Family, Photography and other misc news
The weather has been unseasonably warm recently and on a recent commute into Lincoln, I took the back country route. I was surprised and pleased to see a pickup truck parked up, and behind it a young man in a deck chair playing the Banjo in the sun.
It was such a surprising thing to see in the countryside of Lincolnshire.
While grabbing a quick coffee from a well know chain, I noticed my Coffee Card had no credit on it. 
I keep my coffee card in my Apple Wallet app, on my iPhone, so I wondered could I top it up while waiting in the queue.
Well it turns out you can, I quickly transferred £10 pounds via apple pay from my current account registered in ApplePay to my coffee card and proceeded to buy a round of drinks. Quick easy and it entertained the geek in me.
Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday, where here in the UK we commemorate the sacrifices made by people in past wars.
The symbol we use here is the Poppy, and here in Lincolnshire we have a local artist painting poppies on shop windows, the Royal British Legion has its annual poppy appeal and for a small donation you get a small paper poppy or a metal lapel badge.
I visited Lincoln Cathedral and it was decorated with poppies, and as is usual I had my little Leica M8 with me so took a few snaps.
Apart from Leica’s first digital M, the M8 range, all of Leica’s professional cameras have been 14-bit, but it was with some surprise that the new Leica Monochrom (246) is just 12-bit.
As you can imagine the forums are not happy, so one of Leica’s top beta testers set out to prove Leica was wrong and that this decision from Leica would make the images worse.
Well it turns out that 12 bits for a single Channel image just using luminosity i.e a Black & White only sensor may not an issue.
Testing is showing up some issues when using very high ISO; areas of black are developing pattens when the image is rotated in Lightroom, but testers are saying this is a RAW convert issue and not a 12 vers 14-bit issue and that Adobe should be able to fix this.
I think for now the jury is still out, though I have to admit the output from the new Monochrom does look stunning.
A review of the new Monochrom can be read here.
There are three good reasons to attend camera shows.
At this years LCE Lincoln Photo & Optics show we had the usual big players of Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Panasonic and Sony, plus Sigma and the usual accessories manufactures.
Nikon were selling lots of their new 200-500mm f/5.6E which is not available yet from most retailers.
My main interest was to handle the new Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mk2. It’s the bottom of range OM model but has very respectable performance. The shot above was taken with an OM-D E-M10 Mk1 which was lent to me for the day by Olympus.
The staff on the stand were extremely helpful, and put up with me spending a long time setting up the camera the way I would want to shoot. Once setup it was very responsive, a nice EVF and more importantly for me, could be configured to have a very short viewfinder blackout.
Modern SLR’s are very good in this respect and rangefinders are perfect as they have no viewfinder blackout. Most EVF based cameras are very disappointing in this respect but the Olympus in this respect was excellent.
The Panasonic stand also had the new GX8. The GX7 is quite tempting to me but the GX8 is a very different beast. Its very much a pro camera, and it was unfair to compare it to the OM-D E-M10 but thats what I did. I found the menu’s difficult and had to reset the camera then ask the staff to help me set it up. Once setup I worked as one would expect, faultlessly.
I keep saying that there are no bad cameras any more and with the latest generation of EVF cameras, they also seem to have caught up with the rest.
Unless your shooting sports and wildlife any camera now shoot most subjects very successfully, so just go out there and pick the one that suits you the best.
On Wednesday this week it will be the annual London Camera Exchange, Lincoln Camera and Optics Show.
Over the last few years I have picked up a number of bargains. One year I went to get a Nikon V1 outfit with three lens, last year I went to get my Nikon D800 at a very special show price.
On the years where I have gone under the intention of just having a good look round I have also managed to pick up the odd bargain, such as my Leica M8.
This year I will only be there for a couple of hours and am not expecting to buy anything but it will be fun seeing the demo’s and handling the new cameras.
I find the way a camera feels in my hand is more important then the quality of image. If I don’t like carrying or using it, then it will not get used.
As I have commented on my blog, the recent update to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom has caused me a few issues and reading the forums I am not the only one.
The big issues was the crashing, not good and in that condition it should have never shipped but at least they got a fix out and after updating plus creating a new catalogue (database) at least I had a stable version.
The next issue for me was panorama’s. Being able to create them direct in Lightroom instead of a round trip to Photoshop made life quicker and easier, but if your Leica shooter then this stopped working. I did wonder if it was just me as I could not find any mention on the forums about this one, but I suppose there are not many Leica users shooting panorama’s. I submitted a bug report at the weekend and Adobe quickly got back to me to confirm that they had broken this too.
With issues for Leica users and Nikon users in the latest versions for those of use who use the latest Mac OS with tethering now also broken its not been a good release for Adobe.
For many pros that shoot very high numbers of images in a single shoot the change to the import dialogue is also not liked. While change is often disliked its the fact they removed the ‘move’ feature and the card auto eject feature that has upset the most people.
For me the import is not too bad, I am getting my head around it and its better since I discovered the Command Import option.
I already knew about the Option (Alt for Windows users) Import and Export options; which when you hold down the ‘Option’ key you get to Import or Export Catalogues, but if you use ‘Option’ Import you get a different import screen with the options no longer hidden.
