612 Slightly Delayed
I didn’t really have a happy relationship with the Linhof 612, despite it being a camera I’d wanted to use for well over a decade before I bought the first one. I was drawn to the camera through the works of one of my earlier influences, New Zealand landscape photographer Andris Apse. He was a great exponent of the Linhof, or more precisely, the 612 format. I originally discovered his work shortly after I started working with the Hasselblad XPan, and immediately felt that the 612 format was often more to my taste than the wider 24 x 65 of the XPan*. Also, the Linhof 612 lenses all have a built-in 6mm positive shift, which can be a huge plus in landscape photography. And the camera body has a tripod socket on top, as well as beneath, so that you can invert it to get a 6mm negative shift.
Scanning rediscovered
I’m very, very late to the party on this one, but I’ve finally discovered camera film scanning. By which I mean digitising film using a setup based around a film holder, light source and digital camera.
The results are astounding. I am now able to dig into shadow detail of positive (slide) film to a level that was completely impossible before with any of my desktop film scanners, or indeed the mythical Hasselblad/Imacon Flextight X1.
Capture One for iPad
I very much like the idea of CaptureOne on iPad. I participated in the Beta program, but at its conclusion, I could not see any immediate scenario where it would be of use to me. However, recently I decided to see how it could work for me in a real world scenario. I’ve just returned from a 10 day trip to Iceland, for which I did not take a laptop, just my iPad Air
The CaptureOne Outrage
The photointerwebs, or at least that part which is interested in Capture One, exploded in a orgy of demonstrative outrage last week, when a new pricing model was announced for Capture One software.
In a nutshell, the current offer is that you can buy a “perpetual” license, which will give you long term rights to use a particular release of the software, for as long as you meet the hardware / operating system requirement. In addition, any feature upgrades added up until the next major release you also get to use. The to-be offer is much the same, only it removes the feature upgrades part, and can be bought at any time to cover the then-current product feature set.
It’s pretty clear why they made this move: some time ago, they introduced a subscription model running alongside the perpetual model. A major touted benefit of the subscription model was that you get new features when they’re ready, not just at major release points (yearly in Capture One’s case). The problem here is that perpetual licenses also got that benefit, and the perpetual upgrade pricing was not very different to a subscription. So perpetual was more flexible, and on top of that did not lock you in perpetuity to a subscription.