Gear
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A Fujifilm X-E1 Annoyance
The X-E1 is a good camera, though has some annoyances that make it less handy for Street Photography. Contrary to Leica, (some) Zeiss or (some) Nikon lenses, zone-focusing is not set on the lens barrel. You must do it either through the viewfinder or the LCD, and this makes problematic the switch from one technique to another. Same is true for aperture settings. Operating the camera one-handed, happened twice to me, led to a change of the image quality settings from RAW to Jpg. Unfortunately I wasn’t aware while shooting and I’ve wasted half a day in Barcelona getting inferior quality pictures.
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Hanging Towels
This is what happens when coupling a summicron 50 (third gen) with a Fujifilm X-1.
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The Google Experiment
The usual note: I don’t write about gear. But this time I want to do an experiment inspired by the consequences of having the post about Street Photography and Italian Law bounced by Adam Marelli and Luminous-Landscape. Since these two websites channeled my post around the world, the access to (other parts too of) my blog – mostly unknown, previously – steady increased. I’m far from saying that I’ve reached an “audience”, nevertheless this blog is gaining its space among the zillions of pictures that live on the Internet. And it is “quality” space, meaning that visitors (you’re always welcome, folks!) find something of interest by looking at my pictures…
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So Long, Eos-M
A couple of days ago, while wandering around a street-market, I spotted a small “exhibit” of old Nikon and Hasselblad lenses. I thought it would have been nice to get the two “classic” lenses for the System V, so I traded my Eos-M (and lenses) for a Carl Zeiss lenses: a Distagon 50 and a Sonnar 150. The seller was eager to strike the deal, but I’m not sure who actually got the best bargain…
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The Hasselblad Way
As the readers of this blog know, I seldom talk about gear because since the very first post on this blog I made a point of stay focused on (shooting) pictures instead of musing about pointless technicalities such as Camera A vs Camera B ISO performance, Lens X vs Lens Y sharpness, APS-C vs Full Frame and so on, but today I do an exception because of an old Hasselbld 500 C/M that I have been given to try (and that probably will buy.) There is only one way to shoot with a Hasselblad: following its rule. The film has to be loaded in a certain way, the magazine locked…
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A HDR Experiment
This is my first – and possibly, last – attempt of using HDR to post-process my pictures. Unless I’m able to get a more creative outcome, there is no reason to have pictures that look deadly similar to those of the other users of Nik Software Collection (as I am:))
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VueScan and the missed Bits-per-pixel
Ed Hamrick’s VueScan is a great software that supports almost every scanner available, including out-of-production film scanner. Sometimes its interface behave in non documented way as in the case of the Bits-per-pixel option in the Input tab that disappears once the Infrared Clean option is enabled in the Filter tab. I wasn’t able to figure out the relationship between the two settings until Ed Hamrick himself kindly answered (lightfast, I would say) to my question. Kudos to him for that, but it would be nice to have this Infrared clean-Bits per pixel issue mentioned in the user guide :)
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EOS-M. Manual focus tips and results for Street-Photography and more
In the quest for an acceptable use of my Canon EOS-M I think I’ve finally found a way to exploit my M-mount lenses after the poor experience with the LCD focus. The last two exposures posted, this and this, have been shot with a Carl Zeiss T* Biogon 35/2,8 through zone-focusing, while the picture of this post has been manually focused using the EOS-M’s 5x magnification feature. In both cases the results are more than acceptable, giving a new life to this severely limited camera. All I can say is that is true what seasoned photographers use to say about the cameras: as soon as you get acquainted with your…
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Carl Zeiss T* 50 1,5 Sonnar and EOS EF-M 18-55
Gear time again. Notwithstanding its quirks I can’t get rid of this EOS-M camera and still try to find a reason not to dispose of it. This time I wanted to see how does the camera performs with Zeiss ZM lenses (namely, the Carl Zeiss T* 50 1,5 Sonnar) thanks to the – again brilliant – EOS-M to Leica M lens adapter by Master Adriano Lolli. As everybody can see the results are of a poor quality compared to the (not stellar) performance of the Canon EF-M 18-55. The Zeiss is not faulty (I use it on a Leica M6 and it works like a charm) so I came to…
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A manual-focus atteimpt on a moving target
Still needs practicing
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EOS-M. An act of fairness
While I have been highly critical with the Canon EOS-M street-photography performance, I have to admit that this little camera (coupled with the 18-55 stabilized kit lens) performs pretty well in landscape and, since the cost has fallen down to a very affordable level, is it possible to “risk” the camera in harsh places without worrying so much.
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The EOS-M just sucks
I made a point of staying clear of gearhead-oriented posts like: “x100s is better than M9” to focus on images and shooting only. In fact this blog only hosts two or three entries that talk about gear while the rest is dedicated to the exposure I catch. I want to break the rule again to provide an absolute subjective while definitive opinion of the Canon EOS-M: in one word (well, two, actually) it sucks. Thank to the ingenuity of Adriano Lolli, a pure genius, I have been able to couple my EOS-M with a Zeiss Sonnar 50 1/5, in the (lost) hope that by doing so I would have obtained…
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Kudos to Ricoh
I lost the external plastic ring covering the electronic contacts of my Ricoh GR Digital III. After an unsuccessful quest around the Net to find a spare part, as last hope (or desperate move) I sent a mail to Ricoh customer support asking where to find a replacement. To my enormous surprise, they answered fast and, since the part is not for sale as such, they offered to send it nevertheless. THIS is customer care. Kudos to you, Ricoh. You gained a customer and a supporter.
