So, a used Fuji 27mm f/2.8 popped up on Craigslist before Christmas, and due to the holiday I had to pass. It came up again after the new year, and I only just linked up with the seller before the snowstorm. The lens checked out and I bought it, hoping it would be lighter, sharper, faster, and more useful than the kit 16-50mm that the camera came with. So far, I’m happy with the results.
The biggest peeve I have with the X-E1 is its glacial autofocus speed. I’m learning how to allow for that when I compose shots, but I know the higher-end Fuji bodies are faster. Some part of this is the lens, but some part of it is the body. The 27mm isn’t as fast as a DSLR, but it’s faster than the kit lens, and it’s plenty sharp.
Meanwhile, I did some research and sorted out the conversion rate between Series and MM lens mountings in order to use a second-hand fisheye I got through a friend last summer. It turns out Series 7 equals 54mm in real-world use. I found a $4 adapter on Amazon and had it shipped to the house; it screwed right on and I was ready to go.
This shot is with the Fuji through the 16-50 zoom and cropped to size; it has little to no effect with the 28mm and looks very interesting with a 50mm on the Nikon. So for $4, I’ve got a fun toy to play with.
Well, that fucking blows. Amazon is announcing all kinds of cuts across the board, and one of them affects a site I used to use quite regularly: Digital Photography Review was bought by Amazon back in 2008 and has an incredible archive of detailed reviews spanning 25 years. They will be shutting down, offering the archive for a short while, and then…?
I remember when it was a viable business model to start up your own review site, get a foothold on traffic, and make a living off of it. And companies would send stuff to you for free! So it goes.
Chronophoto is a game where you have to examine a series of 5 photos and guess when each was taken. I love this kind of stuff.
(via Kottke)
A couple of months ago I took advantage of a sale offered by Kodak, the folks who digitized four reels of 8mm film from the Dugan family archives, and sent off the remainder of our family film—eleven reels in total. Nothing much happened for a while, but to their credit they sent me an email every couple of weeks with an update. I got an email notifying me they’d started digitizing last week, and with the space of four days I got download links for all of the reels and a box UPS’d back to the house with our film.
Overall, I’m pleased with the results, but I would have appreciated it all more of they’d focused everything better. I understand that there’s grain in the film, and that the light meter on dads camera wasn’t reliable, but I feel like I’m able to get sharper results with his old projector than they did with whatever system they used. I set up the projector in the den while watching football yesterday and waited for darkness to test out the focus: I was able to get a clean sharp image on a simple white background, but when I tried recording it with the DSLR I got very noticeable flicker. They must have some kind of interpolating software to remove that flicker, which could be the reason the images are blurry.
I’ve seen a lot of old film run through image processing software, both to clean up and sharpen the footage; I wonder if any of it is available at the consumer level…
Cousin Margaret was awesome enough to send me a box of antique cameras few years ago, and there’s one sitting on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to load up with film since then. I haven’t really been shooting much of anything over the last couple of years, but I’ve been thinking that we need some updated family portraits. What’s been stopping me is the film loading method for this camera, which is much different than the Rollei and my current Yashica; there are no guides or arrows for starting the counter—there’s no counter on this camera at all, actually. I did a little digging and YouTube delivered, yet again: this nice man explains the difference between what I’m used to and the simplicity of how they did things in 1938.
His camera has a counter, but it’s the little window at the bottom which tells you where your film is and when to shoot; there’s no mechanical assist with the shutter button on mine. Good to know.
