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Yin Every Yang (Part 2)
Traveling to Iceland in the dead of winter? No problem. Traveling to Iceland carrying a backpack and a zoom lens? Now that’s culture shock.
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Up Goes The Ante: Fuji’s X100T
Fuji and innovation go hand-in-hand. My Hasselblad Xpan? A creation of Fuji’s. My pocketable, point-and-shoot Medium Format camera? Also Fuji. My next digital camera? Well, Fuji’s new X100T has certainly warranted a meticulous examination — nearly 5,000 words worth of meticulousness! So is that lump in my pocket a new Fuji X100T? Or is it…
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Applied Relativity: The Leica M-A
Somewhere in this meandering tale of chance encounters and philosophical philosophizing, there’s a review of the new Leica M-A camera — a camera that just might be the closest any manufacturer has yet come to that elusive quality known as “perfection.”
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The Are-Bure-Boke-Matic
Grainy. Blurry. Out-of-focus. To the average photographer, these are characteristics to avoid at all cost. Fortunately, I never claimed to be “the average photographer.” So for all you not-so-average photographers seeking to infuse some low-fidelity grunge into your high-fidelity world, I present the Olympus Pen EE-2 camera for your consideration.
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The Blacksmith’s Lot
Like telegraphs, typewriters, turntables and anvils, the Voigtlander Vito III 35mm folding camera is a relic of an earlier time. To many, that makes it obsolete. But for those who truly enjoy the act of photography, its antediluvian origins do not equate to uselessness. Distilled of all bells and whistles, it performs the same fundamental function…
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Sigma vs. Nerd (Part 3: The DP3)
In Parts 1 and 2 of this series, I spent a tremendous number of words discussing the merits of Sigma’s Foveon sensor for BW photography. In this article, I’ll look specifically at the DP3 Merrill as a camera, rather than as a box that holds a Foveon sensor.
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Sigma vs. Nerd (Part 2: The BW Merrill)
After Part 1’s discussion of the theoretical advantages of Sigma’s Foveon sensor for BW photography, this next installment looks at the BW process in detail, making it even nerdier than Part 1. The article includes a discussion of the tonal differences between BW photos taken with Sigma cameras vs. BW photos converted from color images…
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Sigma vs. Nerd (Part 1: Sensor School)
Many people love cameras because they love gizmos, gadgets and technology. My love for cameras is more of an adjunct to my true love — photography. But that doesn’t preclude me from occasionally going full-on camera nerd — particularly when it comes to something like Sigma’s Foveon sensor, which has the theoretical potential to transform my…
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Cats and Dogs
It’s not often I give my impressions of modern digital cameras because, frankly, it’s not often that modern digital cameras impress me. So hold onto your socks, because this article contains impressions of not one, but two modern digital cameras — the Olympus OM-D EM-1 and the Ricoh GR.
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The Other Half Frame
There’s more than one way to fill a negative. So when another attack of flat-back panoramic camera lust flared up recently, I chose to extinguish it not with a big bad Hasselblad Xpan, but with a diminutive little half-frame faux-panoramic camera, called the “Minolta Freedom Vista.”
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Pen Pal
Lately, it seems everyone I know is buying an Olympus PEN. Not wanting to be left out, I too jumped into the waters — only instead of getting one of those new-fangled digital PENs, I opted for a classic mid-1960’s PEN FT film camera.
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ULTRA U: History of the Film Camera
Welcome to “ULTRA U,” my new online university dedicated to the preservation and dissemination of photographic knowledge, as best I can manipulate it. Here, in Lesson 1, I’ll discuss the real history of film formats for still photographers. Give it a read — you’ll likely find it’s not nearly as dry as you might suspect,…
