I find it interesting how some brands attract hatred and jealously.
Apple are certainly one in the computing field and Leica are such a company in the photography business.
This month Leica posted strong revenue growth, with the Leica M, SL and Q doing extremely well. They managed to grow there market by 6% in a year where the average loss was 10%.
So a company doing well.
The forums were full of hatred, people saying the figures were cooked, that they have never seen a photographer use a Leica or that us Leica’s are all just rich dentists.
Well I helped Leica in there growth this year by purchasing my first new Leica product, the M10, up to now all my Leica gear has been second hand and I have had to save up for many years before I could afford my first new Leica.
If you have a big investment into Adobe Lightroom, its catalogue and backend database then moving is a difficult thing.
For image editing Lightroom and Capture One are now the big two, with a couple of others coming up quickly. I generally discount software from the camera companies, its at its best terrible and at its worse a crashing virus on your computer.
I keep reading good things about Capture One and as a PhaseOne medium format back owner I have a license, but I still just use Lightroom. Fuji users in particular are always singing the praises of Capture One as it took Adobe a long time to come to grips with the X-Trans Sensor that is in the X series DX crop bodies of Fuji cameras.
But I read an interesting article the other day on Photography Life and he points out that Capture One does not support none Phase medium format cameras; something I had not noticed. It certainly puts me of the product.
I am thinking hard at the moment about my future in 35mm full frame and large format, the Hasselblad may go back to just film use and I may trade in my 35mm Nikon gear and Phase One back for a more modern medium format solution that supports my studio and landscape needs. With Capture One only supporting PhaseOne on medium format, I will not be making it limit my camera choice, so Adobe have me for a while longer.
Lightroom reporting a different file name then the one on the memory card
If your like me or most professional photographers then you take a lot of pictures when shooting digital.
Being able to find photographs afterwards in your asset management system is important, and with modern meta data and database systems, the actual file name is becoming less important.
Sometimes though the file name is all you have to go on if your using more then one workflow.
With my desktop Lightroom catalogue, the new cloud based Lightroom CC on my laptop, iPhone and iPad, then keeping track of what I have imported and what I have not can get difficult.
At the weekend i’ll be shooting in the studio with several models and using several different cameras. Afterwards my work flow will be fairly straight forward.
Copy all the cards to the internal SSD of my Desktop Machine
These then will get backed up by my automatic PC backup
Import to Lightroom Classic
This copies the files to my main external Thunderbolt Drive
This also makes a backup copy to Dropbox
Initial metadata and develop by preset
Then sorting out selects and picks to do a final edit on
When I am shooting more informally then the work flow may be the above, but its more likely me just grabbing the card at the end of the day and then copying the files to Dropbox to sort another day. Or using my iPad SD Card reader and pulling in the photographs to Lightroom Mobile, or even using the Leica Mobile iOS app to pull off the odd photography.
The problem with these other workflows is that sometimes the process, it the Leica App or the iOS operating system itself is changing the file names. This then makes it difficult to keep track what photographs have been imported into my master library on the desktop machine and what are still to import. If not careful you can either loose photographs or end up with duplicate shots in your library.
Leica released a new firmware for the M10 on Wednesday, I have not yet upgraded but have downloaded and have started checking out the forums for any issues.
I am loving my iPhone X and iOS11 has up to now been great, especially on the iPad.
But on Saturday we hit the 2nd of December and every time my iPhone 6 Plus or iPhone X received a notification the spring board would crash. I ended up turning off notifications on my iPhone X in order to be able to use it.
A lot of users have been complaining about software issues with Apple products recently and I must have been lucky as I have been problem free up to now.
We have had quite a bit of news from Leica over the last few weeks.
On the camera front we have the new Leica CL (review here from Jonathan Slack), which is growing on me but I must keep saying no. For how I would use that camera an Olympus Pen-F would do just as well and for the price I could get a few nice Olympus lens as well. We also had a special edition Leica M240 in Red.
We had the second of Leica’s old classic lens released plus they have been releasing a few of the modern lens in the old classic look lens bodies.
We have been hearing rumours over the last couple of months of a new Noctilux and not a 50mm, but some have said it will be a wide angle others have been saying a short or long portrait lens either 75mm or 90mm. Well this week we finally had the official announcement.
The new Noctilux is a 75mm f/1.25 ASPH. In the sample photographs the images look absolutely stunning, the options available to you with depth of field and the stunning bokeh. The look you can achieve is outrageous but then so is the price.
