A Brief Update

The posts made on this site are not scheduled, although they are not normally infrequent either. I am not looking to earn money or try to get thousands of visitors every hour, so I an be relaxed about when I do post.

There has been a slight gap in the last few weeks due to time constraints and a bout of heavy shooting. There will be more posts soon.

Watch this space.... :-)

Financial Times - Kodak and Chapter 11

In these posts I have made no secret of my love of film. I am not using analogue as an accessory to help me create a hipster look, I just like it.

While randomly surfing the ‘net this week, I found this clip on YouTube comparing film and digital. I think it was inspired by Kodak filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2012. I remember at the time a lot of people thought this would be the final nail in the coffin for film. Personally, I think this was a case of the media loving a bad news story. The film was published in 2015.

It was refreshing to see a different perspective. It was not a case of why one is better than the other. It was a comparison about their differences and possible futures. There were some interesting interviews as well, who I think all made worthwhile contributions.

Micro Four Thirds - Not to be Ignored

Like many photographers, I keep an eye on what is happening to our technology to see what is new and interesting. More importantly, are any of these things of interest or use to me.

I do not do product reviews as such, but this post covers something that I feel is interesting as a technological development.

A few years ago I moved to mirrorless from DSLRs. The main reason was to reduce the weight and bulk of my equipment. I have also found that when shooting in public, I do not seem to get noticed as much, which has many advantages. This is almost certainly due to the annoying (but in this case useful) perception that the bigger your camera the more professional you are.

When I made the switch, I decided to go with the APS-C size sensor. I did take a look at micro four thirds, but it was lacking for me at that time. However, in the present day, I do not think it should be overlooked.

The Olympus OM-D E-M5 MKII is a camera with an interesting feature set, and it is the first camera in this system to have made me look twice. It just about covers everything you would need in a general use digital camera at an enthusiast or even semi-pro level. I will not bore you with the features, although I have linked to the Olympus site in this paragraph if you wanted to take a look. They seem to have thought of just about everything, and that includes the accessories. That is not surprising, as Olympus are old hands at this camera making lark.

I do not think the sensors can be taken over 16 million megapixels, so I think the future will have to focus on image quality and camera design. That seems to be happening already.

When the time comes change my camera in the future, I will certainly take a look at this system and the models available. There are two big names behind micro four thirds, Panasonic and Olympus, and I do not see them throwing away all that research and development any time soon.

Two Film Manufacturers - One Resurrected

We have had a really mixed bag of weather this summer. When I have arranged to shoot something outside and the weather turns nasty, I cannot always put together an alternative. The end result of this dilemma can mean I end up going online for a while.

Sometimes these forays into the world wide web can be very productive. This week I discovered two film related sites that I was not aware of. Well, I say not aware, one I had heard of before, although I thought it was no longer making film. The other was new to me, but looks interesting.

The first is Ferrania film, who are in the process of recreation from the ground up as a film maker. This means they have the potential to survive if another company stops manufacturing as they will make their entire product on site from scratch. The factory is in Italy, and so far the progress looks promising.

The second one is the previously unknown manufacturer, and it is CineStill. I originally thought this was a film along the concept of LightWorks (I think that was the name) who used to buy up surplus cinema film stock and sell it as photographic film. The trouble with that was that the processing chemistry was very specialised and probably expensive as a result. CineStill film is C41 chemistry, which makes their product much more appealing. The only downside is that allegedly it has a backing to it that can mess up a labs chemistry. I will investigate that further.

I will not repeat what is on the respective websites here, but I have linked both sites above if you would like to take a look. My creative life does not revolve soley around film photography, I am just excited to see it is not as dead as I once feared.