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Larry Bolch

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Everything posted by Larry Bolch

  1. As formats increase, shallow depth of field moves from being a virtue to an ever-nagging problem. 20th century US west coast landscape shooters were known as Group f/64 from their most commonly used aperture. The idea of an f/1.2 lens would have been incomprehensible. Even with our APS-C sensors, many attempts at bokeh masterpieces fail because they simply look like an out-of-focus error.
  2. At this point, most sensors are 14-bit capable. While the sensors in Hasselblads are 14-bit, it has been said that they pad the files and advertise that they are 16-bit. This is marketing, not engineering. 12-bit image files can store up to 68 billion different colours and 14-bit image files store up to 4 trillion. As a point of reference, all JPEGs are limited to 8-bits and if produced with skill can look terrific. The human eye is only capable of distinguishing between 2.5 and 16.8 million different colors and that is covered by JPEGS. Nothing wrong with shooting 14-bit files, but don't expect to see an improvement unless the image is horribly underexposed.
  3. 32-64mm f/4 equivalent to a standard kit zoom—a true wide-angle 25mm to a normal 51mm. 63mm f/2.8 is the equivalent of the ever popular 50mm normal lens. The 110 f/2.0 would be many people's choice as a portrait lens and all purpose short telephoto. The 120mm f/4.0 is a comfortable but not quite as short telephoto with macro capability. The 23mm is equivalent to an 18mm on full frame. It is the threshold of super-wide and awesome for landscape, architecture and environmental portraiture. The 45mm is a wide-normal lens, which some may prefer over the standard normal 63mm. Like the initial selection of X-Mount lenses, Fuji has selected the most used lenses to cover the basic needs of photographers. With the exception of the 23mm, these are the bread and butter lenses of most working photographers. However, the 23mm strongly extends capability for those who need a super-wide. During the film era, I had a fixed lens 6×10 camera with a 47mm f/8.0 Schneider SuperAngulon with the same coverage that paid for itself hundreds of times over. If the need arose for a GFX, I expect that would be my most used lens. Lacking are the more specialized lenses that may appear in the future. There are no long telephotos equivalent to the X-Mount 100-400mm for sports and wildlife. Likewise, an array of wide and telephoto zooms. Nothing wider than a 23mm and no fisheye. No tilt/shift lens either. Fuji managed to flesh out the original three focal lengths with the X-Mount in a remarkably short length of time and I expect that they will do the same within the medium-format context. The context is crucial. The sensor is quite large compared to full-frame and nearly four times the size of APS-C. The lenses will be comparatively large and heavy. An f/2.0 200mm lens is huge on a full-frame but would be almost unmanageable on a GFX. The same is true of super-telephotos that Nikon F5 shooters use for pro-sports. In film days, medium format shooters did not often carry an arsenal of lenses like their 35mm colleagues. Two or three lenses were adequate since the images were so large, that cropping was highly practical. The same is true if the reports on the quality of 50MP GFX images is true. Fuji has publically committed to producing lenses with resolutions two times the needs of this sensor. Cropping a 16MP section of an image may well equal or better that of our X-Pro1 or X-T1. We will have to wait until the camera ships and is tested to find out. If so, a 23mm, 63mm and a 120mm may cover most everything a medium-format shooter needs.
  4. Realise that the sensor is .78× the size of full-frame and almost four times the size of our APS-C sensors. An f/1.2 would be enormous at any focal length. Longer lenses would have to be stopped down anyway to get even marginally useful depth of field. Shallow depth of field is not a virtue, but an ongoing concern even with an f/2.8 lens. I have quite a lot of medium-format lenses but none faster than f/2.8. One of my most productive lenses was an f/8.0 Schneider SuperAngulon on a 6×10 body. Reading the reports of some of the 50 shooters chosen to beta test the prototypes, there seems to be a consensus that noise under ISO6400 is not noticeable, and not unpleasant even at ISO6400. What was truth with APS-C must be forgotten with medium-format. Just as with film, it is a different world. However, the difference between a 24×36mm frame to a 6×9cm frame is a bit more dramatic than just going from APS-C to 33×44mm. When covering major league baseball, I met the staff shooter for the Montreal Expos. He shot a 6×7 Pentax and had an f/4.0 800mm lens. He nearly needed a fork-lift to get it onto his tripod. The thing was HUGE! It weighed17,700g (39lbs). No reason it could not be mounted on a GFX. Though there is a bit of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth over the choice of a focal plane shutter, it means that pretty much every medium format lens might be adapted to it. Mamiya also made a range of lenses that may also be easily adapted once adapters appear. Many of these were designed for film and may or may not work well with sensors. However, they can be highly affordable.
  5. It is only compatible with the old Fuji SLRs which were based upon Nikon bodies. I don't know of any simple and reliable means of geotagging with the Fuji X-cameras. It is a feature that I would love to see built into all my cameras.
  6. A few years back, I also shot hockey but with my X-Pro1. Also young guys. http://www.larry-bolch.com/ephemeral/hockey/index.html Remote northern town (St. Paul, Alberta), low light in the town rink. I tested and found that at f/4.0 with the 60mm lens focused on the goal, everything from the opposite boards to the point where the players over-ran the frame was in focus. I just left it at that and shot. I used the white on a jersey for setting my white balance. I could, of course, fine tune it in processing, but the balance remained accurate. At ISO6400 the exposure was 1/500th at f/4.0. However, the histogram showed that I could safely under-expose by -1.0EV and still have full shadow detail, so I shot at 1/1000th and pushed it a stop in processing. Very sharp images with zero blurs. The OVF was superb. I could see outside the frame area and quickly grab any action that an EVF or SLR would have missed. I could not imagine a better camera/lens for covering hockey. A typical shot.
  7. Adobe DNG Converter may solve the problem. Use it to do a RAF to DNG conversion and work from the DNG files. If you have the CC subscription, just update to the current version.
  8. This is widely recommended. However, I have never bothered to personally test it.
  9. Or go for the 60mm which is also available. It will not do just a single eye in focus unless you are extremely close. I am far more concerned about that part that is in focus, rather than that which is out, but people do frequently praise its bokeh. It has great sharpness wide open which only gets better when stopped down a couple of stops. Its close focusing ability and flatness of field are to be appreciated. With the long range in macro mode, it is not one of the fastest to achieve focus, but a half-press will pre-focus eliminating the issue. (Develop a pre-focus habit and I am sure the f/1.2 problem would go away as well.) As a short telephoto, it is easy to use and very handy—lightweight and compact. Above all, it is highly affordable.
  10. If you are using manual focus, there is no way the camera can change the point of focus. This leaves camera movement as the culprit. BOTH result in soft images and it is not all that easy to tell them apart. If you are doing long exposures, the most important thing is to have an absolutely stable camera support. A cable release is very good, but using the self-timer is even better. It will provide an interval for everything to settle down. When Nikon brought to market their first super-zoom, I was asked to contribute to a forum about the camera. Soon the forum was ablaze with buyers enraged because the camera "could not focus". I asked people to mail me examples. Every image failure was due to shooting at the long end of the zoom at shutter speeds that no one could possibly hand-hold.
  11. New sensor, new processing engine and so on—I expect that those who use the camera as a point&shoot will see some slight difference. No matter the camera, a photographer will tweak it to suit their taste. Those who lack basic skills will blame the camera as always.
  12. All RAW files are based on the extended TIFF format specifications. It is more a "container" than just an image format. If the opening application is programmed to ignore aspects of the format, it will not open. If the GFX is a roaring success, it is Phase One's loss—both in terms of hardware AND software. So very 20th century in business terms.
  13. Worth pointing out the obvious. Pretty much every manual focus lens made in the past half-century has an adapter for the X-mount. If you really want manual focus, you have the choice of dozens of lenses, mostly at very reasonable prices. Of course, auto-focus can be disabled at the flick of a switch with our Fujinon lenses. Personally, under the circumstances, I see no reason to disable auto-focus permanently. That said, auto-focus issues have been the most common complaints in Fujifilm forums. Auto-focus is clearly a priority among the more vocal X camera users.
  14. I just can not get excited by the problems of storage and burden of processing 24MP files. Drives of enormous size are highly affordable, as is RAM. Image processing is not so CPU critical as it is RAM critical. If one feels the need for fast file loading, a small SSD work-drive solves the problem. I never work on original files but rather tag the ones I want for the project and copy them to my work drive. I often work with medium-format scans that are well over 200MB. and they present no problem on a well specified five year old machine.
  15. Most lenses for APS-C sensors are at their sharpest in the range of f/4.0 to f8.0. Diffraction begins to kick in around f/11, but not all that visible. Shooting at f/11 is a reasonable compromise between great depth of field and sharpness. By f/16 is a conscious decision—do you need to have a subject in the foreground as well as the whole background in focus at the cost of some loss of sharpness through diffraction. At f/22 diffraction can be profound, and only in rare cases would the trade-off be justified. The 16mm being of short focal length has an enormous depth of field. Even wide open at maximum aperture, it is difficult to shoot a close subject and blur the background. With the f/2.0 35mm lens you have more control. At f/2.0 it is possible to soften the background considerably. At f/8.0 hyper-sharp landscapes are routine. Above f/8.0 it becomes a matter of trade-offs predominantly determined by the need to keep a foreground subject and the background both in focus. In any case, use the widest aperture that will fulfil the need.
  16. Shooting architectural interiors is way different from candid photography indoors. With architecture, nothing moves so a tripod will let you shoot stopped down to your sharpest aperture and lowest ISO setting. Use as long an exposure as you need. Now that ACR will do an HDR merge without the horrible artefacts of the early years, it is now entirely practical for contrasty scenes, preserving the ambience in a way that flash never can. My architecture film was Ektar 25, and one time someone walked through the scene. I was using an eight-second exposure and they did not even appear as a ghost. They simply were moving fast enough that they were never in one place long enough to register on the exposure.
  17. I can highly recommend the 55mm f/2.8 MicroNikkor AI-S. At the time I purchased it, reviewers hailed it as the sharpest lens available for 35mm photography. Though designed for working close to the subject, I found it worked perfectly well as a "normal" lens as well. It has served me very well for nearly four decades and works fine on the X-Pro1 as a 82.5mm with a simple adapter and as a 55mm f/2.0 with the Speed Booster. Sharpness is very good in either case. Checking KEH, they range in price from $168.00 - $182.00. The f/3.5 version ranges from $62.00 - $109.00. Non-AI are quite a bit cheaper. That said, my preference is for my 60mm f/2.4 Fujinon.
  18. I expect that the GFX 50S may become quite popular in studio settings. APS-C not so much.
  19. And way beyond. http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2016/03/when-will-micro-43-equal-medium-format-film-we-have-the-definitive-answer.html
  20. I have an "Images" folder. Inside the folder is a folder for each year going back to 2000. Each year, I create a new folder for the images I will take during that year. Logically, at the moment, all my work is copied into the 2016 folder. When it is time to transfer my current files to the hard drive, I use a card reader and copy the whole folder from the card intact into the 2016 folder. I would rename the folder—but not the files within—using the format "10.October 01, 2016 - xp1 - Banff, Jasper" "10.October 01, 2016" forces the files to sort into chronological order in the folder. - xp1 - identifies the originating camera body. (I have a variety of cameras in order to optimise each shoot.) Banff, Jasper identifies the locations where the images in the folder were shot. At this point, I back up the folder to at least two other locations including to a fault tolerant RAID array. Once securely backed up, I return the card to the camera and reformat it. Finally, I open the folder in ACDSee—a multi-function application with powerful cataloguing and search functions. It is highly configurable and lets one set up whatever categories are meaningful. Viewing the thumbnails, I will drag and drop them into appropriate categories. Note:the files themselves do not move—the catalogue generates pointers to where they are. They can even be on the network or on removable media. They can also be cross-referenced. While I will drag all the image files into the Travel→Mountains category I can go through them and also drag the shots I took of a grizzly bear mother and her cubs into an Animals→Bears category. Only the files on my graphics machine get catalogued. No need to catalogue the backups since they are redundant. When I click on the Mountains category, I can view and compare every shot I took in the mountains over the past many years. If I want to do a comprehensive web gallery, it offers several ways to rate or tag the shots selected. Once the images are selected, they can be copied to a work drive for processing. No need to ever work on the original files. Once processed into JPEGs, I can open them in ACDSee and tell it to generate a web gallery ready for uploading. This might sound complicated, but with drag-and-drop, it only takes a few seconds to catalogue a folder. Now I have the options of using any file utility or Adobe Bridge to find an image in a known folder. I can also do a search based upon year, month or date using ACDSee. I can view all related images by clicking on a category. I can also set up a complex conditional search in ACDSee based upon EXIF data along with a range of dates as I wish. Even with nearly 150,000 image files, I can find a specific image file I need within seconds. Very efficient with all the options I need.
  21. No. With my method, there are only new folders created once the current folder is uploaded and backed up. There may well be three or four different subjects included in a single folder. The keywords following the camera identifier allow me to find the folder in the Images→2016 folder, or by subject in ACDSee. It is all about efficiency. I have no interest in becoming a clerical worker, renaming hundreds of files, embedding keywords and captions. Creating multiple folders in the camera, would just slow things down and not make searches any more efficient. I am nearing 150,000 images now after 16 years of digital shooting and can find any specific shot in seconds.
  22. I never rename an exposure—only the folder it is in. The folder name makes it alphabetize in the correct order within yearly folders. An example would be 10.October 01, 2016 - xp1 - Banff, Jasper. Quick to find the correct folder, and Adobe Bridge makes it easy to select and process the contents. Once the folder is transferred and named, it is very well backed up. Then the folder is opened in ACDSee Pro, and all the Banff images are selected and dragged into the Travel→Mountains→Banff category and the same is done with the Jasper shots. Clicking on the category brings up thumbnails of every shot I have ever taken in the mountains. With drag and drop, it only takes a couple of seconds to categorise the contents of the most mixed subject folders. ACDSee Pro has a variety of search functions that will bring up any image from the past decade-and-a-half easily and quickly. Aside from media management, it has many other highly useful features.
  23. From the experience of a well-known photographer with extensive printing experience. http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2016/03/when-will-micro-43-equal-medium-format-film-we-have-the-definitive-answer.html
  24. For travel, whatever you have works. Yesterday shooting in the Kananaskis Country south of the Canadian mountain parks, the X-Pro1 and Samyang fisheye nailed a ring of mountains around a high-altitude lake. A 14mm full-frame captured brackets with incredible dynamic ranges. The 60mm f/2.4 captured delicate autumn colours of tiny plants in autumn. A lens with a 2,000mm FOV captured close-ups on a grizzly bear mom and two cubs cramming carbs for the winter. They were high on a mountain meadow and very difficult to see and frame. Those were the extremes, but many other fields of view have been perfect for the incredibly rich material I have been wallowing in for the past week and a half. Every focal length on every camera is an excellent travel lens.
  25. 1. Give up. Your fears should be overwhelming. You have no idea of how little the GFX50S means in the overall business of Fujifilm. To put things into a bit of perspective without baseless FUD. I have the pro-video Fujinon pages open on the B&H Photovideo site and you would be devastated with the products it is up against in-house. Not just a matter of six new lenses that spell doom to the nice little X-cameras but: 81 professional Fujinon video production lenses being maintained to divert people away from X design. The cheapest of the lot is $3,900US and the most expensive is $233,490.00. That for a single lens!!! Nine pro-cine PL-mount Fujinon lenses from $18,200.00US to $99,800.00! 29 Industrial Fujinons from a mere $109.95US to $11,500.00 14 Hasselblad HC lenses from $3,110.00US to $6,310.00. The Fujifilm GX645AF became the Hasselblad H1 and Fujfilm still makes its lenses. Unknown lenses built under government contracts around the world for satellites, weapons and other classified projects. Also, 30 models of binoculars from $59.99US to $16,559.95. Fuji Xerox is a joint venture between Fujifilm and Xerox Corporation of North America. Fujifilm bought Sericol Ltd., a UK-based printing ink company specialising in screen, narrow web, and digital print technologies in March 2005. They also do cosmetics. Clearly, the X and GX cameras were doomed from the beginning with Fuji needing their engineers to work on paying projects. The consumer-camera project obviously is a drop in the bucket. Give up all hope. On the other hand, realise that Fujifilm is several times larger than Nikon. It is a fully independent corporation, unlike Nikon, which is a member of the Mitsubishi group of companies. Those ignorant of the facts seem to think that Fujifilm is a tiny company only producing consumer-level cameras. Nothing could be further from the truth. Fujifilm has about three times the revenue and three times the employees. Most significant, in 2015, it grossed 7.45 times the income of Nikon! Nikon Revenue ¥857.8 billion (FY2015) Net income ¥18.4 billion (FY2015) Number of employees 25,415 (March 31, 2015) Fujifilm Revenue ¥ 2492.6 billion (2015) Net income ¥ 137.1 billion (¥118.6 attributable to FUJIFILM Holdings) (2015) Number of employees 79,235 (consolidated, as of March 31, 2015) While Kodak management thought that digital imaging was a brief fad that would go away if ignored, Fuji invested and diversified, fully embracing the disruptive technology. Little or nothing is left of Kodak that is still original and intact. With initial resolutions of 16MP, the X-Trans was a brilliant solution to the removal of the AA-filter without creating moire. Above 24MP it becomes much less needed (Nikon D810) and at 50MP no longer relevant. However, for the time being, it is pure brilliance. Times change—technology advances. Don't weep for Fujifilm—or us for that matter. The company has vast resources for this little camera project of theirs. Medium-format is not aimed at high-end consumers as is the X-Pro2 and X-T2. It is an industrial tool for working photographers—just as Fuji's very pricey medium-format film cameras were. The market is limited compared to retail buyers, and production is balanced to fit the size of the marketplace. It is an absurd purchase for anyone who does not make a reasonably quick return on investment. Just in salaries, a single afternoon advertising shoot can far outdistance the price of the camera. A whole 'nuther world.
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