Category: Photography

 

 

Generally on the D800 I use a zoom, ether 24-70mm or 70-200mm, and when shooting wildlife either a 105mm or 300mm telephoto.

All my other cameras I use primes and since about April I have nearly always had the 50mm Summilux to hand on my Leica M10.  Its been a challenge as it never quite seems the right length but one that I have persevered.  Come April i’ll have been using it for a year and will switch to the 35mm Summicron for a year.

During my last studio session I tried too shoot everything with a 70mm, this is also part of a long term test and deciding what focal length I want as my main go to studio portrait lens.  While a 50 is great for full length shots, the 70 is better for head and shoulders, i’ll also be doing some tests at 85 and 90mm.

While Canon and Nikon tend to go for just 85mm as there portrait lens, Leica have 75mm and 90mm and Hasselblad go for 75mm.

2017 was again a light year for photography.  Some years I have hit as many as 12000 images in a year but I have been slowing down over the last few years, switching to using the Leica M8 and then the Leica M10 has helped.  In 2017 I shot 3295 images similar to 2016 were I shot 3281, significantly less then the machine gunning technique used when shooting with a modern SLR.

Another major impact on the rate of shots is the like of wildlife photography.  You can easily take a few hundred images trying to get the one killer shot.

I hope to do some more wildlife this year as well as more landscape and studio.

 

My D800 I rate as one of the most accomplished all round cameras of recent years.  I D810 was a minor update and I did not think it was worth upgrading.

At the recent Lincoln Photography Show, I got the chance to use the new Nikon D850, at it is a very different beast.  Its the best bits of the D800, together with the professional D5 and a new 45.7 MP sensor.

A number of magazines and photographic organisations are now starting to vote for camera of the year for 2017.  The top candidates are likely to be Sony, Olympus and Nikon.  I think Nikon will will, the D850 is hard to beat, high resolution rivalling medium format, as fast and responsive as the professional Nikon D5 but in a smaller and lighter body.

A lot of people set great store by the DxOMark results but to be honest most camera sensors do a pretty good job now  a days and we are really spitting hairs.

The results also do not really provide a guide to image quality, and can give some odd results, like scoring medium format sensors quite low, giving sensors that use aggressive noise reduction that looses detail in images a better score then those that do not.

As expected the M10 scores well but is not up there with the best of the Canon, Nikon and Sony results, but we do have access to some of the best glass in the world that works better on a M then any other camera.

When your learning about photography, you get the basic rules.

Rule of thirds, 80/20, shoot with the sun behind you, f/8 and be there. subjects should lead from left to right etc.

The quick snap above which I took on a walk with Timmy the Greyhound across the fields, breaks a few of these.  The most obvious one is that this is shot directly into the sun.

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.