While Eric Isaac is on the road, I’m finally coming off a long stretch that involved Florida, LA, SF and a few other places along the line. I’m actually quite happy to be back in New York again (maybe my dog will perhaps start to recognize my long forgotten mug…) and will be posting a few articles that I’ve written on my cross-country flights, since that’s about the only time I can find for an uninterrupted writing session.
Also I would like for us to have a holiday get together here in NYC, so if any of you have suggestions or timeframes, please let us know. I think the hardest thing will be getting Mr. Exotic Jettsetter away from wherever he is (Mexico is it?) and convincing Erik Hillard to come out and crash on my couch, since he and I didn’t get a chance to meet in LA.
As far as techie things go, here is a video of Hassy’s new Phocus–check out the google earth gps function at the end.
http://www.yfo.se/phocus/
An interesting article published on Engadget (via Rob Galbriath’s site) states that canon is calling back all its unsold 1D Mark III’s in response to the overwhelming complaints of back focusing. While we don’t really talk about these cameras on this site all that much, I have been following the story and I hope we don’t see similar issues with the 1DS Mark III, due out in the coming weeks.
You can check out the story here
While the industry elite’s were rubbing elbows at the Javits last week, I was off…out of town, yet again. It feels like I don’t spend much time in NYC anymore and there isn’t one place that I am spending the majority of my time…except maybe online. Especially tonight as I am researching all the information on upcoming technology. For example, does this look familiar:
This is the Fuji GX 645 which is really the same camera as the Hasselblad H1/H2. While most of Europe and America have been off using the Hasselblad system, the Japanese have had their hands on this. It make sense really, Fuji was the company that made the entire system to begin with; it just had the Hasselblad name. Since the news about the H2 system came out, everyone has been scratching their heads wondering what is next for all those medium format auto-focus photographers out there. The solution is simple…switch the Fuji GX 645 (Personally I prefer the GX 680).
Speaking of Hasselblad, they are releasing a new piece of software to take over where Flexcolor left off. Check it out here. It is called Phocus…I hope its Phat. It is very Lightroom-esque. Everyone seems to be going that way – even Leaf & Phase.
…And of course, World Peace.$2599 in December
Well they threatened and they are following through. Hasselblad recently announced that they are discontinuing the H2, leaving only the H3D and H3F as options, none of which work harmoniously with anything other than the Hasselblad Digital Back. So instead of having a percentage of something (the sale of a camera with a digital back) they’d rather have 100% of nothing (who uses the Hasselblad system?). I’d have thought that the right move would be to at least wait until they had controlling market share before pulling the plug. Sell your product as “the only solution for digital” first, THEN limit their options. The way I see it, I’ve still got V-series, Mamiya RZ & 645 (not looking so bad now) and Canon.
The H3D system is a closed system whereas the H3F(ilm) works with 3rd party digital backs only with a sync cable. No word on when Hasselblad will announce a superior digital back.
MOnths with not a prob in the world. Using the new 11 vr.2 and a 75s. Now both of my backs have started giving me “storage Media Missing” errors…NIGHTMARE. Trying a 800 firewire extender tomorrow. From what I hear from leaf that is usually the sign of not enough power through the firewire cable. We will see
Hi there, I’m back from Mexico and have one more topic to report on from that shoot. We kept noticing this purple noise that appeared in the raw file when the subject was backlit. The photographer would set up a full length portrait of the subject on a white seamless and if the background was reading pure white (number wise 245/245/245 and up) and the light started to wrap around the subject and feel backlit, you would see this purple noise at the junction of where the subject meets the background. It basically seemed to show up when there was a large difference in exposure between a background and the subject. It occurred outdoors as well in backlit situations against the sun/sky. This was shooting at ISO 100, IIQ Raw Small.
These have been the workarounds:
The photographer owns this back and in the past he has experienced the purple noise in studio a lot. To get rid of the noise, he has to underexpose the file about a half stop.
On this shoot we also realized that if we shot at ISO 200, the noise would disappear and you could shoot at a normal exposure. I’m going to post some images so you guys can see what I’m talking about.
Is this purple noise a limitation of the digital sensor in the back or is it a problem specific to this one back? Have any of you seen this a lot? We shot the exact same image on the P30 and on a Mark II and the noise appeared in the P30 and not in the Mark II file. Also, when you process the raw file to tiff you still see the noise.
If the images don’t appear in this post, go to these links:
This was my location capture rig. We didn’t have a hood so I fashioned one out of two three-ringed binders and some gaffers tape. It got a little soggy towards the end of the trip and started to droop. I also find that the dark cloth is essential in really viewing the images on a laptop. No hood screen combination really works that well. Down below the frame of the image is a battery pack that attaches to the tripod column hook that holds two 6-hour Battery Geek batteries that lead up to the connector on the MBP on the left side. On the right side, I have velcro’d a 100 GB Wiebetech drive. I could have plugged into power at this location, but I really wanted to test the batteries throughly. They both provided about 12 hours of combined battery life consistently from day to day. The internal battery powering for another two hours and another additional 2-hour battery gave me a total of 14 hours of battery life.
The photo below is my second setup…the “retouching station” (if you can call compositing images in direct sunlight, barely being able to see the screen, “retouching”). I also had a 23″ monitor not pictured here, another backup drive and an Epson R800 printer for printing small 4 x 6 prints for layouts. I used the two lappies airport connection to establish a network between the two and set Capture One’s Process folder for the other computer so all I had to do was hop over to the other station and start retouching and printing. It worked seemlessly…well almost. Dropped connections, humidity and heat all played their roles in making paradise not so perfect but I felt like I got along just well. I should complain. It was beautiful, I had my own private pool and I had extra hands to carry stuff up and down the stairs. I checked a Kartmaster 500 back and forth with the shelves and it traveled just fine. It is a very heavy cart but in all honesty it is nice to go to baggage claim setup the cart and haul your 7 bags away all by yourself in one cart.
