Lights! Camera! Mad Science!

I’m baaaaaaack!

After an unannounced sabbatical that involved re-evaluating my vision for my photography, my open-source workflow, and my choice of camera gear, I am back to generating content for this blog.

Half Dome, Yosemite National Park – June 2019 I traveled quite a bit.

My trips to Japan and Yosemite National Park were very instrumental in helping me “get my groove back”. I was fortunate enough…

HASSELBLAD CELEBRATES 50 YEARS ON THE MOON

Neil Armstrong’s footprint in lunar soil.

Shortly after the Lunar Module Eagle touched down at Tranquility Base, astronauts Aldrin and Armstrong aboard the Apollo 11 mission would don their bulky space suits and step carefully down onto the dusty ground, becoming the first visit by humankind to the lunar surface. Naturally, the tools chosen to record and document this momentous occasion…

Hasselblad Announces the X1D II

X1D II 50C

This week, Hasselblad announced the X1D II 50C, an evolutionary update of the revolutionary X1D 50C. Improvements include upgraded EVF and LCD panels, improved performance, and a lower price. The introductory price of $5,750 USD places it $3,249 USD cheaper than the original! This version addresses a lot of the concerns users had expressed about the original. Hasselblad really wants…

Hands On with the Hasselblad X1D

In 2016, Hasselblad rocked the world of photography with the introduction of the Hasselblad X1D-50C, the world’s first Medium Format Mirrorless camera. Unlike its older siblings in the H-series and other medium format digital cameras, the X1D is downright petite. Even now, at the beginning of 2018, it is still the smallest medium format digital camera in the…

My Photographic Journey to Open Source

Sometime last year, I was challenged by the members of my local photo club to put together a low budget photo editing laptop. I surprised the group when I presented them with mid-level machine that was running completely free software. In fact, the money I saved from using FOSS (Free Open Source Software) instead of the usual Microsoft/Adobe/Apple software treadmill allowed me to upgrade the…

Two New Products from Think Tank Photo

Our friends at Think Tank Photo have released new and revised classic camera carrying solutions.

The newly-released StoryTeller shoulder bags come in three sizes. The StoryTeller 10 holds an ungripped DSLR or Mirrorless camera body, two to four standard telephoto lenses with hoods attached and reversed, and a 10” tablet. The StoryTeller 8holds an ungripped DSLR or Mirrorless camera body, three…

Sigma Announces 9 E-Mount lenses for Sony

February 27, 2018

Sigma Corporation today made the following announcements: * Launch of interchangeable lenses for Sony E-mount camera systems with full-frame sensors * Introduction of Sigma 105mm F1.4 DG HSM Art * Introduction of Sigma 70mm F2.8 DG MACRO HSM Art * New firmware version 2.00 for Canon digital cameras with Lens Aberration Correction

Sigma Interchangeable Lenses for Sony E-Mount…

COPENHAGEN, Nov. 30, 2017– Phase One, the world’s leading manufacturer of high-end digital camera systems, today released Capture One 11, a major new version of the industry’s premier RAW conversion and image editing software. This release builds on Capture One’s unmatched color handling, precision-editing tools, seamless tethered support, and native support for more than 400 different camera…

Hasselblad’s New Online Store is Now Open To The USA, China, UK, Germany and France

Hasselblad, the leading manufacturer of digital medium format cameras and lenses, is pleased to announce the launch of its new online ‘Hasselblad Store’. The online store will broaden availability of Hasselblad’s iconic high-performance cameras and lenses to photographers in the USA, China, UK, Germany and France.

a New Way to Experience and Take Advantage of Hasselblad Medium Format Technology

‘Rent a Hasselblad’ enables easier and on-demand access to Hasselblad medium format cameras and lenses for photography enthusiasts and professionals.

Hasselblad, the leading manufacturer of medium format cameras and lenses, is introducing the ‘Rent a Hasselblad’ service. The service has been created to allow…

On1 Photo Raw 2018 Now Available

Portland, OR – November 9, 2017­– Today, ON1, Inc. announced ON1 Photo RAW 2018 is officially available. Along with the essential tools and features needed in a photography workflow, ON1 Photo RAW 2018 includes key updates to the fast, non-destructive raw processing engine. Photographers now have an integrated tool with accelerated photo management, precise photo development, hundreds of…

Phase One Launches Capture One Brand Ambassador Program

COPENHAGEN, Nov. 6, 2017 – Phase One today announced the Capture One Brand Ambassador Program – an exclusive long-term partnership with a selected group of photographers and retouchers who will help educate and inspire others who seek superior image processing results. Ambitious, creative, and uncompromising, the Capture One Brand Ambassadors will show why Capture One is considered “the…

3D printing (or desktop manufacturing) is becoming more and more commonplace. Just as my children grew up having computers, internet and smartphones around them, the generation of children being born now will grow up with desktop manufacturing as a part of their home. To that end I have decided to add 3D Printer Reviews to my blog. There are many excellent reviewers out there, but I have my $0.02…

Day 2 is my wandering day. I will cruise up and down the aisles seeing what there is to see.

The Big Three

Canon, Nikon and Sony booths dominated the entrance of the show. As always, their booths are over the top. Sony had the spot usually held by Nikon, a sign of our changing times.

Canon didn’t have any major announcements other than Same Day Turnaround for Canon Professional Services Platinum Members (membership involves owning a really large harem of Canon gear and making most of your money from photography).

Nikon had the new D850 on display, an evolutionary step up from the D810. No word at all about pro-level mirrorless cameras from either Canon or Nikon. To date, their mirrorless offerings have been more for lip service. This is not to say that they are bad cameras, they just aren’t being marketed very heavily by either company.

I spoke to a pro sports photographer who used a Nikon J camera to cover the US Open a couple of years ago and at the end, when Serena Williams was holding the trophy and leaping into the air, his was the only camera that caught her signature leap holding the trophy in it’s entirety.

Sony is all about mirrorless and they had the newly announced A7rIII and A9 on display long with all of their video equipment and vast stable of lenses.

Sony A9

Sony A7rIII

Olympus and Panasonic

No new cameras from either of these companies. Panasonic was promoting the Lumix GH5 heavily. A longtime favorite of videographers, Panasonic’s latest and greatest sports 4K 60p/50p 4:2:2/10-bit video recording, and all of the ports needed for professionals. Olympus introduced two new pro lenses (which I mentioned on my Day 0 report): the M.Zuiko 17mm f/1.2 PRO and the M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.2 PRO. These join their older sibling, the M.Zuiko 25mm f/1.2 PRO.

I got some hands-on time with the 45mm f/1.2 and the lens is incredibly well-built (and it better be for $1299), weather sealed and sharp with beautiful bokeh. As usual at trade shows, models were present to allow you to photograph someone far better looking than the hairy dude standing next to you.

Steampunk model photographed with Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.2 lens wide open

Granted, the distance between the model and myself did not allow the lens bokeh to really shine through, but I assure you the hairy dude photos had really creamy bokeh (before he made me delete them – go figure).

The One Percenters

Everything that sells ultimately develops luxury brands and cameras are no exceptions. Alpa, Arca Swiss, Cambo, Hasselblad and Phase One all made their presence felt at the show. Oddly missing for the first time in years is Leica. I guess they were too busy schmoozing Russian oligarchs to attend Not-Photokina.

Cambo is company from the Netherlands that made film view and technical cameras for many years. The digital revolution came and they wisely realized that their strengths lay in analog photographic gear. They adapted their view and technical cameras to work with other peoples cameras, adding value without having to make the massive investment of developing sensor technologies of their own. very pragmatic, very Dutch.

Cambo Actus Mini X1D

Cambo CA-XCD Canon Lens adapter for Hasselblad X1D

Cambo Actus Mini GFX

Alpa and Arca Swiss were represented at vendor booths that hosted Phase One as well. Phase One dominated the booth with their IQ3 100MP Trichromatic camera system. This 100MPx bad boy will set you back the cost of a BMW ($49,990), but produces color and sharpness matched by very few others (and that is more splitting hairs than anything else).

All hail the King, baby! The Phase One Trichromatic system. $49,990!

Hasselblad had a booth of their own and while no new cameras were announced, a new firmware was released for the H6D and X1D medium format cameras. Hasselblad has started to play Fuji’s game of adding new features to their cameras via firmware updates. Touch AF has been implemented in both cameras now and it works very well. Previous firmware updates added electronic shutter release which removes the X1D’s inability to support adapted non-leaf shutter lenses. Also on hand was the recently announced 120mm f/4 Macro Lens. The lens resolves an amazing amount of detail.

Hasselblad X1D 4116 + 120mm f/4 macro lens

The Black 4116 X1D is now available body only for about $300 more than the silver body. If anyone wants help a guy out getting one of these, I humbly accept donations.

A Place For Your Stuff (I miss George Carlin)

Storage is always an issue for photographers in the digital age. We have enterprise-class needs and homeless person budgets. This often leads to poor decisions. Storage vendors are always striving to lower the cost of entry and this year’s showing is no exception. I saw Drobo, LaCie, QNAP and WD with booths at the show.

Drobo did not have any new products other than those that were announced at the beginning of the year at CES. Drobo is by far the easiest storage system to use as it does not require symmetric drive sizes and makes upsizing your storage array a trivial affair. A new feature being heavily promoted is their disaster recovery feature which allows you to synchronize two geographically disparate Drobos securely over the internet in case the worst happens. For free. Take that cloud storage!

Drobo 5N2

LaCie was there as well showing off their latest Thunderbolt 3 direct attached storage devices. With Thunderbolt becoming more common on PC motherboards (they used to be only found on Macs), LaCie’s high performance drive systems are seeing quite an uptick in use.

LaCie 12big Thunderbolt 3

LaCie 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3

The 2big Dock Thunderbolt 3 ranges is size from 8-20 TB (raw storage) and also includes an SD/CF card reader. Connectivity is TB 3/USB 3.1 and also includes a SuperSpeed USB 3.1 Type-A connection in front for transfers from external drives and laptops.

QNAP introduced a new 4-bay storage unit aimed squarely at photographers featuring Thunderbolt 3, 10GBe, m.2 SSD caching, among many other features. Dubbed the TS-453BT3, it is priced at $999.00

QNAP TS-453BT3 NAS

Other goodies

Newcomer Illuminati Instruments had introduced their Illuminati Wireless Light & Color Meter. This device uses your smartphone as its display. It is also at a price point that will make it affordable to all photographers. It should be available in the next month or so.

Illuminati Wireless Light Meter + Colorimeter

Benq has updated their professional line of displays with two models aimed squarely at photographers. The newly introduced SW271 is a 27″ 4K display with 100% Adobe RGB color space, 10-bit color, and HDR display modes. A wired “hockey puck” control allows users to manipulate the on screen display regardless of screen position. The monitor can be set in several modes including Adobe RGB, sRGB, Black & White, and HDR.

Benq SW271 Professional Monitor

Well that covers it for this year’s show. Please feel free to leave comments and sharing of these articles are always encouraged.

Photo Plus 2017 – Day 1

The crowds gather for the start of the show.

Today was my appointment day. I had several appointments with marketing reps so I could arrange demo gear for the next year. The gang at Hasselblad were pleased and very surprised that I honored a promise I made in a webinar chat last July and brought them Cuban pastries from Miami. I am a man of my word and am very serious when it comes to pastelitos. It is also the day I drop my Pen-F off at the Olympus booth for a little TLC so I did not have it with me in the morning.

This post now includes a gallery slideshow with captions showing what I saw at the show today between appointments.

Things got interesting after the show

Light L16 Launch Party

I was invited to attend the Light L16 Launch Party. Yeah, I couldn’t believe it either.

The Light L16 Camera was born in Kickstarter a few years ago and is finally seeing the light of day. The Light L16 is physically unlike any camera on the market today. Based on the concept of “computational photography”, the Light L16 packs sixteen different lenses and sensors (13 Mpx each) into a body that looks like an extra-thick plus sized smartphone.

Light L16 camera – Front view of sixteen lenses and sensors.

As goofy as this looks, it is actually a work of pure genius that stands to alter the way we design cameras from now on. Instead of having one main sensor and lens, the L16 possesses multiple smaller sensors whose combined output can produce images up to 52 megapixels in size. That’s medium format territory. But that’s not all. Remember I called this a “computational photography” system and by that I mean that it runs a general purpose operating system (Android) and can be upgraded with new functions via software. On top of that, the lenses on the front have various fixed focal lengths whose combined data enables a 5x optical zoom (28-150mm f/2.0-2.4) all handled via the 5″ touchscreen.

But that’s not all! Since the lenses (5x28mm f/2.0, 5x70mm f/2.0, and 6x150mm f/2.4) are physically spread across the face of the camera, distance information is captured as well and using Lumen (Light’s conversion software) you can actually refocus images after the fact (assuming that the is sufficient separation of foreground and background elements)! Once images a processed through Lumen, they can be exported as JPG or DNG for further post-processing.

Light L16 camera – Rear view

The Light L16 retails for $1,950 USD and pre-orders are being taken now on their website Light.co. I know it sounds expensive, but I physically handled and used the camera at the party and aside from some beta software issues (AF performance mostly, I was told that it will be addressed in the next update), it takes some pretty stunning images and has features you won’t find in other cameras. For instance, if the camera detects (via accelerometer) that it is not moving because it is on a tripod or on a table, it will drop down its ISO levels and use a slower shutter speed automatically. I did not see a flash shoe on the unit, but I can easily see it controlling a cold shoe mounted Bluetooth-enabled lighting system like the Lume Cube.

Best of all, it fits in your pocket.

Photo Plus 2017 – Day 0

Photo Plus Expo is upon us once more and I have once again traveled to the Big Apple to see what there is to see. Today was registration day and there was a small press event called Test Drive. Here are the highlights:

Skylum Software (nee Macphun)

With the launch of Windows versions of their flagship apps (Luminar pictured above) Macphun Software has rechristened themselves as Skylum Software.…