Richard & Caroline's Blog

There is not much of the year left, and this year I have not managed as much studio work as I would have liked, so I have booked in a few sessions before the year ends, to try out a few ideas and to test shoot another new model to me.

With the recent released of mirrorless medium format cameras I thought I would give some thought to how they fit in with the use I would put them to, and how they fit in with those tasks.

On one side we have the Hasselblad, fixed rear screen weather sealed and only a leaf shutter.  The Hasselblad was announced and nearly released at the same time as the Fuji, but delay after delay hit them and the firmware was very buggy.

For outdoor use its a good solid camera but it excels when shooting fashion outdoors mixing studio and daylight with great creative options due to the leaf shutters built into each lens.

Fuji are less well thought off when it comes to medium format but they have a long history of producing well designed medium format; not only that, but Fuji built the built the Hasselblad X-Pan panoramic for Hasselblad.

The Fuji with its tilting rear screen, weather sealing and focal plane shutter is not quite as flexible in mixed lighting conditions but is possibly superior for landscape use.  With the focal plane shutter you can also use other lens with the Fuji.  It also has the advantage of the removable EVF which hopefully will get upgrades.

As an alternative there is also the Leica S.  An SLR styled camera with weather sealing and a focal plane shutter, but the lens are available in two versions one without a shutter and one with a leaf shutter, thus if you need a leaf shutter lens its available to you.

What would I choose, well if money was no option the Leica is the most tempting with its flexibility.  The newer Hasselblad and Fuji have the advantages of newer higher resolution sensors and they are also cheaper then the Leica.  So out of these two I would say my heart says Hasselblad but my mind says Fuji.  At the moment the Fuji is the better camera, better hardware and firmware.

Today was the annual Lincoln Photography Show run by London Camera Exchange. The major players were all there, Nikon, Canon, Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, Fuji, as well as some of the bigger accessory companies.

Fuji had their Medium Format camera which I like, I also played with latest version of the Fuji X100, I camera I really want to like but I don’t know if its my imagination but the current version seems to have a very poor optical viewfinder and I would not pay the kind of money they are asking for it.

Sony keep charging forward, and while they have many good cameras there always seems to be either an issue or a replacement coming along.

Olympus and Panasonic both have strong lineups and Olympus have really rounded out their professional lens now.

A fun event and I enjoyed the seminars.

The most impressive camera was the new Nikon D850. My D800 is a real high end heavy hitter and when the D810 came out I could not see enough of an improvement but the D850 feels like a small Nikon D5, its a real top of the line pro model.

The price of the D850 is an issue for that kind of money its now worth considering a mirrorless system, you could get an Olympus and all the pro lens for the price of a D850 and a few pro Nikon lens.

We have the TL without a viewfinder, and I was disappointed when its replacement the TL2 also lacked a viewfinder.

The Leica Q shows what Leica can do in a small body and a L mount version of that is what people want.

Well from photographs leaked on the web this week it looks like we finally have what we want coming.

The Sony A7R Mark III has finally been released.

I have tried several Sony mirrorless cameras.  Starting with the Sony NEX 7, a very good camera but one that I just could not get along with, then I tried the first A7, now this was a fantastic camera but the shutter was terrible and you could easily suffer with camera shake.  The menus were also terrible.  Sony fixed the shutter in subsequent models and also stole the menu system from the Sony SLR series so correcting that.

From the Mark II onwards the Sony has been a hard act to follow, the downside has always been the shortage of really good lens and the fact that paired with good glass, the mirrorless Sony really did not offer any advantages over other systems.  Good glass at 35mm full frame that can autofocus is never going to be small.  In that regard I feel Leica made the better decision with the mirrorless SL and making it larger.  If your after small I think its hard to fault the Olympus MicroFourThirds cameras.