Spencer Cox at Photography Life discusses some of the challenges of using cameras at cold temperatures: lenses fog up, batteries drain faster, and ice and condensation rarely go well with moving and electronic parts. Plus, it’s hard to work controls when you’ve got mittens on—unless, it seems, you’re using a retro camera with dials and buttons, like a Nikon Z fc.
Photography
Cat Pictures Made Pleasing
Cat pictures may well be nigh-ubiquitous on these here interwebs (see also: my various photo feeds) but there’s an art to it, one that Serbian photographer Zoran Milutinovic has made his specialty. He shares some tips on effective cat photography in this blog post for 500px, most of which boil down to waiting for cats to do their cat things, and not trying to force or rush them. Which, well, yes.
Why 50mm Lenses Got Big, Complicated and Expensive
At DPReview, Roger Cicala explores why 50mm lenses—historically the simplest and cheapest lenses available for a 35mm camera—have gotten much bigger, more complex, and more expensive. “Historically, if you bought an F1.2 or wider aperture lens, you expected that it would be soft wide open and even stopped down it wouldn’t be as sharp as a less expensive, slower lens. The modern (and more complex) designs we’re seeing now allow F1.2 lenses be impressively sharp wide open, and just as sharp as a smaller aperture lens stopped down. And that is actually kind of a big deal.” Nikon’s Z-mount 50mm lenses are much larger, have more lens elements and cost three to seven times more than their decades-old AF/AF-D equivalents; that they’re also reportedly exquisitely better isn’t much help if you can’t afford them.
Why He Photographs Snakes
At Photography Life, wildlife photographer Nicholas Hess explains why he photographs snakes, and explains a few of his techniques. He’s very good at it. He’s been at it for a decade. And he’s 19 years old, which means he started, wow, really young. Here’s his Flickr account.
Leica M10 Monochrom
I have a new lust object: the Leica M10 Monochrom, a digital rangefinder camera with a full-frame, 40-megapixel sensor that only shoots in black and white. There are distinct advantages to going without the usual colour filters, which absorb light and reduce sharpness. This would incidentally make a hell of an astrophotography camera (high-end astroimaging shoots monochrome through specialized filters: you could do that with this but not a digital SLR). Fortunately for me, like all good lust objects this one is unattainable: it costs US$8,300, plus expect to spend as much again on lenses, because Leica.
The Stellina Smart Telescope
DP Review looks at the Stellina smart telescope, an all-in-one “observation station” that serves as telescope (an 80mm ƒ/5 apo refractor), digital camera and self-aligning mount. No eyepieces, just a camera, which can stack multiple exposures to achieve something better than a small scope on a small mount could otherwise achieve. All of these things were available when I was messing around with telescopes a decade or so ago, but not in a single, integrated unit. It took work to achieve results like this; now it takes … $4,000. Ow.
Back to the Digital SLR
I have a digital SLR—a five-year-old Nikon D7100—but I haven’t been using it very much over the past few years. Blame that on the iPhone, which has a camera that while nowhere near as good or as versatile as a digital SLR, is good enough in most cases, and has the advantage of always being (a) with me and (b) connected to the Internet. Which meant that I was able to get shots I’d otherwise miss, not having my camera with me, but it also meant that convenience and spontaneity often trumped image quality. The Nikon came out for deliberate acts of photography—such as last summer’s solar eclipse—which lately haven’t happened very often.
I think that might be changing. I’ve been picking up the Nikon more and more lately: to take pictures of nearby garter snakes, the trilliums growing on our property, and the birds that pay us a visit. So I’ve been blowing the dust off the photography-centred parts of my brain and getting myself back up to speed on using the big gun.
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