‘I’m sorry, but modern cameras are far too sharp,’ opens photographer Steve O’Nions in his latest video. Steve O’Nions loves film photography. His YouTube channel is full of great videos, including many on-location shoots. When many photographers are looking for a new camera or lens, they put sharpness near the top of their list of considerations. I certainly love sharp lenses. O’Nions prioritizes ‘character’ instead.

Rather than opt for sharp lenses, O’Nions’ hunt for character finds him more frequently choosing ‘soft’ and ‘fuzzy’ lenses. His subject in his new video is an 800-year-old castle. While some photographers may see the jagged edges and fine detail and want a sharp lens to bring it all out, O’Nions wants a soft lens to give his photos an old, antique feel. When picking a lens for a specific subject, O’Nions doesn’t only care about focal length and aperture. He also cares about the lens’s character and the ‘feel’ it evokes. For him, a ‘worse’ lens, by traditional standards, can be a better lens for a specific photo.

It’s an interesting topic to consider. When is ‘worse’ better? Even if you are using a digital camera, plenty of lenses you can use have ‘character’ and lack the critical sharpness of expensive optics. With the plethora of adapters available, you can easily attach old film lenses to modern digital cameras to interesting effect. While O’Nions is shooting with a Holga film camera in the above video, the principles he discusses apply to many different cameras.

I think that we as photographers can sometimes care too much about image sensor performance and lens quality. After all, when we share our photos, at least when we share them with non-photographers, the viewer rarely cares about the equipment used. They care about how an image makes them feel. Cameras and lenses are tools at the end of the day, and different tools work well for different tasks. You don’t always need the sharpest lens to capture the best photo.

(Via Steve O’Nions)

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In this week’s roundup, we cover an extensive range of topics. NFTs are buzzing online; what does it mean for photographers? This week, B&H shared a video outlining five fashion photography tips. Across the pond, photographer Steve O’Nions went on a peaceful stroll with his film camera. Slightly further east in France, Mathieu Stern shot with another weird lens. Tech startup Dotphoton claims that its software, Rawsie, can compress RAW images by up to 80% without decreasing image quality, which would be awesome for saving storage space. Next month, Leica will be increasing the price of many of its products for customers in the US, so if you’re looking for a new Leica, now’s the time. This week’s featured photographer is Morten Hilmer, a fantastic wildlife photographer whose videos we’ve shared on Imaging Resource many times.

Adorama launches new video series to help photographers understand NFTs

Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, are all the rage lately. The technology allows artists, such as photographers, to sell their work as limited-edition digital art. In very simplified terms, NFTs are unique digital versions of your art, where you get to retain the copyright. If you only sell your work as prints, it’s easy to understand how you can create a limited edition of an image. You simply print only so many copies. With NFTs, it’s sort of the same idea, except everything is digital. And some artists are making millions of dollars selling NFTs.

Adorama and photographer Lindsay Adler have teamed up to create a three-part video series, ‘NFT 101 for Photographers.’ The first episode is available now and covers the fundamentals of NFTs for photographers and discusses digital tokenized art. You can check it out below.

Stay tuned to the Adorama YouTube channel for the next two episodes.

5 fashion photography tips with photographer Lara Jade

Fashion and beauty photographer Lara Jade released a video with B&H this week offering five fashion photography tips. In the video below, Jade discusses finding photo ideas, marketing yourself and discusses the differences between editorial and commercial photography.

A lovely morning shooting photos with Steve O’Nions

Photographer Steve O’Nions is a UK-based photographer who works with digital and film photography processes. He does great work, and he’s also active on his YouTube channel. In his newest video, O’Nions heads out into the field with a Bronica SQA-I film camera with 80mm and 150mm lenses. O’Nions used Ilford HP5+. He says, ‘Film choice was critical here, as was exposure and development of his film choice. By rating the film at EI200 I gave plenty of exposure to the shadows but I also cut back the development time by 30% which ensured the highlights didn’t block up on the negatives. This resulted in easy to print negatives with no need for excessive burning in or flashing.’

Mathieu Stern and the ‘weird van Gogh lens’

French photographer Mathieu Stern is back with yet another strange lens. The latest featured lens is a 17mm f/4 fisheye lens from the late 1960s. The lens, made by Asahi Optical Company, was made for Pentax cameras. A characteristic that sets the lens apart is its built-in filters that can be rotated. These filters were designed for black and white film photography, work a lot like the different black and white Film Simulations in a Fujifilm camera today.

Why does Stern call it the ‘van Gogh’ lens? The distortion reminds Stern of Vincent van Gogh’s work, and the built-in yellow and orange filters are reminiscent of Van Gogh’s extensive use of yellow. It’s an interesting lens with quite a few strange optical characteristics. You can see it in action in the video below.

Tech startup Dotphoton claims it can make RAW image files 80% smaller without loss in quality

First seen on PetaPixel, a tech startup, Dotphoton, claims that its new program, Rawsie, can compress RAW file data sizes by up to 80% without any resulting loss in quality. The implications for this are huge, especially as camera manufacturers continue to push megapixel counts higher. Take the Fujifilm GFX 50R, for example, which has a RAW file size of around 120MB. Rawsie compresses that file down to just under 25MB. If you’re storing a lot of images, that’s a massive difference in your data demands. Of course, that doesn’t mean much if there is a noticeable drop in image quality. To check how Rawsie handles your RAW files, you download a free trial. Rawsie currently costs $49 per year, or $199 for a perpetual license, although PetaPixel points out that the price is expected to rise this spring. You can also check out a couple of videos about Dotphoton’s Rawsie below.

Leica will increase prices of many of its products next month

As reported by DPReview, Leica has announced that many of its products will see a price increase starting on April 1, 2021. Unfortunately, it’s not a prank.

The increase in product prices is due to the changing relationship between the US Dollar and the Euro. Leica states that it has been absorbing the costs of the suffering relationship between currencies but must now adjust its pricing. Leica writes, ‘Over the past year, the relationship between the US Dollar and Euro has suffered and we have absorbed these costs. However, as this continues, we need to adjust our pricing in order to ensure pricing integrity across all Leica subsidiaries and to continue delivering the highest quality of products. The new prices will vary by product, but overall will generally reflect on average a 2% – 5% increase.’

The upcoming Leica M-10R is currently available to preorder for $8,295, although it will cost $8,995 starting April 1, 2021.

Red Dot Forum has compiled a list of the affected products and their corresponding price increases. If you were on the fence about any Leica cameras or lenses, you still have time to purchase them at current prices.

Photographer you should check out: Morten Hilmer

If you’re a frequent reader of Imaging Resouce, you’ve likely seen videos from Danish photographer Morten Hilmer. His wildlife and nature photographs are stunning and he exhibits an incredible commitment to his craft. His YouTube channel is a great resource of educational content, behind-the-scenes videos and more. I’ve picked one of my favorite videos of his, which can be seen below. It highlights his great photography skills and the lengths Hilmer goes to when capturing images. The video below is the fourth in a series. The previous three videos can be viewed here. To keep current with Morten Hilmer’s latest work, follow him on Instagram.

The post In Other News: NFTs for photographers, compressed RAW images, Leica price hike and more appeared first on Imaging Resource.

Photographer Steve O’Nions found a derelict slate works building in a remote area in Wales and the scene immediately struck him as a viable candidate for shooting with a pinhole camera. That’s exactly what O’Nions did. He used a Zero Image 2000 pinhole camera with Fomapan 100 classic film. Let’s join him behind the scenes.

It’s a lovely area where O’Nions is shooting. It’d have been possible to get a nice, moody image with many different types of cameras and equipment, but the pinhole camera O’Nions used certainly did a particularly nice job. It goes to show that you don’t always need to utilize the most modern of camera equipment to capture nice, impactful images. In fact, there are times when some imperfections can go a long way toward creating a powerful frame. It’s very interesting to see how simply using a camera like a pinhole camera can make images captured in 2018 appear to be from the early 20th century.

For more videos like the one above, head over to Steve O’Nions’ YouTube channel.

(Via Steve O’Nions)

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British photographer Steve O’Nions headed out for a spring walk in Cheshire, England with his Bronica SQAi medium-format analog camera and a pair of lenses, 80mm and 150mm primes. On this particular outing, O’Nions opted for black and white photography and used Ilford HP5+ developed in Kodak HC110 for five minutes at 20 degrees Celsius.

In the video below, we join O’Nions as he works to find the right composition and walk us through his thought process. To help him prepare for his shots, he actually carries along a Panasonic LX5 with him to preview scenes and perhaps different black and white color filters. After all, every shot with medium or large-format film cameras is fairly pricey and you can only carry so much film with you.

If you’d like to see the full-resolution versions of the images O’Nions shares in the video below, click here. To see more of his behind-the-scenes videos, head over to his YouTube channel.

(Via Steve O’Nions)

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