Author: JH

I don’t do a lot of gear talk here – but today’s announcement by Panasonic and Olympus to develop a heavily downsized “Micro Four Thirds” camera system with exchangeable lenses is great news (good gear head summary here, good technical analysis here). As of today, and until there are real products, basically your only choice is to buy a Canon or Nikon DSLR. Both of those systems, with mirror boxes, a plethora of legacy issues, and a lot of outdated lenses, stem right from the olden days of film (Sony and Pentax are no different in this respect). If, on the other hand, somebody started a comparable system from scratch today, using the latest technologies, the resulting camera system would look very different: smaller, no mirror box but electronic viewfinders instead, video mode, etc.; and while today’s digital compact cameras offer these features, they are kept dumb by the manufacturers to protect their cash cows – their DSLR lines.

Almost all camera manufacturers have been following this same strategy for a long time: to milk existing and largely outdated product lines as long as possible by offering piecemeal innovation, if even that. Panasonic and Olympus, on the other hand, have little to lose in the DSLR business. They do not have a large stake in that domain, and insofar were the most likely to make the first move. Rumor has it that both Canon and Nikon are to follow very soon, by filling the large gap between their existing DSLR and digicam lines. For me, all this will put an end to carrying around a lot of compromised cameras (both DSLRs and compact digicams), but concentrate on one small system again – a little like 10 years ago when I just owned two Leica M cameras and three lenses. Only this time, it will be a lot more fun…

Here’s another new image from my Mountain Project, from this summer. While it’s too editorial for my taste (I wouldn’t hang it on my own wall, which normally is my benchmark for the final edit in any of my personal projects), the image is relevant for the series as a whole: This is how the Dolomites look like in early June, when the weather is changing every other minute and you feel like being confronted with an almost theatrical setting, and constant surprises. Here, in the foreground there’s harsh sunlight, a mile away to the right it is raining, and still farther back there’s this sunny haze that seems to be typical for the Alps at that time of the year. Two minutes later, and the scene would have been quite different yet again.

One more thing: A year ago I complained that if you photograph this kind of scenery with film, you are basically done in one 125th of a second, while with digital you can spend hours in Photoshop to achieve the same result. Not so anymore – digital cameras and software get better quickly, and as a result this one barely took me 15 minutes in post processing, with just very minimal changes re contrast. In a later entry I’ll try and pass on some simple tricks that can spare you a lot of post processing grief.

I’m always very happy about feedback to my work that refers to what I was actually thinking. When I started the Mountain Project, I thought quite a bit about the need to include references as to scale (like in “Jaws,” when marine biologist Matt Hooper tries to take a picture of the great white shark following their boat, and asks the horrified police chief Martin Brody to stay in the frame, so that he will be a reference for how large the shark is…). Reference as to scale is of course one of the many rules that are supposed to make a good photograph. For my work it has turned out that breaking this rule makes for the best images, while obeying it usually leads to images that are too editorial for my taste. Then there are those, like these two from a couple of weeks ago, that are sort of in between: Both of these photographs include trees (and everybody knows the size of a tree, so there is an obvious reference), but the resulting images are still kind of abstract. They work for me. Thanks for the comment over at issuu.com to Vincent Garofalo.