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Leica to have 48MP 35 mm Full Frame

sensorsizesoverlaidinside-updatedCMOSIS the supplier of sensors for Leica cameras has just announced a new 48MP 35mm full frame sensor. Hopefully this will find its way into the new Leica M.

I would also like Leica to think about upgrading the S to around 50 MP, as for a medium format camera its now getting a little low resolution.  It will also be interesting where they go with the S.  With Hasselblad and Fuji both announcing mirrorless medium format with a sensor size similar to the Leica S do Leica need to transition the S to a mirrorless design?

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Flash Sync Errors

flash-sync-errors

In general modern studio flash is very reliable.  I have on occasion had cheap flash heads bust into flames after a heavy session of use but in general there pretty reliable.

The main problem with cheap flash heads is consistent colour temperature.  Having a drift in colour temperature is very difficult to overcome as you have to then edit and correct every shot manually.  During each scene during the shoot I take a reference shot with a white balance card to correct for colour.  With the better flash heads having consistent colour temperature I can correct the white balance on the reference shot and then sync that colour temperature across all photographs of that scene.

This last weekend though I had an odd problem.  As you can see in the shot above, only half the frame is exposed, this is generally caused by using a shutter speed too high.

I was using a radio trigger but no matter what speed I set I had this intermittent sync problem.  I tried several triggers and it only stopped when I switched from wireless to infrared.  Not a problem I had seen before and I hope not to have again.

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Photoshop a first trial

photoshop-cc-2017

So Adobe Photoshop CC is now the 2017 version.

I opened a shot taken the other month of Jessica, after upgrading and gave it a quick test.  Unlike the previous major upgrade, I had no major shocks with features that I commonly use, its very similar in use as before, but i’ll be diving into the details when I start to seriously edit the shots I took in the studio last Saturday.

 

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Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 is here

Adobe Photoshop CC 2017

Well its a bit of a risk but I am updating my main machine to Adobe Photoshop CC 2017, and I have a shoot on Saturday.  Its note quite the risk it sounds as my main work place is Adobe Lightroom, I generally update my laptop and test on that before installing it on my MacPro desktop.

I’ll give it a good test on Sunday and it will also be interesting to try it together with Astropad, which is a remote control client you install on the iPad and Mac, allowing you to remote your Mac and use the full version of Photoshop and Lightroom, not only that it fully supports the Apple Pencil which Lightroom Mobile does not.

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IPad as a laptop replacement

iPadProJust this title will get some peoples blood boiling, the answer is no of course not – but its the wrong question, what is it you want to do?

I am currently typing this on the iPad Pro 9.7 with its Apple keyboard (Apple look at Logitech there’s is better).   I have done a number of blog posts on my iPad during this year, sometimes I only got so far and had to wait till I got home to fire up my desktop to access a picture from my master Adobe Lightroom catalogue (not the iPad’s fault).

Another time I had the image in my camera roll on the iPad but it was too large to load onto the website and I could not find a way on the iPad to resize it.

As the last seven months have past, I have continued to alternate between my old eight year old laptop and the iPad, each time as features progress and improve I have been able to do more and more.  Recently I managed a complete blog post just using Adobe Lightroom Mobile and the Web front end, it helped that the images I needed were in my sync’ed images but if they had not been reaching for the laptop would not have helped.

Lightroom Mobile is fairly usable it’s missing keywords and presets but is getting there.  Its a bit of a cheat but I sometimes use remote control tools to remote my Mac and use Lightroom and Photoshop with the Apple Pencil, its nice to work in the living room and be social and not be locked away working in my office.  Interestingly this works better then trying to remote my desktop Mac from my laptop.

 

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Colour Space and the recent Macs

screen-shot-2016-10-30-at-15-35-49As I begin to digest the impact of the Apple Macs I thought I would write a quick piece on colour gamut.

On my work desk where I edit my photographs I currently have an expensive NEC Adobe RGB Wide Gamut Reference monitor.

The recent Mac iMac desktops, the new LG monitors that Apple collaborated with in the design, and now the new MacBook Pros all have the P3 standard colour gamut instead of the traditional sRGB.

So what does this mean for photographers?

Well the P3 gamut like the Adobe RGB is a wide gamut, there both about the same but with the Adobe giving slightly more in the green and blue and the P3 offering more red and orange.  You still need to profile your screen but now when buying a Mac that offers P3 you no longer have to find £1000 for an additional monitor for colour critical work that makes the Macs some of the cheapest computers a photographer could buy.

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Models and Communication

secretaryIf like me you shoot models a lot and frequent many of the common modelling forums you will be well aware of the tales of models complaining about photographers cancelling at the last moment, and also of photographers making same complaint about models.

I have been very lucky and only let down on the day once, and i was able to get another model to fill in at very (two hours) short notice.

This week I had another let down, but this time the model was professional about it and let me know in good time. This enabled me to get another model sorted and switch the dates at the studio so not one ended up being let down and now another shoot with the original model is already planned.

The top shot and the one below is the lovely Jessica Lee who filled in the first time I was let down at only two hours notice.  I have since shot with her a number of times and always enjoyed the shoot and her professionalism.

Need

 

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New Apple MacBook Pro Released

MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt3

Tonight here in the UK we had the Apple Press conference streamed.  I was expecting Thunderbolt 3 and was not surprised to see four TB3 ports on the mid and high end models and two on the low end.  I was also pleased to see the headphone socket retained.  What I was sad to see was the loss of the MagSafe port for charging and also the lack of HDMI and USB3 or Ethernet.  Now we need to carry more dongles until the rest of the industry catches up.

Its also given Apple a bit of a problem with consistency, the iPhone headphones are now Lighting port but we have no Lighting port on the MacBook Pro, so you cannot use the new headphones.  If you just bought a iPhone 7 you cannot even plug it in to your shiny new Mac to charge or sync with iTunes but are limited to syncing over Bluetooth.

I had a quick look on the WEX Photographic website for CF and SD card readers for TB3 or USB-C (its the same port), they had USB 2, 3.0 and TB2; so more dongles to carry.

I have to admit there nice machines but for me i’ll keep using my old laptop for a while longer until TB3 and USB-C get more common and Apple sort out their inconsistencies with the iPhone.

If I did need a laptop for light work I would buy the bottom of the range 13 inch MacBook Pro, while it just has the two TB3 ports it would work ok for light work.

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Camera Complexity

Leica Q FocusingAfter the weekends camera show and thinking about some of the cameras I handled, its been a breath of fresh air to just use my Leica M8.

Castle Ward-3With my SLR I am used to having to study and learn, and practice.  With its highly programable focusing system and customisation options; its a very complicated camera, but then its a complicated tool, designed to be able to fulfil many rolls.  For what I use it for, I don’t mind this, but when shooting for pleasure its nice to get back to basics and cameras like the Leica M with just very basic settings available are great for this.

Wanting a simple mirrorless autofocus it seems that finding a simple camera like this would be straightforward but it seems they do not exist.