jay Maisel, together with 15 other enthusiasts loaded with tons of in-your-face DSLRs. When Jay saw me with the Canon M2 and its tiny but excellent 22mm ƒ/2 prime, I saw a glint in his eye but he said nothing. We went to a farmer's fair in rural Maine, I talked to people and matter-of-factly shot the most wonderful portraits one after the other of people who otherwise froze up or skittered away at the sight of the big guns. I've had tons of fun with the M2. Probably because no one takes me seriously with it."

Mike replies: A camera no one takes seriously is a big asset. It's one reason why it's so relaxing to take pictures with a phone.

I first learned this when I was doing portraits in the mezzanine of the art room when I taught high school. My usual lens was a little Carl Zeiss 85mm ƒ/2.8 Sonnar with a small and unimposing front element—a lens I was "slumming" with until I could save up my money for the magnificent Carl Zeiss 85mm ƒ/1.4 Planar I really wanted (below). But a friend loaned me one of the faster Zeisses with its much larger front element, and I noticed that my portrait subjects were noticeably less comfortable in front of it. There was something about that huge front element staring at them like the eye of a giant squid, seeing into the secrets of their hearts, that just made them tense.

It was intimidating to be "looked at" by this giant front element. But they
sure have held their value—this one's for sale on eBay right now.

I went back to the little ƒ/2.8 Sonnar (discussed near the end of this long post) and never bought a Planar.

Tom Burke: "Absolutely. My Canon 5D Mark IV is a much better camera than my Canon 750D [Rebel T6i in the States —Ed.], both in terms of the specifications and the files it produces, but I seem to enjoy using the 750D more—have more fun with it—than the 5D. Possibly just because it's lighter? Easier to handle? Less complex? More in tune with the sort of Canon (D)SLR I've been buying and using for 30 years? I don't know, but I do know I'm a happier bunny with the smaller, simpler, less-good camera."

The Very Best Camera Deal In the Entire Universe Right at This Moment

Beat this

Submitted for your approval: my candidate for the best all-around bang-for-buck bargain in the entire camera universe right now, the Fujifilm X-H1 with battery grip for $1,299.

Big investment
The X-H1 appears to be an example of the "928 paradigm." The Porsche 928 was introduced in 1978 to replace the aging and technologically questionable 911, which had been very popular as a status symbol during the 1960s and early '70s. But sales had declined as the '70s wore on. Flush with cash, Porsche invested heavily in what it imagined would be the 911 successor—a luxury grand touring car with a front-mounted V8 instead of a rear-mounted air-cooled flat 6. I remember reading various superlatives in the car magazines about the large amounts of money that were invested in the development of the new car.

But all that R&D money didn't result in much of a return. Sales weren't miserable, but the Porsche faithful remained loyal to the 911. The 928 lasted till 1995 but only 61,000 cars were sold over its lifespan. And the 911 outlived it.

That big investment / small return thing seems to be what's playing out with the X-H1 too. Unabashedly aimed at pros, it's got shortcomings in a few areas compared to more established professional workhorses, and rumor has it that it's not selling well. But Fuji sunk a lavish amount of R&D into its development, and the X-H1 is built (in Japan) to exceedingly high standards and extremely tight tolerances—not just for any Fuji, but for any camera out there.

Pros might not be flocking to it, and Fuji's advanced-amateur fan base seem to feel it doesn't have quite the right gestalt, but the fact remains: it's a superb machine for stills and an extremely well made camera. At $1,900 it might actually have been underpriced, or at least it might have had less margin than its development costs would naturally have called for. Its smaller APS-C sensor in the face of FF popularity might have constrained Fuji from pricing it at $2,300 or even $2,700.

Gimme a do-over pleez!
When I tried one, it cost $1,650, and I assumed all of the "post introduction" discounts had already taken place. It was still too dear for cheapskate me, so, to replace my aging X-T1, I bought the G9 on sale for $1,213 instead. (That was a brief sale at the time, when the regular price was $1,299. The G9 is now $1,200 every day, with a nice bunch of extras thrown in.)

Then, right after it was too late for me to return the G9, the price of the X-H1 plummeted again. And I immediately got a tenacious case of buyer's remorse that's been hard to shake. On top of that, to add insult to my injury, B&H threw the VPB-XH1 Vertical Power Booster Grip into the mix for a big dose of additional sweetening. The VPB-XH1 sells separately for $329.

Finally—the last straw!—with the new Payboo card, you can even get reimbursed for the tax, which would have saved me another $103.92.

Augh. It's killing me, I tell ya. Killing me.

If anybody feels there is a better deal out there in the camera universe right now, do tell. I can't find one that beats this.

Mike
(Thanks to S.S.)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

B&H Photo • Adorama

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

Kirk Tuck: "Hi Mike, As you know I switched from Panasonic G9s to the Fuji X series. When confronted with the price drop I bought three. I'm not hard on cameras but when I find one I really like I want backups and redundant backups.

"I had the reverse emotion though, I really miss a lot of what is great about the G9 (and the Olympus 12–100mm miracle lens). Some days I wish I had both...."

hugh crawford: "I don’t know but this seems like a pretty good deal to me. The accessory I most want is something that would keep saying 'slow down and don’t screw things up again!', so maybe my point of view is a bit outside the normal distribution, but that’s a lot of camera for $898."

Mike replies: Oh...well...yes...that's definitely a contender for the title. Very definitely. Might even take the crown from the Fuji....

Jim R: "After fondling this camera at B&H I bought it when they ran the same handgrip discount deal. I really like its ergonomics. I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Fuji—I started with the original X100, and then tried the X-E2 and several lenses. Love the lenses, hated the viewfinder size / eye relief and autofocus. The XH-1 finder and eye relief are outstanding, and autofocus is so much better than the other Fujis. I think it’s a better camera than the X-T1/2/3 given its in-body IBIS. Looking forward to trying my hand at some Milky Way landscape photos this summer as the articulating LCD and added batteries in the grip will definitely be a step up from my Canon 6D."

David Goldenberg: "Brett Weston owned a 928, said to be called the Silver Flounder, and his favorite among a huge number of cars that he owned. Maybe if I could see what he saw in the 928, I could have a tiny bit of what he could see in making photographs!"

Christopher Mark Perez: "True 928 story—I knew a fighter pilot who owned a 928 front-engined Porsche. One day he was going a bit too fast (somewhere near flat-out) and he led the police on a chase down the freeway and over sideroads that miraculously led to the airbase. The Porsche blasted by the guards (who obviously knew the pilot) and slid into a hangar. The pilot jumped out of his car and got the hangar doors slid shut just as the police arrived at the front gate. As you might imagine, the guards asked the police, 'Porsche? What Porsche??'"

SteveW: "I like this Nikon deal for $1,400. (Although I paid $1,750 for this in January. Sigh.) The D7500 body only for $800 is a killer deal."

Mike replies: This is just me, but here are the problems with the Sony mentioned by Hugh and SteveW's pick, the Nikon D7500.

Lenses.

I like a ~40mm prime and an ~85mm prime. I'm willing to fudge the focal lengths a bit, but a moderate wide and a moderate tele are basic for me (have been since my second year of photo school in 1983–4). Sony has a very nice 35mm ƒ/2.8, but I don't happen to like its look. And then there's that wonderful Zeiss 40mm, which would be perfect for me—I mean it's like it was made for me—but it costs $1,300, and after you plunk for it you still need to scrounge up an extra $77 for the hood! The matching 85mm, which is also perfect, is only another $1,200.

Gulp. That's $2,577 just for the two basic medium-speed primes, which makes it blatantly obvious I'm swimming in waters too deep for me. They could give me the A7II for free and it would still be too expensive for me. Don't think I don't envy people who can shoot these lenses, though.

Nikon, which has been recalcitrant about making APS-C primes for years—it's obviously corporate policy to ignore the people who want them—doesn't even make an APS-C prime in the vicinity of 24mm (about a 35mm angle-of-view equivalent), nor does it make a purpose-built medium tele. Yes, you can use the 24mm ƒ/1.8G lens, but it's not an elegant solution for the smaller sensor size. It's light enough, but it's huge (72mm filter size—even my medium-format film camera lenses only took 67mm filters!), and don't think you're not paying to have it cover the larger FF sensor. In any case, with the D7500 I'd have to make do with a 50mm, or a full-frame lens, or a micro lens, or a manual-focus lens, or a third-party lens. Granted, there's a truly legendary zoom for Nikon APS-C, one of Nikon's best and almost a reason in and of itself to shoot Nikon. It's very heavy, and very expensive, but it's fantastic. But zooms, although I'll use 'em, aren't where I live.

So, as Oren would say, "bah."

But all that's just me. Your mileage no doubt does vary. But as I always say, first you pick the lenses you want to use, then find a body to go with them.

James: "What does Stephen Scharf think about this X-H1 value?"

Stephen Scharf replies: If the X-H1 and battery grip were at this price when I bought mine in March 2018 for ~$2,300, I would have bought two of them. I may still pick up another one up as a backup, if or when the other body needs to be sent in to be serviced or repaired, or to have another one to shoot with when the first is worn-out from use.

One of the five best cameras I've ever used in 40 years of photography, along with my Olympus OM-1, any Canon 1D-series body, and the Fuji GFX50S and X100F.

That this camera didn't sell as well as expected I attribute not to any shortcomings of the camera (of which there are only a few), but to an ineffective and limited marketing effort as to exactly whom this camera was engineered for and why.

Which is a shame, as it has all the attributes, robustness, and engineering specification cited by Mike above, but most of all, because it has a wondrous and beautiful image quality that I personally prefer and find superior to the X-T1/T2/T3. While photographs don't have the 'technical specs' of files from a medium-format camera, e.g. the GFX, they look much like medium format files.

I am really, really hoping Fujiflm continues the X-H line, with the X-H2 and successors, etc., because it's just a superb professional tool that produces singularly beautiful photographs. My guess is Kirk Tuck would agree.

HSlav: "No offense, but buying based on deals for a camera, in particular, is not wise, in my humble opinion. If you're going to own the camera for, say three years minimum, assuming you get a long with it, then an extra $300 is about $8 and change per month. I'd much rather have the exact camera I want (within my general budget). The same is true, but even more so, for lenses, given that I own them for five to 10 years on average."

James: "Mike, as you have Fujifilm and Porsche related in the same post, we can add snooker—Steve Davis used to drive a 928.

Mike replies: Alas, I can never write about snooker again, because people are now telling me the outcomes of matches before I get a chance to watch them on YouTube. From now on, the fewer people know I like snooker, the better.

Custom Modes to the Rescue!

I spent a few hours yesterday setting up the G9. I've never used Custom Modes on any camera before, but I think Custom Modes are going to be the key to comfortably using the G9 for me. What they mean is that I can have three starting points customized to the way I shoot that are always instantly recoverable, even if I've used one as a jumping-off point for further settings changes.

That's the thing I hate the most about overly complicated cameras...I'll change settings on the fly as I'm working, then not be able to get back to a basic setup. I often don't remember what I've changed, or know what's different, or else I don't know how to make the setting change I have in mind. The result is constant, low-level frustration, and a difficult-to-banish, mildly helpless feeling of being out of control of the device.

C1, C2, C3
On the G9 I've set up C1 for casual, contemplative, slow-paced walk-around single-shot shooting, C2 for action, and C3 for low light. Those three situations cover 98% of my needs that I can think of.

I thought I'd be able to set these up fairly quickly—I know how I like to shoot—but as the afternoon wore on I kept discovering further refinements to each group of settings. The way I've got it set now, each Custom Mode is pretty exotic. For my C1 walkabout mode, I'm using pinpoint AF (which momentarily enlarges a center section for a visual focus check—very nice when you've got the time), an uncluttered viewfinder with a virtual leveling line, a low (but not base) ISO, and aperture priority. C3, for low light, is a very different experience. I've set it to P, with wide area multi-point AF, ISO 3200, and 5-frame autobracketing enabled by default, so each press of the shutter initiates a bracketing sequence (which is blazingly fast). The viewfinder looks like that of a different camera for each mode setting, and the shutter behaves and sounds differently for each. There'll be no mistaking what mode I'm in.

If I make a bunch of setting changes in, say, C1 that I then want to clear out, I don't have to remember everything I did and undo it one thing at a time. All I have to do is to rotate the mode dial away from C1 and then back to it. Bingo, back to my familiar defaults.

One heck of a camera
I came away from today's sessions with a renewed sense of appreciation for the G9's amazing technological prowess. It's one slick, fast, capable camera. I'm amazed at what it can do and how fast it does it. I still don't know what some of the menu settings mean (quick, what's wrench icon sub C > Focus/Release Shutter > AF-Point Scope Setting > PIP Display > Full? What, you don't know? And you call yourself a photographer?), and there are still a few buttons on the body that are mysteries to me. But I'm getting there. Maybe I'm a slow study. But I can't even count all the options in the menus.

(And by the way, I'm amazed when people here say the solution to overcomplexity in cameras is to set the thing on auto/program everything and use it like a point-and-shoot. No, no, no. That doesn't do it for me at all. I want to be in control of the device and understand what it's doing. The solution is never to throw up my hands and give up. Curiously, I don't demand that a camera be able to be set up exactly the way I prefer. But I do demand that I understand exactly how it's doing what it's doing, so I can apply it to situations intelligently. My ancient Exakta 66 only shows part of what will be on the negative in the viewfinder. But if I know exactly how it crops what will be on the negative, then I can compensate appropriately when I'm shooting. I don't need the viewfinder to be perfect. But I need to know how it's imperfect.)

April is the coolest month
Carl tells me he's been out shooting many times with his G9 because Spring is his favorite time to shoot. He's put over 4,000 exposures on it in April and says he's gotten "extremely comfortable" with it. That's what I need to do with this camera...just get out there and use it. When pictures come first, then everything else falls into proper perspective.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

B&H Photo • Adorama

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

Roger: "Add me to the list of those who cannot remember which button is programmed to do what. How wonderful it would be if there was a 'Here is a list of your customizations' menu screen. Heck, I’d even program a button to bring up that screen...."

Arg: "I did a weird thing with my E-M5 II as an experiment, and now I'm glad I did. I put my camera in P mode, then set it up exactly as I would most likely want when using P mode, right down to the little details. Then I saved that as a MySet on the P Mode dial position. Then I repeated the procedure for each of A, S, and M. My camera feels so intuitive now."

Which Would Win?

When my son was little—like, younger than five—I used to get a certain question a lot: "who would win?" He might have two armies of little plastic soldiers all set up, or be staging fights with two of his "guys" (action figures). Or sometimes the question would be more theoretical. Who would win: Wolverine, or a lion? Santa Claus, or a zombie?

Now, it appears to me that the Nikon Z7 seems to be emerging as the front-runner in the "most lustworthy" contest among all the new FFMs. So my question today is, for you, if you were in the market, which would win: the Nikon Z7 at the current $600 savings of $2,796.95, or the Fuji GFX 50R at the current $500-off price of $3,999?

Rounding off the prices, that's only $1,200 more for the Fuji.

Granted, $1,200 is still be a lot of money—roughly a nice camera's worth, in the budgetary precincts I occupy—but maybe not if you'd really rather have the 51-MP medium-format Fuji. And not if your $2,800 investment was going to seem like second best, or a consolation prize. Parting with that much dosh for something that isn't quite what you really want could amount to throwing money away.

Do you like my awesome color sense?

See, I really like Fuji's sensible solution of putting more distance between its APS-C cameras and its big dogs. But I'm left wondering if Fuji has just made itself odd man out and for some reason people are going to ignore it in all the clamor over all the new full frame mirrorless models.

If it were you, would you find the extra $1,200 and get the Fuji?

How about if they were the same price—which one would you choose then?

I can't answer the question myself. It would depend, first of all, if the camera were going to be my only camera, or if it were going to be augmenting and complementing a smaller one.

This feels familiar, because I could almost never answer my son's "who would win" questions, either. "Who would win—Superman, or God?" Well, see, it depends. God doesn't often show himself, and he doesn't seem to like to fight, at least not out in the open. On the other hand, Superman is supposed to be a good guy, and what good guy would fight God? The more you think about it, the more complicated the question gets....

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

B&H Photo • Adorama

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

Rodolfo Canet: "I had to make that choice myself, and the Z7 was the winner. I could say that the Nikon's flexibility trumped my wild lust for the Fuji but, in fact, the cost of the lenses made the choice for me. A nice set of Nikkor primes costs a lot less."

Cab (partial comment): "I also recently stared down this 'battle,' and the winner was the Z7. I am thrilled with the quality of the Z lenses so far and very intrigued where future development of this lens mount will take us. My iPhone is more than sufficient for casual snaps, so for my 'big' camera I was targeting only landscape use, including hiking with it. Other uses of the camera (family photos, kid sports, etc) were of secondary consideration, but the Z7 works great for those as well, and I probably will also add a Z6 for my wife that will fill those uses and can share lenses."

Rob Ferguson: "I made that choice recently. I already owned a Fuji X100T, but wanted a camera for architectural, documentary, and landscape photography that would provide maximum resolution and file quality. I had abandoned 'big cameras' some years ago, and didn't have any particular allegiances.

"I found it an interesting time to be thinking about these sorts of choices, in part because all the historic manufacturers are, in large part, leaving behind their traditional mounts and legacy glass. I bought the GFX 50R. The high quality glass and sensor, the price/performance of the resulting files, rangefinder-style ergonomics, Fuji's recent partnership with Capture One, and the various conveniences provided by the similarities to the rest of the Fujifilm camera line tipped the balance for me.

"My second choice was a Sony A7RIII; the Z7 was third. I also was influenced by feeling that Fujifilm is more likely to successfully execute on their long term plans than Nikon or Canon, but reasonable people can disagree on that one."

Steve Jacob: "Since this is hypothetical and both cameras are wildly surplus to my requirements I would get the Fuji. It's special. The Nikon is just another camera."

David: "I tried holding the Z7, GFX 50R, and GFX 50S recently. Much as I wanted to like the GFX 50R, I found the Z7 had much better ergonomics (for me, at least). The GFX 50S also felt better than the R, but was not as comfortable as the Z7."

Sharon: "I'm working on a large print that a client ordered today. It was shot with the GFX 50S. The quality of the print is amazing. Fuji lenses are amazing. So, for me the fuji is the one. This is a vertical print. I much prefer the aspect ratio of the fuji, especially for verticals. I wouldn't say this camera is right for everyone, I'm sure it's not. But it's right for me."

MHMG: "The Nikon D850 is going to take my next $3k. If Nikon had produced a serious F-mount adaptor for its mirrorless Z's (i.e. one that would provide proper auto aperture for my Nikkor AIS lenses and also proper autofocus for my Nikkor D lenses), then I'd pay more attention to Nikon's mirrorless efforts. However, Nikon punted with its FTZ adaptor, so the venerable D850 still wins for me. Nikon still keeps me as a customer for one more round. Will Nikon keep me loyal past the D850? I wonder. There may well be another Fuji in my Future."

Mike replies: "Venerable?" Released September 2017!

Mike Plews: "Django Reinhardt or Doc Watson?

"If faced with a choice between the Fuji and Nikon I would land on the side of the Nikon. The difference in pixel count is not significant and FF sensors are so quiet that the larger Fuji sensor presents a distinction without a real difference in my opinion. And then there are those fast Nikon primes at near attainable prices.

"We have a little camera war going on at work right now. One of our guys bought a Z7 and another is D850 user. I played with the Z7 some and my preference is still for a DSLR but that's just me. In fact I am perfectly happy with a D7100. Twenty-four megapixels is enough for me and I know the camera, which counts for a lot.

"Now, before you all vote for Django Reinhardt, go to YouTube and listen to Doc play 'Black Mountain Rag.' It's a closer matchup than you think."

Vladimir: "To paraphrase Gary Lineker: Nikon Z7 vs Fuji GFX 50R is a simple game...and at the and, Sony always win."

Tim Wilson: "I would (did) pass over both of those and would (did) get a Lumix S1R, at a price somewhere in between."

Mike replies: Well don't be shy, man, tell us how you like it!

Bruce Walker: "I would select the GFX 50R, not so much for the pixels as the medium format. I already chose medium format four years ago (Pentax 645Z) and I am completely won over to that view."

Photoshop, Microsoft Word, and Your New Microcomputercam

I started looking into the new FFM (full-frame mirrorless) class cameras, thinking maybe I needed to come up to speed with what's on offer now.

But...good lord. Have cameras finally become entirely their own hobby? As I watch some of the video reviews of the various new FFM cameras, I'm struck by the extreme geekery of the young men rattling off the deep capabilities of features I don't understand*. The Panasonic S1 (one of 'em at least) has a focus mode where it will show you a dot that reports the degree of correction for camera shake, essentially showing you how much your hands are shaking, and the continuous tracking autofocus now recognizes eyes, faces, and bodies (as well as several kinds of animals) and will switch on the fly to different targets as you and your subject move and the "angles" change (Kanye West raps in a guest turn in a Travis Scott song, "Kickin' the cameraman offa my stages / 'Cuz I don't like how he snappin' my angles"). Carl has been getting to grips with the G9, and I won't speak for him, but I've been hearing for weeks now about the various things he's discovering about setup and function. I've been putting it off, myself, just using the camera in "surface skater" mode, not bothering to learn the controls, merely taking pictures with it and letting it take care of its own business. But I'm using it in pinpoint AF mode, which shows me a momentary enlargement of the center area to confirm focus visually before returning to a whole-frame view. It's a neat tech trick for sure, but for a purist it's a little disorienting. [UPDATE: Carl told me the next day that this was a function he hadn't discovered yet. Made me smile.]

Goldilocks tried the first chair and it was too big, too pro,
too video-y, and had too dang many functions

It used to be a truism that a new camera cost you a year. That is, when you switched to a new camera, it took a year of use before you had fully mastered its quirks and features and gotten "the feel of the wheel," i.e., arrived at that point where operation had become automatic, fluid, and intuitive, such that the camera and its controls "disappeared" and let you concentrate fully on shooting. But that was back in the days of enormously less complicated cameras, before they were minicomputers, before they were video cameras, before the deep tech had become the field of competition between manufacturers. Now, I really wonder if the lifespan of a professional digital camera is really enough time for an amateur to master it at all—that is, before you've fully learned one camera, it has become obsolescent and it's time to buy a new one. So it's no longer just a year of fluent shooting you lose—now you're in a constant state of not-quite-mastery that never relents, never resolves. For the amateur, most top cameras create a Neverland of non-mastery similar to the kitchen-sink, impossible-to-master software types like Photoshop and Microsoft Word. At this point, for me to attempt a comparo between the FFM cameras would take as much time as a similar comparo of the same number of leading photo-editing programs—that is, it couldn't be done, because there's not enough time to learn them all before they're replaced and the information becomes obsolete.

Do you take this into consideration before buying a new camera? Years ago, I read a critical essay about The Wire that noted that before binge-watching a new TV drama, you needed to weigh whether the day-after-day emotional hit of being subjected to so much virtual violence and depravity will be outweighed by the reward. Now, when I look at a new camera, I don't necessarily think, gee, it would be nice to own that and shoot with it. My right-off-the-bat reaction is more like, do I really want to take the time and go through all the labor to learn all the ins and outs of yet another of these damned things?

There's nothing wrong with doing so if it's how you like to spend your time. Buy a new camera, spend three years learning how to use it...then, before you've quite gotten all the way there, buy a new camera and start the process all over again. Voilà, there's your hobby. No need to start down the road of considering what you're taking pictures of, how the pictures work, how to reify them for others...

...Or maybe lazy old Mike just needs to stop bitchin', buckle down, and RTFM**.  :-)

Mike

*I was that way once. These young men don't realize their hard-won expertise has a sell-by date. They will one day. Get ready to be impressed: I mastered the technique of using a hard and a soft print developer in sequence with graded papers to achieve intermediate contrast grades. The latest generation is clamoring for that information now and my expertise is much in demand.

**Read the f---ing manual.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

B&H Photo • Adorama

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

Phil Service: "Speaking of manuals, the Panasonic S1R user manual stretches to 519 pages. (No, I did not buy the camera, just downloaded the manual.). In a sense, this is better than Sony's recent efforts with bare-bones manuals that fail to explain many of the camera settings, and therefore require buying a third party book: even Sony's online 'Help' Guides fail to give compete, comprehensible explanations of some features. That said, the Panasonic manual is not exactly easy going or crystal clear. The camera is mind-bogglingly complex."

George Feucht: "This reminds me that I need to get the firmware updated on my Leica M6: It needs it done every 36 exposures. What a pain in the butt."

Mike Peters: "New cameras are a pain to get to know. One argument for staying in the same ecosystem of a single manufacturer is that they all share a similar UI, so the transitions are less jarring. When I get a new camera I initially set it up to work like the previous model. In time as I get to know the button layout, if it's different, I'll begin to look into what else the new camera has to offer and slowly tune it to my needs. So, if you're using a Lumix G9 and eventually RTFM and begin to take advantage of what it does that you like, if you switch to the Lumix S1 your learning curve will be much shorter than if you switch to some other brand."

David Brown: "Is it practical to have a photography web site (like this one) that's about photography rather than all about cameras? Of all the ones I've seen, TOP is the best, and it seems about 50-50."

Mike replies: This site is partially supported by direct donations through Patreon (donate here), which helps a lot. And by the way, of the last 89 posts, only 14 were about cameras. There were almost as many off-topic posts as camera posts. It has been so lopsided that I was actually getting a few complaints.

Christopher May (partial comment): "My local camera chain, Mike's Camera, puts on a test drive day twice a year. They'll assemble a number of representatives from the brands that they feature and ask them to bring a selection of currently available gear that their customer base can try out. I've been going to these events for years now and have always enjoyed trying out some of the latest and greatest gear from both my chosen brand (Nikon) as well as others. I used to particularly relish trying camera bodies out and seeing how they felt and how they reacted to my style of shooting.

"Slowly but surely, that pleasure has been waning as the cameras have gotten crazily complex with menu systems that are dozens of pages long (and often questionably laid out). Without fail, the previous user will have set something up that I don't particularly like and it takes me five to 10 minutes to figure out how to change it. The borrow period for the event is an hour. So taking five to 10 minutes to figure out one item takes a heavy percentage of my trial time away from actually taking pictures.

"The most recent event was this past weekend and I tried some recent hot cameras like the Sony A7rIII, the Panasonic S1R, the Nikon Z's, the EOS R and RP, etc. I think I reached a tipping point where the complexity has reached a point that I'm no longer enjoying the experience. One hour is simply not enough time to get to know these über-complex cameras."

Anthony Shaughnessy (partial comment): "The complexity is a real problem for beginners, who buy a big, fancy camera because they think it is necessary for getting good pictures and then find themselves baffled and put off by the apparent complexity. In photo workshops I do, I show them where to find the basic controls and tell them not to bother touching anything else because they don't need it."

Jeff (partial comment): "This is one reason why I admire Leica, despite the relatively crazy prices. More money buys simple controls and menus, first class viewfinders, and fantastic lenses; the things I prioritize. Some ‘features’ like IBIS might be sacrificed (instead occasionally placing OIS in big zooms), but the tradeoff is smaller size and old-school simplicity."

Mike replies: It's true—Leica is the only marque with sufficient confidence to venture relatively simple products.

Hugh: "Doesn’t anybody else own a smartphone? That’s where you download the camera manual. Means it’s always with you. Or else you buy the Canon 5D Mark IV, because everything except the WiFi works exactly the same as the 5D Mark III, and you don’t need to look at the manual. Conservative design works well for actual photographers, even if reviewers don’t get excited about it."

Canon EOS R: Already?

What means this? The EOS R was only announced eight months ago, and already there's a $300 discount on it, with freebies thrown in?! That seems too quick to me.

Anybody know what's going on there?

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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

Mark Pfeifer: "Simple—battle for market share. Nikon's got discounts on the Z 6 and Z 7 as well. (This may be the last time I include the space in the name). The camera market is shrinking and all of the companies want to get people using their mount and buying their lenses."

Carlos Esguerra: "Here is the reason: 'BCN reports the Sony A7III sells more than the competition combined (Canon R, Canon RP and Nikon Z6).'"

SteveW: "Nikon Z6 too."

David Evans: "I'm not in the market, having just traded in my GX8 for a G9, but for me the lack of IBIS would be a deal killer. I wonder if that's why."

Ken: "Camera makers have been knocking each other over trying to corner the high-price, high-profit-margin full-frame market in a seeming response to declining sales. Well, it appears to me that most consumers are not ready to follow them there, and/or that particular niche market is much smaller than advertised. Plus, it looks to me like camera manufacturers are getting stuck in the 'JC Penney trap'—meaning that many (most?) customers have been trained to just wait for the next sale, which is surely right around the corner, and the camera companies have no choice but to have more frequent sales to make their quarterly numbers."

Robert: "Canon as been stupidly/recklessly/stubbornly/cavalierly/obnoxiously (take your pick) resistant to providing IBIS. This has been a spectacular own goal* of potentially revenue/market share -busting significance. Whoever in the company pushed for this strategy needs to go, and they have to very quickly mobilise their resources to rectify the situation as soon as possible, before everybody moves over to Sony. Dumb, dumb move!"

[*In soccer, an "own goal" is when a team member scores a goal for the opposing team. —Ed.]

Thom Hogan: "The R always seemed like an awkward and hastily prepared entrant to me. It tried to straddle A7/A7R and Z6/Z7 positions with an old sensor mounted on a body with some experimental and untested UX [user experience —Ed.], at a tweener price. Not surprising that it's on discount, but so is some of its competition."

Barry Reid: "No affordable lenses."

On the Quickness of the G9

Our friend Carl Weese was discussing the Panasonic G9 (now $1,199) with an online group of photographer friends when the topic of the quickness of the G9 came up. The G9 is almost eerily responsive, in a variety of ways. But one of its most distinctive features is the hair-trigger shutter release—it's incredibly light and easy to trip, which has been difficult to get used to for me. But Carl, who is a trained marksman, had a tip:

"I just figured out another thing this afternoon on a two-hour photo walkabout. I’ve been getting occasional double releases from the G9’s hair-trigger shutter release. What I just figured out was that I was making a perceptual mistake about the problem and making it worse instead of better. I more or less 'assumed' unconsciously that the camera was making the mistake and firing twice, when there was no reason to think so. What I’d been doing was trying to press/release the shutter quickly and gently, as though it were in burst mode and I only wanted one shot (think firing accurately with a fully automatic weapon). Wrong! The camera is in single shot mode, but trying to jigger the release that way was resulting in double touches. All I had to do was deliberately press and briefly hold and it does not spontaneously make a second shot. Having that figured out may make me pretty much completely comfortable with the hair-trigger release."

Eureka! Several months in, that was my problem with the G9 too—I've been trying to to touch the shutter lightly, as if pressing too hard would set it fluttering in rapid-fire Continuous mode. But he's exactly right—one easy but firm full press and the camera takes only one shot. (The light shutter is supposedly to help defeat "shutter jab" syndrome, to aid the IBIS—or at least that's what Fuji says about the similarly light and hair-trigger release on the X-H1.)

It's rather amazing that this isn't obvious, and it may have been to some users. But it isn't to everybody—Carl and I have a long human lifespan's worth of experience with cameras between us, and it wasn't obvious to either of us. So there must be others out there.

If you have a G9, you don't have to admit it if you'd been making this "perceptual mistake" too.  :-)  But if you were, I'm sure you'll be as happy as I was with Carl's tip.

Mike
(Thanks to Carl)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Kurt Kramer: "Thanks for this useful post. I thought something was wrong with my camera and it was annoying."

Maggie Osterberg: "I'll be! My Pen-F has the same 'problem.'"

Frank: "I have a G9, from the first moment it seemed a little difficult, but after 10 minutes, I became comfortable with the shutter. It feels very good. I never had your problem with it. I've made photos for 48 years now. I think it's no problem for most, and you both are the exceptions."

Dale: "It's not obvious. The initial review in PDN also flagged this as a problem. Now we have a solution. Good work Carl!"

Ricoh GR III (Interesting Recent Cameras I)

The new Ricoh GR III

The Ricoh GR has a very long lineage at this point, across various formats and spanning film and digital. Generally they have all been fixed-lens compacts with a slowish 28mm (or equivalent) lens, a focal length that has long been considered central and important in Japan.

The original film cameras, first introduced 23 years ago in 1996, included the GR1, GR10, GR1s, and the GR1v, plus several "Date" versions and the spinoff GR21, an ultrawide 21mm-lens variant. GR film cameras were used by, among others, the legendary Japanese street photographer Daido Moriyama and British war photographer Philip Jones Griffiths.

The first digital version was the GR Digital, or GR-D, that was announced in 2005 but didn't appear until 2006 had a 1/1.8" CCD sensor and a 5.9mm lens that was equivalent in 35mm angle-of-view to 28mm. The GR Digital II was announced in 2007, the III in 2009, and the IV in 2011.

In 2013 the GR line got a large APS-C sensor, and the numbering system, rather confusingly, started over. The GR II came out in 2015, and the current version, the GR III, was introduced in September of last year.

So now that the GR III has been out for a few months, who's got an opinion? I've never used a GR, despite the fact that the number of total variants has now climbed to north of a dozen. I don't know how the GR III compares to the GR II in the minds, hearts, and hands of users. I don't say "hands" lightly, either, because the GR has always had a reputation for excellent ergonomics and sensible controls—historically it's drawn kudos for user-friendliness. When the GR III came out, I was aware of some blowback from longtime fans who didn't like the changes, but I figured we'd be better off waiting a few months before evaluating, because new things often draw criticism from people who...well, from people who were already happy with the old thing.

And now here we are.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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Featured Comments from:

John Krumm: "I have a GR II, and it is good, even spectacular in some instances. From what I hear this version, despite some drawbacks like less battery life, is better. They even managed to keep the super sharp lens, despite it being a new design. However, my GR II is good enough for me, and I just finally upgraded my E-M1 to the II version, so I'll stick with the earlier Ricoh for now. It's definitely a unique camera, with a very 'fine art' feel to the image quality. It is a real camera in use, fluid and fun, unlike phones. I recommend it for anyone who might want it."

Mike adds: I should have mentioned that the older GR II is on closeout with a 32GB card and Ruggard case for $547, vs. $900 for the new one. So if you just want to try a GR on for size, that might be the way to go.

Barry Reid: "Bear in mind, that 28mm focal length is not just central to Japanese photography but now it’s central to all photography since the bulk of phone cameras lenses are there or thereabouts."

DNY: "I have owned many cameras, from a Plaubel Makina 6x7 to Leicas, and Ebony 4x5, Hasselblad, Rollei TLR's and so on. The Ricoh GR (digital series) is by far my favorite camera of all time. I'm currently on my second GR II with no plans to purchase the GR III. The reason being that the shutter life is a crapshoot. It can last for 10K acctuations or 50K actuations—you just don't know. It seems like something that Ricoh should have worked out by now."

Mike replies: I've also heard that there's a known issue with the retractable lens sucking in dust that can get on the sensor, which is then expensive to clean because it's a fixed-lens camera. Doesn't happen with every sample but often enough, or so I hear, that it has given some users headaches.

RF: "I sold my Fuji X gear and bought a GR II last October and I don't regret it a bit. The GR has revitalized my love for doing photography and has me making shots I love at a pace I hadn't touched in probably five years. It's just fun to use, in as complicated or as simple a way as you might want to use it. Doesn't hurt that it's small enough to take with you everywhere, the lens is spectacular right from ƒ/2.8, and the files it produces are flexible and gorgeous.

"Now if they'd just make one with a 28mm (42mm equivalent) ƒ/2...."

Joe: "There’s no more pop-up flash, but there is image stabilization."

Thomas Tvelt Rosenlund: "I feel strongly against the new iterations of the Ricoh GR. I owned a GR1s back in the film days. It was a no-brainer at the time. It had everything. Great lens, dedicated aperture control, exposure compensation dial. Small, compact and rugged. The optical finder was great. The digital iterations have always been a letdown. No dedicated exposure compensation dial, no finder, optical or digital and no way to actually see the aperture control without looking at the screen. I decided long ago that the new GR digital gizmo's wasn't for me and got the Fuji X100 series instead. Its a no brainer, it has everything. Great lens, aperture control, exposure compensation dial. Small, compact and rugged. The optical/digital finder is great. It's the GR of the digital age, thank god it's also a commercial hit."

Sony Supercamera Sale

Cheapest A7rIII
Sony's most desirable supercamera, the full-frame mirrorless A7rIII, went on sale last night at midnight at B&H Photo and at Amazon. You can also get your choice of a variety of extras for free, including a microphone or a 4TB hard drive (check all of the options under "Configuration" at both sites), and three months of Adobe's Creative Cloud Photography Plan. The discount is $400 and the price is the lowest you'll find on the 42-MP powerhouse.

Knew you'd want to know.  :-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Leon Droby: "Thanks for the heads up on the deal, but a supercamera? I had one for about nine months. Amazing camera. But, I found the longer I had it, the less I used it.

Towards the end of that nine months, I ended up getting a Fuji X-H1. My usage has gone back up. And because I used it more, my pictures got better.

IMHO, any camera that encourages you to take more pictures is a supercamera.  ;-)  "

Mike replies: Couldn't agree more. It's the real reason to buy the right camera—because the one that pushes your buttons and floats your boat and lights up the pleasure centers of your brain-pan will be more fun to use and you'll use it more.

I first realized that when I read a comment by Lee Friedlander, a photographer who at the time I considered severe and uncompromising...he said something to the effect that a lot of his pictures came about because he just liked to get his cameras out and play with them. If he could say something like that, I figured it was okay for anybody to feel that way.

By the way, not only did the price of the X-H1 drop all the way down to $1,299, but right now they're giving away the power booster for FREE along with the camera. With two extra batteries too. That's an awful lot of equipment for the money! Those cameras must really not be selling. I don't understand why...I liked it a lot when I tried it. And to think, I didn't buy it because I couldn't afford it when the body alone was $1,650.

Kenneth Tanaka: "In contrast to Leon’s comment, I certainly endorse Mike’s designation of the Sony A7R III as a supercamera. Mine has been my main go-to camera for a variety of challenging jobs since late 2017. I haven’t found any task it cannot just perform but excel at yet. This is a terrific opportunity to save lots of cash and get arguably the best general-purpose digital camera available today."

Super Recognizers

We've talked before about prosopagnosia, the condition also known as face blindness. People who have it lack the normal human ability to recognize other people visually. The example I always think of is Oliver Sacks, the late great writer on neurology. When Dr. Sacks would go to a restaurant to meet his assistant of ten years for lunch, she had to raise her hand so he'd know which table she was at—he couldn't recognize her.

Turns out there's an opposite condition—a small number of people are so-called "super recognizers," sometimes used by police departments to identify faces in difficult conditions. They have the ability to recognize abnormally large numbers of people from clues and levels of familiarity too subtle for most of us. Even with the burgeoning use of face-detection technology for many uses (some legitimate, some worrying), "you always need someone at the end to confirm it," said Kenny Long, a former super recognizer with the London Metropolitan Police, as quoted in this article at c|net.

Back in photo-land, many Sony cameras (and maybe other brands, I don't know) have also become "super recognizers" of a sort. The feature first called Face Detection and more recently known as Eye Autofocus (Eye AF), has developed to a remarkable degree in recent models such as the super-speedy Sony A9. Here's a Sony page giving instructions for using eye autofocus in many Sony cameras. I saw a video that "tested" or demonstrated eye AF with the Sony A7rIII that impressed me a lot—in one situation, Stuart James was able to shoot a model through foliage and the camera zeroed right in on the model's eyes, where most cameras' AF would have been fooled. I'd think it would be a feature of great interest to dedicated portraitists and fashion photographers.

Dr. Sacks' book that includes his reflections on seeing and visual perception, and in which he discusses his prosopagnosia, is called Mind's Eye. Dr. Sacks was portrayed by Robin Williams in the remarkable movie Awakenings with Robert De Niro.

Mike

 Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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

Joe Holmes: "My son apparently has mild prosopagnosia—to this day he rarely greets anyone by name, thanks to the odds that he's wrong or simply doesn't know if he's ever met them before. But it seems that the genes he lacks all accumulated in my daughter, who may be a super-recognizer. She'll spot a minor actor from a film she saw one time years earlier, and she's always right. It's like perfect pitch in a way."

(A regular reader and commenter): "I did an online test a few years ago that strongly suggested I am a super-recogniser. It's something I've always known I am significantly better than average at, and it has occasionally led to almost a precognitive experience where I know I am going to bump into someone in a few moments because, in fact, I've already seen them subconsciously in a crowd or at a distance out of the corner of my eye.

"But for me at least there appears to be something of a downside.

"I know of people who say they can, perhaps in times of stress when they need something to think about, imagine the face of a parent or friend and focus on it, hold it in their mind's eye, etc. I can't really do that. It's as if I am seeing stars at night but they disappear as soon as I look directly at them instead of out of the corner of my eye, or I am trying to hold too many marbles at once: I can't assemble the whole face in a way that is really stable, before it is lost. I know what they look like, and I can probably describe them bit by bit, but I cannot hold a still picture at all.

"I can visualise little parts of that face—a smile, or eyes—for much longer periods of time, and as a result I seem to have learned a way to visualise people through their likely reaction to some news or a joke, and I remember interactions and emotions (in conjunction with my own). So I have to evoke little mental vignettes; I have strong emotional memories and I often describe people that way.

"As an aside, I'm also almost totally unable to remember someone's younger face if I know them as an older person. I'm not sure how uncommon that is.

"I'm not sure if this form of 'aphantasia' and super-recognising go together, or indeed whether my ability to imagine a face is really abnormally bad, but I do know which ability I'd prefer to have!"

Mike replies: That's very interesting. I might be something like the opposite of you. I'd say I'm on the low side of average when it comes to recognizing people. I even embarrassed myself with a neighbor for that reason a few years ago—I met him about four times and each time asked him who he was. He took offense. But on the other hand I have a very stable memory for faces of people I know. In fact, a few years back I started to have age-related trouble with names (extremely common) and I started to fret about my memory (also very common in people of late middle age). But then I realized that when I thought of someone, the image of their face comes into my mind immediately. So it isn't my memory that's faulty, because my memory of faces of people I know is still instantaneous. It's just that the verbal name component is getting more difficult to collate with that visual memory.

Joshua Hawkins: "I've read a few posts just this morning about the new Sony 5.0 update and how it's helping sports photographers. It's huge for them. Shooting through nets, rackets and random objects between the camera and subject is just the norm for sports. This technology is really wonderful, if still young. I also really like face tracking, and especially the eye tracking, for doing editorial style work with 1.4 glass. It's really improving my hit rate on in focus shots. (I don't use Sony, but it's all the same idea between different manufacturers.)"

Tommy Williams: "I discovered that I have a well-above average ability to recognize faces when I worked at Microsoft, on the main campus, where there were more than 25,000 people present each day. I would greet people in hallways, cafeterias, and walking between buildings and many of them had no idea who I was. Rather than making people uncomfortable, I stopped greeting anyone who I suspected wouldn't recognize me."

Xf Mj: "Well okay, these made for a fun late afternoon: TestMyBrain: Super Recognizers and Face Memory Test. I always wondered...I do recall being remarkably bad at the color (shade? hue?) recognition thing you once posted."

Mike replies: Thanks for that, that was fun. I scored 61 out of 72 on the TestMyBrain one, average being 58.5 and average for my age cohort being 56.4. I'm a little surprised...I would have guessed that I was below average. It occurred to me that I might have done better if I had quickly assigned names to the six faces!

Smartphone Sunday

The two side-by-side camera modules in the Apple iPhone 7+

It's smartphone Sunday, apparently.

I finally downloaded a raw app (one of many) for my phone—Halide Camera. It lets the iPhone 7+ shoot in raw as the default, and improves the camera controls. It's allegedly an "expensive" app, but at $5.99 it's one of the cheapest camera accessories I've bought in years (he said ruefully).

I shot this quick torture test on the iPhone with the Halide app and the result was pretty good. I was easily able to adjust the exposure for the highlights. The shadow recovery wasn't what it would be with a Fuji GFX, of course, but it was adequate, just—by balancing the shadow, highlight and exposure sliders in Photoshop and then applying some judicious noise reduction I was able to get this acceptable result. It's not up to the standard of Micro 4/3 but it's certainly better than the OOP (out-of-phone!) JPEG.

The problem here was highlighted by Marco in a comment the other day. "Maybe I am digressing," Marco wrote, "but this point comes to me often when reading posts like this. How do you decide that you are going out to take snapshots (phone) or something more serious (camera)?"

That's been a big issue for me my whole life. No matter what my "current practice" might be, I'm always afraid of having the wrong thing with me when I stumble across something I really want to make a picture of.

Back when I "saw" in B&W, just having color film in the camera was a big liability—because I'd see a picture I wanted my "real" film for, and I was blocked. My camera bags always contained a few half-shot rolls of color film, because I'd encounter something I wanted to shoot with Tri-X and I'd hurry and get the dang color film out of the camera so I could load some of my "real" film. It was frustrating.

Because when I'm out with a camera I'm not just seeing. I'm seeing like the camera sees. Where "camera" means my preferred technique of the moment. Other cameras look different, and aren't always acceptable as a substitute.

So of course a big problem arises, as Marco says, when you're out and about and you only have your phone with you and you want your camera but it's not with you. Because you never know when you're going to see a picture.

And sure enough, I have maybe two dozen pictures I've taken with my phone which I dearly wish I had taken with my camera. In certain cases it's okay, I can live with it. But in about half a dozen cases it's just a loss. I got something good, something precious, but on the wrong camera. Too bad.

So maybe having the raw app on the phone is a capitulation of sorts—it's an acknowledgement that I actually photograph with an iPhone and not a dedicated camera* some of the time. Now, when that happens, I'll be able to shoot raw and stand a better chance of getting a decent file out of the thing.

(Wish I had taken those six precious pictures with the Halide app? I guess.)

Mike
(Lead photo by Kārlis Dambrāns from Latvia)

*By the way, how long before "camera" means "camera phone" in the culture, and we need a separate term for what we now call cameras? That day is coming, I'll bet. I already find myself using the term "dedicated camera" to say what "camera" used to mean. In the early days of digital we always had to distinguish "digital" cameras from cameras. Now it's the other way around—"cameras" are digital and we have to specify "film camera" when we mean one that shoots film. Ah, the warp and woof of terminology through time!

P.S. Today's the big day I migrate to my new computer. I spent half the day yesterday preparing. Wish me luck, although I hope I won't need it.

Original contents copyright 2019 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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Ned Bunnell: "Mike, I’ve been testing quite a few Halide images which I’ve printed at 8x10 and the results are actually pretty nice...especially the B&W’s. I’m also doing a lot more processing on my iPhone. You should try using Darkroom to convert your Halide images. It does a nice job."

The Most Amazing Thing About Photography Circa 2019

Bob Gary was right in saying that the "Complexification" post the other day "hit a nerve." I think so too.

The best thing I got out of the discussion was the "aside" in the Featured Comment by Dennis, who wrote:

I know plenty of people who have turned away from entry level cameras (ILC or fixed lens) in favor of their phones, but I think that's due to the ease of sharing photos taken with a phone.

As an aside, I truly believe that many people do not think that their phone is a 'good enough' camera (how many times do you read that phones are good enough for most people?)—it's just that the ease of use/sharing is worth the compromise. I think a lot of people who shoot phones as their primary camera would love a better camera in their phone (and that is driving phone manufacturers to compete on camera capabilities).

That's brilliant, and I think it's spot on—"many people do not think that their phone is a 'good enough' camera...it's just that the ease of use/sharing is worth the compromise." Couldn't have said it better.

It highlights a really astonishing development in photography as a whole. Just to make the point a little more deliciously, I'd like to digress with a description of how I was practicing photography in the late '90s in my little house in Woodstock, Illinois, USA (the town where the greatest movie ever made, Groundhog Day*, was filmed). This is long, but I think you'll find it entertaining, whether or not it sounds familiar to you.

Before I start, though, I should mention that I shot Kodak Plus-X, at an exposure index (E.I., meaning a film speed that departed from the official ISO rating) of 64, and Kodak Tri-X at E.I. 200. I made no adjustments of the film speed from picture to picture or roll to roll, or for that matter from year to year. And I got 35 exposures (more on that later) per roll of film, so you had to be mindful how many shots remained, and "pick your spots" for changing rolls to minimize any chance of missing the action. And there was no possibility of shooting color with the same click of the shutter—if you had B&W film in the camera, that's all you got, B&W.

So here we go. First, using a contraption called a Watson loader, I took 100-foot rolls of 135mm film—it was originally movie film, and, in long rolls, still looked like it—and loaded it into a number of reusable cassettes, leaving the leaders sticking out. Then I had to clip the leader into a "tongue" using scissors, for easier loading into the camera. After shooting the pictures, I collected the exposed films, and went upstairs to my bedroom closet, which I darkened completely by stuffing a bathrobe under the door. I could only do this at night, by the way, or the daylight bouncing around the bedroom would overwhelm my defenses. I prepared by cutting the tabs or tongues off square across and attaching the end of the filmstrip, sticking out of the cassette, to the inner core of a "King Concept" stainless-steel film reel. Then I switched off the light. In pitch darkness, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the closet, working by feel, I wound three films on to reels, and placed the reels into a large four-reel tank, with the three loaded reels on the bottom and an empty reel at the top (I got better agitation by using a generous airspace, but leaving the airspace meant the solution wouldn't quite cover the fourth, or top, reel). All done, I put the light-tight top on the tank, turned the lights back on, and set myself free from the closet.

I shot only 35 pictures per roll so that all the negatives, cut into strips of five, would fit into a single Printfile negative sleeve and could be proofed (contact printed) on a single piece of 8x10 photo paper. So I was preparing to develop 105 pictures.

Downstairs, by the kitchen sink, I had already "tempered" the solutions (i.e., brought them to the right temperature) by preparing a 66°F water bath in a large Rubbermaid kitchen tub. While I rolled the film onto the reels upstairs, I had the developer, stop bath, fixer, and surfactant standing in the tempered water to bring them to the 68°F processing temperature. I tempered the water using a plastic gallon jug of plain water I keep in the refrigerator to keep it cold; sometimes the water from the cold tap was warmer than 68°F.

To prepare the developer, every couple of weeks I had to mix a "stock solution" of Kodak D-76 from packets of powder and heated distilled water, which I then decanted into 16-oz. amber brown pharmaceutical bottles. Mixing developer stock solution took the better part of an hour, but I got eight 16-oz. bottles of stock from each mixing session, enough for 24 rolls of film. The developer stock had to be aged. Because D-76 took a few days to stabilize and got more active as it got older, I didn't use it for the at least 72 hours after mixing it, and after 90 days, if there was any left (there never was), I threw it out. But that meant that the bottles had to be labeled with the date and time of mixing.

Before processing, I took one bottle of stock and mixed it 1:1 with distilled water, tossed out four ounces to leave 28 oz., and cleaned and dried  the stock bottle. That 28 oz. of 1:1 developer was what I was bringing to the processing temperature.

Using two bi-metal dial thermometers and one mercury one for calibration, I then performed a ritual I had performed well over a thousand times: I processed the film. First, the tank was brought to temperature with one-minute tempered water bath. Then the developer for 8.5 minutes, with ten precisely choreographed agitations by inversions. The agitations took ten seconds out of every minute. Then the developer was dumped into a beaker so I could check the finishing temperature, and then stop bath was poured into the tank and agitated continuously for a timed period, then ditto for the fixer. The processed film was then rinsed and washed under the tap. Finally, I poured in a solution of four drops of Edwal LFN, a surfactant, and distilled water to prevent water spots when drying.

Then I took the wet films to another closet, on the ground floor of the house, and hung them up to dry overnight. By the way, this closet had to be wiped down and spritzed with Endust every few weeks to keep dust at bay.

The next morning, I carefully clipped the three films into strips of five frames each and loaded them into the transparent Printfile negative sleeves, which had three holes on the left for insertion into a binder and were about the size of letter-sized paper. This was my least favorite chore in the process. Then the Printfile sheets went down to the darkroom to be added to the pile to be proofed.

Once I had maybe nine, or 12, or 15, or 18 sheets ready to be proofed, I went into the darkroom, mixed three trays of chemicals, and contact printed each sheet. I used 8.5x11" paper that I kept for that purpose (I also liked that size for work printing).

At that point, I was ready to begin dealing with the pictures I'd taken.

The first step was to determine which frames to workprint. My rule was that I had to workprint at least one frame from a roll of film (this was to prevent laziness, since it kept me from tossing the whole roll aside as worthless), and no more than six (this forced me to make hard choices when I was examining the contact printed frame with a lighted loupe). Sometimes I took a number of days and repeated viewings before marking the contact sheets for workprinting.

A "workprint" for me was a quick-and-dirty 8x10 full-frame print of the image, so I could further evaluate the picture, edit them, and strategize how to print the selects. The next step was a darkroom session for workprinting. As with contact printing, I had a standard exposure time, contrast, and enlarger head height setting for workprints, and the job was simply to rotate all the selected negatives into and out of the negative carrier and expose all the paper, which I kept in a paper safe as I worked. I might make 10 to 50 workprints in one session, but I processed them about every 15—that was as many sheets as I could comfortably put through the solutions together, agitating by "interleaving," which meant continuously rotating the sheets of paper from the bottom to the top of the pile. Once processed and washed, all these prints were squeegeed and laid out on our couch or the carpet till the next morning to dry.

The next step in my workflow was to figure out which negatives to make "fine prints" of. As I mentioned earlier this week, I made finished prints on 11x14 fiber-base paper to several standard sizes. A 2–3 hour darkroom session was usually good for four to seven finished prints.

I won't even go into the process of making finished prints.

Here's what's funny about that...
It's kind of hilarious now to reflect that I was doing all this because it was the most convenient alternative!! Makes me laugh, now. But with 2 1/4 rollfilm, I could only develop 24 exposures per tank; with sheet film, I could only tray-develop maybe six to 12 exposures in one session. Both larger formats had other costs, such as smaller maximum apertures on the normal lenses, more expensive lenses of more limited focal lengths, more film changing, and fussier film handling. With 35 exposures per roll, fast lenses, and the ability to develop a whopping 105 exposures per tank, I was making the "slacker" choice...I was "compromising" (cf. Dennis's quotation) with the smaller 24x36mm negative size because, well, yes, it was easier.

I'm sure you don't need me to compare all that preposterous effort to today, but I'll mention a few high points. Now, I can:

• Carry the equivalent of dozens of film cassettes on one tiny card
• Shoot hundreds of exposures per card, with no film changing and no appreciable per-exposure cost
• Use ISOs of up to 5000**
• Shoot B&W and color simultaneously
• Carry much smaller lenses thanks to having a sensor that's much smaller than the 24x36mm of 35mm film
• Stitch frames together easily after the fact
• Review what I've shot instantly
• "Develop" my shooting instantaneously and with almost no effort
• Proof and store with a few clicks of the mouse and some keyboard notations
• Manage colors much more easily
• Make color prints that are arguably the most beautiful and longest lasting of any method in history

And so on. The list goes on. You know what I'm talking about...all the advantages of large-sensor (I mean anything over 1"), dedicated digital cameras.

Here comes the amazing part
But that's not the amazing thing I wanted to point out. With all that—all these vast, overpoweringly superior. hugely more convenient advances in photographing, affecting almost every aspect of current workflows, which taken together amount to approximately the same qualitative change as traveling from one place to another using a horse-drawn buggy vs. a Camry—even with all that, it's not enough.

It's not convenient enough. Or it's getting to be that way. For some number of people, a number that's growing all the time, Dennis is exactly right. They will accept picture quality that's not quite good enough in exchange for the improved convenience of having their camera in a slim little pocket-sized wafer they have to carry with them anyway, and for the convenience of superior pointing-and-shooting abilities (the iPhone really is better than a "real" camera in the software department—it balances exposure, corrects color, and applies HDR more intelligently), and for the ability to share with others and post on social media immediately.

When I shot 35mm Tri-X with my old manual, metal, mechanical 35mm cameras, I was actually compromising for the sake of convenience. In May of 2000, by the time the $3,000, three megapixel Canon D30 came out, convenience had improved by—what? Ten times? Fifty times? over the old-fashioned film workflow described above that I was using in Woodstock. The D30 (I couldn't afford one) was the camera that Michael Reichmann of Luminous-Landscape famously declared to be as good as 35mm film (as long as you uprezzed carefully!). At Photo Techniques we sold Michael Reichmann example prints in our Collector Print program, to show people what was possible with "affordable" digital.

But in 2019, Y2k-era convenience is not only no longer news, it is no longer sufficient.

As I say, amazing.

Change is gonna come
You know what I'd really like to see? A comparison of image quality between a Google Pixel 3, Samsung S10, or Apple iPhone XS of today and a Canon D30 of the year 2000. That would really be interesting. Because it's possible we're at a similar stage in the third really major change in cameras in my lifetime. The first was the advent of point-and-shoots in the 1980s. The second and by far the most significant was film to digital. And the third might turn out to be standalone, large-sensor cameras to smartphones. (The one prior to those was rangefinders to SLRs, but I was two years old when the Nikon F heralded that the era of the SLR had arrived in 1959, so I didn't witness that.)

Time will tell.

Mike
(Thanks to Dennis)

*Is so. And since we're talking about Zen Buddhism, is this a good time to mention the concept of the Root Teacher? That's when you trace your teaching lineage from your own teacher, to your teacher's teacher, to his teacher, and so on. Well, my first photography teacher was David Vestal (I learned photography with his book The Craft of Photography open in my tiny darkroom under the basement stairs, and later hired him to write for Photo Techniques), and his teacher was Ralph Steiner, and Ralph's teacher—and thus my "root teacher"—was the pictorialist Clarence H. White, the founder of the first photography school in the United States. During one of his most creative periods, according to Ralph, Clarence White could only afford to expose eight (8) plates of film per month—two per week, and "he would spend every spare moment planning what he would do with those two plates on his weekend." And a surprisingly large percentage of those pictures were among his masterpieces.

There's probably a lesson in that, but I suspect I'd have to rewrite this exact same post for an infinite number of days before I achieve enlightenment as to what that lesson is.

**I don't believe I've ever shot a "keeper" picture at an ISO higher than that. Your mileage may vary.

Original contents copyright 2019 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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Featured Comments from:

Dave Jenkins: "It was complicated, shooting film. And of course, Photoshop has complications and difficulties of its own. It's just a different skill set, and I found the complications of film much more satisfying. On another note—I think yours was the first mention I've ever read or heard anywhere about D-76 gaining strength as it aged. I experienced that effect when I had my studio in the '90s—I used to mix a gallon at a time and found it giving me denser negs as I got toward the bottom of the jug. Rather than go through your process, I just switched to T-Max developer and mixed as needed."

Stan B.: "The complexification part in the analog days came from the shooting/developing routine described above. It was arduous, but...just that—routine. Today, endless choice is readily available; the complexification arrives when accessing that cornucopia of choice—it often comes with deciphering programs that are seldom routine and forever changing, evolving and becoming more...complex."

Mike Ferron: "Mike, I would describe your ritual when shooting, developing and printing film based photos now simply as 'keeping the faith.' About a month ago I picked up the most beautiful Leica IIIf and Summitar 5 cm ƒ/2 lens that was screaming at me from the local dealer's showcase. A total jewel to handle and admire and a PITA to actually use. And I love that. From the crazy loading of film to taking off my hat and glasses to actually be able to use the rangefinder then the viewfinder. Load Tmax 400, meter at 320 and the world is a better place in the end!"

Joseph Reid (partial comment): "There are cameras these days that will get your pictures to your phone wirelessly, such as the Nikon Z line, but they lay off the real work, processing your pictures and distributing them via the interweb, to the app and phone makers. As others have said, the old-line camera makers need to fix this. It's blisteringly obvious...."

[Ed. Note: You can read the full text of partial comments in the comments section. Click on "Comments" in the post footer.]

JOHN GILLOOLY (partial comment): "I purchased a very low serial number Nikon D1 the week they were available. The early days of digital were very difficult as the flash technology was crap and lab printing didn't really exist. My 64MB cards (32 JPEG fine images on a card—no chance you were shooting RAW) cost $349 and I eventually purchased a 1GB CFII card for $1200.00 after dropping a 'very delicate' IBM Microdrive. Everything was painfully slow. Downloading from the card was excruciating. Burning a CD took 40 minutes! Your description of B&W darkroom sounds so painfully slow and work-intensive from where we sit now. The first ten years of digital was a constant trial and error process with sacrifices in quality for many years relative to our analog world. I felt the time of the Nikon D3 was when digital finally came of age."

[Ed. Note: The next two comments came in one right after the other in this order. Coincidence?!?  :-) ]

Christopher Mark Perez: "Sony could easily solve the problem of convenience by replacing their mirrorless product line display interface with a full Android OS. Marry their high quality imaging system with a high quality fully functional networked OS and call it done (for now). They are an electronics company, after all. They could do that and make a whole lot of people happy."

Martin Doonan: "I love the irony that Android, as an operating system, was originally intended for digital cameras."

Neil Swanson: "Fifty years of shooting in formats from 35mm to 8x10, 22 years of making my living with a camera and what do I miss? Prints. I just don’t print or pay someone else to. It’s not a photo till it’s a print and yet I’ve got no idea what to do with dozens of boxes of prints I did make and nobody ever sees. But I miss prints."

Tom Frost: "I saw a cartoon that showed a roll of 2 1/4 film, a 35mm cassette, and a compact flash (CF) card. The caption, one under each device, said '12 exposures, six are good. 36 exposures, six are good. 600 exposures, six are good.'" 

Ian: "Found one of the very first images I shot on my D1 and my then new iPhone 8. Interesting to see how far things have come."

David Lee: "Loved to read your story Mike. I had a similar workflow. The part I enjoyed the most was the printing of full-frame negatives on 8x10 or 11x14 paper. I was using a Heiland Splitgrade that would give me a perfectly good working print at the first try 99% of the time. I designed a mounting and framing work table with slots for glass, cotton rag mats and frames. I was in total control of the photograph, from the shutter release to the hanging of the framed print. Almost eight years into digital and I still don’t have a printer. Shame on me."

Real Options

Just musing here. Mulling over the comments about the Range Rover thing, how's this for a concept....

A.) you pay a healthy amount of money for a luxury car, maybe double what you'd pay for a similar mainstream non-luxury version of something similar, b.) you get presented with a list of options, and c.) tick as many boxes as you want, configure your car just the way you like...

...NO CHARGE.

That's having options!

I predict the first company to do this will make out like bandits. Kia could do it, maybe. As a differentiator. Or Genesis.

And lest you say this is off topic, oh no, because it's exactly the way I'd like to buy premium (luxury) cameras. Pay one price, and they'll configure it the way you want it. Put everything on it, take everything off it, or anything in between.

To my knowledge only Leica has ever done this, with its à la carte program with film M's back in the day (and you paid an à la carte charge but nothing past that, right? I think), but that was mostly for cosmetic choices.

Mike

P.S. I'm sure people will say it can't be done. Nonsense. If it was what the market expected and the only way anyone could make money selling premium cameras, everyone would be doing it.

Original contents copyright 2019 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Speed: "Prix Fixe."

Walter, from girlfriends account...: "Sorry to disappoint, within this à la carte program Leica charged and charges for everything extra, besides a hefty basic fee to do so at all."

New News From the World of Stuff

Of course, the "stuff" doesn't have very much to do with photography—as they say in courtrooms, that's stipulated (in law the word means "to accept a proposition without requiring that it be established by proof"). That aside, a number of delightful new baubles of interest have passed by in the parade recently, as you might be aware.

The new Canon EOS RP

Full-frame Rebel: Most notable is the EOS RP, Canon's new "lower-end" R (full-frame mirrorless) camera. It's a small, light, relatively inexpensive* entry-level camera in the full-frame mirrorless interchangeable-lens category. It evidently uses a sensor very much like the one in the original flippin'-mirror 6D, which isn't really a bad thing as 6D pictures continue to look very nice; and it has a decent if basic feature set that includes things like a single card slot. I approve—I like simple. The notable things about it are a.) it's a Canon and b.) it costs only $1,300, which will look tempting to people who've been pining for full-frame but holding off because of the cost of entry. It will probably be popular for those reasons.

The new Fujicron 16mm ƒ/2.8

New Fujicron: Over in Fuji-land, an update called the X-T30 features a generous amount of trickle-down from the popular X-T3. To go with it there's another new "Fujicron." I refer, of course, to those small, light, still-fast-but-not-superfast X lenses nicknamed with a mashup of the words "Fujinon" and "Summicron." This time it's a pretty little 16mm ƒ/2.8 that's weatherproof and weighs only five and a half ounces(!).

Commentary

There's a reason why I stuck these two bits of stuff in one post. I can't help being struck by the juxtaposition of yet another Fujicron arriving at the same time we first see Canon's entry-level R offering.

...Which there's nothing wrong with, and I don't mean to imply otherwise. But most of Canon's R lenses so far are or will be premium, expensive offerings; the new lenses just announced don't look like they're going to change that. And the camera with even the basic lens is right back up to $2,200. Which ain't cheap**.

When the original Digital Rebel was introduced 16 years ago (can it really have been that long?), Canon had a whole slew of good but small and cheap SLR lenses you could stick on it. I'm left wondering what the point of a small, light, inexpensive body is when you're more or less obligated to buy large, heavy, expensive lenses to put on it.

There's really only one answer...it's so people can buy a "temporary" body as they begin to acquire lenses, putting off the purchase of a better, more expensive body to the future, at which point the RP can very logically become a second body / backup / carry-around / vacation camera.

Unless you just want that nifty 35mm with IS, of course, which solves all problems and quiets all objections. Mmmm.

Otherwise, I personally fail to see the appeal of a compact full-frame body that doesn't have reasonably light, easy-to-handle lenses that go with it. It's not like this kind of thing really matters...we all get what we want to get and then we get on with it. I'm sure the RP will be very nice, and eminently usable. But neither of the Canon R cameras have in-body image stabilization (IBIS), and neither does the X-T3; and if I'm going to get a mid-twenties-ish megapixel camera that's light and right-sized and doesn't have IBIS, I sure know what kind of lenses I want to go with it. One 16mm Fujicron to go, please. Also that one and that one too. Thenk-yew. That will be all.

Your mileage might vary, and I won't argue if it does. This "stuff" is supposed to be fun.

Mike

*Inexpensive as long as it's your money. If we're talking about mine, we need to discuss this further.

**Even with your money.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Here’s the situation

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

John W: "The 'big expensive lens' problem has always been my head-scratcher with FF Mirrorless. You still have FF, which means big lenses...period! The whole idea of mirrorless was to reduce size and weight. Sony seems to have cracked the problem somewhat, but only 'somewhat.' Their lenses are still big and very expensive but 'somewhat' lighter than the older FF DSLR lenses. APS-C as implemented in the Fuji system seems to be the true home of mirrorless. The size and weight are in the 'Goldilocks' zone and the sensors are 'good enough.' But though affordable the price is still a tad high. Still, with continuous free updates you can get a lot of mileage out of their cameras."

Larry Gebhardt: "The Sony A7II is still in the current lineup and Sony has dropped the price to $999. Given it's got IBIS and a range of smaller lenses it seems like an obvious choice over the RP if you're buying into mirrorless for the size benefits of the system. I think Canon should have introduced the RP at the same price, or at least added some smaller lenses with IS."

Upshot

I had to laugh at JohnMFlores's comment to the last post, which was, in its entirety,

Yes

...But, overall, I think the point is made, in my mind at least: cameras don't actually cost all that much. I'm thinking that perhaps I should stop boxing myself in to one stratum of the pricing tiers by conceiving of things as "inexpensive" and "expensive." It's really just all relative.

Personally, at this moment, I can tell you what seems reasonable to me: I balked at paying $1,649 for an X-H1 body (before the big price drop) and did in fact spend $1,213 for a Panasonic G9 body (when it reached its cheapest price during the holidays). So there's my own price sensitivity in a nutshell.

But that's just me. (And I'm still not sure I made the correct decision. I'm having opportunity-cost remorse over the X-H1, and half of me even thinks I should stick to B&W with the X-T1. I like color but I love B&W.)

I do continue to believe, and assert, that expenditures make much more sense if you get one of two things out of whatever you buy: One is "use," and the other is "joy," not that the two are mutually exclusive. I guess really the only truly wasteful way to spend money is to get neither use nor joy out of your purchase. Buy it and stick it in the closet and never touch it, and feel nothing but a pang of regret and guilt whenever you happen to accidentally lay eyes on it—that's how something really becomes expensive. Please don't ask how I know. And please don't tease me.

For pros AND...
I do have to object in part to the refrain common in our comments that the E-M1X is "for professionals" and if you need it for calculated business reasons then you'll make the buying decision purely on that basis. Yes and no. I've been in this game a while, and I can tell you that "professional" equipment is made for two categories of consumer, not one. One is, yes, pros who need it and people who will do a hardheaded cost/benefit analysis before investing; the other is well-heeled amateurs who want to use what the pros use...or who just want the thing, full stop. There's no telling what the percentage of each might be, as I'm sure it varies for each individual product, and by region, and based on what ideas are popular at any given moment in time, and even possibly by the state of the economy. And sometimes the two things are different facets of one and the same supernice Texan dude (cough cough Kirk LOL). But a little story along these lines: long ago, in Virginia, there was a professional camera store that catered to professionals. It was a very slick shop, stylish, and stuffed with exotic, expensive gear. It sold mainly studio lighting equipment, in the days when the average studio pro might invest $30,000 to $100,000 in strobe-and-head systems, light stands, clamps, cables, light shaping equipment (gobos, skrims, reflectors, softboxes, grids, etc.), flash meters, camera stands (the average hobbyist today has no idea what a camera stand is), backdrops, and so on. (A pro I assisted for claimed he had $30,000 worth of Matthews C [Century] stands, which in some circles used to be called "Hollywood stands.") Of course the store strongly emphasized the professional portion of its clientele. But the manager of the store, in an unguarded moment, confided to me that only 50% of its sales were to working pros; the other 50% were to wealthy people, some of them women, who had artistic inclinations and time on their hands and the intention to become fashion or studio photographers, and the wherewithal to outfit themselves to do so. The store downplayed this segment of its clientele, but, to paraphrase the manager (who was a woman), "without wealthy lawyers' wives I'd be out of business."

(This is an aside, but the same woman lectured on the use of the Minolta Flashmeter IV, which until the advent of digital cameras was the most complex device intended for photography I ever encountered, at least if you bothered to understand all of its functions. She also confided to me that if more than three weeks went by between these Flashmeter IV lectures, she had to brush up on its features and operation by rereading parts of the manual before her talk. Made me laugh...if the person who taught it couldn't even remember how to use it....)

So the E-M1X isn't just for working pros who need its capabilities and advantages, and you shouldn't believe otherwise. It's half* for pros who need it and half* for people who want to be like the pros who need it, or who want to be outfitted to try the things it's made to be good at. Those people are a very important part of any "pro" product's market, too.

That's my 2¢ about $3k. More mañana.

Mike

*Actual percentages may vary

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Harsh reality

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

Mike Plews: "As enthusiasts this discussion revolves around what we want versus what we need. Reality sometimes settles the issue for us. My way of dealing with this is to call things based not on what they are but rather on what they were supposed to be. For example, I have a Toro two stage snow thrower that can shoot a frozen dog turd into outer space. I call it my Epson 3880. If you look out over our back yard you can see my D850. It has a 750 gallon tank, a distribution box and three 80 foot laterals. Right now Mrs. Plews is waiting for the local septic service to come and pump out our Nikon. For much of the '90s we had a dog named Deardorff. Nobody in our family is named Deardorff but I asked for a Deardorff for Christmas and I got a beagle. It's all good."

Mike replies: Mike, I am going to have to come meet you and Mrs. Plews someday. It won't be to see your Nikon, though.

Øyvind Hansen: "If you can afford it it is very reassuring to own the 'flagship,' at least until the next version comes out. It keeps the upgraditis at bay. There´s still horizontal GAS to contend with though...."

John Camp: "I read all of Kirk's blog entries, and would comment there more often if I could only figure out how to do it. (Something to do with Facebook, or maybe Google, or maybe both.) In any case, he's down at his local camera store so often he ought to sublease a space in the back room and move in a bed and a microwave. Then he could try out cameras in the middle of the night, at his leisure. He also ought to give the occasional workshop on portraiture. I'd sign up in one minute."

kirk Tuck: "I'd love to reply to the mention of my buying habits, vis-à-vis camera gear, but I'm heading out the door just now on my way to the bricks and mortar camera store in order to buy a new Fujifilm 90mm ƒ/2 lens. Perhaps, finally, it will be the magic lens that makes my career mildly successful. If not, it may be another month in which we boil the leather camera straps to make soup...(sigh)."

Mike replies: Should we take up a collection for you?

Of camera straps, I mean.

I assume well-used, grimy, sweat-stained ones make better soup?

(Actually, I'd better watch myself here...best not provoke karma under this heading!  :-)  Or I'll be eating camera-strap soup myself.) 

4-Cylinder Ferrari?

Olympus E-M1X

Please read the disclaimer before proceeding!

Disclaimer: NOTHING AGAINST Olympus, Olympus fans, Olympus users, anyone who's interested in this camera, anyone who's shopping for it, anyone who likes what it represents, anyone who's interested in its tech, anyone who thinks they might be able to make use of what it offers, anyone who's considering buying one, and, especially, any actual work (pictures or videos) that might be made with one. No hate...for it, you, Olympus or E-mix pics/vids.

If you'll look at the front of the new Olympus you'll see why I've been calling it the "E-mix," pronounced ee-micks, because "M1X" looks so much like "mix." Apropos that, isn't it a great thing that the alphabet contains the otherwise nearly superfluous letter X? What would the camera industry do without it?

Uh-oh, I'm digressing.

Character defect.

Before you read on, though, did you read the disclaimer? I want to make sure everyone read the disclaimer. Otherwise I'll get slammed with all sort of accusatory comments and emails over the weekend, and I'm in much too good a mood for that.

It's true that I'm probably supposed to be getting carried away by all the specs and the launch celebration like everybody else. I guess I resist celebratory launches—I'm like a grouch at the Super Bowl who wanders around muttering about CTE. However, if there was ever a product in our category I'm not in the market for, this would be it. And you should know that.

Okay. So, a question for you: Is it just me, or does this product (behind all the hoopla) maybe make less than perfect sense?

(What'd he say?! Whoops, please re-read that disclaimer again now.)

Don't get me wrong. I use Micro 4/3; I'm on record repeatedly as liking the 20-MP 4/3 sensors; and I'm not a professional so I'm not in the target market for the E-mix. But at first blush there seems to be some kinda cognitive dissonance going on with this new Olympus beastie, except maybe for critter and airshow photographers and others who need a lot of reach. It kinda feels like a supercar with a little motor, like maybe...I don't know, a 4-cylinder Ferrari.

For those of you who might be car-illiterate, or more so than I, Enzo Ferrari, as I understand the story, originally considered himself an engine maker, and his cars were deliberately and specifically 12-cylinder race cars—he originally built road cars to subsidize and homologate the racing program. Enzo's son Dino convinced his father to race V6 and V8 cars in the '50s, but when Ferrari built road cars with smaller-than-12-cylinder engines, starting in 1968, he didn't call them Ferraris at first—he called them Dinos, reserving the fabled "Ferrari" moniker for 12-cylinder automobiles.

Ferrari did make some 4-cylinder engines, originally designed by Aurelio Lampredi for Formula 2. But a Ferrari road car with a 4-banger? Not on your life.

I presume if I got anything too badly wrong in the foregoing paragraphs, reader and car aficionado extraordinaire Jim Hayes will set me back on the right, ah, track.

By the way, I like 4-cylinder engines too, although I'm really a 6-cylinder fanboy. I like V6's and straight 6's best. My dream car, for instance—yes, I know this is quirky—would be a Miata with a transplanted GM LFX V6 engine. Yum.

But I digress.

Again.

Back to the E-mix: I could be wrong. It just seems to me like a Pen-F, E-M5 Mark II, or GX9 is an all-around better housing for a 20-MP 4/3 sensor than a camera that mimics the style and purpose of the biggest pro Canons and Nikons.

Just wondering what you're thinking of Olympus's thinking here.

Remember that disclaimer!

Mike

ADDENDUM:

Actual 4-cylinder Ferrari—a 1957 500 TRC. But get this...it was a V4.
(Thanks to Hugh Crawford. Photo: Ferrari.)

UPDATE Jim Hayes adds: "I dig your analogy Michael! Enzo Ferrari reportedly never had much interest in road cars; just selling them to fund his racing. Big 12-cylinder road cars sold for much higher prices and made more profits, so that made marketing sense. When it came to racing he would build cars for any class he wanted to participate in, so if he needed an engine with fewer cylinders and less displacement, he would do it. They even experimented with 2-cylinder engines.

"While there was never a 4-cylinder road Ferrari, there nearly was one. He commissioned Bizzarini to build a miniature GT based on a 4-cylinder 1- liter engine derived from the current 12-cylinder 3-liter cars. Bertone designed a coupe for it. It never made production at Ferrari but was sold to ASA and eventually surfaced as the ASA 1000GT around 1967.

"It looked like a miniature Ferrari. The car was tiny and the engine, which looked Ferrari-ish, was jewel-like. I've seen a few and they are the size of a small Fiat of the era. Only about 40 were made and they are collectors items."

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Harsh reality

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

psu: "FWIW Thom Hogan is using the same analogy. 😃 🚗 "

Mike replies: I swear I did not read or see anyone else's thoughts about the camera before composing my own. But..."great minds think alike"?

Stephen Scharf (partial comment): "I think the E-M1X was designed exactly the way it should be to do the job it was designed to do. As a very long-time Canon 1D-series user, that is very clear. The E-M5 MkII, Pen E or G9 camera frames and lens mounts are not torsionally stiff and strong enough for the types of long (and relatively heavy) lenses that would need to be mounted on this camera and maintain critical optical tolerances, let alone providing the requisite durability and reliability. Pros don't care a whole lot about all the newest specs, they care about toughness and durability. And shutter life."

Chris C: "It's bigger and heavier than the medium format Fuji GFX 50R!"

Ken Blumberg: "I've been a dedicated OM-D owner for the past seven years (E-M1 Mark II and E-M5 Mark II currently). I enjoyed your digressions and especially like your Ferrari analogy. What brought me to switch from APC to Micro 4/3 was the form factor. I think the E-mix is a miscalculation. I'm looking forward to the E-M1 Mark III."

kirk Tuck: "So. Deep breath. Not every camera is designed and purposed for walking around Downtown Austin with the instrument draped over my shoulder, sporting a nice, smallish lens and being unobtrusive. Some photographers, especially those who photograph all kinds of sports (think Olympics) wildlife and other pursuits that require long, fast lenses, spend hours holding up said long lenses in their hangs, anchored by a camera body. If you have ever done this kind of work you have probably found out that a larger camera with more gripping space helps to hold the entire package more comfortably. In the same pursuits having a robust body is also a good thing. As is a fast frame rate. In the "old days" when everything revolved around print photographers convinced themselves that they needed big (think V12) sensors. Now some prefer smaller sensors in order to reduce the size and weight of those long lenses while still delivering ample image quality. They are helped in this pursuit by the current target media: electronic screens. About 60–70% of Internet content goes to cellular phone screens.... This means that the final results from a smaller sensor camera will seem identical to big sensor cameras when viewed in the medium of choice for the majority of audiences. But the small sensor camera users still want the robustness of the larger body as well as the comfort afforded by the larger contact area for their hands.

"And since I keep saying hands I would also mention that these working photographers (Olympus' target market for a camera like this) will appreciate image stabilization that is head and shoulders above competitors' offering.

"So, what we have here is a well-considered specialists tool that can also be a 'halo' product for Olympus. It was never intended to be an 'all-around' much as a Ferrari was never meant to be used pulling stumps on the farm. We need to get into our heads that all cameras are not all purpose. Heavy-duty users will see the advantages in this new camera and buy one if the advantages align with their very real needs. I think it would be a good choice for theater photography when paired with the Olympus 40–150mm ƒ/2.8. I hope Olympus reads this and sends me the new body for a long, long test run."

PhotoDes: "Well, I don't own Olympus or a 4/3 camera, but I see nothing conceptually wrong with the M1X. After all, sensors and processors have been improving steadily over the past 10 or more years—I suspect a 4/3 sensor today is better than my APS-C sensors of years ago. There are advantages to the smaller sensors, within their limits, and cameras shouldn't be sized to the sensors anyway as long as hands stay the same size.

"An interesting and significant new alternative as I see it."

Ciaran: "Mike, I agree with your question of 'does it make sense?' for the E-M1X, certainly from the customer's perspective. I doubt that many customers have been calling for a bigger, heavier Micro 4/3 camera.

"However, from Olympus's perspective, a bigger, more expensive camera with more batteries provides a vehicle for new technologies, which in their first generation tend to be bigger, more expensive, and more power-hungry than their predecessors. This appears to be the case for the E-M1X. Rather than developing a new higher performance processor, they employed two of the existing True Pic VIII processors, driving up size, cost, and power consumption. Judging by the pictures of the main board and exploded diagram on Imaging Resource, they are using all of the space that a big body gives them.

"Olympus seems to be taking a bigger step into computational photography with the E-M1X, and this is an area that they could differentiate themselves in. (It is also technology that works well with small sensors, as Apple and Google have shown us.) The size of the box is important for a computational device. There are good reasons why the highest performing gaming and Photoshop PCs are desktops, not laptops; desktops have the room, the power, and the thermal management to house the latest processor and graphics card. Similarly, the E-M1X has much more room and power and enhanced thermal management (heat pipe!) compared to the Pen-F, for example. To do the same job with less volume and power might be doable, but it would require greater engineering resources and/or time (miniaturization is hard). Constraining themselves to a small box would be a disadvantage to Olympus, especially when the big boys have their big cameras to bring new technology to.

"Olympus may not sell a lot of these, maybe not enough enough to recoup development expenses, but it gives them the opportunity to get their new tech into the field and benefit from customer feedback while possibly gaining some favorable interest in follow-on products. And now they have a big body for future first generation technologies, relaxing the constraints for size, cost, and power during design."

Mark Jennings: "Enzo’s personal taste? Hard to say. He drove a Fiat most of his life. He tolerated his road car customers, and their taste tended to be a lot of romantic ideals. Ferrari himself just wanted to win, and V12s in the '50s were somewhat more reliable: lots of tiny, low mass parts moving at low speeds. Ferrari V12s typically weren’t the most powerful engines in a race, but they finished a little more often."

Jack Kurtz: "I'm a working photojournalist who uses the E-M1 Mark II and Pen F bodies. I like them a lot. I am a huge fanboy of the E-M1 Mark II and the small primes.

"But the E-M1X is kind of a head scratcher. I think the biggest challenge with Olympus' current cameras is that they've hit the limits of their 20 MP sensor, and this doesn't address those limits. I switched to mirrorless, and specifically Micro 4/3, from Canon 5D series cameras and L lenses because of the smaller/lighter ethos mirrorless promised. E-mix feels like a step backwards.

"As intriguing as some of the new technology in the E-M1X is, it doesn't solve any problems I currently have. I don't photograph planes, trains, or critters, so, even though the autofocus is very cool, I don't need a camera that picks up on a plane, train, or critter.

"I'm hoping some of the new features in the E-M1X trickle down to the E-M1 Mark II through firmware updates. (Specifically, access to both SD cards when you're using Olympus' iOS app, Ol Share.) I'm glad Olympus is still innovating and I think the eMix is a great proof of concept camera—but I don't see myself buying one."

Marcin Wuu: "I don't follow. It seems exactly the same case as the Panasonic G9—too big a camera with too small a sensor. Or is there a limit to how ridiculously oversized those things can get, and the G9 is exactly it?"

Mike replies: The G9 isn't a large camera when you see the actual object in person. It's merely not small, is all.

The light is not quite right in my "studio" in the morning, but here are a couple of quick comparison snaps for you—

G9 with 12–35mm next to X-T1 with larger handgrip and 14mm ƒ/2.8

Next to c. 1977 Nikkormat FT-3 with AIS Nikkor 85mm ƒ/2

Now go look at this. As you can see, that's not apples and apples.

Ed: "Who I'd like to hear from is an actual working pro sports photographer who uses Canon or Nikon and has had a chance to use this Olympus and compare."

Mike replies: That describes Stephen Scharf (who shoots motorsports such as motorcycle racing), who we'll probably hear from if/when he gets a chance to take the E-mix out for a spin.

David Dyer-Bennet: "I run a battery down in my EM-1 Mark II most days shooting roller derby. With a little anticipation you can change batteries at a break in the action, but I know people who don't want to think that far ahead. And I wouldn't be surprised if somebody shooting 4X the photos I do wouldn't run the battery down sooner, maybe multiple times per bout. (I'm already using the 40–150mm, so focusing big glass, and using CAF, so I can't increase my power draw too much.) This certainly isn't the body for the dedicated landscape photographer, and probably not for the street shooter (I don't do enough of that for my opinion to be more than a guess though). But it does seem to be designed for fast continuous action, sports and wildlife."

Whitney Dunn (partial comment): "The size arguments seem misplaced. It’s not for everyone, sure, but neither is a D5 or 1DX. They’re niche almost by definition. The role of these type of cameras isn’t to find a broad audience but to complete a system. You need a body with the best autofocus we can deliver, that will stand up to serious abuse, and deliver regardless of the conditions? Here you go."

Sunday Support Group: OC/OL/OY (and Mike's Camera Decision)

From time to time I suggest little exercises—well, okay, sometimes some big ones too—for people to consider. I love learning, and learners naturally teach.

One of those exercises was called OC/OL/OY—one camera, one lens, one year. Here's a description of it on PetaPixel*.

So...it's January...time for resolutions...which I am notoriously bad at keeping...and I'm thinking...well, that maybe I should take my own advice and do a OC/OL/OY.

I've actually done a OC/OL/OY before, several times. Mainly because there have been a number of more-than-one-year periods when I only owned one camera and one lens. In my first year in photography school I only had a Contax 139Q and a fast Zeiss 50mm lens. In Year Two I made the most momentous equipment change of my life and career and sold the 50mm and replaced it with a 35mm and an 85mm. Whew, big change. Brave new world.  :-)

I actually even did a OC/OL/OY with a zoom lens once, too...I purchased my first DSLR, used, in 2006 I think it was, and it came with the Minolta 28–75mm lens made by Tamron that's still available as a Sony lens. (Buy Tamron's own version instead, available for Nikon, Canon, Pentax and Sony DSLR mounts; it's almost half the cost.) I liked the lens so much on the "crop-sensor" camera (in FOV equivalency it was about a 42–110mm) that I never got another lens for that camera. Note that I can only recommend this lens on APS-C—I didn't care for it on FF at the short end.

Mike's camera decision
I decided to unwrap the G9. And keep it, that means. So I've got a new camera. It's not perfect for me (mainly because, ironically, it's just more camera than I need and prefer) but it does have what I need right now—fast AF and excellent IBIS. I bought David Thorpe's book. I ordered an extra battery and hunted down one of my UpStraps.

I sold two cameras and a lens and covered the cost of the G9 that way. It's expensive, but Amazon still has it at the lowest-ever price of $1,212.49. B&H is only slightly higher if, like I did, you prefer to buy from them. That's what makes it better than the Olympus E-M1 Mark II for me—it costs less. For people who are less price-sensitive the Oly might have a little edge. It has a bigger tribe of users.

So what lens would I use for a OC/OL/OY? I have four Micro 4/3 lenses...the 20mm (an old favorite, but one that triggered this little blat), the Panasonic/Leica 45mm Macro, an old Olympus 12–50mm that came with an early Micro 4/3 camera I quickly sold, and my bread-and-butter 12–35mm ƒ/2.8 II. Again, the Oly version might have a bit of an edge, but I like my Panasonic lens.

I don't really doubt that I could use just the G9 and the 12–35mm for a whole year, but...a true OC/OL/OY would mean no iPhone photographs other than just record-keeping, note-taking, and social-media-communication-type snaps for that year. And that would mean having the G9 with me much more than I keep a "good" camera with me now. Can I do that? Hmm.

Well, I probably should. I'm pretty addicted to iPhoney snappery, not always to good effect.

Mike's new camera. Uh-oh, this picture is an iPhone snap.

But hey, challenges are supposed to be challenging, right?

Unless I really commit, my OC/OL/OY won't last more than a month. And I'm not really committed yet. Just thinking about it.

But I'll keep thinking about it.

Mike

*...Which I had never seen before I Googled "OCOLOY" just now. Thanks, Michael Z. and PetaPixel!

Original contents copyright 2018 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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UKhui
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

Franklin Berryman: "Given your photographic experience, what do you hope to achieve by such a commitment? I mean there should be a goal other than just saying you did it."

Mike replies: Excellent question. I will ponder that, but I think the goal is re-commitment, renewal, re-engagement—a restoration of your involvement; putting gear, GAS, and technical fussing on the back burner, getting out with the camera more, and concentrating on seeing. Sound about right?

Benjamin Marks: "Why not start with OC/OL/OM (one camera, one lens, one month) and see where it goes?"

Paul McEvoy: "On Instagram for musicians (I believe there are other equivalents for other arts) there is a tag #100daysofpractice (and now #1000daysofpractice). I believe the violinist Hillary Hahn started it. Basically practice your instrument every day for 100 days. Generally post a video of yourself doing such every day (the last requirement is sort of loose).

"I’m on day 312 or thereabouts. About 740 hours of practice which very well might be more practicing than I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve gone from an inconsistent 1-2 hours a few times a week to 16-20 hours weekly. It’s been mostly very enjoyable.

"For me the most important thing has been getting offline. I lock my phone in a thing called a kitchen safe for large periods of the day and don’t have other internet access at home. I have another phone I use to make calls. It’s just the damn internet that screws up my brain.

"The other thing is a large wall calendar (now datebook planner for the new year) where I marked down my practicing hour by hour. This made a huge difference in feeling like I was keeping my streak up.

"It’s been life-changing. I have come to just love practicing in a way that as a lifelong musician I never have before. Just consistently sitting with my instrument and exploring, mostly the same stuff day after day and really digging in. Also totally owning being able to record something that’s pretty awful and put it up there knowing it will be better in six months.

"Lately I’m pondering returning to photography a bit with a similar mindset although it’s hard to serve multiple masters."

Big Price Drop on Fuji X-H1 Appears to Be Real This Time

It's not $1,199, but it's $1,299 with the power booster vertical grip and two extra batteries. Since the vertical grip alone is normally $269 and the batteries normally each cost $66—and $1,299 is $250 off yesterday's price of $1,549 for the body—that's like a closeout price for this camera.

Buy it from B&H, as Amazon only has the body-only for the same $1,299. UPDATE: Amazon U.S. now has it too.

Your total savings compared to yesterday are $651. That's...good. Very good.

I don't understand the reasons. Maybe it's just not selling well. I guess it does come across as being rather, ah, unfocused, from a marketing and product-lineup perspective.

As you'll read in the next post, this price drop arrived 12 hours too late to complicate my life, for which I guess I'm grateful?!?

But at any rate, having just tried out the high-precision X-H1 myself, I can attest that this is a very, very good deal for an unusually high-quality camera. I only tested it for stills shooting, but for that application it's superb. And the IBIS (in-body image stabilization) is extraordinary—I could shoot comfortably down to third of a second with a good success ratio. You might do better than that, as I am somewhat shakey.

Mike
(Thanks to Steve Biro)

Original contents copyright 2018 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.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

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

Martin D: "For me, the X-H1 is the natural complement to the X-Pro2. The X-Pro2 is for work with my trio of 23mm/35mm/50mm lenses (all in their compact ƒ/2 versions), where my style is 'be gentle, become part of the scene, and keep both eyes open.' The X-H1 is for working with the 16mm ƒ/1.4 and 90mm ƒ/2 lenses, where the fields of view are slightly more extreme and the lenses themselves are heavier and bulkier.

"With the 16mm and 90mm lenses, the X-Pro2 feels a little too light, and the optical viewfinder (which I love) reaches its limits. By contrast, the higher-resolution EVF of the X-H1 comes into its own, the bigger camera body matches the chunkier lens bodies perfectly, and with the 90mm of course it is also great to have IBIS. (Not all that different to having a Leica M4 for the 35mm and 50mm and a Nikon F2 for the teles and fisheyes!)

"Since I use these two combinations in parallel, I want to minimise any differences in sensor types and processing engines, and in this light the fact that the H1 uses the same 'old' sensor as the X-Pro2/X-T2 is a plus point, not a minus."

In 2018, SONY Moved the Cheese

You know what they say: Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

TOP Camera of the Year 2018: SONY a7 III

Exhibit 1: In 2018, mighty Canon took its lead from...Sony.

Exhibit 2: In 2018, mighty Nikon followed in Sony's footsteps too.

Exhibit 3: In 2018, Sony got Panasonic, its largest and fiercest competitor among Japanese electronics giants, to depart from its exclusive dedication to Micro 4/3 and take the plunge into competing with its (Sony's) full-frame mirrorless (FFM) line as well. 

I hope no one will interpret this as a gimmick choice. It's the opposite of that—a cold-eyed look at significance and importance. And really, the a7 III (here's the Amazon link) is a stand-in for all of Sony's evolving and proliferating interchangeable-lens full-frame mirrorless (FFM) offerings, which also include the a7R III, a9, and a7S II. I nominate the a7 III because it's the one that arrived in 2018.

Why is the "basic" workhorse a7 III a better pick for CotY than the shiny and hot new Nikon Z6 or Z7, Canon EOS R, or Panaleica's forthcoming forays into the breed? Because it has evolved to "Mark III" status already and there are already a large number of native Sony and Zeiss lenses for it, including the Zeiss Batis 40mm which would be my pick for a basic normal prime. Sony knows this space already.

And why draw attention to Sony's FFM line this year, when it's old news in digital-dog years? That should be obvious. Clearly, the biggest movement in serious cameras in 2018 was the coming of age of FFM (regardless of whether it flies or fizzles in its greatly expanded form, something which remains to be seen). And just as clearly, Sony's success in the segment is what moved the cheese. I've long thought that Leica has been drawing inspiration from Sony's product ideas, although I admit that makes for a somewhat subtle debate. But it's not subtle this time. In these new cases Sony's influence is plain, and indisputable. So Sony is the "leading camera company"...in the sense that it's the camera company that's leading the others. It's not just Leica and Panasonic. Even Nikon and Canon became Sony followers this year.

Maybe Nikon's, Canon's, or Panasonic's FFM cameras will snag trophies a few years hence, once they mature. But not yet.

Right now, it's Sony that should take a bow. It was the prime mover in the biggest development in the camera market this year.

That's the view from here.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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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A Mistake? Fuji X-H1 Super Low Price

I don't know what's going on, but Amazon has a few Fuji X-H1's listed at $1,199 right now.

[UPDATE 1:30 p.m.: The good price is gone now.]

[UPDATE #2 10:30 p.m.: Turns out this was a false alarm—just a mistake. See the Featured Comments.

Sorry for the letdown, but it seemed worth mentioning if someone could have gotten a good price. I've been hearing rumblings that the X-H1 might be in for a substantial price drop, and that it could be several weeks away. So keep an eagle eye out if you're interested. Thanks to several correspondents this afternoon and evening. —Ed.]

Everybody else, even Amazon's other vendors, is listing it for $1,649.

Mistake? Bait-and-switch? Gray market? Don't know; proceed with eyes wide open.

But maybe you can score a big savings.

It happens. It's happened to me before. Years ago, I got a digital camera at $200 under wholesale because a large retail chain promised to "beat every advertised price," and I found a very cheap price online that was most probably fraudulent. I explained this to the store. They discussed it among themselves, and then honored their offer. Mere days later, the store closed that loophole—but not before I'd walked away with my very cheap camera.

Anyway, just thought I should point out this deal. The X-H1's superlative build quality and technical tolerances make it a much-more-than-$1,200 camera. Frankly, it's a pretty good deal at $1,649.

Mike
(Thanks to Gordon)

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C.R. Marshall: "I ordered one just before 9:00 a.m. Central Time. It is coming from Unique Camera. They didn't have the lower price on their web page. Amazon says it should be here in a week. I will report back to Mike when it arrives."

Mike replies: Excellent C.R.! I will be curious. Thanks.

C.R. Marshall: "Email from Amazon at 10:28 a.m.: 'Hello C.R.Marshall, We're writing to inform you that your order from Unique Photo, Inc. has been canceled because the item you purchased is out of stock. Please return and place your order again at a later time. We're sorry for the inconvenience this has caused. In most cases, you pay for items when we ship them to you, so you won't be charged for items that are canceled.' Looks like they caught the mistake.

"As a postscript, I am not assuming bad behavior by Amazon or Unique. Someone accidentally posted a wrong price. Unique wisely backed out of the deal. They really don't have an X-H1 at that price."