Unless it is a cold December rain.
After a nice seven hour drive on Tuesday to Hilton Head Island, SC, it has been raining cold water on my photography efforts since Wednesday. Worse, I’m missing the first real snow of the season falling further North. My SL has not come out of my bag and my X1D has been relegated to a few indoor shots.
Here are some more X1D tests. The shaggy dog is Comet. The hands and head and hair are my daughter’s. The woman transfixed by the computer screen is my wife. Those shots were taken before I left for HHI and just after I mounted the 90mm lens on the X1D. My wife does not know I took that shot and daughter nor wife nor Comet know I’m posting them. The Chihuahua is Mrs. T or just T. She belongs to my older sister.
The tonality and subtlety of light and shadows and the retrieval of detail in these images is really special. There is so much to play with when developing the raw images using Hasselblad’s raw editor, Phocus. Phocus, even for a novice like me, is an intuitive program the basics of which have not been too difficult to learn. Though of course, I had previously spent hours testing raw developers and they all work off of similar premises. These tests have only some basic adjustments and some have some minimal cropping.
I do have a rant, however. A few weeks ago I spent a considerable amount of time and then dollars selecting a Windows laptop with a 17″ 4k screen to use for my photography. I read too many reviews of the so called best laptops for photographers and then I bought the laptop that had garnered universal acclaim as one of the best Window’s units. I had it outfitted with the best specs for video and upgraded the memory and the drive. I won’t bore you with the Windows vs Mac debate. Suffice it to say I only recently switched to the Windows world from the Apple world for what I thought at the time were good reasons. Anyway, I liked my choice until I attempted to load my first X1D raw images into Phocus for Windows. Suddenly, my super-duper Windows machine choked. You could actually hear it gag as the internal fans kicked in and ran full bore trying to keep its chips from melting. Maybe I could have lived with the slow loading time of the raw images, but not the lag time from making an edit until the image reflected that edit. Cropping was its own nightmare. So, I went out and bought a super-duper MacBook Pro, loaded Phocus for Mac and my error was confirmed. The Mac plows through the X1D’s medium format raw images like a hot knife through cold butter. There is simply no comparison.
A shorter rant. Bluffton and HHI SC are to internet speed that rubbing two sticks together is to making fire. It is like every computer in the region is linked to one humongous dial-up modem. Cyber Monday must be like cyber Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday…
