Family, Photography and other misc news
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.
Leica M4
Leica Summicron 35mm f/2 ASPH 6-Bit
35mm, 1/250 Sec at f/5.6, Ilford HP5 Plus ISO400
Processed in Kodak X-Tol developer
Post Processed in Adobe Lightroom CC2015.2.1
On a MacPro, OS-X 10.11.1
I was after trying out some Kodak Tri-X film that I had just bought and the Leica M4 had only three frames left of Ilford HP5 Plus, my current favourite film, so I went for a quick walk round the village where I live in the hope of using it up.
Many of us in the village keep chickens and several of us either keep bee’s, have kept bees or are about to keep bees so this view from the high street attracted me. While personally for bee keeping I prefer a national hive with 14 x 12 brood box, an old english WBC hive as seen above is the prettiest and with the double skin practical for colder climates, but with the small brood chamber its not the most practical, thus many sit disused and used as ornaments in gardens.
While I love the Fuji X100 range, I hate the Trans-X sensor and propriety RAW formats, though I have to admit that the sensor does produce nice Black & Whites; but the one thing I love about Fuji is their continued support of old cameras with continued firmware updates that increase the functionality and the life of their cameras.
Now I know I have written a lot of Leica posts recently, but I have to apologies to my readers, that despite the start of this post talking about Fuji this is, as you can guess from the title another Leica post.
Today Leica announced a new firmware update for the Leica T, once that many T users will be glad to see. The new 1.4 firmware update offers significantly faster focusing, X2 if the press release can be believed and a X3 increase in general responsiveness of the camera.
For the last three months there have been many rumours that Leica are ending the T camera and its TL mount, but in the last week we have seen new lens announced and now a new firmware which hopefully will address the few issues that T users have been having.
Also due soon is a firmware update for the range finder M range of cameras and the old Leica X2. We had an update to the old M8 in the last year so its great to see companies like Leica and Fuji supporting their old models.
There is also a rumour of at least two new Leica cameras being announced soon, a Leica X-U and the new M rangefinder. Its the M I am interested in and I am likely to put my money down for either a M-P 240 or the new version if its significantly better as soon as its announced. The rumoured X-U is a mystery, its either an X series camera with a built in EVF and if based on the current X 113 would make it the perfect compact and a great 35mm field of view version of the Leica Q, or an interchangeable lens version of the X capable of taking the TL and SL lens.
Its going to be an interesting next twelve months. We also have rumours of Nikon and Canon introducing their full frame versions of the mirrorless Leica SL, so that will be three professional full frame mirrorless EVF based cameras. In many regards both Canon and Nikon have advantages over Leica, as its likely that the Nikon will use the F mounts and the Canon the EOS mount thus be fully compatible with their existing lens ranges, while Leica has to slowly build its SL system over the coming years.
Lets also not forget Olympus with their pro OM-D E-M1 and growing range of f/2.8 lens and the Fuji X-T1 and there should soon be a new X-Pro1 for those users who want a rangefinder styled body with autofocus.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/10/24/toshiba-divestiture-sony-idUSL3N12O03A20151024
It hit the business news sites on Saturday that Toshiba may be selling their sensor business to Sony.
If you read the blogs you will hear that Sony design and manufacture sensors for Nikon and others. Well maybe the lower end cameras use Sony designs but the higher end models are Nikon designs manufactured by a number of different contracting fabs.
The majority of Nikon sensors are made by Sony but Toshiba also manufacture sensors for Nikon. This will certainly strengthen Sony’s position and weaken Nikon’s.
It has been a busy weekend, Saturday had us rained out, so all the plans for the garden went on hold. The evening was spent up at A&E with Caroline’s dad. He was kept overnight but released on Sunday afternoon.
That gave us Sunday morning to dig up the winter potatoes. We were not expecting much but was pleasantly surprised. To test them out we did a nice salad for lunch with potato salad as the star.
In the now free plot we dug in some compost from our well manured compost heap, another benefit of keeping chickens; and planted next years onion crop and two varieties of garlic, which will be a first for us.
While all the news has been with Leica’s new SL camera, they quietly released two new TL lens for the Leica T. The two new primes a 35mm f/1.4 Summilux and a 60mm f/2.8 macro.
While these lens will work on the new SL, they are built for the DX sized image circle thus on a SL would produce a 10 MP image so there are better matched to the Leica T.
