Lumière d’Argent

After about two years and a half doing 99.9% of my photos with digital cameras, I am left with mixed feelings. Mostly, it is great. I did get what I missed when I was using solely the Rollei SL66 and later the Arca-Swiss 6×9. However, as I should have foreseen, I also lost a few things:

• Ability to cope with specular highlight in an aesthetic way
• Dynamic range
• Production of a tangible, durable object
• The large viewfinder
• Flexible depth of field management

I won’t go back to everything this or that. But I started last summer to use my Leica again, with great joy and nice results too.

For Christmas I received a beautiful present: an old Mamiya RZ67 with a standard 110mm lens. It is big, heavy, slower to use than the E-3, but the large negatives are a pleasure to work with. And now that I found again a proper development procedure, I get instant quasi-HDR on every negative.

Stephane :: Jan.06.2009 :: Film, Gear, Scanning :: 1 Comment »

I have sold all my Canon lenses but the 100 macro. I sold them on eBay. I had setup a spreadsheet with my expected prices, based on an average of recently completed transaction on the same items.

Having bought the most expensive ones new, I expected a moderate loss. I made a profit!

Here is a table of what happened:

The big ones sold for more than I paid for them new! I mean, if I just bought again the same stuff new, I’d still be left with some change (after the currency exchange loss, eBay and PayPal fees and shipping).

Must be an effect of the current Dollar/Euro exchange rate.

This is great, anyway. It leaves me with the freedom to do much better than I expected. so I went through some painful weeks of thinking about what would be best. I am about to decide

Stephane :: Mar.05.2008 :: Gear, Lens, Sales :: No Comments »