So I saw this over at Engadget and figured I’d head over to the Phase One site to see if they had any more information about it. This morning at 7am, nothing, now at 10:30am, here it is, the new P40+ announced. Additionally I saw they had released yet another new version of the software, 4.8, available here. From the release notes the only difference between it and 4.7 seems to be that they added tethered support for the new P40+ and the Olympus E-620 as well as Image Quality Imporvements for the P65+, Leica D-Lux 4, color enhancements for Olympus E-30 and improved colors for jpeg and tiff. No mention of any bug fixes though. Going to give it a whirl in a bit to see what it looks like. If I come across anything spectacular I’ll share for sure.
Hey Guys
Just been made aware of a problem with shutter speed longer than 1/10th on the AFI with the firmware in 11.2.4 and manual lenses. The problem manifests as pink lines through the file. Current work around is to downgrade the firmware to 11.2.0.2.
Good Luck
Just picked up the new Wacom Intuos4 last week and have to say, it’s pretty cool so far. The major change is in the keys and the scroll wheel, which is rad for PS 4’s rotate feature. No more twisting your hand awkwardly while churning out the perfect channel mask, the scroll wheel makes short work of rotating the canvas to the optimum position. The oled displays next to the keys make it quite easy to see what you’ve mapped them to, and the whole tablet flips to either a left or right hand orientation, with a detachable usb cable.
In practice, I find that once you’ve mapped the express keys to your particular setup, they actually become useful. On the old version, I would inevitably forget what I mapped the keys to, or had them change when using a different computer (I would assume that copying your wacom prefs file to a jump drive and putting that on whatever host computer you’re on would solve this, but with everything else I’m doing to set up for a shoot, it’s always a low priority, but still frustrating nonetheless). The scroll wheel has a little led that show you which of the four functions it is currently assigned to and it works well with not only scrolling and rotating, but also brush size and soft/hardness. I do miss the little nub in the old keyset that allowed you to find a common reference point by feel. That’s really my only complaint about the tablet; the keys are arragned in a kind of v-height thing that should allow you to feel what key you’re using, but it’s not as intuitive as the old inverted nub/dot of the old one. I’m getting better at it, but do think it could be improved.
All in all the Intuos4 is much easier to use than the last gen, but if you’re not big on the express keys and are a keyboard power user, I don’t know that this is a must have. The sensitivity is increased from 1024 to 2048, but I haven’t seen/felt that great a difference. This is a solid step up from the Intuos3 and you really can’t go wrong upgrading. I feel I’m a bit faster and more precise in my masking, and that alone is worth it to me.
Wacom Intous 4
We’ve all been there. The shooter sets up fires off a frame, it comes in and you roll over to the focus window to check sharpness, and it ain’t even close. Back and forth you go checking again and again until something works, or you reconcile yourself to the fact that the lens is a dog, or diffraction is a factor, or yada, yada. We all know that precise sharpness in MFDB land is quite frankly, a bitch to obtain and hold, and finally someone of note has offered up more than the usual after shoot barroom theory.
So with that said: Techs, put on your reading glasses. These two articles for your digestion are from Joseph Holmes, a noted landscape photographer and color scientist(at least in my book, check out his site for his working spaces and other tech stuff). Let me say that they are long, detailed and comprehensive, but stick with it as there are many things to glean from such an effort and I applaud Mr. Holmes for the effort and sharing of this information.
Also of note is that Irident Digital’s Excellent Raw Developer is mentioned as one of his favorite Raw Converters. While I think C1 4.7 is producing some very sweet files, it’s always good to have another recipe for file conversion and many people swear by RD.
news-medformatprecision.html
news-sharpmediumformat.html
Today my equipment is being rented as a prop for a commercial in which they are mocking a fashion shoot. Got the job from a prop stylist friend and I get to sit here while they shoot around my set cart (pictured above). In a time where gigs are hard to find, this takes the cake!
5 extra credit points to whomever can name the studio in which we are shooting?
