Richard Williams

Again, it's not a bargain if you are a Lightroom-only user who needs support for new raw formats, but not Photoshop. In the UK, LR6 costs £104. Upgrading every 18 months or so from the previous version used to cost £60, and you could skip a version. 18 months of the cheapest subscription that includes LR is £180. Adobe just wants more money, and the success of the CC subscription scheme shows enough people are prepared to pay it. If only half of regular LR users convert to a subscription, Adobe will still come out ahead.

Where I live, Office 365 with 1TB of storage is half the price of the LR CC subscription with 1TB, or of the 1TB upgrade to the PS+LR plan. Yes, it goes without saying that LR6 will continue to work (though not, of course, directly with any new raw format from now on). The price hike is relative to what Lightroom-only users have been paying for the last decade. The annual subscriptions are more expensive than the initial purchase of a perpetual licence at current prices, and the old upgrades (every 1-2 years) were about half the price of either of the current lowest-tier plans that include one or both versions of LR, while minor raw format updates were free. Yes, you get PS or cloud storage rental included, but you may not want either of these. People who used to buy every upgrade to both PS and LR may well be paying less per year than they were in the CS days (and good luck to them). People who were happy with just LR (especially but not only if they skipped versions until they bought a new camera) will be paying substantially more.

Affinity 1.6 is out now (both Photo and Designer have been updated). It's a free upgrade for existing users, who also qualify for the bonus content they're including as a sweetener: Affinity | Blog Affinity Photo and Designer 1.6 have launched! Free Content included with 1.6 ('Till 16th November)

If you don't want Photoshop or Adobe's overpriced cloud storage this is a big price hike. The cost of a perpetual LR6 licence on Amazon UK would only buy 10 months of one of the rental plans, and standalone version upgrades used to be cheaper than the initial purchase (and were of course optional, especially if you hadn't upgraded your camera and didn't need to support a new raw format).

It really doesn't sound like you'd benefit from any more lenses in this range. You already have all the classic focal lengths, and the 28mm at least is relatively light (though not that small). The 35mm DX would be lighter than anything you currently have, if that's a consideration.

CS6 was also going to be available 'indefinitely', so we probably shouldn't be too surprised. They'll lose some LR users, but this will be more than offset by the extra income they get from those who stay. Someone has run the projections.

Won't be necessary after Thursday. Here's the announcement on an official Adobe page: Introducing: Lightroom CC, Lightroom Classic CC and More | Photoshop Blog by Adobe 'Lightroom 6.13 with support for the Nikon D850 will be released on October 26, 2017.'

Apparently 6.13 will include D850 support. But yes it is, as usual, about the cash. Subscriptions are more lucrative. The biggest losers will be those who were happy with standalone LR and didn't want Photoshop. The last time I looked on Amazon, you could get a perpetual LR6 licence for about the same price as just 10 months of any CC package that includes LR.

If you have the licence information but can't find the DVD, the installers are here: Download Adobe Creative Suite 6 applications

You could always save $6400 by putting some Vaseline on a $100 Elmar 90.

I don't think that's correct about the SB-600. According to Nikon, both the SB-600 and SB-800 are compatible with film TTL, D-TTL and i-TTL: Nikon | Imaging Products | SB-600

It looks real enough, and as above, a factory conversion judging by the serial number. The lens should unscrew from the body anticlockwise unless it's jammed in the mount. It's easier to do this with the infinity lock engaged, but this may not work properly on yours as the focusing lever looks a bit bent.

The mysterious Yashica turns out to be a basic digital with a couple of deeply silly faux analogue gimmicks: Expect the Unexpected. digiFilm™ Camera by YASHICA

As you were trying to contact him previously, have you tried phoning the number above?

I've never dealt with John Maddox and I have no idea of his current status, but I've seen quite a few references to his LTM repair business over the years (e.g. in the Nemeng Leica FAQ) and there are forum posts on places like RFF containing that email address going back over a decade. The Nemeng FAQ gives a phone number and address. Incidentally, there are quite a lot of short cryptic posts on photo.net lately, often reviving old threads (not necessarily this one). Is someone trying to generate a bit of traffic?

Which exposure mode is set on each Contax? Do you get this problem in aperture priority or manual mode?

Well, they seem to have taken my comment about light leaks on board :-)

Shooting film often isn't really about picture quality these days, at least not in the 'lines per mm' sense, With 24MP sensors even in cheap dSLRs, digital won that argument for most practical purposes quite some time ago. People shoot film because they like the look of it. The things a the previous generation of photographers spent a lot of effort minimising - visible grain, unusual colour palettes, even light leaks - are often exactly what a film shooter is looking for. Everyone already has a digital camera in their pocket. If they're going to shoot film, they want it to have a bit of 'character' that differentiates it from the billions of smartphone images everyone else is sharing. I'm not surprised that the big camera companies have no enthusiasm for new film cameras - the days of million selling P&S cameras are long gone. But I wouldn't bet heavily against someone else producing something for a niche market. A 35mm camera isn't exactly rocket science, after all. I might go as far as betting a roll of Ektar on Mr Hunt coming up with a prototype.

I guess it will also work in non-TTL auto mode on the dSLRs?

Easy enough to gauge the demand nowadays - put it on Kickstarter or Indiegogo (like the new 'Yashica' thing) and see what response you get. He doesn't have to sell a million of them - rapid prototyping to generate interest and small to medium scale production runs to fulfill whatever demand there is are much more accessible now than they were 20 years ago.

It looks like he's doing more than dreaming - Bellamy Hunt is the man behind this latest project: Exclusive: Japan Camera Hunter talks to EMULSIVE about his new 35mm compact camera project | Articles, Film Culture, News | EMULSIVE "What I can say is that the camera will be a premium compact and have a build quality, lens character and set of features to suit. It’ll hopefully be of a metal body design and will definitely come with manual ISO selection ... I want to mix and match the best features of compact premium point and shoots from Contax, Minolta, Ricoh and others. Things like custom modes / user profiles, some form of fixed-focus mode and definitely no auto-on flash are really important to me ... We are tentatively planning for having a camera and app ready for testing in late 2018 but that’s a timescale based on our current knowledge of the challenges ahead."

Found over on Talk Photography: Actual new 35mm AF compact coming Campaign Results LIVE release for #SaveAnalogCameras - Cameraventures.com

It seems there is more to it after all: YASHICA Official 'Expect the Unexpected The Unprecedented Camera by YASHICA October 2017, Kickstarter.' Still nothing solid about what type of camera this might be.

On my monitor the mixed light film scans look very green.

Perhaps there's more to it than this, but I think a Hong Kong company is just using the classic camera heritage of the brand they purchased from Kyocera to sell an accessory lens for smartphones: YASHICA | The Silence of Story