Personal ramblings on photography
Bokeh talks about the damage of X-Ray on film with a complete practical illustration: where, how many time, which film, and the actual images. Just an example of what can happen.
Just read.
Personally I just avoid as much as I can traveling with film.
Arkadiusz Podniesinski, a Polish photographer, has a photoessay on Fukushima and the exclusion zone around the nuclear power plant disaster.
Petapixel has Daniel Lachman tell us how much you can over expose colour negative film:
“What I took away from this is that film basically can’t be overexposed, it can just be too dense for the scanner to be able to shoot through the negative. But the information will always be there.”
My quick take is that you can shoot it at +2 and it will be more tolerant to under exposure error.
(Petapixel) Fuji’s New XM-FL is an X-Mount Body Cap Lens with Built-In Photo Filters:
Fujifilm has announced a strange new lens over in Japan. It’s called the XM-FL, and it’s a 24mm f/8 body cap-style pancake lens that features built-in photo filters that can be accessed by turning a dial on the side.
Very light, totally “dumb” (ie no electronics), for ~$100, can make for interesting experiments on your Fuji X.
From Fujifilm Japan (in Japanese)
Similar in principle to the Olympus body cap lens in 2013.
Zack Arias take on the Fuji X-T1: Yep. It’s A Fuji (archived from the original).
Conclusion… I have zero regrets about selling all of my Canon gear and going Fuji. Zero regrets.
I have to admit, I’m not a pro like him, ie I don’t shoot for a living (also I’m less talented), but since I have my X-Pro1 I haven’t used the Canon much nor even lusted on any piece of gear for it.
Last week I have had my hands shortly on the X-T1 and the EVF is absolutely so much better than the X-Pro1. Non-withstanding the other advantages. If only I could try it longer.
Also don’t miss his Mystical Marrakech video (on YouTube) that he did for Fuji:
CBC report on a Shipwrecked camera found underwater after 2 years with photos intact:
A camera lost in a shipwreck off the west coast of Vancouver Island two years ago is finally to be returned to its owner — with the memory card and its images intact.
The camera, we can’t really say it survive, but the SD card still in working order 2 years later. Kudos to the researchers for locating the pictures owner, this is a kind gesture.
This show how robust media has become. Try this with a tape, with film, etc. Unlikely you’d be able to salvage them. On the other hand this doesn’t really mean we’ll be able to read them in 50 years, the problem being to actually access the media.
via m43 Rumors
Wired has an article on The Hackers Who Recovered NASA’s Lost Lunar Photos :
[…] After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten.
They changed hands several times over the years, almost getting tossed out before landing in storage in Moorpark, California. Several abortive attempts were made to recover data from the tapes, which were well kept, […]
Read it all, the effort is amazing. It doesn’t matter how you keep the medium, if you can re-read it or decode it, it is useless.
This is a shape of things to come. What will happen to all of those digital archives? These CD or DVD that will be unreadable because we no longer have the drives, or just decayed, these hard drives with obsolete connectors, which, if they ever start, might still hard to use in a few decades. And then what do we do with these RAW files that the camera vendor refuse to document?
These are all the questions we should remember to ask. The next Vivian Maier might never happen in the era of digital as we might unable to recover the content of the shoe box. Not everybody will have the skills of that team that recovered the NASA photos.
Tim Bray wrote a love letter to Fujifilm:
He starts with the conclusion:
It’s the best camera I’ve ever used: Light, wonderful in the hand, perfect controls, astounding lenses, pleasing pictures. So if you were thinking of buying a Serious Camera, this is totally one of the ones you should look at. Or maybe the X-E2; more on that below.
I’ll let you read the rest.
As an X-Pro1 owner I can tell that almost everything applies to it too.
Two recent articles on cleaning (old) cameras:
Japan Camera Hunter: Classic Camera Cleaning Guide.
Petapixel: How to clean up your old camera.
Both have similarities in techniques, which is absolutely not surprising. I haven’t had the time yet to try these out, but if you needed a starting point to clean your collection of film camera, here you are. Digital cameras are not covered.
Jorge Ledesma call the Thinktank Retrospective 5
The Best Street (Casual) Photography Bag for the Ricoh GR and Companion.
I’ve tried quite a few bags, too many to name, but let me tell that the Thinktank Photo Retrospective 5 has stolen my heart and the hearts of my two primary photographic tools — the Ricoh GR and the Pentax K5 IIs. Its like this: you know how you fall in love with a certain comforter and that’s what you like to sleep in all time. Well, its like that for the GR/K5IIs and the Retrospective 5. I can’t think of any other bag that has all the features that one needs to have while on the field photographing.
While I don’t have a Ricoh GR, I bought this bag over a year ago to use with my Fujifilm X-Pro1 – after having bought the Retrospective 30 – and I love it. It even fits the 5DMkII with the 24-105 or the 40mm pancake.
