milandro

Vive la France! Everybody happy!

different ball park

X-Pro 1’s, any shop will be given many to get rid of

oh but give it time it will! In the NL there are a couple of secondhand copies for about €650-699 and there are also shops making this part of a kit ( NEW camera and NEW lens) with the X-Pro 1 ( it will be raining these cameras in kit form soon).

Rest assured that there will be enough people to do that or otherwise they wouldn’t do it. But not many of those would be new Fuji clients. They will be people ditching the 1.4 and buying the 1.0. How many people do you think, were NEW 56 APD buyers? Many were 56 owners who sold one and got the other. Of course this generates some sales and that’s what they naturally want but I think that these energy would be better spent in a different way. This is like I said another time, like multiplying the fish poles in a pond to the point that there are more poles than fish. I am doubtless about the possibility that there will be people out there who would own two 35mm but the majority would go for one or the other. So the owner of a new 35 will place his old one for sale and the lens would be bought by someone who would have bought a 35 anyway. There is only so much fish in the pond.

one major source of lens “ noise” is the actual aperture opening-closing when you depress the shutter button to focus.

I have to admit ignorance on this and declare that I don’t even know if this has been done by anyone else or if it would be feasible but bear with me ( or be patient, I am not up to speed with all the cameras on the market!) One of the problems of shooting landscapes is, more often than not, the fact that some shots do call for the use of some sort of graduated filter. If you have ever used one you know that they are a pain in the (....................), write here whatever part of the body that it bothers you the most! They can be expensive, clumsy, and often reveal themselves to be purple in pictures while they look grey when we buy them. Rectangular filters need more or less complicated and expensive holders and if you own a large lens, such as the 10-24 they are expensive and complicated to use (on a windy and drizzly day with an extralarge bellows to avoid reflections? I don’t think so) Circular graduated fiter are ok for price and usability but, at the very most you can rotate them but you cannot change the height where the graduated effect will be taking place. So, I was wondering. Since we can make the graduated effect in post production but it takes a bit of time to do it... Couldn’t Fuji add this to the advanced (!) filters? In other words. Could we have a mode where we could decide the graduated ( ND or coloured) effect filtering of one section of the image establishing a point of start (mark) and a level of exposure reduction ( and colour)? Now, if this regulation would be possible. Could we apply the same concept to the “ miniature” mode and decide, in camera, where the blurring of this “ effect” would take place?

I am really puzzled by the scope of these continuous “ improvements” with the introduction of so many duplicates and especially of the real “ kaizen” of all this which starts looking distinctly like a “ follow the fashion of the moment” kind of thing. So, any time soon a wannabe Fuji photographer would have 3 lenses in this focal range to chose from? The 35mm F 1.4, the 35mm F 2 and the 33 f 1.0? It was already bad enough to see the 56mm being differentiated into an APD version and its f-utility ( I love a good pun! ), then they announce this shiny and eye candy 35mm 2 ( ok, that might be a sealed lens) and now another “ bokeh” lens...( I hope they don’t bother putting an aperture at all since the customer for this lens will never bother selecting any other aperture than f 1.0 , so this lens will be the most silent Fuji lens lens possible! ). What’s the point? The market is what it is. I seriously doubt that someone will switch to the Fuji system because of a lens or two to lure them in. All they do is to compete with themselves and waste productive energy which could be otherwise employed).

My fellow members. I don’t want to patronize anyone. The point of any discussion, anywhere, is not to get the upper hand or “ win” the argument. The point of a discussion is to exchange ideas and points of view. Disagreement is the thing is the thing. I don’t necessarily want to “ convert” anybody to my thinking or diminish someone else’s position. Arguing one position is simply explaining one position to another person but ultimately we all have to resign to the fact that, thank G-D, we are all different! There ’s a very long (!!!) Italian poem called “ Il Cicerone” written by Gian Carlo Passeroni, a part of which is dedicated to the difference of taste and habits (culinary or otherwise) among humans none of whom are exactly like any other. It is only the other day that two friends of mine were singing their praises of boiled rice, which, nice though it is, I always use as an example of although certainly healthy but uneventful and rather boring type of food! So some like primes and some don’t. Isn’t it wonderful that we can all buy what we like and let the others do what they prefer?

Well, it all depends if any pixel guru out there would declare this a holy trinity ( it is a triplet after all!) or not. It is pretty amazing what collective compulsive purchasing behaviors can actually do. I am gonna try to find one of the old ones and sell it to the people who will be prepared to pay good money for it. Not because I want to take advantage of the fools but rather more in the spirit of “ Ask, and it will be given to you!”

Nothing in ever really new under the sun. The internet only gave a larger platform to this kind of discussions. Years ago I was often asked to be one of the jury members (3) at a regional photo-club competition and of course part of the “ job” was to talk about the how’s and why’s we had chosen one picture over the other in the various categories. Of course there were, at times, animated discussions on these matters and it was very interesting to see that the pro-jury was very much more interested in the end results than the participants who were very much more interested in the technical minutia. Another thing. About 15 years ago I was one of the photographers engaged into a lengthy and expensive digitization project. We were shooting with a digital back ( scan back) for 4” x 5” large format cameras capable of shooting files of 720Mb. The reason why we were shooting ( and keeping) such enormous files was not often clear to anyone. The people who had the direction of such project simply thought we are going to use the best possible file within the state of the art of the times so that no one could ever tell us that we didn’t do our maximum best. The results way overshot the goal but that it didn’t matter.

Well, all the more reason, for those into these one-trick ponies, to scour the street markets, jumble or car-booth sales and charity or thrift shops. There are lots and lots and lots of undiscovered an unloved old lenses out there, some in a more than decent state ( although I doubt that a little fungus would matter much for the end results of any such lens) sold at a pittance because the sellers are, not yet, aware, of the potential market. Happy hunting!

We can certainly agree to disagree. You mentioned: Implying that you need the things that you mention otherwise gear would be unusable. The pictures that I’ve posted show exactly that it is not about the gear ( so one doesn’t need a 1.4 lens or a very fast film) but that indeed it is all about the photograher and that over 100 years ago there was no need for a lens to be f 1.4 or the emulsion to be rated at 3200 ISO to shoot, poorly lit indoor pictures of more than one nervous artists ( one is Picasso, the other one is Anton Giulio Bragaglia). As they say, it is not the equipment that you’ve got but what you do with it. Be well. I believe we both made our points although I am not certain that you really got mine. Let’s leave it to that!

Yes, the famous British cashbacks! Limited only to people who live in the UK. At some stage before when I bought my Fuji equipment, I publicly complained because in the Netherlands and the rest of continental Europe, the prices where remarkable ( and strangely) uniform, to the last € as if the result of an agreement ( and I was given an enormous amount of suspicious flack for saying so! As if there was a will to hush anyone even suggesting that there might be something not Kosher about this strange phenomenon! ). When complaining about it with a Dutch shop, on the phone, they told me, informally, that this was the fruit of agreements between Fuji, distributors and shops. I shan’t comment further on the fact that IF this were true it would be illegal. Anyway. Let’s hope that the introduction of the new cameras will show the possibility to do the same cashback ( although I hate the system because it causes an enormous amount of aggravation to get your money back) also for the rest of the Europeans and not only for the British buyers.

I don’t have much experience with the 18-55mm but I have a friend who has the same camera and I was helping him setting it up from new. At first, before changing all sorts of parameters, his 18-55 was very noisy too.

Anton Giulio Bragaglia, one of the founders of the futurist movement ( 1913). He was pretty moody and artist.

I am not so sure they didn’t ( not 100 but some time ago) Not bad a picture. Made LIFE magazine! Of course they were supermen back then!

Perhaps I didn’t succeed in making my point clear. If it was perfectly possible to shoot at lower speeds and with lenses not as fast back then, should still be possible to-date. According to your paradigm, if it were true, using my 10-24mm f4 should be impossible.

if my grandma had wheels ...she would have been a bike

Makes you wonder how did we ever ever manage, for almost 100 years, to shoot pictures on films which simply never possessed the capability to be sharp without showing tons of film grain if exposed and developed at 3200 ASA and with lenses that were no way as light efficient. And yet we all did.

mine is only one year old and is not particularly noisy or slow ( but I have never had another one so I cannot say whether my copy is better or even different from older copies)

Yes, quite so! Taking into consideration the capability to produce great quality images even at relatively high ISO setting choosing this lens over other ones, especially if only marginally more light efficient, is a no brainer.

Title “ How to get away with buying what you want and avoid divorce”.

well, all OP has to do is to tell us if he has a 14 or an 18. Perhaps he has a 14 but the “ fair few Fuji photographers that he spoke to” referred to the 18 and not to the the 14 and he has suffered from inverse placebo effect ever since (it is called either ways subject-expectancy effect )

Yes, exactly, camera snobbism has many shapes and forms and this, in my not so humble opinion, is one of them . My usual comment is that the proof of any pudding is in the eating and the results that I’ve seen are very good indeed. Even If the 55-200 would have been a 2.8 lens at the same price I could bring myself to buy that lens.