By KAREL VAN WOLFEREN Sony has inched closer to making it possible for us to realize even modest large format photographic quality from a camera body we can hold in the palm of our hand. Medium format quality is already within reach of its new 42MP sensor, and Hasselblad will have to come up with […]
By KAREL VAN WOLFEREN Ever since Sony offered us a way to get traditional medium format quality photographs with the small and lightweight α7R, sharpness aficionados like me have been been made aware that most of our film era lenses are not quite a match for those wonderful small tools. What was still good and […]
By KAREL VAN WOLFEREN If sharpness and general image quality are your goal, as it is with me, you avoid zooms and pick the prime lens that you think is right for your subject. But that habit, as we all know, means much fumbling in the camera bag and with switching rear caps while worrying […]
By KAREL VAN WOLFEREN There is no question that the Zeiss 55mm F1.4 Otus Distagon T* represents a significant optical achievement. But more than once, as I placed it on my tripod mounted Sony A7R — feeling like a ceramics collector who with one slip loses a $4,000 investment — I wondered what kind of […]
By KAREL VAN WOLFEREN You must have noticed that as popular cameras became smaller, to almost everyone’s delight, the lenses became bigger. Greater portability of one is offset by more weight of the other; unnecessarily heavy normal focal length lenses, some of them pretty monstrous. Could this involve some heretofore unknown law of nature, deserving […]
By KAREL VAN WOLFEREN Quite a few times I have regretted not to have had a different camera with me as I viewed results from a photographic excursion. In the past year and a half this was mostly the case when I had the Fujifilm X-Pro1 or X-E1 with their marvellous lenses and image quality […]
By KAREL VAN WOLFEREN Unlike what happened in some other Asian cities, Japanese photographers did not rush out en masse to get hold of that full-format camera (digital’s new medium format) miraculously squeezed into a palm-sized mirrorless body when it went on sale in Tokyo on November 15. There was no one else besides me […]
By KAREL VAN WOLFEREN Pixel peepers of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your mind! Quite literally. All those infected by the bokeh bug ought to know that the verb form of this Japanese term, bokeh suru, means that you are losing it. The bokeh mania will be with us for some […]
