Street season is out – and no winter so far!

So December is passing by outside my window. I have been very busy working the last couple of months and I am really in the need of some vacation time. The stock market is usually quite unstable around Christmas and New Year so it is a good time to take some time off. But the big question of the month is; where is the winter?? It is autumn here in Stockholm with temperatures being around 5-7 degrees Celsius most of the time. The forecast tells us that it will continue to be warm weather here in Stockholm for at least the coming ten days. So if we finally get some winter, it will be very short.

But I am not complaining, I love the summer (and even spring and autumn), but my favourite winter is the short one (even if the last years 5 months of winter had its charm). Sure you can get some very nice photos during the winter time, but after you have gotten these shots it’s just a waiting game for the spring to arrive. I am not a big fan of doing street shooting during the winter, it is cold, and handling the camera with gloves is not really something I want to do. If I do street work during the winter it will be done with a DSLR or a bigger camera with a decent grip. So don’t expect allot of street photos in the blog until the end of February. Instead I will put up some of my recent landscape work from where I live, Farsta strand.

I will do a proper summary of the year in my next post, but 2013 was the year when I found my way back to shooting with a film camera again, after 9 years of pure digital work. Hopefully I can present some of this work on the blog in a future post; I need to find a solution to scan the images though, as I haven’t been able to get my scanner to work with my latest computer (driver compatibility issue).

I have some subjects that I will discuss on the blog in the coming posts, stuff that was planned for last summer, but that I did not have the time to go through. Some of these topics are:

• Techniques
• Where and when to shoot?
• What to shoot?
• Ethics
• Gear (Leica, Fuji, DSLR, digital or film)

Please leave your comments below! What do you want to see on the blog in 2014. 

So finally I just want to wish you all

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!

Sunset at lake Magelungen, Farsta strand, Sweden (200 meters from my house), Fujifilm X-100

View towards southeast. Fujifilm X-100

Ice on reed, lake Magelungen, Sweden. Fujifilm X-100

Ice on reed #2, lake Magelungen, Sweden. Fujifilm X-100

The Pentax Q project - and where is the winter?

November is over and out. Normally it should be winter here in Stockholm around this time. Last year we had 50 cm of snow here in Stockholm in the beginning of December. Today we had 7 degrees Celsius and no snow so far; well I guess it’s just fair after last year’s winter, which was one of the hardest in the last 40 years. I live just 100 meters from Lake Magelungen, and there was ice on the lake until the 24^th of April this year. The lake was covered with ice for about 5 months, and that is very unusual.

Well enough about weather and ice, well it was quite cold shooting with the Pentax Q during November (even though I only did about 30 minutes of total shooting). It is time to conclude the Pentax Q project and try to figure out what this camera is all about and if it is something for street photography. Well for starters I could say that it is very stealthy, except for the shutter, that is audible, something I am not used to as a Fuji X100 shooter. Compared to other cameras it is still quiet, but definitely louder than the ninja shutter of the X100.

It is not fair to draw any big conclusions after only this short time of use and only 33 frames in the project so far. I have decided to continue with the Pentax Q project as a side project until next summer and then come back and give a more proper review of the Q as a street camera. But I can at least give you a first report about my findings.

Pentax Q speaks the same language as any other professional Pentax cameras out there (such as the K-5-series and the new K-3) and that is the language of “take me seriously, I am serious”. The menus are straight forward and informative, the physical buttons on the camera body makes the essential controls easy to handle, there is no need to dig into the menu system now and then. When the camera is set up and ready to go – everything is at the top of your fingertips. The camera is very comfortable in the hand, even after extensive period of shooting; so in this way it is a perfect companion for street work. There is one setting I would have liked to see on the outside though, and that is the AF/MF control; that setting is in the menu, but just one level down and very fast to access.

The lack of a viewfinder was probably the biggest challenge for me so far. I usually shoot almost exclusively through the viewfinder while using the X100, so not having this possibility was a bit of a challenge for me. But I am doing some street shooting with my Canon S100 from time to time so it didn’t really feel awkward. The Canon S100 I mostly use at the wide end (24-35 mm equivalent), which make the framing a bit more natural for me. With the 01 standard prime, which is equivalent to about 47 mm, I had to be more careful when I framed the shot.

At first I struggled with the slow auto focus of the Q, and was using pre-focus. Later on I did some testing with manual focus with the assistance of focus peaking, but I can’t really draw any conclusions from this training so far. I found the Q to be more a camera for non- or slow moving subjects. But with better training with the focus I can see it be useful even for other situations too.

What about image quality? That 1/2.3 inch sensor must be limiting? Well, not really! Sure there are limitations in the dynamic range and color depth. The noise handling at higher ISO should be a disaster? Yes and No – yes, you do lose some fine details when going above ISO 800, but you gain a beautiful film like grain structure. I LOVE the “noise” the Q puts out between ISO 800-3200, it’s one of the most organic “grain like” noise I have ever seen on a digital camera, and I am used to the X100 excellent noise at high ISO. It somehow reminds me of the noise that comes out of the X100, but again, not really. The Q has a rawer feel to it, it’s hard to explain. But I hope it comes through in some of the photos I put up on the blog.

This post is getting long, but I will come back and discuss more about “Mr Q” in the future. It is for sure an interesting camera for street photography, that is able to produce a very unique style of images, that has a certain feel to them, and I really like it!

Finally, here are some more photos made with the Pentax Q during November.