Anonymous Photographer with View Camera...

 

Is Panasonic the most responsive camera maker today? Or did they just scramble to fix a big mess up? Hmmmm.

 Back on November 22nd (2020) Panasonic rolled out firmware upgrades for all three models of their S1(x) cameras. Along with the assortment of added features such as 5K video in the S1R, they made major upgrades to their auto focusing capabilities which were intended to make the cameras much faster and better at all manner of AF. But there was just one teensy-tiny problem; the upgrade basically broke all of the cameras' autofocus when used in non-continuous lighting ( LED, Fluorescent, etc.) which manifested itself in a dramatic way. 

When you attempted to focus a scene lit by those light sources the view in the EVF was a bright, flashing mess and the camera basically gave up focusing entirely. At first I didn't experience this because I was mostly shooting in daylight where there was no issue. 

I was made aware of the problem on the L-mount forum on DP Review. Once informed I walked into a fluorescent lit environment and was instantly able to duplicate the issue. A few intrepid camera testers discovered that having the 120 fps refresh rate set in the EVF exacerbated the problem and that reseting the refresh rate to 60 fps was helpful. But the problem was still there, even if diminished a bit. 

The same bug in the firmware hit all three of the camera models; the S1, S1R and the S1H. As I'm not booked on anything for paying clients right now I didn't descend into sheer panic mode but I've been carefully watching to see when Panasonic would rectify this really huge stumble. The cameras were rendered almost entirely unusable by this flaw and I think anyone invested in the system and heading into any mix of holiday projects must have been sweating bullets. You might be able to "get by" with the 60 fps "fix" but if you've spent well over $10K on Lumix gear I don't think "get by" is much delivery on the promise of the system being a "professional" tool set. 

A glance through the inter-webs this morning let me know that now, one month after their catastrophic misstep, Panasonic has delivered newly updated firmware. It's 1.7 for the S1, 1.7 for the S1R, and 2.3 for the S1H. I've done some preliminary tests with some old and nasty fluorescent fixture I have on hand and it looks to me like the issue is resolved. More testing will be required so I'll make a point to go back this evening to one location I stumbled across that made my viewfinder flicker and pulse like strobe lights at a bad night club. Only then will I give my final stamp of approval. 

So, is a month fast for an emergency firmware update? Was it a laudable effort at fixing something? I guess so but I can't understand how a firmware update that breaks such an important feature got out of the lab in the first place. I guess the intern who tests these things was on vacation...

Just wanted to let everyone know who might be affected. Hopefully this new update will fix the flicker without taking away the two steps forward we got in our camera's focusing speed and accuracy. 

If you have an S1 then this is a good place to start: https://av.jpn.support.panasonic.com/support/global/cs/dsc/download/ff/dl/s1.html

If you are looking for the S1R or S1H update then just use the link above and add the correct letter to "S1" near the end of the link. 

Back to work on the Fuji X-100 V. Much to learn.

Okay. Let's give this popular camera a run through. X marks the spot.

Shooting into a convex mirror out on the streets late at night. So, I've opined for years about how I'd love to use a Fuji X100 xx but I could never get past the 35mm equivalent focal length lens bolted onto the front of the camera. A friend reminded me that I could always use the "digital tele-converter" that's in the menu to get either a 50mm or 70mm frame and I thought that might be cool, especially since the sensor is now 26 megapixels instead of 12 or 16. 

Anyway, fate interceded. I was munching on some great sourdough toast this morning when a dental crown became dislodged from tooth #15 (upper left, back molar). The crown came off at 9:30 and I was on the phone to my dentist by 9:32. The crown was re-acquainted with my tooth and I was out the door of her office by 11:15. I'll need a new crown because this one was just worn out from 30+ years of chewing stuff. But we'll take care of that in mid-January. Anyway, my dentist's office is just around the corner from my favorite camera store and I already had the idea of dropping by to pick up a Zeiss 50mm one of my photo friends had seen on the used shelf and dropped me a note about. 

But for some reason I've been compulsively reading about the Fuji X-100 V for the last couple of weeks and when I walked into the camera store I took a cursory look in the used mirrorless camera showcase and there sat a mint, almost unused, chrome version, X-100 V. I forgot all about the Zeiss lens and fell into bargaining for the best price possible on the Fuji. By lunch time I was back at my desk with the Fuji reading the owner's manual online. Yes, I picked one up. I couldn't resist. The price was right. The timing was good. And I know the boss at my company would be more than happy to give me this camera as my year end,  Christmas bonus. After all, I've been good and have written many blogs for the company this year...

I thought I might be a little lost with a new camera but I have owned a huge part of the Fujifilm camera and lens catalog from time to time, including the short-lived ownership of a brand new Fuji X-100 T. 

( which I was not too fond of ). The menu is not much different from that of the XH-1s or the XT3s I was playing with a couple of years ago. But still, every camera has it's idiosyncrasies so I thought I should take it out and play with it. 

Accounting obligations got in the way of a daytime shoot. The post office was murder. I should have stayed in my pajamas and just wired everyone their cash instead of being such an old school, check writing buddy-duddy. But around 5:30 I closed the lid on the accounting laptop, grabbed the new camera and a fully charged battery and went for a walk through downtown. 

It's early times with the X-100 V but I can say that I really think I like this model. We'll see after some good light and good weather shooting. Here are a selection of photographs I was able to grab before dinner. All very strange images but I seem to be stuck in an obscurity loop lately. I'll work my way out of it. That's something for tomorrow. 

 

The store windows are better at night. Bring that camera that does great high ISO along with you....

I left the house as the sun was setting and drove back into downtown. I was tired of chillin' out in the suburbs, looking at the decorations someone paid to have someone else put up on the trees and the facades of their comfortable homes. I wanted to see people walking around, looking in shop windows; couples holding hands, that sort of thing. 

It's interesting to walk down the sidewalks right now. Usually it's dark and boring after the natural lights go down but at this time of the year all the trees on Second St. are wrapped with white lights and the few shops that are still weathering the downturn have put some fun stuff in their windows. It's mostly welcoming and lively.

It was cool and the weather was calm yesterday. I guess if we had a history or culture of sweater wearing here in central Texas then we could authentically call this "sweater weather." But people were still in shorts and light jackets, still trudging around in sandals or flip-flops, and still drinking their coffees mostly iced. 

I like the domestic scheduling these days. At my house we've kind of honed in on a 7:30 dinner time. The sun sets a bit before 6:00 pm. That gives me an hour an a half to walk around in the twilight and afterglow. I find myself just breathing in how the city smells and feels, and what the changing light does to familiar pathways. In some ways it's like a scenery change in a slow moving play. A play with very little dialogue. 

When I find stuff like this to photograph I can't understand why there are so few people in the downtown area walking around with their cameras. I mean, after all, we are the 13th largest city by population in the USA now. Where are the photographers all hiding?

I brought along my best high ISO camera; the Lumix S1. The camera and the 85mm f1.4 together are pretty effective for shooting large and small stuff in low light. Sometimes I shoot stuff just to see what it will look like when the background goes goushing (I made up a word) out of focus while I'm working close and wide open. I like it. It's nice. 

And I love the way the little robot turned out this time, now that the main lights for the scene are the ones adjacent on the tree. A tree that has its own fiber optics sprigs...

Nice. 

Last night Belinda made veggie wraps. Fresh tortillas tinged brown by some quality time on the griddle wrapped around fresh roasted vegetables and slathered with goat cheese. A nice, green salad with just the barest hint of vinaigrette and a bottle of Bordeaux to make the goat cheese sing. Not quite traditional holiday fare but tasty nonetheless. 

I hope the weather is treating you well and you have many opportunities to get those cameras out and stretch those legs. Those lenses are not going to walk themselves.

Finally, this season, like every other season, is coffee season. We're in the thick of it. Bouncing between mail order packages of "breakfast blend" from Intelligentsia Coffee, Organic Columbian Supremo from (local) Trianon Coffee and cans of Illy medium roast. The kitchen usually smells like my construct of heaven. 

Interesting things I sometimes see when I'm out strolling at night. On Congress Avenue.

Even in Austin where we all have bumper stickers that read: "Keep Austin Weird" it's strange to see a giant, illuminated owl whose eyes change color, rolling towards you while flapping its wings. I had a Lumix S1 with me and that nearly new 85mm f1.4 Sigma Art lens so I thought I'd snap away. There were some other mechanical constructs rolling around downtown last night, including a sleigh pulled by six human reindeers but I never could get the shot I wanted of them. 

Just some inventive folks out spreading joy for the holiday season. God knows we need it.
 

Just a short post about a light. Yesterday was a full retro experience. But (groan) enlightening...

I've been trying to figure out how to store my newest gimbal. I wanted a solid case that would protect it while traveling to weird locations. I looked around the studio and spied an old, black Pelican case wedged under some Metro shelving. I hadn't opened that particular case in years but I pretty much knew it had some old light fixtures from a different age. I opened it up and found one Lowell Tota-Light (pictured above) and two Lowell VIP lights. All three are tungsten light fixtures that take 500 watt bulbs and have barn doors that fold up to protect the lamp. 

My instantly retrieved memory of these lights was about how often I burned my hands trying to handle them before they cooled off and how hot the rooms got when we had three or four of theses fired up to shoot ancient Sony Beta SP video. Since it was pretty cold outside yesterday and I wanted to set up a quick light for my on camera chat I decided to just put the Tota-Light on a C-Stand, put us a big diffuser and then see if the lamp still worked. It did. Well. And it kept me warm for a while.

Funny, we've more or less (collectively) relegated inexpensive "hot" lights to the trash heap of video production but yesterday's session reminded me about a few features that I'd more or less forgotten in the heedless pursuit of LED lighting at all costs. 

First of all, you can buy a used Tota-Light fixture for around $75 and a lamp for about $15. Aim it at a diffuser and turn it on and you've got an amazing amount of light in one small, inexpensive package. Bounce a 500 watt off the ceiling and you can evenly light up a small space. But there's more to it than quantity. Hot lights/tungsten halogens are very, very color accurate. There are no big spikes in their spectrum like there are in most inexpensive LEDs and nothing to correct. If you are matching lights from set to set you'll have no problem with hue or color temperature with your lights. They sit there at 3200° until the tubes burn out or you assistant bangs them around before they've cooled and kills the filament. 

They can also be (see the Total-Light) small and light and easy to use. 

When I shot some video yesterday I set up the light and set the camera at the tungsten bulb setting for WB. When I looked at the virgin footage with a vector scope enabled in Final Cut Pro X the light fell exactly on the flesh tone index line with no weird spikes or splintered. The white dot was centered and compact. Nearly a perfect white balance. No muss, no fuss. 

They do suck up electrical power. They do run quite hot. But damn they are color accurate and easy to use. 

No, not giving up on the LEDs now. The tungsten lamps are pricy and prone to having short and sad lives. But I'm not ready to jettison these three little lights. They've got some practical use left in them. 

Nice to rediscover stuff. 

Simple and quick. And color neutral. 

VSL reaches another (smallish) milestone. We've enjoyed 27,000,000 direct page views here at the blog.

The Borghese Gardens. Rome.

That's the tally from 4,761 published blog posts (plus any that I tossed away over the years for irrelevance or spite) and well over 50,000 comments from readers all over the world. It's been a lot of fun and kept my mind busy and my hands less idle during times of international financial collapse, the pandemic, personal family tragedies, and all kinds of anxiety producing mini-disasters. 

I've written blog posts on airplanes after midnight, in very strange and cheap motels sprinkled over the hinterlands, on an iPad in Berlin and once on an iPhone keypad while sitting out a blizzard in an airport in Toronto. Mostly though I tend to write blog posts first thing in the morning. And I tend to blaze through without an outline or a re-write, though I do go back through after I've finished writing and try to clean up  the grammatical errors and clumsy fingered misspellings. 

Pre-pandemic I'd get up early, write a blog post, head to swim practice and then meet my assistant in the parking lot at the swim club to head off for a day of client work. When I returned home in the late afternoon, if it was not my turn to cook dinner and clean up, I'd decompress from the day buy getting started on another post; usually a de-brief of my day's project. Now I just get up, swim and then write. I have other writing projects I'm working on after I get the daily blog out the door...

Since the median length of a post is around 2,000 words (give or take) my calculator tells me I've banged out something like 9,522,000 words over the last 11 years. That must be why my fingers feel most comfortable hovering and pecking over the keyboards. Glad I took a typing class in high school. Better than anything I learned subsequently.

I don't seem to write in a way that encourages much commentary on the site but I know I have a loyal family of readers here. I guess I could pepper my blogs with more opportunities to: list your favorite camera, tell us what you want for Christmas, encourage you to chime in on top ten lists, set up straw man arguments about the benefits or detractions of the latest current cameras, and make frequent predictions while asking you what you think of said predictions. 

All of these things are known tricks of the trade for bloggers who are determined to make their sites financially profitable. They also pepper the comment attractive posts with lots of affiliate links and even display ads. 

I watched one blogger shamelessly ask one of the "trigger" question which prompted, almost immediately, hundreds of comments. But that particular blogger loves to go in to study and parse and edit each comment. Almost a compulsion, and it puts him way behind the productivity curve vis-a-vis for getting interesting material out on a routine basis. But since I stripped the blog of monetization schemes I stopped being very concerned about using popular triggers. I'll just take the people who enjoy reading about photography and video. I also don't edit my own stuff. It's all first draft. Maybe that's why some posts are so long?

I am lucky. Most are happy to read and comment just at need. To correct me (hopefully gently) if I seem to be going off the rails. I like that. I never "edit" my commenters comments. I might banish a malignant comment to the pits of blogging hell but I don't presume to step in and clarify or correct my commenters. 

Sometimes I get affirming or informative direct e-mails. I don't mind that at all. Sometimes the one-to-one engagement leads to longer term friendships. (I'm looking at you Frank, Andy, Eric, Fred, Michael, Stephen, Sanjay, Greg, Abraham and others lost in the swirl of memory this early morning). I love it when that happens because we start with a basis of interest but it grows more interesting when personalized. One of my own best mentors is someone I met here years ago and I have coffee with him nearly weekly. He's a sage guide for impending retirement. A thoughtful artist.  A great guy too. 

Since I'm not editing, and only doing binary comment moderation, I don't waste a lot of unproductive time that I'd rather spend writing. But I was happy to see a couple of longer comments on yesterday's post. I always feel like I'm really putting myself out there when I do a video starring me. It's nice to get a longer and more considered comment. 

My current intention is to stay relevant until I hit at least 5,000 posts. That seems to be enough for anyone and it will take me at least another year to get to. Till then I'm committed to pounded out pieces about whatever I find interesting. I hope you'll continue to read. That's what makes it a happy process for me. 

I am enjoying the (very quiet) holidays and I hope you are too!  - Kirk