Auteur/autrice : admin

August is here, with the normal run of stupid things happening in the world press, which most people forget within minutes.

Closer to home, the Z8 seems to be getting bad press from a series of ‘incidents’ involving strap lugs – I personally have not noticed any extra play etc. but people have had their cameras fall off their shoulders when one of the strap lugs comes out of the body.

Nikon have not officially recognised this, but as there’s already a recall in operation for another ‘fault’, they are sure to be checking for that too – people in the know seem to think this may have been an error with the mounting pins in a very early batch of bodies.

UPDATE: Nikon have announced a recall – 07/08/2023 (Based on a range of serial numbers)

Someone has tested the serial number check on the Nikon site, and has suggested that ALL the shipped bodies (up to 10,000 units may be affected) – I’ll check mine…

I have never relied simply upon the strap lugs, as I tend to slap an ‘L-plate’ onto each new body A: to let me attach straps to that (if needed) and B: to have an ARCA mounting plate available in both axes for mounting on my tripod.

This is the one I purchased from Smallrig – almost half the price of Really Right Stuff etc. it does a perfectly good job, is adjustable, and VERY well made – it also has mounting ‘eyes’ for my Peak Design camera strap connectors. Very well thought out piece of kit from Smallrig.

I’ve been out and about with camera (!) to prepare for a ‘photo day’ for which I’ve invited a close friend – he (and his son) don’t know where we’re going, but suffice it to say they’re both prepared to get up at 5am so that I can take them to a special place to photograph the sunrise, and then on to two other places I doubt they even imagined exist! As he ‘follows’ me on social media etc. I can’t publish any of the images I’ve been taking while I put this all together (frustration!) but my time will come! With a bit of luck the weather will be suitable in a few days – watch this space.

And finally, for all fans of colonoscopy and hooks in garage ceilings, our (un)friendly local deviant and founder member of the BABBA, has decided to ban everyone (or more to the point, everyone who counts) from his social media, Flickr accounts etc. Joy to the world! We’re having a party next week to celebrate – we feel somehow blessed 🙂

Ironically – it seems that this person has been having quite serious health problems, and the phrase « a pain in the arse » has really taken on a ‘hole’ new meaning… if you get my gist…

Happy holidays

My chums Nicolas and Julien from the Collectif Petit Travers, were back in Auch this week – the collectif were in residence at CiRCa with the Debussy Quartet for a new production titled ‘Nos Matins Intérieurs’ (« The mornings inside »)

It was great to see them again as we’ve been collaborating since 2014 – and they still use some of my original images from that time.

The new production is huge compared to most of what they’ve done before – 10 artists on stage AND a string quartet playing live. All new!

They still have a nasty tendency to avoid lighting – a few years back they performed by candle light ! All in all a well rounded production – which we sadly won’t see here for the time being.

Been active recently, which is nice to be, as birthdays tend to be a bit of a downer…

Anyway, despite criticism from the « BABBA » (Benders and Bum Bandits Anonymous) my wedding photos seem to have gone down very well – however I won’t be repeating the experience – bit of a ‘been there, done that’ sort of feeling really, and it was promised as a one off.

The ‘8’ has arrived and been put into use – I’m fortunate to be able to say mine doesn’t suffer from the dreaded problems which have resulted in a recall of certain serial numbers.

What a week – changing a windscreen wiper motor, front brake pads AND repairing a rear door electric window, I now feel my stint as car mechanic will hopefully also draw to a close.

Another thing shortly to be pensioned off is my Flickr feed – I don’t think I’ll be publishing anymore over there. What’s the point? I don’t ride a ridiculous folding bike or photograph cauliflower so I feel strangely out of place. I will, obviously, remain in contact with the few friends I’ve encountered there, but it’s a bit like changing email address – great way of weeding out the dross, and dross there is, in monumental quantities.

The ‘dreaded’ wedding has been and gone – the relief is enormous.

In hoesty, the only ‘dreaded’ bit was not producing images that were appreciated by the newly married couple – which seems not to have been the case as I’m receiving almost daily messages of thanks and joy!

Like most of my ‘work’ the images are, for the most part sharp, bear no refgerence to how skilled (or not) I might be at riding a bicyle, and for the most part, don’t concern trains and/or Bordeaux.

This was probably a great relief to the couple as their wedding took place in Auch…

They are a lovely couple and, to my certain knowledge, don’t have any hooks in their garage ceiling, which makes them so much more appealing. The remit was basic – ceremony at 16h at the town hall in Auch (civil ceremony – 20 mins and your out mate) then off into the wilds to the ‘Fou Gascon’ a wonderful place for the reception with excuisite decoration, food and drink – top marks to the young couple who run this – it really was 1st class from beginning to end.

A wide open remit is oki, if you know the pople you’re working for – it helps to have an idea of their taste as some newlyweds are very keen on the classic, very ‘posed’ wedding shots – luckily this couple were simply looking for a discrete photographic record of the entire sequence – which I think I provided.

Here are the three ‘teaser’ shots I sent them before the actual album…

I fully realise that these are all crap, to some, but….wait a minute….do I care?

It’s nearly all over – we spent Saturday the 3rd of June here in Auch – and despite the fact that there were only 53 participants, I think it was a good year.

This year I decided to make a couple of changes – the morning would be given over to a workshop, in our concert hall, and the two themes for the afternoon would be announced together to enable people to wander off and spend their afternoon freely looking for inspiration.

The workshop was a tough one – I have spent the last few months ‘developing’ a fold-up pinhole camera! This is great fun – you start with a simple box, make a few holes, add a piece of photographic paper and bingo!

And despite the fact that there were 53 people totally lost, we all managed to A: make the cameras, B: take a photo with each camera and C: come back and develop the photos!

Naturally, two groups didn’t like this and complained that « this wasn’t the spirit of Déclic » and « we prefered it before » etc. etc. well darling, you try inventing new things every year – it’s REALLY easy to criticise, but a whole different ball game when it comes to putting on a show. Needless to say, these people WILL NOT be invited next year.

The jury takes place today, Wednesday 7 June and the winners will be announced on the site tonight…

Could be interesting…

Well it was…and this image was one that caught my eye (although I couldn’t vote) and managed to win the prize for the 5th Theme « Le Vélo dans le Paysage Gascon » (« The bicycle in the Gascon Landscape« )

Well done to Laurent VEYSSET

(And is it better?)

Over the years, Leica have evolved from film to digital cameras, much like all the other camera manufacturers. This said, they’ve always shown a preference for black and white photography, and to this end, have recently started producing a ‘Monchrome‘ version of their camera bodies – to the extent that there is even a monochome version of the ‘compact’ Q2 series.

So what does ‘monochrome‘ actually mean?

In a conventional colour sensor, there is a filter layer in direct contact with the sensor itself. This is called the ‘Bayer‘ filter, named after it’s inventor.

Each photo-site has a coloured filter over it, thus only allowing certain wavelengths of light through to the sensor itself.

Light from four adjacent photo-sites makes up one pixel. Thus in the example of the Bayer filter above, the first pixel is made up of light values from one blue, one red and two green photo-sites. This approximates to what the human eye ‘sees’ in terms of colour – the mixture of these four light values gives the ‘colour’ of that particular pixel. The greater the pixel, or photo-site density, the more accurate the rendered colour will be, but with the disadvantage of receiving much less light as the density increases – the photo-sites are physically smaller, and thus receive less photons of light.

For the second pixel to be recorded, the group of four moves over 1 photo-site, and records 4 photo-sites again. This continues all the way to the right hand end of the sensor, then moves down one photo-site, and starts all over again. Obviously, this actually happens in real-time over the entire sensor area, and is almost instantaneous.

This is the reason why sensors are often stated as having an ‘effective’ pixel value GREATER than the quoted pixel value. The ‘borders’ (pixels on the edge of the sensor) are not counted as part of the picture itself, merely used to create the 4 photo-site grid.

The resulting information is ‘rebuilt’ by the image processing engine to create a colour image.

In a monochrome sensor, the Bayer filter does not exist. The pixel information is combined in one of two different ways – either the four adjacent photo-sites are ‘summed’ together as in a colour image (which gives greater dynamic range overall, as 4 times as many photons are recorded) or single photo-sites are recorded as individual pixels.

The removal of the Bayer filter creates a more authentic ‘colour’ depth (or grey tone between white and black) as there is no ‘mixing’ of different filtered light values – this means that the overall difference between the levels of grey is far more subtle, something which cannot be reproduced by simply using a colour sensor (with Bayer filter) and choosing « B&W » in the capture menu of the camera.

It should be noted that Pentax have now launched their ‘Monchome‘ camera, based on the K-3 APS-C reflex camera. At €2500 (body only) I imagine that it’s not something people will buy just to ‘try out’ but I think it’s a step in the right direction. I would very much like to see a monochrome version of the NIKON Z6 or Z7. Sadly there is no reasonable way to remove the Bayer filter and reprogramme the recording software to be able to undertake this after the camera has been made.

Leica price the monchrome version of their full frame M11 at €9540 where the traditional ‘colour’ version only costs €8750 – why nearly €1000 no-one knows….perhaps simply because it’s a Leica?

UPDATE : I wrote to Thom Hogan and asked if it was really so unreasonable to imagine a monochrome version of the Z6/Z7 could exist one day?

His reply, short and to the point :

« You can imagine it all you want ;~). Not difficult at all. 

You can even buy one (from a third party, maxmax), but at much higher cost and the phase detect autofocus layer is removed ;~(. »

Thanks Thom – I’ll keep it in mind 😉

I photograph circus companies. On a regular basis. I must be good at this, as some even ask me to come back. For the most part, these companies are happy for me to follow the evolution of their work, and they let me in to see what’s going on. I make an album of photos, and often use some to hang in the circus restaurant etc.

The other day I contacted the current company in residence here, and we agreed that the best day would be the following Monday (as I was not working – it was a bank holiday). I duly contacted them on the Sunday – or tried to – they didn’t reply. Eventually, the next day, they got back to me saying that instead of the day we’d agreed on, they’d be ready the following day.

I had already explained that this day would be difficult as I was only available in the early evening. Their response was remarkable « Oh I thought you were more flexible »….

We eventually met up, only to be confronted with the arrival of a man supposedly checking things out for a proposed video shoot (another day) – after a lot of faffing around we finally got started (late) and I had to try to make images with two women who spent 90% of the time (over an hour) talking into a microphone and/or rolling around all over the floor.

I did my best – sent them the link to the album – and 24 hours later received « OK thanks »

Makes you wonder why I bother…

…the new NIKON Z8

First impressions?

Sensor – sadly, we’ve got the 45mp Z9 sensor….which is very good, but a shame they didn’t ‘push the envelope’ a bit here and go for a larger density sensor. This said, they have decided to include the protective shutter blind – this is a good thing. I wonder if it’ll ever make it into later versions of the Z6/7..?

Size – 144 x 118 x 83 which makes it bigger than the Z6/7 (134 x 100 67) by a centimetre or two, but significantly smaller than the Z9

GPS – No there isn’t a GPS – which seems odd. The NIKON site states « GPS – Via Snapbridge app ». I’ve tried this – it’s slow….

Price – 4599€ which makes this camera 1500€ less expensive than the Z9, with very similar specifications.

The top plate is like the Z9 (surprised?) with a mode dial to the left, and a large screen to the right – this said, the mode dial is not exactly the same as the Z9, and is in fact much thinner/lower to the body – which presumably means that the choice of single/continuous/multiple shots, self timer etc. are now displaced into menu items…

Another good thing carried over from the Z9 is the eyepiece protection which clips in (release button lower left) rather than sliding-on like on the Z6/7 (which falls off regularly on these models), so this is a good move.

Two button card formatting is still there too – so much easier than having to delve through menus, and illuminated buttons too – things are looking up !

For me, it’s sad to lose the built-in grip – and that huge EN-EL18d battery which allows me almost 4000 shots on one charge which simply can’t be matched by the two EN-EL15 in the new add-on grip. However I fully understand that a lot of people don’t need this kind of autonomy.

Storage is also different – with one CFe/XQD and one SDXC slot, but then, this is a pro-sumer model…

The grip is the MB-N12 which here in France will cost just shy of 400€ – like the MB-N11 for the Z6/7 ll it’s a ‘replace the battery’ type grip which I find frustrating – sure, you can hot swap either one of the two batteries, like on the Z6/7 ll, but it makes the whole thing quite large. I would have preferred something along the lines of the D850, without the battery box ‘spike’

At the end of the day, what you’re actually getting for 1000€ more than the Z7ll is a better auto-focus and a shutter blind…in a slightly larger body. Duh….

And finally, I still consider sticking to the 45mp sensor limiting…in the long run. But then of course, it just allows NIKON to come out with another model in a years time….

Fun part – I posted a comment over on the Nikonrumors blog…which was immediately treated like bait, and all the bottom feeders zoomed (excuse the pun) in to criticise the fact that I had dared to mention that I was disappointed in the new toy (regardless of the fact that the vast majority would never actually own one, or know what to do with it if they ever did purchase…) I was simply expressing my opinion, that I thought it sad that there was no GPS, and my comments on sensor size from this post.

Visibly ‘self expression’ is frowned on over there – sad for Peter (who runs it)

To sum up, this is going to be a total winner for NIKON – size, weight, specs – it’s all there and if I hadn’t already ‘invested’ in a Z9 this would be seriously interesting, and I’d recommend this to any serious photographer. For the bottom-feeders, and garage ceiling crowd, you’ll have loads of things to moan about – like for all the other camera bodies you never buy.

Available from the the 25th of May 2023 it’ll be interesting to see how long people have to wait to see their orders. (The Z9 waiting list was initially an entire year)

BENRO recently announced on Kickstarter that they were developing a ‘self levelling tripod’ – couple of questions here…

1: Why KICKSTARTER? This platform is famous for leaving ‘investors’ in the lurch when their total lack of concern about the viability of some of the projects proposed extends to not giving people their money back when the project is found to be a total scam. TO BE AVOIDED

2: Why self levelling? Most, if not all, decent tripods have a bubble level and regardless of how the legs are positioned, at least the platform for the camera can me made level in seconds.

No it seems in the day of the Internet, we need to cram even the most mundane objects full of batteries and circuitry to make it simple for the bottom feeders, and perpetual forum posters (who buy this sort of rubbish) to actually just use it. Naturally a significant amount of these people probably don’ even own a camera anyway…but they will swear to God Almighty that it’s the best tripod since sliced bread, to justify their purchase…

Frankly it’s cheaper, and easier, to buy a few more hooks for the garage ceiling…

I find it interesting to note that the Kickstarter campaign was started aiming for $50,000 of funding and that at close, the float was $2,452,958 – my God there’s a lot of gullible people out there…

And more to the point, is it important?

This is a ‘mock-up’ (or a real image) of the upcoming NIKON Z8 – the fan boys are all getting very excited – to the point where some have even stopped adding hooks to their garage ceilings, so that they can scan the web for new ‘news’ on yet another NIKON camera they will never actually own.

For me, at least, the most important element is that this shows what NIKON thinks is the future – where we’re going with full-frame digital cameras. It’s fairly clear that they’re not putting that much effort into DX – the number of lenses is frankly disappointing for the smaller format, although the camera bodies ‘seem’ to conform to a reasoned planning ( for once) with a tendency towards video and v-logging which is more marked than before.

The ‘smaller Z9’ status seems to be born out with the specifications of the new camera. NIKON are maintaining the electronic shutter – but why wouldn’t they – it’s hugely effective, and considerably less complicated to make. It’ll be interesting to see if they include the sensor protection (shutter blind) in this model as well.

Two different memory cards seems to be par for the course as well – in the ‘pro-sumer’ range of cameras it’s totally reasonable to have the ability to use a really fast, but expensive, CF Express card for the 45mp sensor, and a much cheaper SDXC card for video capture – the buffer size seems to increment exponentially every new camera iteration, and this helps getting the images off the sensor and onto the card as quickly as possible, but it also helps to have a sufficiently rapid card. Personally XQD or CFExpress is the way to go, with the former probably fading away soon – the large capacity and MUCH faster CFe cards are slowly -becoming almost affordable !

There is a body size comparison over on Nikonrumors.com but I admit to being slightly confused – I was led to believe this new body would be more akin to the Z6/7 format, but now it seems it’s grown in size to be a similar profile to the D850 – only thinner, obviously.

I don’t have any problems with the size and/or weight of the Z9 – obviously, with almost identical specs in a smaller body could be useful for some jobs, it’s true, but judging by the proposed 4,500€ I won’t be adding this to the stable soon. Apparently a battery grip will be available too, with this and the camera using the well established EL-15 series batteries.

Another thing that has surprised me in these theoretical specifications, is the sensor size, and we’ll all find out in a few days time. I still can’t get my head around staying with a 45mp sensor when suitable 60 or 61mp sensors already exist. The ‘manual’ that was leaked earlier this year seems to include an interesting format too ( 9552 x 6363 ) which is certainly larger than 45mp. I’m certainly not hunting for a massive pixel rise with all the complications that come with it, not least of which, the disk space needed to store even larger RAW files, and the time to treat them, but the Z series lenses must have been designed with 60mp or even greater sensor sizes in mind, in particular the ‘S’ variants, so when are we going to see a camera with this kind of sensor. Adding a higher pixel density camera body would extend the overall range of the ‘Z’ system.

This would seem to me an ideal moment to follow in the footsteps of LEITZ and allow a choice of pixel density on the same sensor – 30, 45, 60 – all technically possible.

The rumours continue regarding the use of new thermoplastics being used to advantage in the camera body – this is a good thing if it lightens the load, but I know a lot of the fan boys ‘don’t like plastic’ so any mention of this material is doomed to receiving criticism. It should be noted that ever since the D3000 NIKON has used plastics in many situations – even the latest Z DX 12-28 f/3.5-5.6 PZ VR lens has a plastic lens mount, like a number of it’s AF-S cousins.

It should be noted, by the simple inclusion of a mirror box, this isn’t the new camera…

Countdown is still on…8 more days to go fan boys!