The Phoblographer

Portra 160 35mm

Not long ago, Kodak got in touch with me and wanted me to try out their latest Portra films: 160 and 400 in 35mm. At Photo Plus, I was also given a roll of Ektar to play with. Admittedly, I’ve mainly been a user of Portra 400, Tri-X 400, Fuji Pro 400, and Ilford XP2. However, I decided to give it a shot and reawaken the excitement that comes with not knowing what your image looks like until it comes back from the lab.

A giant thank you goes out to Nathan Blaney for letting me use his Canon 1N for this post. Blaney is a wonderful photographer, and you should take the time to look through his site.

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At Photo Plus Expo 2011, we got our first hands on experience with the newly announced Fuji X10. Marketed to the world as a point and shoot with phenomenal image quality due to a larger sensor while maintaining stunning good looks the on the outside, the Fujifilm X100 gives design cues to the Fujifilm X10, but targeted at a different price point.

On the second night of Photo Plus, I attended a party (one of many) where after a couple of rounds, I tried out the X10 with a flash mounted on it. Shooting all JPEGs and with the only intention being to have fun, did the Fujifilm X10 surprise me?

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This past week my mom celebrated her 55th birthday and her friend decided to throw a small surprise party (happy birthday mom!). The party started at 7pm so I figured what better lens to bring than the light devouring Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 35mm F/1.4 ZE.

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At the time of writing this posting, despite it performing very admirably, there have been technical problems with the Sony NEX 5. Because of said problems, this posting will talk about the sweep panorama feature and the image quality delivered from the camera using this feature. Once again, the RAW files cannot be processed in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3and the provided program did not work on my Macbook laptop at the time of writing this piece. Editor’s note: once again making a note that Lightroom 3.2 can process the files and that this review is being written as it happened in chronological order for accuracy. On my PC, the program works, but it is quite cumbersome and slow to use. In a couple of days, all images recorded from the camera will be shot in JPEG unless otherwise stated.

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The Canon T2i was used recently as part of the field review doing something that many Rebel users do: shoot parties and get-togethers. Go to nearly any restaurant or party in NYC and you will see people using their Canon Rebel cameras as they steadily are replacing point-and-shoots as the cameras of choice. A complete gallery, as well as full analysis after the jump.

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