KENDALL CAMERA CLUB BLOG FEED

For a long time, I considered myself a manual focus purist—not because manual glass should strictly be used manually, but because there simply wasn't a way for me to autofocus it with my existing systems. It really isn't much of an issue; with constant practice, gauging distance and nailing critical focus can become second nature. But once you stop practicing, it takes some time to get that muscle memory back. It becomes increasingly frustrating because it means I can't fully enjoy the output of my favorite M lenses, especially with the near misses. [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Zhen Siang Yang)

Viltrox has announced four full frame autofocus primes for L-mount, the AF 14mm f/4 Air L, AF 20mm f/2.8 Air L, AF 40mm f/2.5 Air L, and AF 50mm f/2 Air L, all of which go on sale today at prices from $168 to $199. The heaviest of the four weighs 205 g.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

Since the inception of the L-Mount Alliance, there has been a gap in the market for affordable ultra-wide angle lenses. With the available options, you could either purchase an affordable lens that completely lacked autofocus or invest in an autofocus lens that was decidedly not cheap. The launch of the Viltrox AF 14mm f/4 for L-Mount drastically changes that landscape. This pocket-sized ultra-wide opens up an incredibly lightweight, budget-friendly autofocus option for Panasonic Lumix, Sigma, and Leica shooters.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Zhen Siang Yang)

After about 40 years of photography, the biggest change in my work has nothing to do with cameras, lenses, or the transition from film to digital. It’s what I look for when I’m out with my camera.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Simon Burn)

Wilson Alwyn Bentley made the first photograph of a single snow crystal on January 15, 1885, in an unheated shed behind his family's farmhouse in Jericho, Vermont. He was nineteen, a few weeks short of his twentieth birthday, working a bellows camera bolted to a microscope on a frame he had built himself. He held the exposure long enough for the crystal to keep its shape in the cold, and when he developed the plate he had something no one had managed before: a real photograph of a snowflake. [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

Evoto has attracted a lot of attention in the past 5 years or so. When you consider Adobe’s decades-long domination of the editing and retouching space, that is a major accomplishment. Today, Evoto has announced a major update with a variety of new culling and editing improvements for photographers. It even includes an Asset Hub designed to help photographers make money. I attended the press event in NYC today, and here is my report from the event.    [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by John Ricard)

Jumping from 4x5 to 8x10 film means bigger negatives, longer focal lengths, slower shutters, and a bill that climbs fast with every accessory. Anyone weighing whether the leap is worth it will recognize the mix of excitement and sticker shock that comes with building a fresh large format kit from scratch.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

Digitizing film at home has always been a fiddly, annoying, time-consuming process, so discovering a system that makes it simpler has been a breath of fresh air.  The VALOI easy35 v2 is a system that simplifies the process of digitizing slides and negatives at home using your existing digital camera. [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Andy Day)

Limits can do more for your photography than any spec sheet, and a manual-focus rangefinder forces those limits on you in a way autofocus never will. That tension sits at the heart of one photographer's decision to bring a Leica to a job it had no business being at.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

The Canon R8 Mark II adds in-body stabilization, the single feature its predecessor left out, and packages it into a 24.2-megapixel full frame body aimed at people making their first jump up from crop sensors. That one change reshapes who this camera is for.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

The long-awaited expansion of the Viltrox Air series lenses has finally arrived for L-Mount users. Marketed on the promise of "Lightweight & Masterful Image Quality," the Air series has already built a solid reputation in the photography community. I know at least a few photographers in my local network who are massive fans of these lenses, primarily because of how exceptionally light and portable they are without compromising on the delivery of solid final images. [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Zhen Siang Yang)

Finding an incredible animal is one thing. Turning that encounter into an incredible photograph is something else entirely. In this new course, legendary wildlife photographer Richard Bernabe joins Scott Kelby to go through Richard’s own portfolio and talk about what makes the images work. From jaguars in the Pantanal and polar bears in Svalbard to lions in the Masai Mara, you’ll hear the stories behind the photographs and, more importantly, the decisions Richard made when creating them. Richard and Scott look at how shooting from a low angle can put you eye-to-eye with your subject, how gesture and light bring energy to a frame, and how the right crop can pull the viewer into the photograph. They also explore why getting...

Landscape photography carries a stack of advice so old and so repeated that most of it goes unquestioned, and a good portion of it falls apart the moment you test it in the field. Sorting the useful guidance from the myths changes how you spend your time, your money, and your mornings.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

Making a single black-and-white print used to take a locked room, a red bulb, and roughly eight specialized tools that have almost no equivalent on a modern desk. If you started shooting after the smartphone, there is a good chance you have never touched any of them, or seen them work. None of these were quaint accessories. Each one solved a real problem in the gap between the negative and the finished photograph, and together they formed a workflow that was slow, physical, and unforgiving. A print was something you built by hand, in the dark, one timed exposure at a time. [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

ACD Systems has released ACDSee Photo Studio Ultimate 2027, and the pitch is less about what the AI can do than about where it runs. Face detection, keywording, masking, super-resolution, and image similarity all process on your computer, with no images or facial data leaving it. The four new generative tools do reach for the cloud, and the company says those requests travel through servers it controls and are wiped a week later.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

The Mac mini with M5 Pro chews through 4K footage and reads from its SSD in an instant, from a silver box 5 inches square that never once became audible on my desk. It is the fastest small desktop Apple has built, and for photo and video work, it is the best value in the entire Mac lineup.  Apple sent me the following configuration: an 18-core CPU with a 20-core GPU, 48 GB of unified memory, and a 1 TB SSD. I spent a week running the work photographers and filmmakers actually do on it, including raw batches, 4K transcodes, a Resolve project, and hours of pinned all-core load. [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

Some of the best photography locations don't have a trailhead. Samuelson's Rocks—seven massive boulders bearing eight philosophical inscriptions deep in Joshua Tree National Park—is one of them. No trail, no signs, just open desert, a Milky Way overhead, and one of the most unusual night photography subjects in the American Southwest. Here's how I made the hike and created the shot, complete with a Perseid meteor for good measure.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Ken Lee)

Every photographer learns the rule of thirds early, then spends years collecting other guidelines that promise a more balanced frame. The question worth sitting with is which one actually deserves top billing, and whether the real answer is a technique at all.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

Underexposing to save your highlights sounds like the safe move, but it drags your entire image down with it. Darker files, harder tracking, more editing, and photos you don't enjoy looking at all come from overcorrecting a problem that has a much better fix.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)

Fog changes a landscape into something you can actually shoot, but the fog alone won't hand you a photo. You still have to find a subject worth pointing the camera at, and then you have to work it.   [Read More] Original link(Originally posted by Alex Cooke)