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Took the liberty of tweeting about this, since I have many Scottish followers and Ctein's scottish prints are beautiful.
TOP's Upcoming Dye Transfer Print Sale—Wait, What, How? Why?!
Written by Ctein It's not normal to announce a TOP print sale this far in advance, but Mike and I have been planning this one since the beginning of the year. It's time for the big reveal. Ctein's Thanksgiving Dye Transfer Inventory Print Offer Starting on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgivin...
For a long time, I used the original Fuji X100 (35e). Loved it. When I moved to m43, my favourite for years was the PanaLeica 15, 30e.
Now I use zooms mainly for recording vacations, outdoor shots in good light. The quality is 'good enough' for the purpose.
For my hobbyhorse, old churches, small, poorly lit, my staple is the 7.5 f2. Much better than stitching.
And for everything else, which is quite a lot, it's the 20mm, 40e. I tend to like a little wider.
Fully agree with your 'framing' arguments. My zooms are convenience lenses, no more, no less.
OLOY, done it twice, definitely improves your composition skills.
The Case Against Zooms
I’m well known for having a prejudice against zoom lenses. I generally don’t like them, generally don’t shoot with them, and generally don’t recommend them. Again and again, I’m asked to explain this, usually in a sort of bemused way, as if I’m some sort of strange curiosity who can’t get along ...
This is exactly why I'm staying with Panasonic MFT. I've had Fuji, Olympus and Nikon cameras, and I'm fed up with learning new menus, features, buttons. And when my cameras die, I'll probably get a compact with a medium zoom and leave it at that.
It isn't the camera, it's the photographer ...
Killing Themselves Softly With Complexification-Saturation
Just wanted to reiterate this. (I've said it before, here and there.) This is a renegade, outsider, beyond-the-pale, meta viewpoint, but... ...I still think the camera companies are killing themselves with complexity. It's easier to figure out a new computer than it is to figure out a new camera...
"gallery style". This is known in Germany as 'Petersburger Hängung", as the Eremitage in St. Petersburg used it. They have about 3 million objects, so space is at a premium 😂
Ron Preedy
Sunday Support Group: An Update about the 'TOP Visitor Center'
["Sunday Support Group" is about long-term projects, mine and yours. —Ed.] Apparently I can't get this out of my mind. I'm not saying I've tried too hard. Some readers might remember my initially pie-in-the-sky plan to put in a sort of "shop window" for TOP here in the Finger Lakes, in the form ...
"...not what you want to hear from your medical professionals..."
Yesterday they told me "there's something in your lung that doesn't belong there"
Not good...
Get well soon, Michael.
Recuperation Break
TOP will be on vacation for a short while. It will reopen on March 29th. —Yr. Hmbl. Ed. AKA the Left-Handed Typist P.S. It's good news and bad news. My heart is fine...actually quite healthy for my age. The bad news is that nobody is quite sure why I'm still experiencing pain from the procedure ...
When I know I'm going to be indoors I take the Olympic 9-18 (slow, but fine for non-moving subjects) and the PanaLeica 15 f1.7.
As you say, the zoom for considered shots, the 15mm for anything and everything.
The Perfect Two-Lens Kit
Speaking of the Olympus 12–100mm ƒ/4, here's a strategy I've written about before that I've always liked but that has never caught on. Nobody ever talks about it, and it's not considered go-to or default equipment-purchasing advice. The idea have never gone viral. It is anti-viral. The idea is t...
Fairly soon, we'll be like vintage car enthusiasts. Not because they're better, but because they're different, more manual, more *sensual*. And they look good. Mostly.
Scary Future
I'm not much for predictions—I'd rather analyze the past—but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that in three years, there will be three fewer digital camera companies than there are now. The way I count there are 12 of them, not including smartphone makers. Canon, Nikon, and Sony are the t...
The Austrian artist, Oskar Kokoschka, ran summer courses which he called 'Schule des Sehens', School of Seeing. (My wife was the youngest painter to be accepted). We often have to relearn how to see, really see, what is in front of us. Good photographers help us to do that.
Teaching In Real Time
Got this in the email stack this morning, from Peter F.: Greetings from a long-time TOP reader. I was wondering, can you recommend any book(s) or resources that would be particularly useful for someone teaching photography "in real time?" What I mean is, not by critiquing work a student has done...
This should be easy, since I once shot for over a year with just the Fuji X100. I don't think I had fewer keepers in that year. I've tried almost all the affordable m43 lenses, and I now have just two primes: the Panaleica 15mm and the Sigma 30mm f1.4. Longer primes just don't work for me.
Full disclosure: I also have two slow zooms for travel and outdoor stuff, the Olympus 9-18 and the Panasonic 35-100 f4. But I could really live with just the two primes.
And if Fuji went back to a Bayer sensor, I could scrap the lot and live with an X100. Or maybe I should buy a used X100 Bayer ... hmmmm
Lens Geek (Wednesday Open Mike)
I've been on a "thinking about gear" kick recently. You might have noticed. Yesterday, Thomas Rink wrote a nice comment: I find that too much product researching and testing is just confusing. Therefore, I tend to keep my "gear footprint" low—for the last two years, I used a single camera body a...
Always worth remembering that some countries with stricter limits on working hours (like Germany) have much higher productivity than other similar nations (like the United Kingdom) that have looser (I hesitate to say more liberal) legislation. Making folk work longer hours doesn't automatically mean more output - whatever you define that as.
Open Mike: Eight Hours
There are very few magazines left for people who have the patience to read essays of 3,000 words or longer. But I don't think it's because people are illiterate, or less intelligent, or have attention spans that are too short, or aren't willing to expend the effort required by attentiveness. I t...
A true audiophile has only two CDs: a test CD and Ravel's Bolero. A true photophile photographs only two things: brick walls and flowers at minimum focus distance to test the bokeh.
Change Your Head
This is a photography post. But writing about the S8 subwoofer yesterday (that article took me all day to create—I'm getting slower as I slide down the backslope from the middle of middle age) reminded me of something crucial: It's still the music that matters. Yes, it's nice to have a beautiful...
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Feb 25, 2016
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