There is always something affecting the worldwide camera market. Will it be the shortage of semiconductors this time?

One of Kirk's chip die photos done for Motorola back when they were all about 

semiconductor production and had large fabs working around the clock in 

Austin, Texas to supply all kinds of industries.

 There are two scenarios that give me pause right now. Both are related to the production of high tech gadgets as well as mission critical tools like cameras. One is a world wide shortage of many different kinds of micro processors, micro controllers and various other families of semi-conductors. Ford and GM have both announced slowdowns in production of new vehicles because they are unable to source the semiconductor parts they need to complete vehicles. It's only a matter of time before the same shortages hit Tesla, Dell and Apple. I presume the short supply is already affecting high end camera production which is largely about assembling silicon parts together with a lens mount. 

It's easy to predict that we'll start having back-order issues in short order. It may be one of the reasons behind the two month backlog of Leica Q2 cameras. It may already be the primary reason camera makers like Panasonic have fallen behind on lenses already announced on their product roadmaps. 

But a bigger concern in the long run is the increasing aggression of the mainland Chinese government against Taiwan. The Chinese military have stepped up all manner of harassment against the tiny island nation in their quest to assimilate it back into communist control and ownership. But some of the biggest and most advanced makers of semiconductor components are located on Taiwan. Should open hostilities break out companies like Apple, and other computer makers, and car and truck makers, will run out of supply for parts for new laptops, iPads and, eventually, phones. Not to mention Ford F150 trucks; which would cause widespread panic in Texas.

Any disruption measured in time longer than days will roil the markets for just about all the fun toys we love. From cars to TVs, to our beloved cameras and lenses. 

I'm not sure how firmly this is showing up on most people's radar but in the case of a company like Apple a month long glitch in critical supply would cause panic in the stock market which might retard any economic recovery and cause a net loss of hundreds of billions of dollars of investor capital. And a lot of jobs.

The current shortage seems to have stemmed from the quick shut down of demand for the first six to eight months of the pandemic. Ramping up for increased production is complicated and takes time. 

But a shooting war between China and Taiwan would result in a disruptions the likes of which we haven't seen in a long time. And the fall out will include a lot more than delivery times lines for cameras and lenses. 

Just something to think about. As if we don't have enough to worry about....

Am I missing something? Do you have additional (factual) information that might make me less anxious about the whole situation? Share it please. 

The Hot Pursuit of Excellence or the careful testing and adaptation to what you already own?

I recently went through the exercise of trying to decide if it was worth it to me to buy a new zoom lens. My foray into Leica SL cameras started pushing the buttons of avarice in relation to that company's one and only standard, SL zoom lens; the 24-90mm f2.8-4.0. At a lusty $5500 even the most spendthrift among us might take pause and at least investigate to see if there are more rational options. 

Of course, the obvious choice is the lens sitting on my desk and currently muttering derisive remarks about my lack of credit given to its exemplary performance. That lens would be the very, very good Panasonic Lumix 24-105mm f4.0. I've used it over and over again and have always been happy and satisfied with the final results but the powerful lure of Leica legend always makes me wonder if their lens will supply just that tiny bit more "edge" or "magic" that will elevate images and make each image sweeter. 

It's interesting that I find myself so interested in the cameras and lenses at a time when there are still so few real opportunities to push the creative envelope and do the kind of work that might elevate a great lens above a pile of really, really good lenses. But as I've read recently so much of our feelings of boredom, lethargy and lack of initiative are a direct result of our feelings of lack of control. We're not completely in charge of our ability to go to the places we want to go or to photograph the people we want to photograph in the same way we did before the pandemic hit. This translates directly into our feeling as though certain potentials of control have been taken from us. 

On a whim I bought an older, 28-70mm f3.5-4.5 Leica Vario Elmar-R lens. It is well used and the built-in lens hood is floppy and rattles. I wondered if I could get some of the character that gets credited to Leica lenses in general with this lens. The price was too good to pass up so I added it to the collection and bought an "URTH" brand adapter to mate it to the SL body. 

It's interesting to research some of these lenses and learn just how intertwined camera makers and other brand lens makers were (are?) intertwined. This particular lens is a re-badge of a Sigma lens from the early 1990s. Leica's input apparently extended only to the cosmetics of the exterior design but didn't involve any optical design input. Perhaps the lens coatings are different from the Sigma version but that's just conjecture on my part. So, essentially you are putting an older lens from what was at the time a very second tier lens maker on the front of a much more modern and capable camera. What could go wrong? 

Apparently this lens suffers from mediocre build quality and that's evident in the floppy, built-in lens hood. At some point Leica decided to find a company that might do a better job with the basic lens construction so they partnered with Kyocera and also took a more direct hand in the mechanical build quality; but the optical design stayed the same. The newer version is NOT the version I have....

I got tired of the lens hood self-retracting and rattling around so I extended it to its full position and gaffer taped it there. Then I went out and shot with it. One thing you can say about the lens is that it appears very sharp and contrasty in the middle of the frame. Another thing you can say about the lens is that the geometric distortion at the edges of the frame is very, very high at 28mm and vacillates all through the focal length range. Ending up with above average pin cushion distortion at the long end. 

And, in my first tests I found the lens to have oddly manifested vignetting. With extremely dark corners that were hard to correct; if they could be corrected at all. I compared it with the Lumix 24-105 and found the later to be so much better. So I stuck the older lens in a drawer and ignored it for a while. 

But at some point this last week I woke up in the middle of the night and wrote down, on a small sketch pad, "faulty hood." and went right back to sleep. Yesterday I re-visited the 28-70mm and also looked around the web at the very few samples I could find from this lens. I wondered if my middle of the night writing was somehow intuiting the issue. I took off all the tape and pulled the lens hood into its fully retracted position and re-taped it there. I took some shots around the house and noticed that the aberrant vignetting had vanished. There was still the usual vignetting of a lens of this type, and it becomes more apparent it a time when most new lenses are corrected for vignetting in the camera software. But it was nothing like the bizarre vignetting I was experiencing before. 

I decided, after photographing several lawyers during the work day, to go back to the downtown area and take some test shots with the newly "modified" 28-70mm lens. At the end of my experiment I found that the lens still distorts like crazy --- but I never expected that to change. It's pretty easy to correct in post processing so I don't worry about it. But I really don't worry about it because it's not a lens I'd chose to use for exacting architecture for clients... The vignetting, however, was massively better and completely correctable in Lightroom. 

I do like the look of the the colors and the acutance of the lens. I understand that it was designed to have more contrast and to only match the needed resolution of film at the time but the impression of sharpness for so much content that hits the web makes this lens seem more modern than it otherwise might be. 

The vignetting clears up almost in a linear progression with stopping down. By f5.6 or f8.0 it's mostly gone and easily manageable with one of the Lightroom sliders. 

To be frank, while I like playing with this small and likable lens it's really the great performance of the 24-105 Panasonic lens that quells my desire for the big, fat and pricey Leica lens. If I'm honest with myself there's probably never a use case which would dictate that I need the Leica lens. I can't think that any client would see a demonstrable difference between the Leica and the Lumix in real world use. But the expensive lens and all its promise hovers around in an orbit just on the edge of my consciousness, waiting for a moment of weakness, a glitch in my fiduciary logic, to pounce and ingratiate itself into my camera system like an invasive species of bamboo. 

Till then, I guess I'll get along well enough will all the other toys in the collection...

P.S. I thought I should explain the silly and over the top posters below. 

When I was on the 23rd story of a downtown office building photographing an attorney I looked out one of the windows and saw, down on Colorado and Third streets, a big crane with a nine-light (giant cinema fixture) on the front of it and a gaggle of movie grips trying to look cool, professional and on the ball surrounding said crane. I knew they were movie grips because they were busy attaching sheets of color correcting gels to the lighting fixtures. And they had the little, worn grip pouches hanging off their belts. And the production company T-shirts, mostly in black. And the black, cotton baseball caps, ala Ron Howard. 

When I came back downtown to do my lens test with the 28-70mm Leica I walked over to that area and conferred with the intelligence experts out in the field. Those would be the two young guys running the valet parking station across the street. They had the scoop. Austin is currently home to filming the re-boot of "Walker Texas Ranger" and the production company is using a number of downtown locations for the effort. These posters went up on the first day of shooting and are nothing like the usual posters downtown. They are obviously a movie art director's idea of punk rebellion coupled with dated commerce. 

The production had also taken over on the store fronts on Third St. and created a canopied entry for a fake business. On every corner was a large grip truck with grips hanging out smoking and desperately trying to look like the prevailing stereotype of a movie crew. I thought the posters were funny and photographed them. Nobody seemed to mind me being in their (temporary) space. It's almost always interesting...

 

The kind of photography I'm missing these days.

 Over the years assignment photography has gotten more and more controlled and to the point. We get a brief about the project, maybe some samples or comprehensive layouts, and then we work to deliver something that exists only in a very narrow envelope. I understand that this is an "efficient" use of time and resources and that people are in a rush but there are other ways of working and those are the ways I miss. 

I like this off hand photograph of actor, MATT McGRATH as Sergei Pavlovich Diaghliev in the late Terrence McNally's last play. McNally came to Austin to produce his final piece, Immortal Longings back in 2019. 

I made it a habit, back when the theatre was open and running, to drop by the early rehearsals and try to get some interesting shots that we might use for human interest stories and stuff like that. Maybe short teasers for the news outlets...

In these visits I didn't have a brief, there were no expectations of any particular sort. I'd stay for an hour if the rehearsal was slow and draggy or multiple hours if there was constantly changing visual stimuli. It was totally up to me. And since I was hanging out at the early part of previously unproduced plays I had no idea of how the action would flow or even what to expect.

Occasionally I would read the script in advance but not usually. 

It was early Fall of 2019 when this play was being produced. It changed a lot throughout the process. Even after the first week's "soft" opening the script was being cut or edited or added to between shows. A wild process when compared to commercial work. On the evening I dropped by I was still working with Fuji cameras and I was particularly interested in the 56mm f1.2 lens and how it rendered images. 

I tried to project a low energy, anonymous persona and I tried not to engage anyone while I was shooting. More of a "fly on the wall" sort of perspective. I'd see something I liked and I would shoot a few frames. Then I'd put my camera down at the end of its strap and wait, passively, for something to change or build or even fall apart. It's the only way I know of to get really authentic working photographs. Stuff that doesn't look set up because it's not. 

We used to do something like this process with conventional clients as well. We'd come into their location and treat the project like anthropology. I'd walk around and just look for images that told small stories. Expressions, details, gestures, etc. 

It seems that now we have shot lists, tight schedules, and we have to hurry through them. And when we finish the clients head for the doors and scatter. It's not just a reaction to the pandemic because the "adventure" of advertising photography had been heading in this direction of "cut and dry" non-engagement for while. 

A fantasy I used to have earlier in my career would be getting hired to do a historic documentation of a major company like Dell or IBM (in its earliest days) where one would work in the same way that the White House photographers worked (pre-Trump). Which was with day-to-day and hour-by-hour access in an attempt to create a visual history of an administration. Or the early history of an important company.

We used to do more of this but I guess in today's efficiency obsessed arenas, and with clients who demand total control, the casual, photojournalistic style of documentary photography is failing quickly. 

Too bad. I really liked it. It was the magic ingredient for visual story telling. "It" being time spent exploring and photographing whatever catches your eyes...

From earlier or later on the same evening. 

We're updated! We're updated! Thanks Panasonic!

Leica SL + Sigma 65mm f2.0. 

I've been a big fan of Panasonic's full frame, S1x series of cameras from the moment they hit the market. There is a place in the inventory for each of the three models if you are the kind of commercial photographer who routinely handles wildly different projects. If you asked me to name a favorite I'd be hard pressed to pick. The S1 is a basic, 24 megapixel camera which was, up till today (for me) a really good stills camera and a decent, basic video camera. That all changed today with the arrival of a firmware update to 2.0. If you upgraded your S1 with the SFU video package in the past your camera will now provide 5.8K video, cinema style video (17:9 aspect ratio) and much more. It already writes 4K as 10 bit, 4:2:2 to an internal card but now you can take advantage of much higher resolution files as well. 

Couple that with the ability to use the microphone interface and the ability to write files to external recorders and the S1 becomes are very, very good video camera as well. Almost as good for most video projects as the S1H. If you have an S1 sitting around the newest update is available at the Panasonic Lumix support site right now. And, bottom line, the body is nearly bulletproof while the high ISO performance is at, or close to, the top of the 24 megapixel camera heap right now. 

The newest firmware is most valuable for users who've done the video SFU-xx upgrade which costs $200. But in my experience it's well worth it. The reasons now to splash out for an S1H are for the unlimited recording times with even the biggest and most processor intensive files as a result of it active fan cooling. The ability to shoot video in All-I configurations is great as is the inclusion of an AA filter to cut down on moiré in many instances. Some people are also partial to the swiveling rear screen but most video producers are making use of external monitors in their video set ups. The S1H also got a big firmware upgrade a few days ago with added Black Magic Raw capability (you'll need an external recorder for this) which joins the Pro Res Raw capability, already in progress. With the new firmware (2.4) for the S1H you can shoot 6K raw files in two different formats. Nice for the people working at the highest levels of production....like making movies for Netflix. 

Even the S1R got some upgrades but since it also got 5K+ video in an earlier update the new changes were either small or hidden fixes, under the hood. 

I downloaded the newest firmware for all three of the cameras and had all three of them updated and ready to go in about 15 minutes. No glitches. I am thankful that Panasonic is doing such a great job extending the  utility and relevance of cameras that are, in some cases, nearing the two year mark since introduction. The great thing is that most of the upgrades are actually real features instead of the usual practice from other makers of fixing stuff that was broken or iffy on the initial launches. With Panasonic's S1 series (and the S5) it's like getting more stuff for free. And who doesn't like that?

I guess it's time to write myself a video project and get busy shooting with the newly enhanced tools. But then, there's always the SL2. I guess I've got to do some trials and see which of the cameras makes the files I like to look at the most instead of just spec-believing. At any rate I welcome all new firmware upgrades, be they in lenses or camera bodies. Keep em coming. 

I've always been a fan of deck plate. It seem so....functional. 

And I like the patterns it makes in photographs. 

All images above created with the Leica SL and the Sigma 65mm lens. 

Go look for your camera's latest update. Not only do most updates add or improve features, most also fix small glitches in performance and don't get formal mentions....

 

Enjoying the color rendition of an older sensor and the Sigma 65mm f2.0 lens.

There's something about the color rendering of the sensor in the Leica SL that's different from the images I used to get from Sony sensors. Maybe it's just a different way of interpreting color. I'm not really sure. But I like it. A lot. And the 65mm focal length is such a joy to work with. It's a nice pair. 

Nice light. ISO 50. 

 

Reprint time again. This time around we're looking at a Phase One MF digital camera from 2008. Here's the article I wrote about it. This was "pre-blog." I thought you might enjoy reading and seeing how far the industry has progressed since then.

A re-publication of an article from 2008.

A Medium Format Digital Camera With Enhanced Handling.  Phase One Delivers The Goods.

by Kirk Tuck

In the past few years medium format digital cameras have captured a smaller and smaller share of camera sales worldwide for two reasons:  1.  They seem to come equipped with extravagant price tags... and, 2.  They handled, for the most part, like the Frankenstein inventions they were.  The communication between the removable backs and the traditional camera bodies was kludgy and slow.  Autofocus implementation seemed like an afterthought and the “mix and match” batteries had the endurance of a chain smoker trying to run a marathon.  It’s little wonder that many photographers chose to go with high megapixel DSLR style cameras like the Canon 1DS mk3.

But in 2008 the landscape is beginning to shift. Prices seems to be dropping even while pixel counts are rising while at the same time the engineering that matters is getting better and better. The Hasselblad 3D camera system seems focused on providing the tightest integration on the market.  Its totally closed system of backs, body and lenses is a contrast to the less integrated but far more open system that was introduced in the form of the Hy6 body being used by Sinar, Leaf, and Rollei.  The problem with the Hasselblad system is that it is closed to outside vendors which prohibits you from being able to select the digital back you might really want.  An issue with the Hy6 systems is that, in order to provide the most “open” system, the integration of lenses, bodies and backs is less elegant.

The bottom line is that the camera bodies, lenses and support accessories are actually the foundation or platform for an efficient and effective medium format system.  These parts should be a long term investment that stands the test of time while  allowing for backs to be upgraded as technology improves.  Nikon and Canon understand that your real, long term investment will be in their lenses, not in their camera bodies.  Now the medium format digital camera makers are starting to come around.  And the competition will start to heat up.

Mamiya and Phase One have teamed up to take advantage of a truly open platform that promises to run over the competition by dint of having a wide and growing vertical integration of options for medium format shooters.   Phase One makes incredible, high density digital camera backs.  Mamiya makes one of the most comfortable high performance medium format camera bodies on the market today.  Bundled together the combination is formidable competition for everyone in this small market.  And it’s not an entirely exclusive relationship.  If technology moves on and the Phase One back becomes obsolete the open nature of the camera system leaves ample space for you to choose replacement backs from a range of suppliers, including Leaf and even Mamiya.  Kudos to Phase One and Mamiya for establishing a clean upgrade path. 

A fun part of camera reviewing is unwrapping the packages after the FedEx truck trundles away.  I recently reviewed a passel of Leica stuff, including an M8 and four lenses.  They arrived rattling around in a box in a sea of styrofoam peanuts and nothing else.  No manuals, no  original boxes.  No additional protection.  By contrast, the Phase One camera system arrived in a really bulletproof manner:  A solid cardboard box, filled with the requisite peanuts, held a solid hard case.  Inside the highly protective (and water/weatherproof ) case was a system obviously packed by a truly obsessive person.  Every piece had its own compartment and the overall package included manuals, cables, and even a memory stick with an extensive user’s guide.

Here are the basic details of the Phase One camera I tested:  The camera itself is a rebadged Mamiya AFD3 camera body.  The back is Phase One’s latest 39 megapixel back, the 45+.  The back and the body looked like a matched set and featured the same matte surface finish.  The AFD3 is the fourth generation of the Mamiya 645 AF format camera body.  As a camera system that’s been on the market for well over a decade just about any flaw or shortcoming has been eliminated during its long evolution.  What is left is a camera that handles just about as easily as a Nikon D3 or a Canon 1DS xx camera.  The traditional camera functions were absolutely flawless and as easy to understand as just about any camera in the market today. I’ll be frank, I loved the body and the lenses more than any other medium format camera I have ever handled.  And that’s saying a lot since I’ve owned a slew of Rollei 6000 variants, many Hasselblads, as well as Pentax 645’s.  The Mamiya body represents the very best that medium format manufacturers have been able to design.  Your mileage may vary but not by much.

The only caveat I would have about buying the Mamiya camera body would be for users who need to be able to remove the pentaprism finder and replace it with a waistlevel finder or other accessory.  That doesn’t seem like a pressing priority for most photographers as even stalwarts like Nikon and Canon have done away with the removable finders that, in the past,  were always part of their professional camera bodies.

So,  thumbs up to the camera body, let’s move on to the lenses.  All the senuous body ergonomics in the world are meaningless if the glass doesn’t measure up.  I’ve compared it with the Zeiss glass I own for my Rollei system as well as the Schneider glass used in the Leaf camera system (Hy6) and at 100% on my monitor the Mamiya glass definitely makes the grade.  I worked with three lenses while testing the Phase One camera system,  a really incredible 28mm lens, a 75mm to 150mm f 4.5 zoom lens and the 80mm f2.8 “normal” lens.

The 28mm Phase One lens is, along with the digital 28 from Hasselblad, the widest production lens available for medium format digital SLR systems.  With a field of view that matches a 17mm lens on a 35mm camera this 14 element wide angle is a powerful optic.  This, along with the 45mm tilt shift lens offered by Phase One, should really appeal to architectural photographers who miss the highly corrected wide angles they used on their 4x5 view cameras.  The image quality of the 75 to 150mm Mamiya zoom blew away the output of my 75 to 150mm Schneider zoom for the Rollei while the 80 was sharp, well behaved, and a welcome relief from all the big, fat glass of the other optics.  While not silent focusing lenses with integral motors, the lenses were quick to autofocus and bitingly sharp at all medium apertures.  

There’s an additional advantage to the Mamiya system.  They’ve been making a wide range of autofocus and specialty lenses for their 645AF camera system for the better part of 15 years.  The landscape is literally littered with great used lenses at ridiculously good prices.  And all of these AF lenses, as well as many of the manual lenses from previous Mamiya systems, are usable on the Phase One body.  If you are so inclined you can also pick up a real, live film back and shoot your choice of slide, color print or black and white film!

For my money, the Mamiya AFD3 camera and lens implementation is close to perfect.  That leaves the digital back.  Here’s what I want from a digital back:  I want it to be so boring in actual operation that I don’t have to waste any mindshare worrying about it.  It should start up quickly, the menu and control options should be straighforward and easy to set,  it should be easy to shoot tethered, its raw files should be intelligently compressed and write quickly to disk, and the LCD screen should give me a good idea of what I’m capturing under all lighting conditions.  The back should be parsimonious with batteries and should not have any “nervous tics” or idiosyncrasies.  It should give me enormous, high bit depth files that brutally trump the resolution, color accuracy and other rendering characteristic of all smaller format cameras.

So, how does it stack up?  

Set up:  One click of its power button and the back springs to life.  It takes three seconds from button touch to open the menu.  All the back navigation is done with four silver buttons on the back and all the menus are straightforward and easy to understand.  I felt right at home with the back in the first half hour of operation.  Unlike other systems which offer a range of profiles and adjustments in nested menus the Phase One 45+ back sticks to the basics, “format, white balance, etc.”  The benefit?  You’re up and shooting quickly.  

Shooting tethered:  Here Phase One cheats.  They offer a big, fat fireware port (not one of those mini, four connector fireware pinholes) with which to tether the camera and then they provide you with one of the best software systems for tethering and raw conversion found on planet Earth right now: Capture One.  To say that tethering the camera and shooting to a Mac laptop is smooth and easy is an understatement.  Do it twice and it becomes as easy and fun as eating chocolate.  In six weeks I never lost connection with the back and never had a crash.

Writing with RAW:  Okay.  Each of these files opens up as a tiff that is over 120 megabytes but... sitting on the card, waiting to be hatched, they are a slim 33 megabytes.  Using Sandisk 4gb Extreme cards gave me a system that shot at approximately 1.5 fps and rarely left me waiting with a full buffer.  One thing I would love would be the option to shoot at a reduced file size as I don’t always need the full bucket of pixels for the kind of portrait work I do.  It’s a feature I always loved on the Kodak DSLR/n cameras.  They were capable of shooting raw files at 14 megs 6 megs and 3 megs.  It was a very underrated camera.…….

Chimping:  The LCD screen is fine in the studio and just okay out in the Texas sunlight.  I bring along my Hoodman viewing chimney along when I head outdoors and with that accessory in hand I was able to see the histograms and check relative light balances.  It’s no match for the three inch screen on the back of a Nikon D90 which costs a mere $999 but then the D90’s not really up to making a 17 by 22 inch print at 300 dpi with little or no interpolation either!  If you shoot tethered the LCD becomes a convenient “menu” screen while all serious evaluation gets done on your laptop.

Batteries:  Like the Leaf camera I tested several months ago the Phase One camera/back system uses two sets of batteries. One set of “off the shelf” double “A’s” powers the camera body and the autofocus functions while the back is powered by one of the ubiquitous and “not interchangeable with any other appliance” lithium batteries that manufacturers have become so fond of.  In six weeks of shooting I never had to change out the Kirkland brand, Costco double “A” alkaline batteries I in shoved into the camera handgrip.  The back was another story.  Depending on how often I checked the image on the LCD the battery for the digital back lasted for between 120 and 240 exposures.  As the back can also draw power from the firewire connection the short battery life isn’t problematic in the studio.  Location shooters will want to take at least three of the batteries with them on the road.  Another bright spot for the camera back was the included battery charger which can charge two batteries at a time and has a nice little info window for each battery indicating where the battery is in its charge cycle.  Cheers for an efficient and well made charger system.

If I were to use the Phase One 45+ back in its un-tethered mode often I would want to have a repair person whip me a up a cable and connector to use with a Quantum Turbo battery or Digital Camera battery for day long shooting.

Cutting To The Chase:  The image quality from the back was very, very good.  Having worked my way through the early generations of digital cameras my proclivity is to always use digital cameras at their lowest rated sensitivity.  I started using the Phase One 45+ at its calibrated ISO 50 setting but after reviewing my first test files I got braver and started playing with the sensitivity settings.  The back is flawless up to 200 ISO and even ISO 400 is amazingly clean.  I didn’t get to do too many long exposures with the camera but I did deliberately try it at 4 and 8 seconds and got back files that were essentially noiseless using ISO 100.

While Adobe ACR works well on Phase One 45+ files, yielding neutral colors and high sharpness, Capture One (the RAW conversion software created by Phase One for a wide range of camera raw files) renders files that are breathtaking.  Fine detail is more translucent while color is rendered with a more lifelike differentiation in tonality and subtlety.  But whatever your software choice for massaging your files you need to be ready for a totally different computing experience than you’ll likely have with something like a Nikon D3 file.  The Phase One files are huge once they are opened and operations that appeared seamless on my Intel processor Mac machine move a good bit slower with the Phase One files whether in ACR or Capture One.

Bottom Line:  There were no stumbles with the holistic Phase One system.  The camera is quite fluid and its operation becomes second nature within minutes of use.  The lenses are as good and as varied as any available for any of the other systems.  There is the added benefit of a decade and a half of lens development which means more choices at more price points.  The back is well behaved and plays quite well with the body.  And the Capture One software is the component that brings all the other pieces together and raises them to the next level.  In fact, Capture One is so good I now find myself using it with my Nikon files instead of the visually splendid but very interfaced challenged, Nikon Capture NX.

Would I buy the system?  If I were in the market for a medium format system I would consider the Mamiya/Phase One option for several reasons.  First, the open nature of the system is wonderful.  An entry level professional could opt for a lower priced system from Mamiya with the intention of moving up to one of Phase One’s better backs as his or her business grows.  Second, the feeling of integration makes the camera and back a joy to shoot.  It actually harkens back to the golden days of film when one could shoot more and think less about technology.  

Who Needs A Medium Format Digital System?  Many argue that today’s 21 and 24 megapixel cameras are “good enough” but nothing in the 35mm style comes close to equaling the look you get with the increased real estate of the Phase One sensor and the way larger format lenses “draw”.  This camera and back combination is the perfect match for any photography that requires very high production value or loads of detail.  In closing, this system (and its direct competitors) is the antidote for “good enough”.  It renews and supports our commitment as artists to aim for perfection.  Even if the only audience that really cares is ourselves!

Kirk Tuck is a corporate photographer in Austin, Texas who also writes books about photography.  His first book, Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography, has been a best seller since its publication.  His second book on Studio Photography Techniques is due out in the Spring of 2009, and he is currently hard at work on a third book about which he is very secretive.……..

Website:  www.kirktuck.com

Street corner mannequin #132. A different look.

 Leica SL + Sigma 65mm f2.0. Late afternoon.