Picture of the Week: Crow
February 3, 2023Picture of the Week: Crow
Picture of the Week: Profit from the Panic
February 2, 2023Picture of the Week: Profit from the Panic
After 10 minutes with the Fujifilm mini Evo Instax camera
February 3, 2022I bought the very first Fujifilm Instax hybrid camera they came out with a few years ago and I did not get it. I didn't really quite understand what the "hybrid" part meant, and the object itself was sort of joyless: Clunky, blobby, fussy. If I wanted to take images that were not as good as I could take with a nicer camera, and if all I was doing was printing images taken with an inferior digital camera, I could have just used my phone along with the Instax printer I already owned.
Quick review: Cobalt Image for normalizing raw across cameras
December 29, 2021I think Cobalt Image may have taken away my last excuse for working on a collection of the last few years’ work. DNGs I shot with the Q2 and RAFs from the X-Pro3, X100V, and X-T4 all fit with each other now. I went on a brief “use it for everything!” over the past day, trying it out on a little of everything from the past few years. This afternoon I took a step back and realized I want to preserve a record of what I’ve been up to with my edits as much as my subjects, so I’m grateful Lightroom has a versions feature: As I pick things for the collection, I can save a snapshot of my favorite edit up to now, then make a new proof for a collection using Cobalt.
On iPhoneography these days
November 21, 2021I took my iPhone 13 Pro along as my sole camera for a quick camping trip to Vernonia. I’ve only had the phone for a week and was pretty excited about its new RAW format. I like the images I get out of it, but in a qualified sort of way that I’ve felt about iPhone photos for a little while now: Computational photography is a wonder that can do some amazing things.
A tree on the floodplain
January 18, 2021Once we recognize that all things are impermanent, we have no problem enjoying them.
On the Leica Q2 and Fujifilm X100V
December 3, 2020Somewhere mid-summer I decided to take a break and head for the coast. I found a room with a small kitchen close to the beach in Manzanita and I set out to do nothing but walk the beaches in the area and take pictures at my own pace. As COVID-era vacations go, it was just right. I also pulled the trigger on a Q2, Leica’s compact, fixed-lens, full-frame camera. I wanted to start this sentence with “Reasoning that a great vacation deserved a great camera,” but I have not, five months later, convinced myself that reason was involved.
The picture habit: On 37,000 pictures in three years after a week of bad pictures
February 14, 2020This week was packed and long in a way I haven’t had to deal with in a while. One day started at 7a and went to 10p, schedule filled the entire time. Another went from 8a to 11p, with a 20 minute break that went to someone else’s problem. Yesterday was a mere “start at 8:00, go to 5:30” day, but the cumulative sleep loss and churn of the week made it a day to be gotten through, not won, punctuated by doubling back on things that should have been handled but simply had not been.
More on the X-Pro3, which has done as it should and largely disappeared
January 31, 2020When I first got the X-Pro3, I wondered if I was going to have that nagging “oh, this wasn’t the right thing” feeling I’ve had over the years when a camera doesn’t quite click with me. Back in my point-and-shoot days, it was with Canon’s followup to one of the Powershot S-series. In my early dSLR days, it was Pentax’s followup to the K10D, and then the Nikon 5000. Back on the point-and-shoot side, it took about a week to decide the Fuji XF10 was largely a dud.
'shopped
January 21, 2018I still hear people skeptically asking “did you have to touch it up in Photoshop?” as if the purity of the image has somehow been diluted. As someone who came up in film, the question never made sense to me. This is what people did before there was Photoshop. https://t.co/Uz7avrBQmk — Mike Hall (@pdxmph) January 19, 2018 Maybe that was a little disingenuous, because I do understand the question. As someone replied to me, there’s Photoshop and then there’s Photoshop.