I’ve been meaning to put links up to these film comparisons for quite some time. They are all large format, but they are incredibly well done and informative. The people who worked on them knew what they were doing and were pretty objective about the results, so while you might not get the exact same results as they do, the results are a great baseline to work from.

• Color film comparison, Pt. 1
• Color film comparison, Pt. 2
• Color film comparison, Pt. 3
• Big camera comparison - comparison between some really sweet large and medium format film cameras (on several different films) and a couple of top notch digital cameras.
• Commentary on the camera comparison - Some commentary by the editors of the big camera test.

Looks like Kodak has finally declared bankruptcy. Hopefully the film group can emerge from this and still bring the stuff I like to market. Mike Johnston at The Online Photographer has nice post on this.

I recently borrowed the Canon 24 L II from work and shot with it for a weekend. Here are some of my thoughts on it. As a reminder, I’m a film shooter, and I mostly shoot on rangefinders, so this brief ‘review’ will be colored by that.

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Looks like Fuji is introducing a camera I might actually buy: the Fuji X-Pro1. Dumb name, but it’s an interesting looking camera system. As in interesting enough that I might eventually get one.

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I write a lot of stuff in Markdown: this site (and others), general notes, and most of my note taking for work. Previewing your text is useful at times. Enter Marked. You open up the file you are editing in Marked and it keeps watch of it, automatically updating the preview whenever you save. Over the years, I’ve used a variety of Markdown previewers, from BBEdit’s built in preview, to writing my own preview script (which I had to manually update), to writing a quick Vim function to preview the current file in Safari. Not only does Marked work better and look nicer with less hassle, it also has some nice features, like letting you ignore YAML front matter if you wish.

If you do a lot of writing in Markdown, do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of Marked. It’s only $3.99 at the App store (OS X only).

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Well that was fast! I recently, as in 3 weeks ago, converted my site to run on Octopress. And I just got done switching it over to nanoc.

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Putting some stuff up for sale. Pictures can be seen here. If interested, send me an email at tgray at this domain. Note—I updated this post with a link to some pictures.

• Hasselblad XPan - $1450

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Quite some time ago, I ordered a Macbeth Color Checker, a Kodak Color Separation and Gray Scale set, and some Kodak 120 film. I took it all with me on a nice sunny day and shot a bunch of frames with varying exposures, then had them all developed and scanned by NCPS.

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Astronaut Suicides is a fun photography concept.

It’s always good to hear a new film product being released. This time it’s Kodak Vision3 50D (5203), a replacement for Kodak Vision2 50D. We shot some Vision2 50D for H.P. Thomcraft 2—it’s great stuff.

Here’s some more info on 5203:

• Technical Data
• Product Information
• Behind the Design of VISION3 50D

It was time that I did a revamping of my site. Long story short, I moved it over to Octopress. I’m liking it so far.

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Dust is the enemy of photography. Every time I go to print or scan a negative and find dust on it, I consider switching to digital. Then I remember all the stories of people with dust on their sensors and having to correct hundreds of files. At least you can automate that.

The first and best way to obtain dust and scratch free scans is to have dust and scratch free negatives. Sometimes scratches happen and are unavoidable. But dust and water marks can usually be minimized. For water marks, use Photo-flo or a similar solution. I use it as described on my Film Processing page. Then hang your negatives up to dry in a dust free environment and handle them carefully after they are dry. Mine go immediately into sleeves for flattening, and only come out for scanning and printing.

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I recently obtained a 75mm Summilux. Here are my thoughts on it.

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what was i thinking

absolutefucker

I’ve been moving my website from a homegrown static system based on BBEdit and some Python scripts to one using a homegrown Python page generation. The script is takes some inspiration from ikiwiki and PyBlosxom, both of which use Markdown for the content. In the previous homegrown system, I wrote pages in BBEdit and then piped them through a python script that ran py markdown and py SmartyPants on the text, and the glued result into some html templates which were then updated using BBEdit’s update function. At some point, I used PyBlosxom briefly, which had it’s own Markdown.

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