BTM_Pix

1 hour ago, webrunner5 said:

I did pay for your camera. 

Looks like I've come back to the forum at the right time.

Is this offer still on as I quite fancy a GH5s. Do I just mail in the receipt or what?

This specific one is for the C300ii but I believe the steps are the same.

5 minutes ago, jonpais said:

Good to have you back, @BTM_Pix

Cheers.

Panasonic's nomenclature has bit them on the arse with this I think.

All of the previews I'm seeing of it are referencing the GX8 rather than the GX80/85.

Its a better GX80/85 for sure but if I'd been holding off buying one of those waiting for this then I'm not sure I wouldn't be at the shop looking for end of line stock and put the £250 saving towards lenses.

I'd have been really excited by this announcement last year but my X-T2 experiment has by and large wound down now in terms of it being a viable complete replacement system for my stills work so I'm probably about to walk out of the same door as a lot of people will be walking in with regard to Fuji.

And I think this will get a lot more people through their door to be honest.

Curious to know whether they'll do an X-H10 version a few months down the track in the X-T1/X-T2 to X-T10/X-T20 tradition.

That one would probably get me back in.

5 minutes ago, IronFilm said:

What is it?

Its the distillation of my hardware Panasonic controller experiments from last year.

Self contained, internal battery, pocketable, magnetic base for mounting.

It acts as the central interface to the camera so can be used standalone to change settings or as the middleman to pass on commands from more ergonomic controllers for focus and aperture control etc.

And it actually sort of kind of works as well.

No Cinelike D on it.

I'll have to pop into a shop with this and see whether it can be persuaded then eh?

1 hour ago, Andrew Reid said:

 

"The real story of machine learning is not how it promotes home bomb-making, but that it's being deployed at scale with minimal ethical oversight, in the service of a business model that relies entirely on psychological manipulation and mass surveillance. The capacity to manipulate people at scale is being sold to the highest bidder, and has infected every aspect of civic life, including democratic elections and journalism.

Together with climate change, this algorithmic takeover of the public sphere is the biggest news story of the early 21st century. We desperately need journalists to cover it. But as they grow more dependent on online publishing for their professional survival, their capacity to do this kind of reporting will disappear, if it has not disappeared already."

 

The really sinister bit, of course, is that even if you wrote the story then to get it out there you've got to play along with the very same game.

At the end of the day, its fast becoming true that the only difference between the two organisations pictured here is that the Stasi didn't have break out areas and football tables to make it all look fluffy and innocent.

The total scale of the focus is 0 to 1024, however focus is driven in increments of 10 (fast) or 1(slow) and depending on the lens there are around 20-25 'zones' for want of a better expression.

So if you use the 'fast' control this means you go from closest to furthest possible focus in 20 to 25 commands and if you use the 'slow' command it will be 200 to 250.

Lenses on a speedbooster will have much coarser control and can often only be 10 'zones'.

 Trying to get anything smooth as well as precise requires some tricky stuff

Imagine driving your car if it could only go 60 miles an hour or 6 miles an hour.

My view is that if you want to do manual control of those lenses then its best to do it completely by wire (as in with an external controller) as its more predictable than interpreting manual moves of the barrel on the lens.

I'm wondering if there would be any love for a linear controller that was just on a fader to do that where there was hard stops at either end?

The problem with the 'real' (old) media is that instead of standing their ground and weathering the storm against 'new' media and actually upping their standards, they shit themselves and joined in.

You only have to look at the websites of traditional newspapers in the UK to see whats happened as they are culling more of their content from social media and trying to sensationalise it.

You regularly now see what 20 years ago would have been a disagreement between two anonymous people in a small town elevated to national 'news' because its so easy, cheap - and natural - for the new crop of journalists at these publications to source these stories and amplify them.

We now have a situation where there is a generation that hasn't grown up with any real depth or quality to the media that they are exposed to.

If 'real' media is now just a randomly compiled, delayed and watered down version of 'new' media then why the hell would anyone pay for it anyway when you can get the other stuff for free?

The future of online might actually be semi-offline for many of us as we seek higher quality of everything from journals, to music, to films but we will have to pay for it directly and properly.

If we want people who are providing the content to be serious then we have to be too and accept that we'll have to pay for it.

I think it is actually doable and the burnout that a large number of people are feeling about the internet could make the timing of it not far off.

The great thing about the internet can be that there is no filter between creators and consumers but sometimes we need to accept that that filter sometimes wasn't a bad thing.

These days, everyone wants to celebrate that the big corporate monsters of print, broadcast, music and film have been bypassed but to my mind they've now been replaced by corporates that are far, far more sinister.

1 hour ago, AaronChicago said:

Great example above @BTM_Pix

@Jonesy Jones Maybe try 1 and 2. I prefer 2 for anything under 35mm. 1 does really well for 50mm and up.

I've got a shoot today where I can do a quick A/B on a subject.

Yeah, that was on a Sigma DP3M which is 75mm equivalent and the 2 does feel a bit too much on that.

Only on stills but I just did a quick shot for you using the Tiffen Digital Diffusion FX 2

Frame and crop without filter on left side and same with filter on right.

21 minutes ago, Andrew Reid said:

Apple just did a very good thing -

Who trusts some shady ad company with their internet browsing history?

When your 'economic model' is more or less stalking then you deserve to have it sabotaged.

I would happily pay a subscription fee for an internet service thats free of this intrusive bullshit.

Sometimes 'free' is really way too high a price to pay.

Just now, mercer said:

Yeah... this is great! I'd love to pretend to be more cultured and discuss how I've always loved the surrealism of Crewdson's work set in a realistic world... but I'm not. Never heard of him until now and now he has an exhibition on my Instagram page.

But yes, the imagery is fantastic and right up my alley. His take on the familiar and the mundane creeps me out. I have to do some research now. I need to know the camera he uses?

The extent of my cultured critique of his work at that show was that I wouldn't trust him if I saw him at shop buying a shovel, plastic bags and some lime thats for sure !

I think I remember reading somewhere that he now uses a Phase One system.

Did some experiments yesterday using the DP3M and a Tiffen Ultra Contrast 3 to see if it smoothed things out a bit.

Contact sheet of some more from yesterday.

The GH5 ETC mode is certainly a thing of non-grumpinesss with that lens isn't it?

Crewdson's 'Cathedral Of The Pines' exhibition is currently on at The Photographer's Gallery in London and is worth a visit if you're in the area.

I think @mercer would enjoy this one in particular as I'm sure its a look he'd be into making if he just had the scores of crew and lights that Crewdson uses !

Sony turning up with the A9 but with no lenses for it has let them off the hook I think.

You've got to think that Canon have a full frame mirrorless ready and waiting and would've got it out ASAP if Sony had presented enough of a threat. That would have put Nikon in harm's way as I don't think they are in as advanced a position as that with theirs.

And no wonder they haven't got very far along with it if their R&D director is spending most of his days on Facebook looking for new ways to pimp his Df

Its alright, Nikon have put last week's PR clangers behind them by coming up with a whole different one to start this week with.

A Nikon director of R&D has given quite a candid interview in China and come out with this :

"Nikon customer base is very broad, from novice to enthusiasts to prosumer to professional, that’s Nikon’s advantage. Olympus, Sony and Fujifilm can only cover a small part of that. So far there is no professional using their products. So when they develop products, even like retro style, they only try to meet these people and that’s only what they can do. Their customer base is limited anyway so they have limited view in developing products."

And concluded on this really inspiring note :

"...before A9 was introduced, Sony went through a lot failure internally. Nikon has a lot more failure experience than Sony."

https://nikonrumors.com/2017/09/15/new-interview-with-tetsuro-goto-from-nikon-full-frame-is-the-trend-if-nikon-will-go-mirrorless-it-must-be-full-frame.aspx/#ixzz4sy7LQksS

And I think @Andrew Reid response was just a pun on Ebrahim as in its a female so would be Ebra-her rather than Ebra-him 

1 hour ago, Jonesy Jones said:

I know the exact software you are referring to. Looked interesting when I saw it. But I'm looking for something before post. Right now I use Filmconvert which helps de-digitize a bit.

 

Sorry, I just meant as a way of appraising all of the filter effects and combinations before having to buy the physical versions  

Found the link to the software in the shop if anyone is interested in buying it online (they must have taken them off display)

https://www.cameraworld.co.uk/tiffen-dfx-v3.html

Tiffen used to do a piece of editing software/plug in that simulated all of their filters but its now discontinued.

I used to have a demo version of it and the annoying thing is that I saw it being sold off quite cheap (£50) at a camera store in London a few months ago and thought I'd pick a copy up but they didn't have any left.

Might be worth a scour on eBay for it as its sounds like exactly what you could do with to try different combos

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/845319-REG/Tiffen_DFXPCSV3_DFX_V3_PLUG_IN_FOR_PHOTO_SHOP_LIGTROOM_APERTURE.html

9 minutes ago, mercer said:

Okay to play the devil's advocate here... the boob enlargement ad is a European ad, correct? And isn't that "cheeky" humor popular in advertisements?

We've moved on a bit since Benny Hill you know!

The comparative aspect of it (body rather than camera) is particularly off in any era to be fair.

Mind you, the promotion from their Italian distributor for the D700 where Dad wants a dSLR and you get a free vacuum cleaner for Mum could've been straight out of the 70s

54 minutes ago, jonpais said:

So I'm in the middle of watching Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon (booed at Cannes)

I bet you were leading the booing as well you grumpy old man.

Too soon?

14 hours ago, Andrew Reid said:

 

 

".....I chose this guy in my visor, put his finger on the button and kept taking pictures while he fell..."

 

Its quite apt that the translation used the word 'visor' instead of 'viewfinder' as it does actually speak very accurately to the detachment of photojournalism when it seems that you are viewing the world through this protective barrier that it does separate you from it.

This is in no way condoning the triumphant tone of his description but in that moment I would say that the he was viewing those falling bodies with the same detachment as he would have if it was the falling debris. Behind his 'visor' he would have been seeing objects to be framed and tracked with no differentiation between human and non-human form. His response is that of a technical and artistic job done well and that is something that is unfortunately to me is both deeply troubling yet also very relatable.

It is a really difficult issue and one made totally abhorrent by his triumphalism but at the same time its quite a fascinating if troubling and disturbing phenomenon of this detachment that happens when you raise that camera to your eye.

It actually troubles me to the extent that I've just took out a couple of paragraphs of this response with some of my personal experiences of this because its an issue that is maybe too nuanced to try and go into in this thread. It definitely would end up being happy hour at Pete & Bernie's Philosophical Steakhouse.

The bottom line is I understand where the photographer was coming from but the zeal with which it was relayed and then used as a promotion by the Nikon guy was utterly out of order.