Reading photography forums could lead one to believe Ken Rockwell is the devil. Or if not the devil, an idiot who has no business writing a blog about photography. I disagree.

Rockwell’s site is so over the top with hyperbole and its associated affiliate links that one wonders whether or not to trust his opinion. The answer, for me, is “sort of.” Let’s start with a look at the footer on the home page…

(C) 1973-2009 Ken Rockwell. Optimized for Mosaic 1.0 and 640x480 monitor

That alone makes me want to cheer for him, but at the same time narrow my eyes and take a step or two away. And then, just when you think it’s safe, there’s this bit from the About page…

“While often inspired by actual products and events, just like any other good news organization, I like to make things up and stretch the truth if they make an article more fun. In the case of new products, rumors and just plain silly stuff, it’s all pretend. If you lack a good BS detector, please treat this entire site as a work of fiction.”

So there you have it, right in plain sight. Next time you’re on a photography blog or forum and someone starts to diss poor Ken with things like, “Ken contradicts himself” or “I swear he just makes it up as he goes” or whatever, just move along or if you must, point out the above paragraph.

I enjoy the hell out of his site, and use the affiliate links whenever I can because, right or wrong, he’s working at it.

About a month ago I bought a Bronica SQ-A kit after spotting it on Craigslist. I wanted to try medium format film and I’ve always liked the square 6x6 shape. The big negatives are amazing, and the camera works just fine.

The only problem is that it isn’t a Hasselblad, which is what I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember. After putting a dozen or so rolls throught the Bronica I decided to buy the Hasselblad and be done with it.

Hasselblad 500 C/M

The 500 C/M was produced from 1970 until 1994. Mine was made in 1990 and it’s gorgeous! That’s the good news. The bad news is that I couldn’t focus the thing. I don’t know how anyone ever got off any sharp photos with the standard focusing screen. I have since replaced the original with the later Acute-matte D screen with microprism and split window. It’s still tricky, but much better. The Acute-matte screen looks to be about 2 stops brighter than the original. I still need to use the magnifier, but at least if everyone holds still I have some chance of getting it right.

Hasselblad’s V series prides itself on being modular, and compatible. There are many different viewfinders, film backs and lenses available. Here’s a photo of mine with all of the parts separated.

It really is clever, and seems to be built to take years of normal use. I plan to invest in a 45-degree prism finder eventually to see if that helps with focusing, but for now, I’m having fun peering at the ground glass and hoping for the best.

I recently bought a Leica M8 and it seemed like such a great idea. I love my film M cameras and the convenience of digital could only make things better, right?

The M8 is a great camera, but I sold it. I just couldn’t get used to the quirks. Things like lens coding, crop factors, and IR/cut filters were distracting and preventing me from loving the camera. I paid $2,600 for it, and didn’t love it. For that much money I needed to love it. Besides, it was depreciating faster than the film Leicas. Leica is about to announce a full frame M9, which will likely reduce the value of the M8 even more. I sold it for $2,500, meaning I’ve about $50/month into it. Not a bad rental rate, but I don’t see that holding up. I’ve seen them for sale since then for $2,300.

One thing I enjoyed about the M8 was aperture-priority auto exposure. I love my meterless, fully manual M4 but sometimes it’s nice to just focus and shoot, knowing the exposure is going to be spot on.

So I replaced the M8 with an M7, Leica’s most modern film camera. The M7’s automatic exposure is an improvement over my old M6. The electronically-controlled shutter makes the M7 battery dependent, but I can live with that.

M8

• Pro: Convenience of digital
• Pro: Beautiful files
• Con: Suffers from reliability problems
• Con: Depreciating rapidly
• Con: Still very expensive
• Con: Wide lenses require coding
• Con: Lenses require IR Cut filters to prevent color shifts
• Con: I don’t like the body covering
• Con: Larger than the film Ms
• Con: Covering and lack of film advance lever make it difficult to grip
• Con: Completely battery dependent

M7

• Pro: Aperture priority auto exposure
• Pro: Easily replaceable sensor (film) :)
• Pro: Vulcanite body covering better than the M8’s
• Pro: Smaller and easier to grip than the M8
• Pro: Price is not depreciating rapidly.
• Pro: Quieter shutter than M8
• Con: No chimping
• Con: Electronically controlled shutter means partial battery dependency (some speeds work without battery)

The adventure continues.

Since I like to see what stuff other people use I thought maybe others would like to see what I use. So I wrote it down on a page called Stuff I Use.

As a kid, I would notice when someone on T.V. was taking photographs with a Hasselblad. I had no idea what it meant, just that it looked cool and I wanted one. Medium format photography is one of those things I’ve always regarded with respect, but not much interest. The gear is terribly expensive and everyone is using digital now anyway. The Hasselblad was something rich landscape photographers used, but now they all have 5Ds instead.

A funny thing happened. I was browsing around Flickr when I found myself in the middle of a 6x6 pool of photos. Loved them. Something about the the square format is interesting to me. And how nice to not have to decide if the shot makes more sense in portrait or landscape orientation.

I spent a couple hours looking for used Hasselblad kits and though much cheaper than they used to be, it’s still a $2000 investment. On a whim I took a look at Craigslist and spotted a used Bronica SQ-A kit. An hour later I was back home with an SQ-A, 50mm, 80mm, 150mm lenses, waist-level and prism viewfinders, extra focusing screens, a few filters - all in a waterproof, custom Pelikan case. Total cost, $500. Pretty cheap way to get my feet wet in medium format photography.

I love the idea of a big, high-quality negative, even if I’ll only be scanning them and printing digitally. And the shooting style of looking down at a focusing screen to compose is new and interesting as well. This should be a fun experiment! Yes, I could drop a lot less and get a Holga, but those are stupid and I find the whole Lomography thing irritating.

I burned through a roll of Neopan Acros 100 as a test, then processed it in D76 since I’d exposed it at box speed. The next roll I shot at 200 ISO and will be seeing how Diafine works with it.

Developed roll of Acros 120. It’s BIG!

Now the only thing left is to find a scanner. My Nikon Coolscan 5000 can’t scan medium format and the 9000 is way to expensive. I ordered an Epson v750, which gets great reviews and was only a third as expensive as the Nikon. I’ll find out on Tuesday how this all turned out.

I have no idea what I’m doing, but it should be fun.

Let’s call it an experiment. For the next 30 days I am going to avoid as much online consumption as I can. It’s a social media fast.

Lemme ‘splain.

I spend a lot of time consuming things online. By the time I’ve read all my feeds for the day and caught up with 500 people, 140 characters at a time, there’s little time left, and I still can’t stop. The social media addiction is so very strong, and I’m all in. A junkie.

Time for an intervention.

To fix the problem I could reduce the amount of time spent social networking. Easy, right? Easy yes, but the problem with simply cutting back is that it doesn’t last. It’s too vague. Have I cut back enough? I can trick myself into anything, so to avoid any mamby pamby ambiguity, I’ve decided to go cold turkey. As of right now, and until the end of June, I’m shutting off every time-sucking, attention-grabbing bit of computer distraction that I can reasonably live without. No more Twitter, Facebook, Blogs, RSS Feeds, Forums, or other things where too much time is spent aimlessly consuming whatever it is they’re feeding me.

So what now?

I enjoy writing, drawing, and taking photographs, yet I barely do any of those things. With all of my new-found time I should be able to something, right? I recently bought an easel, some acrylics, brushes and canvases. So far I’ve succeeded in painting one of the canvases blue. It’s been almost 2 months. That can’t even be considered a good start. So more painting would be nice.

Writing doesn’t come easy for me, and I’m not getting better by not doing it. To that end I’ve decided to write no fewer than 500 words per day for the next 30 days. It doesn’t matter what I decide to write about - it’s all part of the exercise.

And photography? We all know that I love taking photos. And yet, my cameras can sit idle for days at at time. That’s just silly. How about shooting 2 rolls of film per week? That sounds easy, and much more fun than reading 1000 inane comments on Techcrunch.

What then is acceptible? Email, of course. Movies I consider life-sustaining, so those are okay. Posting to Flickr and my Blog are fine, since that’s a form of creation. Also posting to Twitter is fine, but only using Birdhouse. With Birdhouse I can broadcast updates just fine without being forced, or tricked into reading everyone else’s tweets. It’s only selfish temporarily. If you DM me I’ll get an email, so feel free.

At the end of the 30 days I hope to have created a few things instead of blindly consuming them. Should be fun. In the meantime, I’ll be where I always am: jbaty@fusionary.com and (616) 723-0910. Talk to you soon.

I thought I’d share the latest iteration of my photography workflow. I recently bought a nice used Leica M8, rendering my Nikon workflow obsolete. Here’s how it looks today.

Ingest

I still use the terrific Photo Mechanic to ingest photos from the card. I tried giving it up but it’s the only thing that moves and renames files exactly how I want them, which is…

1. Copy RAW files from card to the Capture One session folder (I’ll get to Capture One in a minute).
2. Copy duplicate RAW files from card to a second external hard drive.
3. All files are put into directories by date (e.g 20090521) and renamed with date and sequence (e.g. 20090521_001.DNG)
4. Photo Mechanic automatically applies whatever IPTC template I choose to each photo.

Cull and Convert

Once the files are off the card and named properly I fire up Capture One. This is new to me, as it came with the M8. At first I dismissed the idea of using yet another app in my process, but then I compared the RAW conversions of Capture One 4.8 with those of Lightroom 2.3. Out of the box it was no contest, Capture One’s conversions were cleaner and the color was better. It’s subjective, but there you go.

I then use the nifty Capture One workflow, deleting the junk and moving the keepers to a folder for processing. Once things are reasonably culled, it’s process time. The only things a RAW file get you are exposure and white balance. I tweak each keeper and set a white balance and adjust exposure as necessary. After that, RAW doesn’t get me much, so I output either JPG or TIFF files, depending on if I expect to do significant additional processing. These are output to a folder called, you guessed it, “Output.” I then delete the originals. (Remember I have another copy of each)

Catalog and Archive

I use Adobe Lightroom for cataloging, tweaking, printing and uploading to Flickr and SmugMug. The Capture One output folder is configured as the auto-import folder in Lightroom. All I do now is launch Lightroom and the latest processed images are imported automatically. I’ll move them around into folders from there, either by date or by event.

After any final tweaks, crops, etc. I’ll usually export one or two images to Flickr and several more to SmugMug right from Lightroom using the handy plugins from Jeffrey Friedl.

Backups

I delete the original RAW files from the processing folders of Capture One, but still have all of them on the external hard drive. I have 3 external drives. The first holds my Lightroom Library consisting of processed keepers. The second holds every RAW file ever pulled off a card. The third is a Drobo which acts as a backup of each of the first two. I copy everything from both of the “media” drives to the Drobo daily using Chronosync. I also occasionally buy an additional external drive and copy each of the backups to it, then store that drive offsite. Whew!

Too Much?

This all sounds very complicated, and perhaps I am trying too hard. After all, I could easily just import right from the card into Lightroom and be done with it. Who knows, that’s exactly what I might end up doing, but for now, everything is how I like it, file handling, RAW conversion and cataloging are all nearly perfect. Today, it’s worth the effort. I like that I don’t save every single raw image to my Lightroom library now. I might have a card with 300 images on it and only convert 20 or 30 for import into Lighroom. I still have the secondary backups on the other drive, but the library stays nice and clean. Clean is good.

The Leica M8 is hard to hold. It’s basically the same size and shape as earlier film-based models, but it’s a little bigger and a little smoother. It feels as great as other M cameras, but doesn’t inspire the same confidence when holding it. It may be the covering. On my M4 the covering has more texture and feels a littler stickier than that of the M8. The M8 also does not have a film advance lever to snuggle your thumb under. This all adds up to a problem, and Tim Isaac has solved it with a terrific little device called the Thumbs Up.

The Thumbs Up arrived packaged very nicely.

Nifty box, eh?

The Thumbs Up is milled from a single piece of brass and then laquered up nicely in black. I don’t love the choice of type used for the logo, but that’s a pretty minor complaint, considering that within 10 seconds of putting it on the camera I knew I would never want to take it off. The difference is amazing. It completely changes the way the M8 handles - for the better.

Using the Thumbs Up

Thumbs Up on the M8

I ordered the Thumbs Up Model 1 from Tony Rose at PopFlash Photo and it arrived in just a couple of days. Fast turnaround, as usual from PopFlash. Cost was $126.

Highly Recommended.

After 3 years of pretending I didn’t want an M8, I now have one. Much has already been written about Leica’s first digital M so I will stick to a few personal observations based on first impressions using the camera.

I’ve been shooting with Leicas for while now, most recently with a nice M4. I get along well with the way rangefinders work. Leica also makes some damn fine lenses. Having 70 years of lenses by Leica, Zeiss and now Voigtlander to choose from is nice. I went back to film so that I could use a Leica M camera and 50mm Summicron. The size, feel, and build, (also admittedly, even the legend) made the Leica M a perfect camera for me. Too bad it wasn’t digital so I could stop swearing at dust and scratches and the tedium of scanning negatives.

When the M8 was introduced I wanted one, naturally. Unfortunately, $5000 for the body made the notion of buying one unrealistic. But, over the past few years I’ve kept buying gear, a little at a time. I noticed recently that if I sold a few things I might be within range of an M8.

So that’s what I did; sold my M6TTL and all of my Nikon digital gear and bought a nice used M8. I chose the chrome version because I think it’s beautiful that way. I’ve only had the camera for a few days, but here’s what I know so far…

Cons

Size and Sound. It’s bigger and louder than the M4. That doesn’t mean it’s big and loud, but there is a noticeable difference in size and sound. Also, the M8 is more difficult to hold. I think this is due to the lack of a film advance lever and possibly the covering. To compensate, I’ve already ordered a Thumbs Up. That should help.

Sensor Noise at higher ISOs. Image noise at higher ISOs is more prevelant than with the D300 I just sold. Significantly higher at anything above 640. If you’re looking for baby-butt smooth files at IS0 3200, look elsewhere. I convert 90% of my shots to black and white, and I’m used to noisy high speed B&W; files, so this isn’t nearly as important to me.

Crop. The M8’s sensor is not quite full-frame, meaning it has a crop factor of 1.33. I tend to like wider rather than longer lenses so the crop factor limits my options. I only have 2 lenses, the 50mm Summicron and the Zeiss Biogon 35mm. With the M8 these are now effectively 66mm and 46mm lenses. I’ll be shopping for something wider soon.

Magenta Shift. Sensitivity to infrared light causes the M8’s sensor to render black fabrics as magenta. I’ve already seen this in a few shots and it’s a problem. Fortunately, it’s easy to fix by putting an IR Cut filter on lenses. Not ideal, but no biggie.

That’s a lot of cons, now for the good stuff.

Pros

It’s digital. That may sound obvious, but if you’re happy with film and prefer rangefinders, there’s no reason to buy an M8. Go grab an M7 or MP and be done with it. I like film just fine, but mostly because it was the only way to shoot with a Leica rangefinder. With the introduction of the M8, that is no longer the case. I now have all the juicy goodness of a Leica M paired with the convenience and flexibility of digital capture. Bliss.

It’s simple. Seriously, the value of having analog shutter speed and aperture controls with manual focusing is underrated. Even the M8’s menus are simple. They could be better, but with only a few choices there’s not much to do there anyway. I enjoy not having to choose between 4 metering modes, 9 shooting modes, 42 focus points and so on. I can just pick up the camera, set the important bits, almost by feel, and shoot.

File quality. The files directly out of the M8 appear to be very good, especially at IS0 640 and under.

Handling. It’s an M. It feels great in my hands. Framing and focusing with a rangefinder is terrific. It’s compact, quiet and thinks the way I do. In other words, the M8’s handling is just about perfect. Put an ISO switch on the body and we’re all good.

Conclusion

It’s too early for a real conclusion. I’ll need time to get over recency bias, but my first impression is that the M8 is flawed, but awesome. It handles like an M should, and is capable of producing outstanding images. I can put the camera and some lenses in a very small bag and produce images on par with what the best DSLRs have to offer. And I can do it using a smaller, quieter and prettier package. I’m in.

Enter the M8.

Well almost. I don’t have one yet, but it’s in the works. But why an M8? Mostly because I want a quality digital option and love my film Ms so much that the M8 seems a natural progression. I ran into a gentleman online who is looking for an M6 and has an M8. Convenient, no? We’re going to trade my M6 and cash for his M8. Might be a few weeks before it all happens, but it looks to be a done deal. Can’t wait!