Richard Williams

<blockquote> <p>I always thought Cosina was in the best position to slap a sensor on the back of their cameras and make them digital RF bodies. They could have done this from the start of the digital age.</p> </blockquote> <p>They already did. The Epson R-D1 was built by Cosina and is basically a Bessa. At one point some people thought their collaboration with Zeiss might also produce a digital RF, but sadly not.</p>

<p>Your Fuji files should be fine for Alamy. Although they want you to submit high quality jpegs, I believe the size they specify (I thought it was 17MB) refers to the image when uncompressed. Photoshop (and Irfanview, etc.) displays this below the active image by default - simply load your jpeg to check it. If your software doesn't, save a copy of the processed jpg as an 8-bit tiff without any compression and look at the file size. It should be about 47MB from an uncropped Fuji image, which far exceeds Alamy's minimum requirement.</p>

<p>'In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.'<br> - George Orwell, <em>Politics and the English Language</em><br> http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/politics/english/e_polit/</p>

<p>I think Canon can get away with charging 33% more for the 5DS (and a bit more for the 5DSR) over the 5D MkIII because of the crazy 50MP sensor. This is Canon's answer to the Nikon D8x0 series, and is a bit of a special purpose camera, slower than the MkIII and with a more limited ISO range (the rumour mill thinks there may be a more conventional MkIV with fewer pixels on the way). And it is at least new technology - all the 35/2 ASPH has got to show for more than doubling its price is a barcode for the 6-bit sensor. Otherwise it hasn't changed in nearly 2 decades. The new lenses, of course, start out at the 'exceptional' price level, and then just rise further. Only Leica have the cheek to sell a 50/2.4 for £1,250 (not just one of the most expensive, but perhaps the slowest conventional double-Gauss 50 ever sold, where the design brief must have read 'limit the aperture at the entry level so we can hike the price of the 50/2 even more').</p>

<p>I had a look at the prices of the 35/2 ASPH at London dealer 'The Classic Camera' on the wayback machine at archive.org. From 2001 to 2004, you could pick one up new for £895. Then the price hikes began, mostly between 2005-2010, and the current price is £2090 at the same dealer, 234% of the 2001-2004 price. In 2001, a new Nikon 35/2 AF-D was £279. Today, the price has gone DOWN to £229. To be fair there's a new model, the 35/1.8 AFS, which is £369, 132% of the 2001 AF-D price.</p> <p>Leica has chosen to be a boutique brand (literally, in their new network of Leica stores) with prices to match, in a market where it only competes with its own secondhand products (the prices of which seem to rise in line with the new gear).</p>

<p>You might want to ask again over on the Classic Cameras forum - you'll probably get plenty of suggestions, and maybe offers to sell from people who can properly judge the working condition of the camera.</p>

<p>On sale at a London dealer right now, David Bailey's Leica Monochrom for £3500: http://theclassiccamera.com/epages/BT0261.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/BT0261/Products/9603<br> ...or a random Leica Monochrom is slightly better condition for £3300: http://theclassiccamera.com/epages/BT0261.sf/en_GB/?ObjectPath=/Shops/BT0261/Products/9601</p>

<p>I guess you've already rejected the Sharpie method?: http://lavidaleica.com/content/leica-lens-codes</p>

<p>Big, bright optical VF, ideally something like the hybrid OF/EVF finders from the Fuji X series, with full shooting data displayed in OF mode.</p> <p>Direct independent controls for aperture and shutter speed without a menu or mode switch. Could be command and sub-command dials like the modern SLRs, or traditional top plate and lens dials.</p> <p>Quick access to ISO, focus point selection, AF mode and AE/AF lock without menus.</p>

<p>Exciting Craiglist camera buying experience: http://petapixel.com/2013/03/26/how-i-busted-a-thief-who-tried-to-sell-my-camera-on-craigslist/</p>

<p>Some cheeky upgrades there - the 35 he wants is a stop faster than what he's offering and he's gone for the most expensive 50, the Summicron ASPH; I make the list price over £23,000 GBP for the new kit. I wonder if anyone will bite? I've seen a couple of cameras formerly owned by well-known photographers on sale at London dealers over the years - they didn't attract much of a premium.</p>

<p>I have an app plugged into my web browser that blocks conceptual projects from hipster design students when a defined silliness threshold is exceeded. I would check out the original article, but for some reason I can't access it.</p>

<p>I would try:</p> <p>(a) Transferring the images from your media card by dragging and dropping using your computer's operating system rather than Nikon Transfer (which can sometimes corrupt images if the version of Transfer is older than the NEF version).</p> <p>and</p> <p>(b) Editing the files with the latest version of Capture NX-D: http://nikonimglib.com/ncnxd/</p> <p> </p>

<blockquote> <p>Initially people didn't pay much attention to the low-end D40, but soon after there were the D3000, D3100 ... D5000 ... D5500. Those third-party DX lenses without a built-in AF motor started losing value pretty quickly.</p> </blockquote> <p>You wonder when this might go further up the camera range. Nikon has been busy replacing their legacy AF-D primes with the new f/1.8 AF-S lenses, so there aren't many left (perhaps none still being manufactured in quantity) that require a screwdriver motor.</p>

<p>The picture on the tea house wall is actually a Schiele.</p>

<blockquote> <p>Oh and BTW, Windows 10 is OK. 3 times faster than Win 7, double faster than Win 8 or 8.1, 100 times more capable than XP and 1000 times better than Vista.</p> </blockquote> <p>And 17 times more fictional statistics!</p>

<p>Note also that the D800 <strong>does</strong> have a built-in flash. I don't find 36MP a burden with a reasonably fast, fairly recent computer, and I do much prefer the ergonomics of the D800 to the D610, etc. The only downside of its build quality is that the D800 is not a lightweight camera!</p>

<p>You might just find a D800 for that if you look around - they're about $1600 at KEH right now. It should do all you ask - the 4fps maximum framerate shouldn't be a limitation for the type of shots you mention. Everything else is fast, ergonomics are excellent, and the sensor is great for cropping (though you need a decent computer to keep up with the large files).</p>

<blockquote> <p>Subsequently, in 1982 I had a chance to see his original works (over a dozen) hanging at Belevedere in Vienna.</p> </blockquote> <p>I envy anyone who saw the intact collection before 2006, when a court case transferred ownership of 5 of the paintings back to the family of the original owners (it was found that they had been illegally appropriated during the Nazi era). Unfortunately for Vienna, the Austrian government did not buy back the paintings when it was offered them on favourable terms, and all were promptly sold off and acquired by various private collectors. The greatest work, the stunning golden portrait Adele Bloch-Bauer, is at least on permanent display in the tiny Neue Galerie in NYC, where it's the main draw for the rather steep $20 admission fee. Its companion piece, a later portrait of the same subject in a very different style, is currently on loan to MoMA - I hope I get back to NYC while it's still there, as I've never seen it. Anyone interested in Klimt should still see the paintings in the Belvedere, though - it remains one of the greatest collections of his work. While in Vienna, the Beethoven Frieze at the Secession and the Klimts in the Leopold Museum are also worth your time.</p> <blockquote> <p>The contrast between modern graphic prints and his actual work is simply many kilometers apart.</p> </blockquote> <p>Yes, definitely!</p>

<p>Good news - that makes a secondhand M9 look like a much more viable option. I wonder what the lead time on sensor exchange is?</p>

<p>One advantage of Nikon's own software is that it honours some in-camera settings (like Picture Controls) that other converters ignore. Another is that you get Nikon's idea of what a raw conversion 'should' look like by default (similar to in-camera jpegs) using Nikon's own camera profiling (which is buried somewhere in the software). Compare the output of various raw converters using the default settings and you'll see subtly (sometimes not so subtly) different colours and other image characteristics. Which output you prefer is a personal choice, and of course with sufficient tweaking you can get any result you want (with more or less difficulty) There are also other things to consider, like image management and speed of processing. Personally, I like Nikon's default colours and use Capture NX-D as my first choice converter: http://nikonimglib.com/ncnxd/ However, it's far from the fastest converter and has a less refined interface than Lightroom. As suggested above, try several and see which you prefer, considering both the quality of the conversion and the workflow. NX-D is free, most other commercial packages have demo versions, and there a few Open Source/Free Software packages like Raw Therapee.</p>

<blockquote> <p>And the price is about right at US$16,900.</p> </blockquote> <p>I wish I lived in Karim's world!</p>

<p>Might be worth registering the serial numbers on http://www.lenstag.com/ and also reporting them to Leica - they used to have a public online stolen gear database you could check serial numbers on. If they still maintain this internally, then they probably check it when a camera comes in for servicing, etc.</p>

<blockquote> <p>It appears that you are unaware that Hugin is open source. That means the developers decide what is in it. If you want software with some real feature management, pay for software instead of using free open source software.</p> </blockquote> <p>In general, I've found Open Source/Free Software projects more responsive about bugs and features that proprietary software companies. With the FOSS projects there's a very good chance you can talk to the developers directly, and if it's something easy to implement they may well just do it (no guarantee, obviously). I have had a Linux kernel bug fixed this way. If you're a random user of some proprietary package, simply paying for it rarely gives you much leverage - only someone with a contract that specifies feature development on request can reasonably expect the company to pay attention (except perhaps for some small companies with specialised products, which make responsiveness a selling point).</p>

<p>PhotoRec is one tool that can manage this if there is anything to be recovered:<br> http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec<br> Most of the documentation is for the command-line version, but a nice GUI, qphotorec, is now also included. The download is free.</p>