Family, Photography and other misc news
After many years the owner of Ebony cameras has decided to shut up shop. The 30th June 2016 is the last day for orders.
These beautiful cameras made of ebony wood, leather and titanium metal.
For a large format camera they fold down well and I have hiked with one on a shoulder bag, holding the meter and filters as well.
Its a camera that will last my lifetime as long as I can continue to get hold of film.
We woke this morning to the result of the United Kingdom’s EU referendum. Its certainly made talking politics popular right now.
This lunch time I grabbed my Leica and snapped a few photographs on the street.
It was noon and high sun, possibly the worst time you can take pictures. I have lowered the contrast in this picture, instead of my usual technique of increasing it.
So what did Hasselblad release?
The worlds first small mirrorless medium format camera. Yep you heard right!
The spec is quite something and this has certainly re-invigorated the Hasselblad. Wifi, GPS and twin SD slots, and 50 Megapixels. The new lens also feature leaf shutters so flash sync to 1/2000 second natively.
Hasselblad have been losing medium format users to Leica with their S, but this should stop that.
A few more rumours are starting to appear now and it looks like the new camera from Hasselblad will be their first entry into the mirrorless market.
Yes I know they have already released mirrorless cameras but they were just expensive re-badaged Sony’s. If the rumours are true this will be a real Hasselblad.
Since Hasselblad turned their backs on us ‘V’ System users and made changes to the ‘H’ System to ensure less compatibility, they have been driving medium format users to the Leica. Leica released an adapter to allow full functionality with their medium format S cameras so Hasselblad have been making some changes recently to get users back.
This mirrorless camera may be their first step but will it compete, especially against cameras like the Sony A7 and the Leica SL.
Here is a film Friday. Taken when out for a stroll with the Leica M4, and a handheld meter.
This week I have been hearing rumours about a new M mount camera but with a CCD sensor.
CCD has some advantages over CMOS, the noise is more random, giving a more natural looking image. The big advantage of CMOS is low noise at high ISO.
Still since Leica moved from CCD to CMOS people have been complaining, but with careful processing its actually very hard to tell the difference.
Hasselblad have now announced a press conference on the 22nd June, this is rumoured to be a digital XPan. With these two rumours people are now putting 1 + 2 together and getting 5, a new Hasselblad M mount camera. I do not feel this is likely but with Leica releasing cameras like M-D anything is possible.
Firmware 1.0.0.4 for the Leica M-D Typ 262 released. The only new feature that I can see is just a tweak to the power save mode.
One of the advantages of this camera is its power on speed and the fact it always seems ready to shoot, due to the fact it never powered down.
Having no screen and no video plus a big old battery it still lasted a full day. Now with this new firmware the camera does go to sleep after ten minutes of inaction. So it will be interesting how quickly it responds now.
The latest version of Lightroom now includes a Guided upright feature. In the previous version under lens correction you had the options you see below:
The corrections were Auto, Level, Virtual or Full. Used with care it worked quite well but I don’t think too many people were aware of them as they were hidden in the Lens Correction Panel.
We now have the corrections in there own panel called Transforms with the new guided option. This allows you to select areas of the picture for it to key on correcting the verticals on the areas you select, or horizontals.
This week I made myself have a lunch time walk around Lincoln. Each time I shot seventeen images (yes exactly seventeen on each walk).
Once back in my office I imported them into the iPad 9.7 Pro and did a quick select and edit of the ones I liked.
Usually for me I make my street photographs taken with the Leica into Black & White images but this time I kept most of them in colour. Most likely the wonderful weather putting me in a technicolour mood.
I did a quick a edit of the top shot on the iPad, boosting contrast, saturation, vibrance and clarity. I liked it even though its got a bit more colour impact then my usual shots.
Then as an experiment once home, I fired up the desktop computer and cloned the image processed on the iPad and then applied my usual Leica M8 People Preset. Then I returned the contrast, saturation, vibrance and clarity back to the iPad settings. A quick tweak of the back point and you have the second image.
Now I prefer the second image and it also shows that my custom Leica Preset I have created the the M8 certainly does a good job, but what I found interesting is that not having the presets available on the iPad and just developing the image by ‘touch’ has led me to a final image that is very different to the usual way I work and taken the image in a different direction.
Yesterday Adobe released Lightroom CC 2015.6. The big news for Leica users is support for the new Leica M-D, the screen-less Leica M (Type 240) based camera.
http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal/2016/06/lightroom-cc-2015-6-now-available.html?sdid=R726NVN2
This release for Creative Cloud members include the new Guided Upright feature.
It’s designed to easily straighten images, fix horizons, and reduce or eliminate the keystone effect in buildings.
I’ll be testing it with a few Lincoln Cathedral shots to see if it affects corner resolution adversely.