*** This Week Through Your Eyes 2023.09.02 ***

Fantastic shots! These are my favorites. Even though I'm from Austria, I had to look up the Hochkönig region as I've never been there. Looks beautiful - glad you managed to capture such wonderful scenes and enjoyed the visit!

I know the scanning part might not be of interest to many, but it's really fascinating to me, because I use a number of different Noritsu lenses (mostly from their range of minilabs) on my camera. Do you happen to know which machine it was scanned with or are you sending it to some place via an online service? Some of these film scanner/processing lenses are quite impressive as taking lenses in my opinion:

Ante up! by simple.joy, on Flickr

Protection no longer in production by simple.joy, on Flickr

Color full circle by simple.joy, on Flickr

Downpure by simple.joy, on Flickr

I agree, the whole set is highly impressive, but this is very special. I absolutely love how the light itself looks and how it shapes the image. It's beautiful and haunting at the same time, like a dance interpretation of a Kafka shortstory! 😱 Excellent work! Hope the theater appreciated your work.

This is wonderful. Really really liked it !!!

I have a Nikon FE and Ricoh KR10 but I never shot with film at all :) They look OK, light meter, shutter. I should give it a go.

Levelling up is my pick, I always worry about freak accidents. I am glad you returned to safety.

I do agree, it reminded me Margate. And about the mud... Next week I will share my incident with the mud. It was a bit scary ....

Thanks. I did some other work with this company, so I guess they liked my work. This was probably one of the most difficult photographic shoots I ever did. The light levels from these hand held lamps was very low and probably I was shooting at about 1/15 (without VR or IBIS) using my 300 .2.8. I remember I pushed the Tmax 400 to probably 3200. The piece was called "Sangue e Fragole" or The Strawberry Statement, to give it its English title.

I wonder how easy this shoot would be with our wonderful modern gear and software. I think a lot would be lost in colour, and I have seen that in many of my old shots, the technical imperfections seem to breath some life into the pictures.

The company was part of the Bologna art school scene, although they were based in Ravenna.

Here are a couple more from this set

Nice to hear you are from Austria, what part would that be ?

For developing and scanning my B&W films I've used a lab in Vienna called Fotospeed.at, in 1080 Wien, and they are quite quick !
They have several different options, I used "Premium scan, 3x8 bit depth, 70MB" which gives me 256 grey tone values and 24MPixels
The scanners they use for this are the Noritsu HS-1800 or Noritsu LS-600/1100
The next film I'll send them will be a somewhat finer grained Fujifilm Neopan Acros 100 II and I'll ask them to scan it at the next resolution level of "85MB" which uses the slightly better Noritsu scanner.

Here's a link with more details about those scanners.
fotospeed.at/common/scans/filmscanner.html?nglayout=plain
They are friendly and helpful on the phone if you want to contact them.

... Your shots below with those Noritsu lenses are quite remarkable!

I like this one 😀

Well, it could have been 16, 24 or 26, but yeah, I went higher with the GFX100S. I did consider the GFX50SII, but there didn't seem to be a lot of benefit there over the Z7, so I figured if I'm going to splurge on a medium format camera it would only be worth it if I went for the higher res sensor.

For now I've only got the 35-70 lens, but the results are impressive at full res. Downscaled to internet sharing sizes there doesn't seem to be a lot in it, maybe subtle differences in colour differentiation and tonality, but it's pretty negligible, at least at base ISO. Of course I am comparing a top end 24-70 f/2.8S lens to what is in effect the kit lens on this system.

Here's a few more example images, all taken hand held. I'm quite impressed with the IBIS as I was still managing to get sharp shots at some pretty long exposures as the available light deteriorated.

1. Looking across Lever's Bridge

2. Summer House

3. The Pigeon Tower

4. Rivington Pike

5. Second Summer House

6. Twilight Tree

I'm actually not that far away from where you've been, a little bit to the west in Tyrol! It's quite a nice place to live, albeit a bit rural for many people... 😅

That's great - thanks! I've once read the name, but never looked into the company. They seem to have quite an impressive array of high-end scanners. I'm particularly interested in scanner lenses, as some of those are among the best there is in terms of macro photography.

Don't want to distract too much by off-topic stuff, but just to re-emphasize how effective some of those minilab scanner lenses are, here are two shots with a similar (zoom) lens from an Agfa minilab:

Bean around the block by simple.joy, on Flickr

A snack for when you have the blues by simple.joy, on Flickr

I'd love to have a conversation with some of the fotospeed people about that stuff and am probably going to try and reach out to them. From my experience so far though most people dealing with these machines have a.) zero interest in the inner workings/lenses and b.) usually also not enough time to worry about that unfortunately. But we'll see - thanks for the information!

Thanks a lot!

Wow - those are really great captures! Love the combination of green plus the slightly purple tones created by the light...

Congrats on the new camera :-)
It sounds very good and those results look good too.
How is the size and weight compared to your Z7 system ?

Such a fantastic shot - glad you didn't adjust the shutter speed... works great as it is!

Love the atmosphere in both of these and I admire your feeling for good composition and the well balanced processing!

Thanks.

The body is slightly bigger than the Z7, but not by much at all. The 35-70 f/4.5-5.6 lens is quite a bit smaller and lighter than the 24-70 f/2.8S, but then it is the most compact zoom in the system and only equates to a 28-55, so it doesn't have the reach of the 24-70 and is a bit limiting as it stands. In terms of weight, configured as shown in the picture, the Fuji is lighter than the Nikon at 1430g vs 1670g, but that is mostly lens in the case of the Nikon and mostly camera in the case of the Fuji (both of those are with L-brackets fitted).

To make the system more useful, I will need to add at least one more lens. I keep looking at the 100-200, which would cover 80-160(ish), giving me enough reach for most situations and wondering if that would satisfy my needs? But that still leaves a sizeable gap between that and the 35-70. Fuji do make a lens for that though, in the shape of the 45-100, but then I'd be carrying three lenses, two of which are pretty heavy, which starts to undermine the relatively compact form factor.

It's an interesting camera though, it feels good in the hand and is reasonably snappy considering the size of the files it's chucking around (lossless 16 bit raws come to around 130MB). The IBIS is excellent too, it's no E-M1 MKII in that department, but I'd judge it to be a bit better than the Z7 from my experience so far. To counter that though, you do lose a stop in aperture for the same depth of field, so my usual f/8 on the Nikon becomes f/11 on this, so great IBIS is kind of a necessity when hand holding it.

The handling of dynamic range is a bit quirky compared to what I'm used to. Where the Nikon has a bit of latitude at both ends of the histogram (more in the shadows, but some in the highllights), this has none in the highlights. If there's any bunching on the right histogram at all, those areas are not coming back. However, recovery from the depths of the shadows goes really deep and comes back very clean too, so it just needs to be treated a bit differently when exposing for a high contrast shot.

So, on the whole I happy with it. It's capable of truly excellent results and has some great features, but I get the impression it's only going to suit specific use cases such as woodland photography or short hikes, with my Z7 still being the go-to camera for longer hikes and where more reach is required.

I really like this one too, but maybe a tighter crop?

Wow - these are stunning.

It's a shame m4/3 never really continued down the small size path. That's why I quit. A camera like a weatherproof Pen-F would be great. Considering new camera kit is such sweet torment.

Thank you. But you give too much credit to me: I just fired up Silver Efex plugin, flipped though filters until found good enough to me and applied it :D

"I know my demons by name and sometimes they let me take portraits."

Yeah, a weather resistant Pen-F would be pretty sweet, as long as it had the focusing system of the E-M1 MKII, which was pretty great once they sorted out the firmware.

These are all superb. I love the colours.