Dear Susan member Pascal has written before about the rise of the camera phone and his appreciation for it’s simplicity. They have certainly captured the imagination of the consumer market, and have essentially killed off low end pocket cameras, leaving camera makers like Panasonic and Sony moving increasingly upmarket with ultra wide range zooms and […]
Continue reading
By philberphoto | Monday Post , Opinion , Uncategorized
Defending giving in to GAS (Gear Acquisition Syndrome) might seem strange coming from a guy who has spent all of this year with a 20+year old lens (Leica Elmarit R 28mm f:2.8) mounted on a 7-year old camera (Sony NEX 7), both more-or-less-loved leftovers from past times. When I lost my gear to […]
Continue reading
By pascaljappy | Opinion
The spectrum of relationships to photography runs very wide. The plumpest section of the bell curve is devoted to recording events and places for a purely personal notebook use : birthdays, family reunions, selfied or unselfied travels, graduations, … The driving force behind this is mainly social. Many asian travelers compose their travel pictures with […]
Continue reading
By philberphoto | Monday Post , Opinion , Uncategorized
At some point it is good to look at the past to take stock of the present. Let’s go back to when “serious” digital cameras replaced film. Why did that happen? Practicality was the main reason, not IQ. Always-on LiveView and the ability to chimp, the instant availability of results, variable ISOs are but […]
Continue reading
By pascaljappy | Opinion , Printing
According to Wikipedia, DIY culture, with its grassroots societal overtones, spans a range of activities that includes Kit Cars (science fiction in a country overrun by administration such as France), naked cycling events, guerilla gardening, anarcho-punk and cult of the dead cow. But not home printing. I wonder why. It hardly seems fair, too. After […]
Continue reading
By Chris Stump | Opinion
Who, I wonder to myself, is buying these new cameras and lenses and, again, why? Are they more capable? Depends on your definition. Large of sensor while incrementally smaller and lighter than their predecessors? Appear to be. But, towards what end? What are enough of us doing with these state-of-the-art image producing machines to justify […]
Continue reading
By philberphoto | Opinion
Market wisdom has it that good (photographic) investment is in glass. This is how this works: with film cameras, the camera itself has little influence on the end result. The film and the glass do. So get yourself a camera, keep it forever, and spend money on glass. The resulting business model for manufacturers is […]
Continue reading
By pascaljappy | Opinion
Long a once upon ago, film was the great equalizer. Your colour fidelity – or deliberate lack of -, your grain, your sensitivity to photonic vibes, your monochrome coolness … all of it came from film. It was a simpler time when larger was unequivocally better. Real men did it in Medium Format. Jedi did […]
Continue reading
By pascaljappy | Opinion
Not that it needs me, mind you. The crushing statistics would suggest traditional photography is the one in dire need of support. But I’d like to put in a few words in favour of photography done with a smartphone, rather than smartphone photography. A couple of days ago, Paul mentioned this opinion piece by Wim […]
Continue reading
By paulperton | Monday Post , Opinion
There was a mild flutter in the DS hen coop last week. Seems film director’s Wim Wenders’ opinion that phone photography had sucked the life out of “real” photography, leaving it for dead, yet here he was seeking new nomenclature to describe this art. That said, he did admit to using a phone camera […]
Continue reading