It’s a Kind of Magic

“There are fields, Neo, endless fields where plants are no longer born …”

A photographer I know and trust recommended mirrorlesss system cameras and criticized Nikon and Canon harshly for not being on top of their game. The two DSLR giants are lacking attractive offers in this market segment dominated by Sony, Olympus, Fujifilm and Panasonic. Even Leica and Hasselblad have interesting, though expensive EVIL cameras (electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens) on offer!
On the other hand,

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Second Shooter

Autofocus sensors right to the edge of the frame

My main DSLR, a Nikon D 800, is 4 years old and has 80000 actuations. Should I trust it to work flawlessly during this year’s photo projects (especially my son’s wedding)? Not without a backup body, no, I won’t.

Is One Inch Enough?

Damaged beauty in bed… 😉

Got myself a Sony RX100 Mark 3 compact digital camera. Read all about it here. It is compact enough to stick into a jacket pocket while motorcycling. Still, it has many advanced features. First to mention among them is the pop-up EVF (electronic viewfinder) that allows proper framing, not this holding-at-arms-length nonsense. They found place for a little (minuscule, actually) pop-up flash on the upper deck, too, that is good for fill-in. It does RAW as well as JPEGs, and the color space can be set to Adobe RGB. It has a 24-70 equivalent mm Carl Zeiss designed zoom lens (a feature I’m missing with the Ricoh GR) that deploys in a PG18-rated fashion from a pancake size.
So far, so good. But it has a one inch sensor. See if you can spot the results in the following screenshots from the RAWs being developed in Apple Aperture. We start with the lead photo. As always, pictures are clickable for full-size.

Fill-in flash at 800 ISO. With a beauty like that, you don’t look for eyelash sharpness, but for string sharpness (focus lies between the two pickups). It is there, in a good compromise with shadow noise.

And a photo 100 ISO lower:

“Glass of wine, bottle of red”… Yeah, Billy Joel…

At 400 ISO, not bad, but not devoid of shadow noise, either.

ISO 200 works fine, ISO 125 and 80 show compression artifacts, take my word for it. I’ve excluded the latter two settings from the Auto-ISO range. What about high ISO?

This crab-like object is my motorbike at night on a thoroughfare.

That’s actually not bad for a 6400 ISO night shot from a 1″ sensor!

So, the verdict: The Sony RX100 Mark 3 is surprisingly useable for a lot of subjects, brilliant at high ISO and good enough “in between” if you’re not viewing everything at 100% and counting ants.

Another Dimension

The Nikon 1 V1 camera body pales in comparison to the huge 1 Nikkor VR 10-100mm f/4.5-5.6 PD-Zoom lens. And yes, I black out all my cameras with a sharpie pen. Didn’t stick on the “1” though 😉

The second lens I got for my Nikon 1 V1 EVIL camera was the Nikkor VR 10-100mm f/4.5-5.6 PD-Zoom lens. As you can see, this is no longer a compact camera system now,

Pocket Rocket*

The Nikon 1 V1 really is much smaller than it looks here. That's a mini bottle of mineral water behind it.

Ok, another photographic gadget that has to prove it’s worthiness. First impressions: I think it will!

GUIs, Cycle Touring and Photography

Wide-open Skies

This is one of only three photos I took on a 98 km bicycle loop yesterday.

Apple’s Blue Man Group

Christian, Workshop Instructor at the Hamburg Apple Store

Out of sheer curiosity, I visited an Apple Store for the first time today. The Apple Store in Hamburg is located in a mall at the northern outskirts of the city. It’s not so large and flashy as Apple’s latest openings, but right from the start it was brimming with customers and employees in blue t-shirts. They quickly found each other using a ticket system for sessions that needed a lot of advice. Off the shelf purchases were quickly accounted for by blue men (and women) prowling the store with mobile terminals.
But I didn’t come to buy something (originally …),

Amusement Park

In the Queue

Some things you got to do. For example, visit an amusement park with your youngest daughter when on holiday. Took the opportunity to try out ART filter 3 some more on my Olympus E-PL1. So here are some results:

Family Resemblance

My Apologies to Andreas Feininger

The Olympus E-PL1 with a Voigtländer 40 mm viewfinder reminded me of this famous photo.

Olympus E-PL1 is a Poor Man’s Leica M9

Well, that is fun! I can use all my old Leica M bayonet lenses with my new Olympus E-PL1. Above is a photo of a mural relief of the duke that built the Wartburg that I took with the Voigtländer Nokton 35 mm f/1.2 at open aperture.