Printing on linen

A friend of mine once got a test pack with a single sheet of Argenta coated linen cloth. We printed one of his negatives on it and it looked amazing. Ever since we have had the label hanging on the inside of the door of our paper storage:

We have been looking for this photoleinen L everywhere with no success. There is not a single pack on ebay, not even in the sold items section.

But one day Macodirect found some old products in one of their warhouses. Amongst them was MACO structura LUX photolinen.

After some searching on the internet i found this fact sheet on Tech Chat. I went ahead and asked Maco how much they had and got a fair price for the lot.

Now im starting to learn how to use it. Either we were very lucky with our single Argenta print or the Maco linen is a lot harder to work with. There are several traps to avoid with this paper, but once you know of them it produces wonderfull prints and i plan to use them for my next exhibition.

Pitfall 1 - The emulsion doesn't like water! 

When kept in any fluid for too long, it forms blobs that sticks out from the cloth like warts. When dried the warts withdraws into the emulsion, but are still visible as low contrast spots. The solution is to be quick. With strong developer, fresh stop, two bath fixer, hca and a quick rinse is however not a problem. Just be quick about it!

Pitfall 2 - The surface is not even

Getting things in focus is very hard. One have to remember that the focuscope shows the focus of the top of the cloth. One sees a lot more than that. Compensate and stop down!

Pitfall 3 - The emulsion is thick and prone to melt

When drying the linen one have to keep two things in mind. Be quick about it to keep the warts mentioned above to form and keep track of the temperature. Drying it hanging in the film dryer works fine, but it will be hard to get the print flat after that short of steam ironing it on a very low temperature (backside). Leaving it on the grid is too slow (warts) but they keep a little more flat. So for air drying i go with one stint in the film dryer until they are half way dry and then put them on the grid over night. Then i can get them flat in the mounting press by turning the heater on for one minute and then just leave them there for an hour or so until they have reached room temprature again. If i want glossy prints i leave the heater on for 5 minutes instead.

Pitfall 4 - Not every negative suits to be printed on cloth

As with any paper, it suits its own sets of motives. Its just more obvious with cloth. Gloomy stuff look great, so do trees while lots of details tend to get mixed up with the woven structure of the cloth. 

So what does it look like?

Well, you are welcome to see the results on my upcoming exhibition late spring. But here is one of the first prints that are considered for the wall.

Memorial grove of Skogskyrkogården with fuji gx680 and the fujinon 125/3.2@5.6. Printed on linen cloth and slighly hand coloured.

Another print of the same negative with the focus deeper into the cloth and a few minutes selenium toning.

Part 2: New cheap batteries for the gx680

Since my last post on the subject, i have also been testing out two other battery convertions with 5 and 6 aa cells. A six cell aa conversion with 2600mAh 1.2v aa cells gives a whole lot of juice. Further more, one can quick charge them with the original gx680 mk1 power house of a charger.

However, AA rechargeables are bad in cold weather. At about 0 degrees celsius both kinds of expensive rechargeable cells i tried ran out in a few hours with the meter viewfinder turned on, whereas the nominally weaker pentax batteries lasted for 3h each. Indoors, the six cell pack lasts the whole night, though.

The 5 AA holder, on the other hand, is a super backup when im out in the field, any store has disposable AA:s if i would run out of batteries. (I don't want to test the 6 aa holder with 1.5v batteries since it measures 9.8v with new 1.5v disposables).

Anyway, if you want to build a 5 or 6 cell battery, you can pretty much follow the instructions for the pentax conversion. Just remember to remove the resistor. You can get 5 cell and 6 cell holders on ebay.

So what conversion is best?

That depends on if you are converting one or two batteries and on whether you plan to use the camera in the field in cold weather or not.

My recommendation are as follows:

A: If you have only one battery to convert, go for the pentax conversion! Those batteries work well both in the field and indoors and you can recharge one while you use another one. If you are on a roadtrip, you can also use the 12v car plug that comes with the charger. If you need more batteries later, they are cheap and you don't need to build anything new.

B: If you have two batteries to convert and only intend to use your gx680 indoors or never shoot in cold weather. Go for two 6-aa packs with 2600-2700mAh 1.2v rechargable cells, if you put the lid back on, they will look exactly like the original fuji batteries and you prevent someone to put six 1.5v disposables in them by accident.

C: If you have two batteris to convert and want to use the camera both in the field and in the studio. Go for one pentax conversion and one 5-aa conversion. Then you are super safe since you can buy disposables if all the pentax batteries should run out or you forgot to charge them. You could also go for a 6-pack and get a dummy battery, but i wouldnt risk someone (most likely me) putting almost 10v into my camera by loading six 1.5v batteries by misstake.

Part 1: New cheap rechargeable batteries for the gx680

Edit: If you prefer to use AA cells. Read Part 2! After having more and more of the original batteries for my gx680 failing over the last couple of years, i have now eventually fixed it. A few years ago, i modified a broken battery by replacing the cells with those of a pentax k10 battery. It has worked fine ever since and i now decided to make an adapter so that i can use those small and handy batteries directly instead of mounting the cells in the bulky gx680 holders. Here is what you need to get 6 batteries and a mount.

1. One dismantled original battery. It doesnt have to work, you need only bottom part to mount the new holder on the camera so that you dont have to modify the camera to fit the new batteries.
2. Two sets of pentax batteries + charger, available on ebay.
3. A soldering iron.
4. Hot-melt adhesive or some other suitable glue.
5. A drill with a drill bit of about 3mm.

Howto!

• Put one of the new batteries on charge with one of the new chargers.
• Dismantle the original battery and cut the wires away. If you want to be safe, keep the resistor, but i think its only needed for stopping the battery from overheating when charging with the original quick charger. You may get better capacity if you cut it away as well.
• Look at the battery mount on the camera, notice the third knob that looks like a connector. Measure out where the knob would be pushed by the original battery when connected to the camera. Drill a hole so that it doesn't push the knob. Test it by attaching the bottom. If it still pushes the knob or if it is hard to remove the bottom, then widen the hole until it works fine.
• Slide off the battery mount from the second new charger. Remove the bottom of the mount. Keep the part where you fit the battery and scrap the rest. Keep at least part of the wires, its hard to solder on the connector pins without melting the plastic. I replaced the wires in the new charger as i though they looked thin, but if id do it again i would at least try to use them anyway.
• Solder the wires + to + and - to - on the new holder to the original bottom plate.
• Test the camera with the charged battery! One of the following should happen: A: If you removed the resistor and the battery is fully charged, the camera should show a green led. I B: If you kept it, the led should be yellow (dont worry, you will still have lots of more juice in each battery than with the original ones). C: If only the lcd on the back shows the frame number, but the camera doesnt start, check your soldering! D: If nothing at all happens, double check that you soldered + to + and - to -. E: If the camera explodes, dont blame me! I have had one of these batteries working a few years without explosions.
• If everything works as expected, glue the new holder to the original plate!
• Charge all your six new batteries and go out shooting.

Kaizen wishes

Wishes

I made a kaizen wishlist for the x-pro2. The aim is to gather fixable shortcomings and possible uppgrades in one place. Please help out by suggesting more entries!

X-Pro2:
http://bit.ly/2ds4VrP
Ill create similar documents for the rest of the x series too and add links for them in this post.

X-T2: (This is a stub, i dont have this camera)
http://bit.ly/2dJ28HS

Thanks for participating!

What will the fujifilm medium format mirrorless camera be like?

Thanks, fujirumors, for sharing the rumour about an interchangable viewfinder for the hopefully upcoming Fujifilm mirrorless medium format. If true, this makes all the difference in the world for the camera and says so much more about what it is going to be like that i can almost give a shot at predicting it.

What the heck, ill give it a try.

(Its been released now, so how did i do? Find out at the bottom.

An interchangable viewfinder, what difference does it make?

When making an interchangeable viewfinder for an EVF camera one have two options. 

1. A detachable EVF.
2. A small sized amoled screen, much like an SLR focusing screen. Lets call it the EFS, electronic focusing screen.

Nr 1 has been used with quite low success but several mirrorless camera manufacturers. All the solutions were technology driven, expensive for the photographer and commercially rather unsuccessfull.

Nr 2 is an modern version of common solution from SLR world, but untried in a mirrorless camera. It is a lot cheaper, especially for a waist level finder that is nothing more than a foldable shade with a likewise foldable looking glass. For the eye-level viewfinder, prisms cost a bit more, but sometimes a cheap mirror may do the trick almost as good. If the EFS thingy is up-flippable within the eye-level finder it may in fact obsolete the prism all together.

With Fujifilm, a release of a new system always seems to come with a twist. Something novelle or quirky, sometimes brilliant, sometimes more or less pointless. I think its because most Fujifilm product lines start with an idea of how to improve or revive a certain aspect of photography with a new solution. It could be another new kind sensor pattern, moster tilt-shift medium formats, 6x8 frame size to fit magazine covers perfectly, reinventing instant photography, very short 120-films to suit drop-in studios, film simulations, yet another sensor pattern or another one again. Nothing has been predicted in the MMF rumours we have heard up until now.

I'd say Nr 2 would make this camera fit right into what to expect from a new Fujifilm product line. At the same time it makes the whole rumour of a MMF a lot more beleavable. It would also be the cheaper way to go and being cheaper than Hasselblad is kind of important here. 

The implications

With a focusing EVF on top of the camera, it will not look like the Hasselblad, the x-t1 or an x-pro2. It will look more like a SLR or a classic MF camera (of which there are many different designs, a bit more on that later).  Whatever they choose, the camera will be deeper than the Hasselblad that is a very thin camera being a medium format. That means that they can fit a focul plane shutter where the mirror would have gone in an SLR, without making it bulky. I know, Fuji do like their leaf shutters, but large leaf shutters are expensive and if you want to make them really fast, they are really expensive. They also make the lenses heavier. Another implication of a deeper camera is that the lenses can be shorter, since the sensor can be a bit further back and some of the focal length can be kept in the camera. I would love a telescopic tube or a TLR-like movable front behind the mount to keep the lenses down to large format size and even allow crude AF with adapted lenses, but i think the R&D and production cost of that would be a bit on the high side unless they come up with a super brilliant solution. I would rather expect a fixed register, something in the range of a regular small frame (D)SLR. Short enough to adapt most medium format lenses, but long enough to keep 44x33 covering optics rather small.

Interchangable viewfinders also limits where you can put the hot shoe and a pop-up the flash. We will most certainly not see a pop-up and the hot shoe may either be left out too, pushed to the left of the viewfinder or put in an unconventional place. Far left is is my guess.

Other conclutions

Sensor

Well, there is only one that would meet the requirements of being not to expensive and good enough. The Sony 50Mp 44x33mm one. Bayer or xtrans then? Rumours sais bayer and so does logic. Fuji will want to go with a perfect colour alternative here. Binning the 50Mp bayer would give true RGB on every pixel on 12,5Mp and a smart demosaicing algorithm would give twice the size with almost perfect RGB and almost 50Mp shapes. Then there is the problem with the current cost of a computer (and internal circuitry) that can demosaic an 50Mp xtrans file in bearable time. There is also the fact that a bayer sensor may still scare off less potential customers than an xtrans.
Bayer it is!

Interface

Fuji allready has a well tested interface of dials, knobs and buttons on the x system. I dont expect them to put resources into another one. We will propobly see the film simulations and most of the menu system duplicated as well. Then there is the question of the screen. If the camera is sold with the WLF as standard, its not impossible that they may skip the big screen in the back. However, i think the first release will be the premium model, a cheaper single screen may come later.

Touchscreen? Not yet, first they need to evaluate that on the cheaper x cameras.

Form factor

SLR-like, TLR-like, HB-like, P-67-like or even GA645-like? Well, i think they will keep the system specs so that they can build most of these in the future. However, for the first model i think its going to look a bit like the Reflex Beauty, but with a grip for the right hand. A small box to house the shutter inside and the EFS on top with a mount for the lens in front and another for the viefinder on the top. The box will most likely be a bit smaller since the 44x33 is smaller than the 55x55 of the beauty reflex. Maybe they will keep the electronic focusing screen at the modern standard 645 size of 56x42mm or their own 645 that is more like 55x43.5mm. Behind the box there would be a fixed back, with electronics, battery and memory card slots, with knobs, dials and buttons much like an x-pro2 or x-t2 and the same screen as them on the back.  All and all like if one would take an x-pro2 and put a small box in front of it and the viewfinder mount on top.

Ofcourse there will be cheaper models if the first one sells well enough. An HB 500c form factor or even a TLR-like camera, but with only one lens at the entry level are viable options in the future.

IBIS

The only reason why Fuji would implement IBIS would be that they were planning to go for a 645 sensor in a future genration so that the lenses were allready 645 prepared. That would actually make some sense here. But the do allready have in-house tech for OS lenses and IBIS is harder to implement the larger the sensor is. So its definetly a no anyway.

Lenses
Three lenses are rumoured to be first released. One normal and one portrait tele plus a wide to normal zoom.

Summary of my prediction compared to the real deal.

• Reflex Beauty style camera
  Not to bad. I didnt see the brilliant move of moving the grip of the camera forward to make it more balanced. But the box is there, just as predicted but its just visible on the back instead of the front.
  
• X system like handling and output
  Was pretty obvious.
  
• 50Mp 44x33 bayer sensor with True RGB binning option
  This is not clear as of yet. We still think bayer and they presented a few tricks of downsizing. More info on this later.
  
• Invention of the EFS, the electronic focusing screen
  Fail! It may still come on a future model.
  
• Small lenses compared to the ones of Hasselblad
  They are smaller, but not super small.
  
• Sadly no bellows, tube or other retractable mount
  Right, sadly enough!
  
• A bit thicker a body compared to the Hasselblad one, but smaller with most comparable lenses mounted
  Spot on!
  
• First body only slightly cheaper than Hasselblads, cheaper ones coming later
  First part is right at least, time will show if the second part is right.
  
• Neither touch nor flippable screen
  Half fail, with no WLF, the flippable screen has to be there. They didnt say anything about touch though.
  
• A focal plane shutter is slightly more likely than leaf shutters
  Right
  
• No IBIS
  Right
  
• Pop-up flash, no
  Right
  
• Hot shoe, far left on top of the camera
  Wrong, sort of. They have an odd hotshoe solution, but its on top of the viewfinder on the regular one. But with the angle finder, where is it then, is there none at all?
  
• Three lenses: Wide-normal zoom, normal and portrait tele primes.
  Kind of wrong. I don't think anyone see them anounce a six lens system.
  
• Weather resistant
  Right.

Oh, im gonna be so wrong...
Well, it could have been a lot worse. What was really wrong was the viewfinder construction and thus also the touchscreen. I'm pretty impressed with what i have seen of the system so far and hope for more (hopefully) cheaper bodies to be released in the future.

Thanks Fujifilm, for releasing such an impressive system!

Purple flares and grid pattern on xtrans: Why its there and how to remove it

There have been a few discussions and posts over the years about a phonomenon on some digital cameras where a grid pattern is appearent in purple flares when pixel peeping. Here is a discussion on the topic from a few years back, that time about a Sony camera.
Now it has become appearant that the effect can occure in xtrans sensors as well. A few months ago Mathieu att Mirrorlessons wrote an article on it. I first read about it on a discussion a few days ago and have been doing some digging since, here is what i know and what have been able to find out the last couple of days.

Purple flare effect in general

Purple flare origins when there are strong light sources in line of sight of the front lens. The source can be, but doesnt have to be, in the frame to cause a flare. If its outside the frame, a well made shade usually helps on a prime. On a zoom lens the shade has to be made to protect only the widest end and if one zooms in, a light source outside the frame can still be in line of sight from the front lens. Filters and dirty front lenses will usually increase the effect.

Flares can usually be avoided, but sometimes they look really good and thats when the real problem occure. If you want it there it has to be well rendered in your photo.

Film vs digital

On film this is usually not a problem unless you scan the negative. If one makes an RA4 copy, a well placed purple flare looks awesome. On a digital camera or a scanned image, things get more complicated. Purple flares over highlights usually work ok, but on shadows, and gray to black highlights in particular, they often become problem. On every camera i have been using (doesnt include sigmas) and every scanner i have used (which are a lot) what always happen is that the post processing latitude turns to almost zero if such a flare is present. Any pushing, pulling, sharpening or even white balance shift will make it look horribly ugly if you dont treat it carefully. Further more, if shot with a digital camera, usually the tolerance for cropping decreases a lot too. To much cropping and one of several kinds of artifacts are bound to appear. It can, for example, be clotting, loss of contrast or that part of the image just gets a different look. On xtrans files is it the grid pattern.

Why?

Mixing bright colour with dark gray is obviously not easy. Try to imagine it yourself. However, when its done right it can look very pleasant. I like to do in postprocessing my darkroom prints. On most papers it doesnt work at all. When it works, its because the papers have a structure like tiny hills and valleys. The black silver then only forms its shade of gray of the photo on the mountain tops in the highlights. Then i can rub colour down in the valleys without desturbing how much silver that should be visible. Even with such a paper it only works in the highlight areas of the photo, in shadow areas the silver reaches down in the shadows and there can be no mix. Digital images face very much the same kind of problems, a single pixel cant be both bright purple and dark grey at the same time. To create something that looks like that, some pixels have to have one property and others the other one. With some clever maths and enough pixels, this is fixable if you start with a picture that have all the colour information for every pixel. But ouch, a digital sensor doesn't have that. Every pixel only have one colour, and its green in 50% of the time on a bayer sensor and even more on an xtrans one. To a green pixel, purple looks almost black. So the amount of pixels the clever maths have to work with is seriously reduced in a purple flare.

The grid pattern

Why does xtrans form a grid pattern? To answer that we have to take a look at the xtrans pattern, so here it is.

As you can see, every fifth green pixel have a different coloured pixel on its side and a green one at its corners. However, four out of five green pixels only have differently coloured pixels at two of the sides. Demosaicing is complecated stuff and ill give you a very very simplyfied version on how it works from one of the green pixels perspective when being faced with purple light.

First it looks to its own information and sees black. Then it asks its longside neighbours. Half of them say black, one says slightly red, and one slightly blue. Including itself, a 3 to 2 majority vote black. Then it asks its corner neighbours and gets the same answer, 3 to 2 for black. The 5th green pixel gets another ansew from its longside neighbours, 4 to 1 majority says its not black which changes its mind.

Now lets look closely at an affected picture converted with lightroom and compare to the xtrans pattern. 

The result is the complete opposite of the prediction, but the pattern remains as the algorithm seems to overcompensate when there is not enough data. I have now looked at the output from several different raw converters including the in-camera one. Every single one creates this reverse pattern in the purple flares. Clearly some tweaking of the demosaicing algorithm in affected areas would be in order. It would still need the mix of brighter and darker pixels to keep the luster, but they have to be scrambled somehow.

Is this a problem worth bothering about?

Yes and no. It only shows this clear when pixel peeping and the kind of screen you use also affects how visible it is. However, when trying to post process a photo with a purple flare by any means to achive sharpening, cropping, clarity, opening up the shadows or changing the contrast, it is always the flare areas that sets the limit of how much one can do. If i was at charge at Fuji, i would dedicate some resources to investigate it and if i was in charge at Silkapix id definetly see it as a chance to show the world i was still ahead of Adobe.

Does it affect my pictures as a photographer? Almost never, and when it does, i know how to fix it in post for almost every case.

The post production solution

Lets start with a picture. This is from the x-pro2 with a 10-24 with a street lamp slightly in front of me, shining down on the camera from above . It wasnt in the frame, but the shade didnt cover my lens enough to keep the light from reaching my front lens. 

Here is a 1:1 crop, it dosnt look pretty at all:
(it uses the adobe standard profile with no modifications but slight clarity and slight dehaze to exagurate the effect)



From lightroom i then right click on the image and chose "Open as smart object in Photoshop". In fotoshop i select the whole image and apply box blur with the minimum strenght of 1, (I use gaussian blur 2 if the pattern appears as diagonal rather than horisontal/vertical). I then close photoshop and click save.

Here is the result that then automatically opens up i Photoshop as a PSD file next to the RAF:

The grid is gone and the loss of detail is much like using a sensor with aa-filter.

Here you can download the before and after pictures side by side. It is a crop at approximatly 1/4 of an xtrans III file.

Happy shooting with purple flares again!

P.S.
In Mathieus article there are pictures with a diagonal pattern as well. I have not been able to recreate that pattern. Could someone, please, mail me (roos@swedish.photography) a RAF of such a photo so that i can investigate it further?

More facts about film sizes

You should know that in photography, 6x6 doesnt equal 6x6cm image area, neither is 645 the same as 6x4,5cm nor is 4x5" 4x5", it would just have been too easy. Except for 135 film (small frame) the sizes include the borders of the roll film, making a 6x6 lens have to produce a circle of good quality that can fit a square of around 55x55mm. It varies a lot though. For example, im pretty sure my 6x6 P6 produces a smaller picture area than my 645 fujis do and my 6x12 produces only around 10cm wide a picture.

For large format it gets even more complicated. First we have to take into account that the nominal sizes are those of the film holders rather than the film itself. The film sheet has to be i bit smaller to fit the holder. By chance, this makes the slightly larger 13x18cm format have exactly 5" wide sheets, while film called 5x7" is slightly narrower than 5". In addition to this, there are the borders. For 4x5" format in total that means the image area is about 95x120mm which is between 0.5 to 1 cm smaller in each direction than the name suggests.

Does this affect digital as well? In a way, it does. Making a 60x45mm or a 60x60mm mf back wouldnt make anyone happy except the lens manufacturers. A lot of lenses for regular 6x6 or 645 systems would be quite useless with such a back since the corner would lose light, image qualitey or both. However, on digital backs and cameras, if you look carefully you will find the actual size mentioned. Just remember that while 44x33 is a 645 crop, around 55x55 is a perfectly sized 6x6 sensor.

On top of that, there are so many misconceptions on how film/sensor size affects the photos floating around the internet. I tried to straighten them out during a rainy day this winter.

http://bit.ly/2bFPmKO

I should try to make a shorter and better version of this, i know. But it at least tells how it sorts the myths out from the facts if you can get yourself through it.

Thats all for today, or tonights darkroom class will be a teacher short.

Entry level mirrorless medium format camera

Early summer, i put down my mirrorless medium format wishlist. Reading about the rumoured lenses on fujirumors made me realize a MMF done right could have so much potential. Here is how Fujifilm could make an affordable entry level that would still be attractive in low end medium format price ranges. (Edited the text after fixing some seriously flawed arithmetics)

The only certain known about the hopefully upcoming fuji MMF is the sensor. It will be the Sony 44x33 or not at all in the close future, whether modified to xtrans or not. This gives us a 4x3 aspect ratio which is quite close to optimal for fitting a lot of sensor area in an image circle so the lenses will not have to be too big. Its also gives the images the same proportions as the classic 6x45 film format, making it very suitable for waist level shooting.

Even an entry level MMF camera wouldn't come cheap so it would have to come with something very appealing, much like the x100 attracted a lot of attention and buyers without being the best performer at its going price. It would also have to strip away a lot of the extra stuff we would expect from an expensive Fujifilm camera.

One obvious thing we can expect to lose on an entry level camera is both the EVF and optical viewfinders. Other things that may have to go are big buffers, extra jacks for headphones and mics, dual sd-slots, weather sealing and so on. So would anyone buy a £2000-3000 x-m1 with those things missing?

I wouldn’t and i guess you wouldn't either. But what if i offered you this, but with the sony 44x33 instead of 127 (40x40mm) film?

A rather small (and thus cheap) screen as a wlf with a foldable cover and there you are, a small and retro MMF camera in TLR style but with only one lens, interchangeable or not. Maybe the screen could even flip back so that we can use it like a regular non-evf mirrorless camera when we want to look stupid instead of super trendy.

The X-T2 - the end of an era

Until now, the x series has been all about photography. We have all felt it, the cameras walk, talk and look like cameras. The knobs are in the right places, the needs of photographers have been dictating the firmware updates and development of new models.

With x-t2, the heat produced by 4k dictates the internal airflow design of the camera, some of the precious firmware development resources will be put on video features and bug fixes, not to mention the extra buffer memory that could have been there if all those video modes were not there. If it sells well among videographers, designers of future models will consult both photographers and video shooters regarding ergonomics, button layout and lens needs.

Ofcourse more sales at least in theory will come with more resources to r&d which hopefully can negate some of the drawbacks. But there is no question about it, from time to time there will be choices between what is best for photographers and what is best for videographers and from now on fuji will have to consider both groups. Thats why video cameras and camcorders dont look like still cameras and why spoons dont look like forks.

Let's hope we don't end up with a spork like those sonys and panasonics out there!

The MMF (mirrorless medium format) wishlist

Tomorrow, Hasselblad will announce their MMF. It's going to be fancy and expensive for sure and hopefully good and even groundbreaking. Given the history of cooperation between HB and Fujifilm with the H series, xpan and Fuji manufacturing HB lenses, there is a good chance Fuji is involved somehow. But let's leave exactly how and how much to when we know more and dream away a bit of what a Fujifilm MMF could offer!

Here is my wishlist in short (details follows):

1. 33x44
2. Price
3. X system look, feel and handling
4. EVF
5. Small size and low weight
6. Good lenses
7. DR and low light performance
8. Protect the sensor
9. Filming

33x44

There is only one sensor that makes sense for a Fuji MMF today. The sony 50Mp, roughly twice the size of a regular small frame (FF DSLR) picture frame. Anything larger would be too expensive and make the camera bigger. It's uses more or less the same tech as the x-trans II sensor, only it's about four times bigger. I will simply not wish for anything better, because i wouldn't want to pay the price for it. If Sony has improved it by making a second generation that gives the same or better performance at a lower price, i am all for it, of course.

Price

It has to be lower than the Hasselblad MMF, but it will most certainly be more expensive than a A7R2. Lets wish for closer to the Sony than the HB.

Look, feel and handling

Fuji has done very well with the x system in this regard. Lets hope they don't spend any money on doing it in a new way. An x-pro2 like body back and top with a better iso-dial would do great. They may go for x-t2 like, but losing the street and action photography advantage of seeing things moving into the frame that you get with the HVF would really be a petty on a small MMF.

The front will have to be different with bigger mount and i hope they will add a bigger grip to cope with more of the weight in the front.

They may even start with a fixed lens version or a step zoom like their 645z and go for interchangeable mount later. I think we will get a hint about that with the HB release tomorrow.

Bringing in the film simulations are crucial, lots of photographers are so happy with the jpegs that they only use the raws in special cases and Fuji will need them to tag along to MMF to get the volume up.

EVF

They could make an optical viewfinder only camera like the ga645 ones, but i really hope we will have a hybrid viewfinder. It has to be competitive, but not market leading in size and refresh rate.

Small size and low weight

This is arguably the very key to the product, thus i will elaborate quite a bit more on this subject.

How small can a MF be?

Well, have a look at the Voigtländer Bessa RF. It fits in a large pocket and it has 6x9cm picture frame.

That's about four times larger than 33x44!!!

How can that be?

Well, it's all about extendable flange. If you put a lens (or even a very small hole) 65mm away from the film or sensor, it will have the focal length of 65mm, hence the name. The amount of glass you need is minimal and you focus closer than infinity by moving the lens further away. However, if one want to keep the same flange and use a longer lens, you either need more and heavier glass or you have to put a longer barrel on the lens between the camera mount and the lens package. Let’s compare a regular 85mm DSLR lens with a 210mm large format lens (about the same angle of view on 4x5” as the 85 on the 24x36mm). The large format lens is very small and covers an image circle that is several magnitudes bigger than the DSLR lens. The drawback is that it has to be placed 8-9” away from the film.

When you make a fixed flange camera, like a DSLR or Fuji X or the Sony A7 you can make use of this when making a lens that has the same focal length of the flange of the camera. Just like Sony did with the 20/2.8 that more or less gave it it’s reputation of being a small and lightweight system. The price with such a short flange is that there has to be a tube on every lens making longer lenses big and bulky. If you, once again like Sony, add IBIS to the equation, making the sensors effectively bigger by moving it around, your long tube problem piles up on a wide problem and lens size goes from small to big to huge.

So how to solve it? Fuji already did on the ga645 cameras. On them a retractable tube can be telescoped into the camera when not in use. Bellows works just as well and are cheaper but comes with durability issues.

On the Fujifilm MMF i wish for a retractable tube with a lens mount in the front. This would provide all the following.

• Small and light lenses regardless of focal length. Fast lenses will ofcourse be bigger than slow, but that's just as it is.
• Design choices on auto focus. The lenses can have internal motors for fast focusing or money and weight can be saved by using the slow but accurate focusing method of moving the tube.
• The camera would be very flat with the tube retracted.
• Almost any lens that covers 33x44 could be mounted and used with slow but accurate AF.

In the end i wish for the camera plus a few lenses to fit in the same bag that holds an Canikon DSLR or a Sony A7 with equivalent lenses. If the camera with a small lens could fit in one of the large pockets of my jacket i would pay $500 more.

Good lenses

Fuji knows how to make good small frame lenses, good medium format lenses and good large format lenses. If they make the effort, they will make good 33x44 lenses. I just wish they will focus on that rather than dirt cheap or lots of lens options early on. If they build the camera smart, there will be enough options by adapting lenses while they expand the system slowly.

DR and low light performance

We know what we get with this Sony sensor, it performs well and Fuji will tweak it a little further. Two stops better than aps-c is the mark to reach for, but 1.5 is good enough.

Protect the sensor

Please Fuji! There should be a shutter-like thingy that covers the sensor when the lens release button is pressed and opens when next lens clicks into place. Why don’t we have this already?

Filming

Any minute on spending R&D time and resources on filming features are wasted on me. But if it pays itself by reaching a larger audience i'm all for as long as they don’t dedicate any buttons or knobs for filming and that fiming settings don’t get in the way of finding useful menu entries and alike.

Pure speculations: The G4433 - the digital exchangable lens folder

Do you remember this?

That is the GS645, Fuji's pocketable 6x4.5cm rangefinder from the mid 80s. Folding rangefinders are usually single lens cameras. The lenses are usually neither tele nor wide angle designs, but sits at the same distance from the film as their focal length. That way the lenses can be kept very small even if they are of the best possible quality, much like large format lenses. Up until now, digital folders and interchangeable folders have been scarce. It is very hard to create a rangefinder system that is reliable with different lenses. Every lens needs its own cam and they also need different infinity stops.

However, now we have EVF and phase detection pixels on digital sensors. We neither need a proper rangefinder nor a big mirror flapping around to focus. The implications are very interesting. One now could build a folder with swappable lenses or even with an extending telescopic tube like on pocket cameras or the ga645 cameras, only with a mount at the end where one could attach very light and small lenses. And we still could focus them just as well as with an x-t1 or x-e2.

The current rumours says Fujis next camera system will be a digital one with a large 50Mp sensor. That fits perfectly with the excellent dwarfed medium format sensor of the Pentax 645Z. (Dont worry, with its 44x33mm it's still almost twice the size of a full small frame sensor.  Put an xtrans filter on it and put it in a ga- or gs645 package and it will be an excellent sony a7 killer.

Ofcourse I could be totally wrong or the Fuji MF rumour could be nothing but a rumour, but a G4433 fits the specs well and it would be very very Fujiesque.

Resurrecting peel apart pack film

The facts

When polaroid went out of business, most of the options for peel apart pack film shooters was lost,. Among them the 665, the last pos+neg pack film. The only remaining producer was Fujifilm with colour and b&w positive only pack film. The emulsions were nothing but amazing with vivid colours and deep blacks in less than a minute of shooting.

Nevertheless, in the years since, sales were diverted to instax and one after another, they discontinued every emulsion and every size of pack film and as of this week, the production is stopped. Does this mean the era of peel apart pack film is over for ever?

Former approaches

When fp-3000b, the ultrafast b&w was discontinued the other year, approaches was made to buy the machinery to resume production. They were met with zero interest from Fuji. With all production ended they may not need their machines anymore and that may or may not change their minds. But we do not know whether they are useful at all without the Fuji emulsions. It could even be that they are broken and beyond affordable repair and that is why the production stopped.

Even if the machines work, Fujifilm may not want to sell them. Most of their photography business, instax in particular but digital as well and even some other branches like cosmetics rely heavily on Fujis know how in film production. Let's face it, there is no way they will ever let a third party know what their emulsions are made of and the same goes for coating if they have secrets to protect in that area as well. That is the core of their business.

What can be done

There is still a chance that some (or all) of the machinery could be sold without risking any trade secrets. Maybe they could be cleaned and modified to protect them. I do not know, but if someone want to give it a try, they have my support and that of many others. 

A word of advice though. Approach Fujifilm with both passion for the film and with great respect for both their right to protect their business and for their decision to discontinue peel apart pack film. They know they have ended an era and they did not do i lightly.

Do you want a fuji x camera?

Pure speculation:

Do you want a Fujifilm x camera?

Designing a camera is really hard work. Not just like: "We had to put in lots of hours"-hard or even "We needed to hire really competent and expensive engineers to make this"-hard. No, i mean really hard, like:  "We had to start all over several times and scrap years of work to get a satisfactory result"-hard or "Quite often we have to give up and realise the product will not reach the market in time"-hard. Trying to design a camera that is neither a copy of the current market standard nor a mere set of good specs, but rather a camera that will find its customers by offering them a unique and better shooting experience is even harder than that.

First, one have to know what a "normal" camera is, how it is to use it, why it is built like it is, from both a photographers perspective and an engineering perspective and how to build and market it. Fuck, that is hard. Nobody can know all of that and that's why we have camera manufacturing corps and not one man camera shops.

When you have gathered all that competence, you still need to be able to ponder:
-We are not good enough, we need to turn taking photos into a different kind of experience. OMG, how do we do that?
Somehow you have to find the answer to that and then the really hard work starts. Now you need to convince everybody in the production team that they are fundamentally wrong about what a camera should really be like and that your vision is better. If you think: "I could do that!". Just try to convince even a single person they are wrong about how they should perform their work and that you know better!

Keeping that vision in the minds of all the staff will then be your never ending and most important task. Whenever they make a decision they have to consider what choice leads neither to a product that consumers recognise, a slightly easier development nor more profit in the short or medium run, but only what leads to a the envisioned different kind of shooting experience.

So, when one day, your head of firmware development approaches you and says:
- Boss, you know this new sensor that we are working with, it can do 4k video. We already have five black and white film simulation modes and if we skip acros we will have time to implement 4k video.
When that happens, its decision time. You know 4k is one of the hot buss words  in the business and you know that most reviewers will say:
- Acros looks nice, but i shoot raw. 4k would have been useful.
You could just say, go with 4k then, but in your heart you know it is hard work time.

You send the firmware guy away with a camera, 5 rolls of across and 5 rolls of other iso 100 b&w films. Since you even considered him being right, you decide to shoot some acros yourself too. After a week or two, you have a few beers with him and the longer the evening gets, the more the both of you whine about how you never want to shoot digital again. But in the end you know what you have to do.

Next day you call him back to you office and tell him:
- Yesterday at the pub, we talked about the film experience as a whole but we can't implement all that in our next camera. So today tell me about something we can do something about,  tell me about acros and what sets it aside from the rest of the films you shot!
He starts with praising the details compared to the hp5+, the lack of reciprocity compared to t-max, the flatness compared to tri-x but that is just general praise of a good film. Not until he starts talking about how the tonality differs and how contrasty photo paper he was able to use when making copies without loosing details in the shadows do you know you have the vision back in his mind.

You tell him:
- People spend hours in front of their computers instead of behind their cameras trying to achieve that look, and they do it over and over again. Now go back to your team and make them understand why we can't release this camera before we can save our customers from those hours of post processing.

Later that day the head of user interface design knocks on your door and you know there is more hard work to be done...

_________________

I want a camera made with that passion. Of course, i don't know what happens behind Fuji's doors and i don't really care whether i'm even close to anything that could resemble the truth with this story. But i do care that it feels like its designed with this kind of passion. That catching up with better specs and new features that other brands introduce only comes after making shooting more fun, more passionate and with less post work. It brightens my day and frees my nights up from using Lightroom.

Thanks Fujifilm for putting in all this hard work to be able to produce cameras like this!

Now i only wish i could afford an x-pro2 as well.
I don't know if you want one, but I sure know that I do.

An alternative to IBIS

An alternative to IBIS

For some reason, there are always loud advocates for image stabilisation on the sensor in the camps of Fuji, Canon and Nikon. For certain reasons these companies are not yet interested in the tech. I am with the companies on this , i think there are a lot better things to put time and resources into when there is even better stabilised lenses to get when i need them. With that said, there is one product i'd love to see.

Those of you that are old enough to remember the auto focus introduction in SLR:s in the 80:s would remember the TC-16A from Nikon.

Someone at Nikon came up with the idea that people would like to use their old manual focus lenses with autofocus. Not a bad thought, i might add. Sadly it was hampered by the fact that every lens turned into a 1.6 times longer lens, very much like if you had put them on a half frame camera. Nevertheless Nikon sold their fair share of TC-16A:s and some people still buy them today on the second hand market.

Quite a few years later, Metabones came up with a similar idea. With lots of mirrorless cameras on the market with aps-c or smaller cameras lots of people tend to want to use their SLR glass on their new cameras. There are only three problems.

1. A regular SLR lens has 1.5 times narrower (measured in mm) field of view on a aps-c sensor than they were made for.
2. A lens made to cover 24x36mm film lose half its resolving power on an aps-c sensor.
3. The flange distance will still be the same. Thus the adapter has to be a long tube making the lens+adapter very large on an short flanged and small mirrorless camera.
   
   
   Metabones managed to almost completely overcome these problems with their speed booster. 

It works more or less like a magnifier. If you put it on the camera and look into it, you see a sensor the size of 24x36 mm instead of the 18x24 mm sensor that is really there. All the light from the adapted lens is thus gathered with all of the lenses resolving power preserved. For sure, there is a loss of quality by going through the extra lens elements, but it is a lot less than only using half of the lens.

Now back to our Fuji cameras. What if we had a combination of the speedbooster and the TC-16A. A Fuji made focal length reducer with a floating element for autofocus and image stabilisation with a canon FD mount in the front. The relatively short register of the FD mount and the lock ring that tightens the mount very hard allows for adapters to be fitted to mount almost any SLR lens. We would be able to use our Canon FL, FD, EOS, Nikon F, Pentax K, M42, old Fujica X and even Leica R lenses with both image stabilisation and auto focus. A Metabones speedbooster is expensive and a Fuji made focal lenght reduser with that kind of capability would at least be twice the price. But there is no doubt i would cash up for it even if i had to sell one of my beloved cameras to afford it.

And let's not forget the best part. We can show it up the throat of those "I need IBIS to take good photographs"-whiners.

Facts and speculations: Update on the organic sensor

Facts and speculations:Update on the organic sensor

In 2014 i wrote this about the organic sensors and what role it could have in the future digital imaging market. Much of it still holds true and there has been very little news on the subject until last month. Now Panasonic has gone public with some more information about the technology itself and way to apply it to reduce motions blur and flicker when using what we today would call an electronic shutter.

First, lets ask ourselves why they go public at all with this! They could have just kept silent about it until they had an actual product to sell. There are a number of possible reasons for going public, everything from that they don't have the resources to finalise a product themselves to that they want to start a buzz or wanting to protect their patents. We can't really know what combination of reasons that made them disclose the information, but we can draw conclusions about what they are not planning. They do not intend to take the world by surprise, suddenly shipping cameras with organic sensors. That makes perfect sense too, the digital sensors of today are getting rather close to what is theoretically possible in terms of low noise and high DR. At some point in the not so far off future, the best way to compete in that market will no longer be by performance, but rather by getting the production cost down. Whenever an organic sensor would reach the market, that future would probably already be upon us and getting the prices down is all about volume and production efficiency and almost nothing about virgin tech.

With that said, lets go back to the announcements. What first strikes me is that they have upped the promised dynamic range from 88dB to 123dB by applying Fujis old Super CCD  SR II structure of mixing large and small photodiodes. From the experience of the Finepix S5 Pro we know this works remarkably well. That old sensor from 2006 with 6Mp of high sensitive and 6Mp of low sensitive was very popular by wedding photographers for its high dynamic range and still beats modern cameras in that department. It didn't deliver the same detail as a 12Mp sensor of the time, but still a lot more than a 6Mp one. 123dB of DR would amount to almost 41 stops, compare that with the best 24x36mm sensors of today that has just past 15 stops.

Further more, have a look at this passage: "In OPF CMOS image sensor, charge-storage function and photoelectric-conversion function can be set independently." If you look here and here. The orange rectangles called charge storage node and floating diffusion is the charge-storage function in the above quote. A floating diffusion is usually an isolated part of a chip that can store charge without being affected of what goes on in the rest of the chip. The photoelectric conversion is done by the film, the organic part of the sensor. Combine this information with: "Wide incident angle (60 degrees), high sensitivity, high saturation and highly-functional circuits due to a unique feature of OPF, in which an OPF for photoelectric-conversion and a readout circuits are independent." and focus of the last 5 words. This sensor can actually be built into 3 different parts that can work independent of each other. For example, one could have a large OPF with charge storage behind all the film, but the chip that actually does the readout could be a lot smaller and travel behind the film to cover the whole area. This would make it even more suitable for very large formats than i previously believed. Instead of the cost increasing linear to the sensor area compared to exponential for conventional sensors the cost of a twice the size organic sensor would be less than twice the price if one accept a longer readout time. For a large format photographer a few seconds of readout time is nothing, as long as the capture time is the same all over the image.

In the 2014 text, i also mentioned the state of the camera market as such. Not much have changed, but there are a few things worth mentioning.

1. There are now 645 full frame sensors available on the market. They are very expensive, but not that much more expensive than crop 645 sensors were a few years ago. Production has thus become more efficient and it will become even more efficient before we see an organic medium format sensor.
2. Sony acquired Toshiba's sensor department. Toshiba was important it was one of the few remaining competitors to Sony in the small frame sensor market. Nikon for example, can no longer ask if Toshiba can make a cheaper sensor than what Sony offers when they need a new one.
3. Canon is lagging even more behind in the DR department. They still have almost 50% of the market, but sooner och later this will catch up with them and they know it. Not upgrading their fabs to modern standard for 10 years was a very smart and brave decision and has so far not cost them that much while saving a lot of money, but the time brave turn into foolish is getting closer every day. 
4. Fuji film are slowly increasing their semi-conductor production. They just announced the establishing of a new plant. It's not a big one, the investment is about $8.4 million, but it tells us that they are expanding nevertheless. 
5. When i wrote the old text Fuji X system and the Samsung mirrorless systems were up and coming. Now Fuji X is established and Samsung looks to be abandoning their mirrorless effort.

Speculations

The facts that Panasonic is this public about the organic sensor, that the competition in the small frame sensor market is decreasing and that Canon has still not caught up with Sony in DR is opening up a slim chance that Panasonic is aiming for something bigger than i expected in 2014. I say slim, because the problem of getting the production cost down so early in the development is almost impossible. But somehow it does fit the facts and if Panasonic could get Canon onboard they would at least have the volume needed to actually aim for the small frame mass market.

Still, if that would become true, the impact on the small frame market would still be nothing compared to what it would do to the large and medium format markets.

Enough speculation, in a few more years, we may actually know something.