Part 3 of the Living in New Zealand series where I talk and post photos about my life and travels in New Zealand,
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A welcome home and a not so typical "review" of the Sony a7ii and the Zeiss 24-70.
It's been a month and a half since my birthday. Yes it was a special day, and not only because I turned 24 which is leading me to the 25 next year. That day something big happened, a crazy investment.
Everybody who follows my nonsense on twitter (@joanolleb) or in real life (poor you!, if you're reading this blog for the first time, welcome!) know that I call myself a film photographer because, well, I shoot film. Dah!
Yet this time something different came in the way (as if I hadn't spoiled it with the tittle and the picture). As I manage to find my place in the "pro" and the fine art world, I found that for the first one, speed and time are very important things as clients want extremely short time file turnarounds so after a little thinking and a big amount of craziness we headed to the camera store and yes, ended up with a Sony A7ii.
Yes I know it's not 40 gazillion mp nor shoots internal 4k. And so, what? 24mp is more than enough for the size of the prints I'll make and how the work needs to be delivered. Plus 4K it's cool, yes but yet again, for an assigment by now 1080 is what is mostly asked and if I needed something else I'd rent an a7Sii. So no problem. Plus for my videos I'm more than covered with this beast. The S-log recording and the cine modes are just bliss.
Enough of this boring text let's dive straight to what we all want: How does it feel? Do I like it?
Oh with it I bought the Sony Zeiss, Zeiss Vario-Tessar 24-70 f/4 because I thought it's a nice tool to work because for my personal photos I'll be using my Nikon legacy glass and the Hasselblad, as always. But more on that later.
The camera is bliss, it's extremely small and light (coming from the 3 ton Hasselblad it's light as a feather), so it makes for the perfect hike companion. Plus it's weather sealed and the full body is made of magnesium alloy which makes it super resistant.
As said before it has the same 24mp sensor as the a7 but with improved autofocus and IBIS.
ISO Is decent enough but I won't be shooting higher than 6400 so it's perfect for me and at base ISO the IQ is outstanding. That's what I call a WIN WIN.
The 5 axis IBIS is pretty convenient both for stills and for video, I've taken pictures at 1/10th without blur! And for video mixed with it's capabilities, recording in Slog and XAVC-S which makes its bitrate faster than the old a7s, is for me too much already to venture into the world of fine art videography or however it's called.
The EVF is superb. It's like looking at a massive TV inside of the camera, and I haven't found any drawbacks about the blackening after taking a photo whatsoever.
The flip flop back screen is gorgeous to look at but hey don't trust the film guy who only looks at his computer screen perhaps for the pixel peeper is not good. For me it's too good! Having a screen is nuts!
What about the lens? Well I've read tons of bad stuff about it and can say only one thing: Mine must be a defective one because it's stunningly sharp (perhaps a little bit soft on the edges at 24mm but nothing that I bothers me at all) and works smooth as a knife cutting through butter. Yes, the bokeh isn't comparable to anything we're used to: Loxia, Planar, summicron, etc but hey we're talking zooms here. So for a 24-70 f/4 it's decent and beautiful enough. Harsh and distracting depending on the background but overall I quite like it when the background is good.
What else is left to say? If you really want to know how does the camera work and the results of it go try it out, nobody will tell you if it suits you or not. I've had a lot of criticism because I bought this instead of the new A7Rii which has 42.4 mp and records 4K and it's just that I don't need that much at my level and for the work that people ask for, this is even too good. If some day I find myself shooting for VOGUE or ELLE I'll surely buy... LOADS OF FILM and make them drum scan it to a gazillion GB file to print!
Jokes aside, cameras are tools and we choose the tools we like to use to solve the things that our clients ask us to do. At the end of the day any review of some guy online will tell you what is like to use it and maybe what for some may be a bad ISO performance or a bad camera or lens for you can be the best you've ever shot with. Everything is relative my friends and with this I finish.
And oh! stay tuned because there are a few photos from the last 2 weeks coming later this week involving this camera and this lens, I hope you have enjoyed :)
Going Large
So, it's here, after a few months of long conversations I've managed to borrow a Large Format camera and nothing else than a view camera!
With the excuse of doing an architectural photography project this was possible.
I must admit that the #believeinfilm community on twitter influenced in my obsession for a large format camera as it seems as if 2016 was the Large Format year, so (even though I've been planning to shoot large format since mid 2015) I didn't want to be left behind!
I'm having this camera for 3 weeks, which means: 3 weeks of pure photography at its finest, 3 weeks of taking way too long to take one shot... to sum up: 3 weeks of learning, patience, happiness and creativity.
I'll be sharing all this short journey on twitter of course as well as with a series of posts about the photos which hopefully will be good enough to be shared with you.
As for now, here's the beast and the lenses!
New year, new goals, new Scanner!
It's been so long since I wrote anything. So first of all forgive me for writing too much, I will cut down as I get used to it again.
And second: I've got a big announcement (big and important for me of course) that I want to share with you all.
We're already a month in 2016 and I've yet to complete every new year resolution, so, I'm doing the first one of my list: I promised myself to blog regularly from the first month of the year. So here we go (I'm sorry for all this introductory nonsense).
Here's what's new. (although the title spoiled it a little bit) This Christmas the 3 magical kings (because in Catalonia santa doesn't come) went nuts and brought me the best present they could bring. A beautiful Epson V800.
Yes you haters, it's a flatbed, it's got its flaws and now everybody seems to love digitizing with a dslr or whichever digital camera they have. But dslr scanning is just not my thing. Not even with a dedicated macro lens working at a 1:1, 1:2 or 1:4 magnification with a full frame camera at the optimum aperture so I don't get diffraction and get the highest resolution. I just can't.
Considering this 2015 has been my jump from digital to 100% film, the scanner seemed the best option. Of course we all love the new A7rii with all it has but I love film, and film makes me happy so, considering Iast year I invested my money in a big ass Medium Format film camera happiness, the V800 was and is the perfect accessory.
The acquisition of the scanner makes me completely independent from the labs and makes me save money because after only a few months of not sending film to a lab, the scanner pays itself.
Now I can control everything from the developing process to the final print, passing by the scanning settings, color management and so on. ( Color film by now is still sent to the lab but will sooner or later developing it at home will become a normal thing as B&W developing is ).
So, here go my first thoughts about the scanner (I'm not gonna get technical, and I don't want to, although I could, there's plenty of information for all of you, technical photographers, here I like to talk and show things about art and feelings).
Medium format looks gorgeus. Not even the low res files I got from the lab looked as good as my low res do now. Plus at the maximum resolution the negatives look just WOW!
35mm is another thing, perhaps it's too little and of course I still don't know nor have enough experience scanning to get the exact and perfect result I wanted to but by now I get the job done pretty easily. I still have to print the scans to see how they compare (all that technical stuff ) but by now I'm very happy with what I'm getting, although I need to improve a lot. Silverfast is a little pain and drives me nuts sometimes but getting at it.
Needless to say I've a huge amount of "old" home developed film that nobody has seen, and now, the scanner is allowing me to see how much I sucked before at developing because there are some weird things going on on some negatives. I should post some pictures to discuss what is going on there.
From now on we will all be able to see what I shoot and not wait years, so hopefully, expect a more recurrent posting.
Feel free to comment, or hit me via twitter to discuss and criticize everything here :)
Okay, so here they are, what we are all waiting for. The first scans or attempts at scanning. I hope you like them.
although these are randomly scanned images, they kind of make a 2015 recap. enjoy :)
Castell de Castellcir
About two weeks ago I went to an old castle ruins. And to experiment a little bit I decided to bring both my film and 1 digital camera, the little fuji X100 that was collecting dust at home.
Here are just a couple shots I took which were taken based on a project I'm now working on.
all the photos were taken with a fuji x100
Norderney on film pt.1
Last summer (2014) I went to Germany, concretely to an Island which I didn't know of its existence, in fact, as my german geography is almost non-existent I didn't even know that Germany had Islands.
But without even thinking about it (only a few hours ruminating) I accepted the proposition of going there to work (2 months) and therefore improve my german.
I must admit that my relationship with the island is something very peculiar, let me explain why:
I went there completely alone. So, when I arrived there, I found myself in a foreign country, don't know how many km far away from home and with a language which I had barely spoken in the last few months. (Must say it looked promising right?).
So here starts my definition of the island: It's a beautiful and a too small for anyone used to living in a city piece of land (only 12km long and barely 2km wide). And while it's a really beautiful place I had one of the worst experiences there. A few weeks there were like living in hell, countless hours of work and a solitude accompanied by the deserted island after 4-5pm plus it's never summer there( as the weather changed every 2 hours and the temperature was always cold) made an interesting cocktail which I hope to be shown and transmitted in the photos I took, as my only escape and therapy there was to have a bike ride with my cameras and walk walk walk, countless hours of walking in the endless beaches of the island.
Overall I can say it was useful, I learned a lot there (both from life and spiritually, even when having a bad time, that helped me specially) but I say this now, after almost 4 months of being back from there. Nobody can imagine how much I hated that island and how nostalgic it's making me right now to see the photos from it.
After all this amount of words here comes what I think about Norderney: I deeply hate and like this piece of beautiful landscapes hell.
All the photos have been taken with a Yashica Mat 124G and a Nikon F3 on Kodak Tri-X and Portra 400
