Photography

A portrait session with my aunt and uncle’s family. Taken using the Hasselblad 500C/M and 80mm Planar. HP5.

The viewfinder is kind of a mess right now. I have been thrilled to be able to use my little GR1 again, after pulling it off the shelf and finding that it does actually work. Except this morning I was reminded why I’d retired it before. The viewfinder becomes blocked by something loose in there or perhaps some sort of separation. Either way, it’s not usable when this happens, so I may have to document the issue and re-retire the camera. ...

I brought the Hasselblad to my parents house while my daughter and grandson were visiting. I underexposed the roll a bit, but the hit rate was better than expected. I love this one of my sister and Lincoln. Jess and Lincoln My parents with Lincoln Crystal and Lincoln Mom with photobomb

Jess on Trampoline I posted the above photo to Flickr 20 years ago today. It was my first. Flickr remains the best place to upload photos. I just wish it was still the best option for sharing them.

Photo Mechanic is the fastest, most powerful tool for ingesting/browsing/exporting photos. It’s always been a little expensive, but I’ve had a license for many years. Before 2024, I could buy a license and use it until the next version came out. I paid $90 to upgrade Photo Mechanic Plus (the fancy version with catalogs) from version 5 to version 6 in 2020. That was four years ago. It’s not cost me a nickel since then. ...

Most of the information I’ve written down about my cameras is either on my wiki or in random blog posts. I’ve decided to try and consolidate things in a new, separate wiki (using TiddlyWiki). It was trivial to drag and drop my original camera notes from the main wiki into this new wiki. I then copied the wiki file to my server, and it now lives here: 👉 jackbaty.com/cameras It’s very much a work-in-progress. My intention is to flesh out the individual entries and catch up on the TODO list. If that goes well, I may include some of my photos or notes on process. After that, maybe I’ll add information about photographers who’ve inspired me. Or not, who knows? TiddlyWiki makes all this easy, but it is also kind of weird. I’ll try to keep it easy as I can to navigate. ...

Recent versions of the new Lightroom (Desktop, not “Classic”) have added features making it feasible for me to use.

I switched from using Lightroom Classic (LrC) to Capture One Pro (C1) “for good” back in 2021. It wasn’t because of Adobe’s subscription model, or because I had some vague aversion to Adobe, the company. It was because I felt like I was getting better images, faster, with C1. I kept a few notes on Lightroom Classic vs Capture One but haven’t updated it in a while, so here are a few notes about why I have moved back to Lightroom Classic. ...

As much as I would love a new X100VI, I don’t actually need one.

I don’t like the way Glass shows images in a desktop browser when the browser window is wider than around 1,000 pixels. I prefer the layout in narrower windows, but I never have mine that narrow. This means whenever I’m browsing Glass, I have to shrink the window. Left: What I want. Right: What I get The Arc browser has “Boosts” that let me easily adjust the CSS of any website, so I created one for Arc. This is it: ...

In which I think about using Lightroom again.

I have never regretted taking a photo, but I always regret not taking one.

I got tired of waiting for a Fuji X100V so I skipped it and got another Q2

I recently found my original Fujifilm X100 in a box in our storage unit. I have such fond memories of the camera, so I knew I would enjoy using it, even today. I was surprised to learn that I didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would. It still feels great to carry, but it’s not quite as nice to actually use as I expected. It’s kind of slow. Slow to power on. Slow to focus. Slow to navigate. This shouldn’t bother me, as I often use old, manual-focus cameras and I’m used to working slowly. I guess the difference is that if I’m going ask the camera to do things, it should be faster than I am. The X100 isn’t. It’s not unusable, but it takes a bit of the joy out of using the camera. ...

I go through periods during which I don’t feel much like making “art” with my cameras. This is normal, but lately I haven’t felt like taking photographs at all. For example, I met my parents yesterday to celebrate Mother’s Day. This, being an Event™, prompted me to bring my two good cameras, one film and one digital. I wanted to be sure to make a nice record of the day in both formats. In the end, I took a single photo as we left. I took it with my iPhone. ...

While doing some spring cleaning this week, I ran into a box of old cameras that I had marked “To Sell” but forgot about. The box had an old Olympus digital and a bunch of beat-up OM-2n film cameras and accessories. This was neat, but what I was most exited about were two cameras in particular: An original Fujifilm X100 and an Olympus Stylus Epic. Here’s the Epic: ...

I brought a Hasselblad 60 megapixel medium format digital camera to Africa with me. I took photos side by side with my film camera. The digital camera’s images were sharper. They had more detail in both the shadows and the highlights. The digital camera made photographing very, very easy. And I hated it. … In fact, had I photographed using a digital camera from the beginning, I’m not sure that I would have liked a single photograph that I had ever taken. ...

It’s always surprising to me how many frames I don’t screw up when using the meterless M3.

I’ve been a Flickr user since 2004 and a SmugMug user for nearly as long. For some reason, I prefer looking at my photos via online galleries rather than, say, my Photos library, and both Flickr and SmugMug have helped me do that. I’ve also kept standalone static web galleries for the odd side project, such as a memorial to my dog Leeloo. Recently, I’ve been creating more of these, so I started looking for easier or better ways of generating static web galleries from a selection of photos. There are what feels like a thousand options. Everything from giant GUI apps to the nerdiest little command line utilities. ...

The Leica SL2 felt inevitable. After an almost accidental run with the Panasonic S5, which I didn’t enjoy at all, I tried going back to the Fuji system. I’ve always liked Fujifilm cameras and their classic control layout. I purchased a new X-T5 and a few nice lenses late last year, but it didn’t grow on me. The X-T5 is a great camera and I had nothing to complain about. Except it just didn’t give me The Feels. Not the way, say, a Leica does. ...