Category Archives: photography

Look-a-Leica

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The A7CR finaly arrived:

Looks somewhat like a Leica M, but not really; I got the duotone version because it gives me a slightly nostalgic vibe due to similarity with my old Minolta X-300, which also had the silvery plastic on top.

I don’t know why everybody shits on the EVF. It’s perfectly fine; better, in fact, than the one on A7II. It’s smaller than the one on A7RV, but guess what, so is every other viewfinder out there, which is actually why I got the A7RV. They each have their own merit: A7RV is something I would take when I’m trying to get macro shots of bees. A7CR is something I would take when I’m looking for wideangle compositions and I don’t want to carry a huge brick. It’s something like Canon EOS 3 and Minolta X-300 or Leica M – in both cases you have the same film inside, but depending on what you need you can make either a light or a heavy setup.

Pocketable wideangle

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Israel and America struck Natanz nuclear facility in Iran.

In return, Iran struck Dimona, probably hitting scientists and technicians who work there, but not the nuclear reactor itself.

America and Iran are exchanging ultimatums as to what will happen if the other side doesn’t bend over.

Panic is starting over fuel prices.

Me, I’m testing the new Sigma 24mm f/3.5 DG DN, on the Sony A7RV because A7CR is still in the mail. It’s good that I bought it, because A7RV isn’t a light camera by any means. It isn’t big, but it’s heavy, quite on par with something like the Olympus E-1 dSLR which was basically made of aluminium ingot. A7CR is closer in size and weight to Olympus E-410.

The problem with using a wideangle as your walkaround lens is that everything is sharp, which means you compose scenes where one actually gets to see the whole scenery. That’s what you actually want when you’re a tourist and you want to show where you were, but when you take pictures of your back yard as I usually do, things get repetitive very quickly, as you take pictures of the same things again and again.

There are only so many times you can pull this off.

The lens itself is, as expected, sharp, with excellent colours and contrast, very resistant to flare and chromatic aberrations, and does everything great. It basically produces the same image quality as my Zeiss 16-35mm f/4, only stuck at the middle of its range, and much smaller and lighter.

This was in the town of Hvar; it did everything great, but I noticed that I was too accustomed to using 50mm and longer lenses; all the compositions I initially saw were details and cutouts, and 24mm was initially a shock. I recovered better than Biljana did with her RF 16mm f/2.8, after using nothing wider than 35mm for years. Ultrawide lenses are definitely a thing of their own, and an acquired taste. Yesterday, I continued testing it in nature, while Biljana returned to the 105mm macro.

As you can see, it’s essentially like using the iPhone main camera, only with image quality that would not fall apart on a big screen or a big print. It’s obviously not something I would use every day, because the most interesting parts of the scenery are the small details that catch the light, and not the whole thing. Still, there are things that work great with a wide angle.

And that’s exactly what this lens is for, because normally I would have something longer on the camera – 50mm to 135mm – and when a wider scene appeared, I’d photograph it with my phone, because of course I didn’t take the Zeiss with me because it’s heavy for something to carry around just in case. Well, this lens is for just such cases; it captures the image width of an iPhone, only with the resolution of 4×5″ large format Velvia scanned on a Heidelberg drum scanner. And it’s pocketable. And there are no stupid lens flare artefacts that are a standard thing on an iPhone.

Do I want to use a proper camera and a proper lens to emulate the look of an iPhone? Well, there’s not necessarily that much wrong with the iPhone image, if you want everything to be sharp. I captured many good images with that camera, but the problem arises when I come home and see what that image looks like on a big monitor, and detail falls apart, shadows fall apart, and the whole thing looks overprocessed in the worst way. But the 24mm image itself is definitely something that sometimes works great.

The answer to “can’t you just do it with the iPhone?” is of course I can, and on downsized pictures for the web you probably can’t see the difference, but I can. Also, with proper equipment, I can at any point make huge prints for an exhibition. With iPhone pictures, that would not work so well.

 

Cringe

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I just watched a video from a famous photo YouTuber on how everything that resembles stuff that can be AI generated is now “cringe” – essentially, the highly polished, fancy stuff – and things that are lo-fi, such as film or photography that looks like it was taken with a phone, are “trending” now, and if you want to be “in”, you should do that now.

People who wanted to be “in” went to Epstein’s island to fuck children and worship Baal, or they waited in line to suck Weinstein’s cock. Makes you think that something might be inherently wrong with trying to fit in with the cool crowd, following trends and doing “whatever it takes” to succeed.

I hate fake people. I see them everywhere – in photography, politics, business, spirituality. They all know what you need to say and do to project a certain impression. Even “being authentic” is a thing that’s routinely faked.

So my answer to this newest trend of “avoiding cringe” and “being authentic” is “fuck you and the horse you rode in on”. Fuck everything about you. Go find a trendy cock to suck somewhere and shut the fuck up. There is nothing cringier than the vacuous trend followers trying to fake authenticity because it’s trending. Get fucked.

Tidbits and trinkets

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The Iran war is going as expected – every day more things are burning, while Trump is trying to short oil prices in order to keep up the pretence. There’s a reason why people traditionally didn’t do that – I mean, go into more debt in order to be able to sell valuable assets under the market price. Everybody who tried, got to go bankrupt and starve. For instance, you hear there’s going to be a bad winter. Instead of hoarding stuff in the basement, you sell everything under cost, because no reality is going to tell you what to do. The winter came, you died and became a cautionary tale. Something like America is about to. Yeah, reduce oil prices artificially. That will make people buy your oil because it’s cheaper, and you’re going to run out, and the low prices will make people not ration, so your supplies are going to run out even faster.

Instead of making popcorn, I’m playing with photography. Specifically, with the small and light setup that I ordered. The A7CR camera is still in the mail, but everything else arrived. I tested the FE 28-60mm f/4-5.6 lens; the small collapsible thing that comes in kit with A7C. It’s very good:

It also seems to work quite well on a macro extender, which is pocketable, so I can have both medium-range landscape setup and a closeup setup in very pocketable dimensions when I don’t feel like carrying the camera. Is it going to be as good as the A7RV? The sensor and the electronics in the A7CR are the same, and the FE 28-60mm, according to my test, is for the most part sharper than the FE 24-105mm f/4 G, except at 60mm, so yes, it’s going to be as good, at least on a sunny day when I work at f/8. Also, what can you do with some kit lens and extension tubes? Quite a lot, as it turns out:

Much more than I can do with an iPhone, that’s for sure. Those two were taken with Canon 5d, and EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5 on macro extension tubes. I actually preferred that setup to EF 85mm f/1.8, because it was lighter, and the lens created a very nice glow wide open, which made the pictures look more magical.

So, that’s what I’m doing while waiting. Beats popcorn.