If it’s gonna be a rainy day
There’s nothing we can do to make it change
We can pray for sunny weather
But that won’t stop the rain.

   – Jim Morrison

 

I live in an old resort community, on the edge of the Pocono plateau in Pennsylvania. This is an old settlement, founded in the 1880’s on either side of a what was then the main road between towns. In the center of the community, there is a creek that runs below a 70-80-year-old masonry culvert.

Over the years, the road, still owned by the township, services only a few properties beyond our community. It is no longer a main thoroughfare.

The creek at this point is perhaps 200 yards from its inception in an artesian spring, one of many that bubble up in the surrounding woodlands. Being so close to the source, there is little watershed to feed the creek. Typically, by late July, the creek bed under the road is dry. In the 30 years I have lived there, this has always been the case.

In the last 3 years the culvert has been deteriorating to a point where it needed replacement. it’s an expensive proposition, and the Township has been struggling to find the money.

A state grant was obtained, and the job bid out. This spring we were told, that the “culvert” would finally be replaced in the late summer when the creek ran dry.

Unfortunately, however  the summer of 2018, about the wettest summer in my memory. As of early October, the stream is running as vigorously as though it was late March.

As it turns out my memory is fairly good.  According to NOAA, this is been a record here for rainfall in my region.

Now I want to recognize devastating effects caused by hurricanes, that have already occurred and will apparently occur again in the southern US.  The fact is however, we’ve had more rainfall as compared to normal than anywhere in the U.S.

The wet summer has had a variety of consequences. Fall foliage is clearly delayed by at least a week or maybe two, and many trees apparently affected by the super-saturated soils have already lost their leaves prior to any change in color. I understand that this is particularly true of apple trees. Sometime in the summer, both of my apple trees dropped their foliage, and then feebly tried to push out a second crop of sparse greenery.

It is a great year for mycology. In both the forests, and the lawns, I have never seen a greater variety of mushrooms springing up in places they are not generally seen.

It has been a constant battle to fix the washouts of the gravel driveway that leads to up to my barn. My house painter, who works on part of my house every year, is so delayed that I doubt he will get to me.

As I alluded to in an early article, on any warm day biting insects remain a significant problem even at this late date due to the persistence of vernal pools.

 

As I write this (October 9) we have just enjoyed a 3 day weekend of fog, mist and intermittent downpours.  It was so humid, in the outdoors, that my X100F autofocus started to act strangely, only to return to normal in my dry studio.

At our location and altitude, normal peak foliage time is around 15 October, yet at this point, with less than a week to go , most of the foliage is still green. It will be interesting to see the effect of all of this rain on the quality of the colors when they finally occur. 

I’m afraid I am not optimistic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

It has been an unusual summer for the Pocono region of Pennsylvania, if not for most of the mid-Atlantic region.  Brief periods of muggy partially sunny weather have offered inadequate solace for the long periods of days of gloomy skies with intermittent downpours that flooded our basements as well as our creeks and rivers.  Unusual for August, the Susquehanna River came near the top of its banks, and flooded many low-lying areas.

Despite this, summer goes on.

I am of an age, where the children of my contemporaries are now getting married.  I had 2 such ceremonies this year where I could be the guest, and not the photographer.

 Weather-wise the first wedding came off without a hitch, occurring during a rare appearance of pleasant sunny weather. The second wedding, which was held in a gorgeous lakeside lodge in Bucks County, was thoroughly rained out.  It was kind of sad to look out at the teeming rain, and see the archway, and the white chairs still forlornly waiting to be occupied.  Nonetheless it was a lovely ceremony, even held indoors.

The weather this year has certainly affected my photographic output.  Often the rainy periods occurred over weekends when I have time to shoot. Even when it wasn’t raining, the warm muggy air seemed to egg on the biting flies and particularly the mosquitoes.  The latter are breeding profusely given the persistence of vernal ponds and other areas of standing water.

This weekend, given the extravagant run off, I thought it would be interesting to photograph moving water.  How naïve.  I grabbed my X100f and a tripod, and gamely hiked out into the nearby State Forest intending to visit a hidden glen I know well.

It took about 5 minutes to figure out, that this wasn’t the day for unhurried tripod work.

I was almost instantly set upon by hordes of mosquitoes who would likely exsanguinate me, if I stopped long enough to set up a tripod.  They certainly provided me the incentive for a brisk walking pace.

I have another wedding to attend, this time for my niece Alex, in Jersey City this weekend.  The weather it is said, will have turned by then, providing bright blue skies, cool temperatures and low humidity.  I will probably shoot a few images, and try hard, as always not to get in the way of the hired gun.

 I am happy that she will not have to come up with a plan B.  And I am hopeful that this weather change portends a more hospitable late summer and fall.

 And hopefully, less mosquitoes.

 

Every once in a while, it is stimulating to leave what is familiar and comfortable, and venture into a place where we are challenged to adapt and extend our abilities.

In pursuit of this, some people travel to novel destinations, or take on a new physical challenge.  In photography, this can mean trying a new form of photography or working with new equipment. Recently, my exercise has been to shoot in a very unfamiliar format with the Laowa 9 mm f2.8 ultra wide lens.

We all have our comfort level.  In terms of focal lengths, I tend to work within a range of 35 mm to about 150mm (full frame equivalent).  These days I favor my Fujifilm equipment. So the X100 series 23mm f2 fixed lens( 35 mm field of view), the TCL-100 adapter(50 mm field of view) and the XF 56mm f1.2(roughly 85 mm field of view) get the bulk of my use, with the XF 55-200mm zoom available when required.

A 9 mm lens (13.5 mm field of view) is radically more wide angle than anything I typically shoot.  But I was intrigued by some images I saw online, shot with this Chinese-sourced lens. Curious,  I purchased one from the company website.

This is a small lens, smaller than anything I currently have for the Fuji lens mount.  It looks old-fashioned, it is made of metal with a metal lens cap and seems quite sturdy. There is a handy depth of field scale on the aperture ring. It interfaces securely with the Fuji X lens mount.

Setting the aperture and focus are  done manually  as there are no electrical contacts on the mount.  The body must be set to “shoot without a lens” in the menus to allow the set up to work.  One simply sets the shutter speed on “A”, and the light meter will set appropriate exposures on whatever aperture is selected. For the most part, this seems to work pretty well.  Exposure compensation also seems to be usable.

Ultra wide-angle lenses require specific framing if you are to obtain an interesting image.  I had very little experience with their use, so I went online and watched a variety of tutorials.  Pretty much everybody says the same thing:  first, you need to set the aperture fairly tight to maximize your depth the field.  On the lens this wide, at roughly f11, everything from about 1 feet and infinity is in reasonable focus. You need to pick a subject in the foreground and then get extremely, almost uncomfortably close to it. Then need to pay close attention to the background, as this focal length is very inclusive.  If your composition is right, then this should result in an interesting, fairly three-dimensional image.

With focal lengths this short, sometimes you have to get very low to the ground or shoot at unusual angles to frame a compelling image, or to exclude something unpleasant-looking.  A tripod is helpful, especially since any small movement of such a wide lens tends to alter significantly perspectives and angles of the seen.

I quickly found that if I could not get sufficiently close to an interesting subject, the resultant image would usually be completely uninteresting and flat. Every once in a while though, you can break the rules, and still end up with an interesting photograph. 

This was my first experience with a Chinese made lens.  Both the aperture ring and the focus ring rotated smoothly, and the former had click detents at 2 stop increments. The front element has a hydrophobic coating said to resist water droplets and mist.  The lens however, is not billed as weather-sealed. From the standpoint of built quality  it certainly felt like pretty good value.

Image quality was interesting.  This is not a fisheye lens and is designed to be rectilinear.I rarely found the need to set the aperture wider than perhaps f5.6 and found that from there to perhaps f11 the lens is not only very sharp in the center, but acceptably so in the corners. I have very little expectation that a modestly priced, ultra wide lens would be sharp edge to edge.

What was surprising was the light fall-off.  There is considerable corner shading even at tighter apertures, though obviously this can be easily corrected in post. I think this is particularly noticeable, because unlike my Fujifilm lenses, the camera has no lens information to use to correct optical aberrations “in camera”. 

I tended to shoot this lens on my XT 10, as the articulating screen of that camera was useful to frame images in some of the unusual angles required for wide angle photography.  I found the best way to deal with focus, was  use the focus peaking feature of the camera, but most of the time to bunch the sparkly bits towards the foreground, to prioritize sharpness there.

I did not shoot people with this lens. An optic this wide tends to do unflattering things to faces, particularly if you are close enough to fill the frame.  And most casual subjects will be uncomfortable with the proximity that the lens requires. Stay tuned, though.

This brings up what for me at least,  is  a major disadvantage of shooting at this focal length.  In situations where I am not shooting professionally, I am particularly wary of invading of peoples privacy and their property,procedure this for the sake of what is essentially my hobby. 

Particularly in rural areas, when armed with an ultra wide lens, you simply cannot take advantage of every scene.  In a cityscape though, where more interesting subjects are more freely accessible, things get somewhat easier.  Sometimes however, no matter where you are, it may just be impossible physically to get close to a subject or location to the degree the focal length requires.

I have been shooting the lens for several weeks.  I’m starting to develop a better sense of what will work with an ultra wide and what will not; my percent of “keepers” is going up.   Now, when I’m opening up a card in Photoshop, I am seeing images that often intrigue me, but don’t look like my previous work.

Which I’m pretty sure was the goal of this exercise.

I am nothing if not a tightwad. I can’t help it.  Nonetheless, after approximately 20 years in digital imaging, I have finally broken down and acquired my first specifically-designed photo editing computer display.  This turns out to have been a really good idea, and one that was long overdue.

When I got started in computers back in the early 1990s, I bought what was for the time, a very nice computer desk, with a hutch and a matching printer stand.  It was quite modern and stylish for the times.  And just sufficient in size for a single CRT monitor.  I  have spent a lot of time at this desk.   More important yet, it was the place my two graduate computer engineer kids learned their craft. I think I developed a slight sentimental attachment.

Over the years I went through a variety of computer displays.  Cathode ray tubes, gave way  to flat panels, which were certainly more space efficient. When I became interested in digital photography, the display quality became more critical, and I would seek out IPS (in plane switching) panel displays of good quality. This technology allows one to view at wider viewing angles without a significant change in the appearance of colors.

Dedicated photography monitors, such as those made by companies such as Eizo, were just prohibitively expensive. Plus, my little desk from the 90s  limited my choices and prevented me from running dual monitors which would be very helpful both in photo editing, and for my work tasks.

My latest monitor was an 4/3 aspect ratio  NEC panel circa 2008 that  came highly recommended.  In the last several months, I noticed during calibration that it was  losing its luminance.  Given that pretty much all available monitors are now wide-screen format,  I was finally forced to bite the bullet and upgrade my situation.

Ultimately this led not only to new furniture, but to a significant redo of my home office/photo editing space.  I got rid of the old standby, and obtained  a large Hon desk for the work-space.  I painted the walls a more neutral gray, and changed the carpeting in attempt to match.  My desktop computer was already robust, so I merely needed a better display.  I looked at a variety of panels recommended by various websites, specifically  wide gamut panels that could display nearly 100% of the Adobe RGB color space.

For the uninitiated, there are multiple so-called “color spaces”.  These refer to the different “languages”, a digital device uses to interpret  color information.  Most monitors can display all or part of the more familier narrow “gamut” sRGB color space.  This is the “language” for instance, that your smartphone uses.

Photographers, particularly those that will print their work, will generally prefer to work in Adobe RGB, a broader color space.  Better digital cameras can generally be set to capture this more vibrant “dialect”.  Relatively few monitors however are capable of displaying this wider range of colors accurately.

There are some that do, most of which come in at a fairly high price point.  I ultimately chose the Ben Q  SW2700PT, a very well-reviewed full gamut display for roughly $550 (a comparable Eizo professional display costs $2900 US).  Despite its reasonable cost, it performs in a way comparable to higher price products.

The display comes very carefully packed with its stand. Included in the box is a monitor hood, the mark of a serious piece of kit designed for critical photo editing.  It includes a handy remote control with a sufficient cord either to sit on your desk or in its cubby, on the monitor stand.

It was easily assembled.  For the time being I am partnering it with my NEC monitor which is still functional, but no will no longer be used for any serious photography work.

Please bear with me on the technology, for I am hardly an expert.  For serious photographers  there are multiple advantages to this monitor compared to a more generic display.  First, as I understand it, each SW2700PT has its color profile carefully calibrated in the factory prior to its delivery.  The individual monitor’s profile is included in the box.

Monitors used for photography need frequent calibration to known standards, using specialized on-screen sensors, and software.  Once calibrated, the resultant “profile” is stored on the computer’s hard drive. This allows you to send files that will look the same on other calibrated devices (i.e. printers) 

The SW2700PT has sufficient memory that it can retain the color profile within its own hardware, rather than requiring it to be stored on the computer’s hard drive.  You can download  BenQ’s own calibration software from their website, which used with your own color calibrator, will store profiles that are directly accessible to the monitor’s remote control.  Using BenQ’s software makes re-calibrations much more straightforward then using aftermarket software which are generally designed to accommodate multiple types of displays.

If you have ever reviewed images on a dedicated professional photography or printing workstation, you know they tend to look dim. Most of the time we intuitively set our monitors to be brighter, and higher contrast, than actually is appropriate in a calibrated printing work flow.

Unfortunately, if you use your computer for both printing and casual use, you can end up viewing the online world in a less vibrant way.  I put up with this for years.  If I did brighten the screen, I had to remember to set it back to a more appropriate brightness/contrast levels prior to a print job.  This was generally a guess, and resulted in a lot of wasted paper and ink. Until things were dialed in, my prints generally came out too dark.

This is where the remote control comes in.  There are 4 buttons.  One is used to access the display’s menus. The others access three color profiles: sRGB, Adobe RGB, and monochrome.  More importantly, because everything resides within the monitor, you can also set a brightness/contrast setting for each.

Thus, for normal web viewing, I naturally use sRGB, which I have set for a pleasantly bright viewing screen and color reproduction that aligns with the web.  Switching to AdobeRGB dims things down to allow accurate photo editing and printing.  It is interesting to me that although AdobeRGB images reviewed in photo editing software look really nice, web content is overly saturated and unnatural.

The appearance of the monitor in Adobe RGB is striking, and for the first time I was able to see onscreen, the full spectrum of color, and nuance that  modern cameras imagers acquire.  It also has a fairly high resolution at 2560 x 1440 (not quite 4K) which allows you to view impressive amounts of detail.  This turns out to be not only important in photography (for accurate sharpening), but makes it much more pleasant to view text and waveforms, which is a part of my online medical work.

The monitor has a variety of other nice features including multiple inputs ( DVI-D, DisplayPort 1.2, HDMI and multiple USB ports). There is also an SD card reader.

I’ve been using the BenQ now for multiple months.  This is a situation of “I had no idea what I’ve been missing”.  As I scan between the new display and my old NEC monitor, there is no comparison in terms of color reproduction ( particularly in AdobeRGB), and resolution.

I note that there is a new version from BenQ, the PhotoVue SW271 featuring full 4K resolution for roughly $1100.  I’m sure that this would be a striking display, but for me at least, I’m not sure the improvement would justify doubling the cost.

If you’re serious about your photography, particularly if you are printing your work, this monitor is well worth a look.  If you’re coming from a more generic display, I think you will wonder how you did without it.

 

 

The winter of 2017-18 is over.  At least chronologically.

As I write this, it is the first full day of spring.  For the third time this March, a Nor’easter has formed off the coast of the Outer Banks and is making its way north.

It is now spreading snow over the Appalachians, and points east.  Forecasts for this storm have been wavering, but I think that between 2 and 6 inches over the elevation or I reside is likely (5″ eventually fell).  Though I do yearn for spring, the upcoming weekend is forecast to be sunny and pleasant.  It will likely offer one more opportunity for cross-country skiing before I put my equipment away.

It has been a strange winter.We had a little snow earlier in the year, and then extremely warm February.  By groundhog day it seemed likely that we would drift right into spring (though the groundhog disagreed).  Winter is cruel that way.

Then came March with its storms which in our part of the Poconos have maintained an adequate snowpack for recreation.  Today’s storm continues that trend.  And the warm weather, at least according to the meteorologists, is not yet in sight.

The last several months have been a busy time.  Given my position as a pulmonary physician, this winter’s flu epidemic kept me on my toes, running between patient rooms, gowning and re gowning to avoid the spread of the virus to other patients and hospital staff.  I have been overseeing some renovations at my home, including a new home office and photo studio.  Earlier in March, I spent my usual late winter week in the Adirondacks.  There was plenty of snow for skiing and snowshoeing as well as photography.   This will serve as my excuse for the lack of attention to the site over the past month or so.  Now happily, the flu epidemic has waned, and my renovations are largely done. It’s time to put pen to paper (so to speak).

In the time since my last article, mindful of my good experience with the rather modest XF 18–55mm zoom legacy lens, I focused my attention on its bigger brother, the XF55-200mm f3.5-4.8 OIS zoom that hearkens from the same time period.  I have written about this lens before.  Ironically, I published its original review almost exactly the same time of year back in 2014.   Now with the higher resolution sensors available on newer Fujifilm bodies, it was worth digging out of my roomy new equipment cabinet for a second look.

Over the years, this is proven to be a fairly rugged lens. Though I used it fairly frequently in its early years, cosmetically it looks roughly the same as when I took delivery.  At 55mm, and without its deep lens-shade, the lens is fairly compact, though it telescopes awkwardly as one increases the focal length.  It tends to look weird on a rangefinder style body such as the X Pro 2, though it handles just fine.

The focus and aperture dials remain smooth after 4 years of ownership.  The lens continues to exude high-quality.  Though it is not officially weather-sealed, I have used it multiple times in rainy or snowy conditions without any difficulty.

 

In my normal photography with the Fuji system, I tend to favor mild wide lenses like the 23 mm lens in my X100 series cameras, combined with a mild telephoto such as my XF 56mm f1.2.  With the 50-200mm I tended to shoot from its short end, out to about 160 mm, because as it approaches 200 mm, sharpness is known to deteriorate slightly.  It thus tends to be an outdoor lens, as it is not nearly fast enough, (nor razor sharp wide open like the Fuji primes ) for natural light indoor photography.

Particularly on a “long” lens. the addition of optical image stabilization (OIS) is extremely convenient. It definitely increases your “keepers” if your subject is static.

Now I love being a prime lens snob. To be honest, though, the quality of both of the original “kit” lenses is somewhere between more than adequate to awesome, Used within their limitations (good light, slowly moving subjects) they are no impediment to producing quality prints of landscape subjects. This suits me fine.  If I want to go back to shooting sports and fast-moving wildlife, I would probably invest in a use or refurbished Nikon D7XXX body to use with the  70-200 f2.8 VR Nikkor that still lurks in my studio.  For what I do, this Fuji telephoto zoom works just fine.

 

Fujifilm makes several other long zooms including a robust 50–140 millimeter f2.8 which would also suit my focal length needs, and allow more light for fast action and dusk/dawn shooting.  It is $1500 new and weighs more than twice as much as the 55-200, attributes that are not particularly interesting to me.  Like my Nikkor 70-200mm, it has sufficient size/weight to require a tripod mount. Thus, for me, it would be likely relegated to shooting from the car. That kind of shooting I tend to do with my heavier Nikon gear.

I still prefer prime lenses, both for their inherent quality and for the discipline they instill in my shooting.  But I can see maintaining a camera bag, with the 2 zoom lenses, and a more SLR-like camera such as an X-T10/20 body. This would be fairly light, and a very easy “grab” when headed out into the outdoors for some impromptu exercise. 

Given the quality of images I have seen these two lenses, such a gear bag would likely spend a lot of time by my side.

 

 

I consider myself an interested, if not a keen observer of natural phenomena. For instance,  I have over the last 25 years, kept a diary of snowfall events as measured on my back patio. I maintain 2  weather stations. 

So when I ventured outside on the morning of January 13th, I noticed that something interesting must have happened overnight.

For 2 days before, we had rain, some heavy, with temps in the fifties and even sixties(F) which wiped out the little snow we had. Overnight Friday into Saturday, the cold front passed, which was predicted to provide a period of freezing rain, then sleet, then perhaps a coating of snow.

So I was not surprised that Saturday morning, to find the yard white again.

It was in the single digits when I went out to clear the walks, and defrost my truck. I was not surprised to see an icy veil over the tree branches and pine boughs.  As I took in the lovely morning, I noticed that something looked different.

The bright morning sun filtered through the icy foliage looked extremely specular, an unfamiliar appearance to me

 

On closer inspection of the branches, I noticed not the uniform coating of ice that is the usual result of freezing rain. Rather instead, there were individual droplets of water, like crystal beads, on bare branches and evergreens alike.

This is why it looked unusual, for I was observing each tiny droplet as a tiny point of refracted light. The effect was quite stunning.

My community exists at between about 1650-2000 feet on the western edge of the Pocono plateau. the icing event occurred from about 1700 ft and above, with no icing below 1600 ft.

So what happened? I went to my online weather station which is located at around 1900 ft.

First, let me say that the sensor on this station is sheltered from the wind (as is most of my property) A 35 mph gust is impressive indeed and really emphasizes the strength of this front. Note that the temperature late Friday drops rapidly from almost 60 degrees (f) to just above freezing for a period of time and then plunges to the mid “teens” in just over an hour.

  To form this ice pattern, I suspect it continued to rain with the temperature just above freezing, and then stopped during the final plunge. Sleet, and finally snow would have come in as, or just after the front had passed. And the droplets from the rain were in fact “flash frozen” by the unusually abrupt drop in temperature.

It’s admittedly a small thing, a slight deviation in our usual weather patterns. But as a photographer, it created a tangible difference in the appearance of a small portion of our natural world. One perhaps that can be anticipated in the future.

 So why do I feel like such a geek?

 

 

In the highlands of Northeastern Pennsylvania, meteorological summer has passed by, without stopping to say hello, or even waving as it drove past.

I can’t say there was no hot weather, but for the first time in many years, I don’t remember any even slightly uncomfortable nights sleeping in my non– air-conditioned bedroom (most summers we have a week or so of nighttime temperatures in the mid-70s).

I suspect that my friends with boats and/or swimming pools were disappointed. I, however, loved the pleasantly warm days, and crisp nights. So the climate trend that I described in June, which helped to abort a gypsy moth infestation, continued for the next 2 months.

For a variety of reasons, I have not had a great deal of photographic output over the summer. I think that the summer season often distracts me from photography with a number of different diversions, and discourages me from photography in a number of ways. From the biting insects that plague me when I try to I set up my tripod, to the monotonous green landscapes, and the sunrises that are inconveniently early, I tend to lose some enthusiasm over the warmer months.

Usually, my interest in a new piece of gear stimulates me to get out and shoot, but at this point, I’m extremely content with the gear that I have. This is particularly true of the X100F, and the X Pro 2. I really don’t crave the next upgrade in focusing or sensor resolution.

I read with interest the introduction of the Nikon’s new flagship DSLR, the D850.  I should really be lusting after this camera, with its state-of-the-art backlit 47mp sensor, its 9 frames per second speed, but I’m not.  Two generations old now, my 36mp D800E still looks new, works beautifully, and produces gorgeous files that look great in as large a print size as I am likely to create.

Maybe I’ll buy a refurbed one in a couple of years.

  Also though, I can’t escape the feeling that big bulky DSLRs are like dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous; about to be overwhelmed by the smaller, more convenient and increasingly capable mirrorless cameras which are becoming a more dominant force in the market.

Meanwhile, things photographically are looking up.

 Here in the Poconos, the leaves are beginning to change color, and the sound of katydids punctuates the crisp night air. The big cinnamon ferns in the forest are beginning to change to a sort of golden brown, while the deer transform from the red coat of summer to their cold weather coat of gray. Sadly, the humming birds have disappeared south.

For my wife and I, there will be an upcoming trip to the Adirondacks, to enjoy Oktoberfest, and “peak leaves”.

There is also the fresh introduction of the Fujifilm XE-3. Hmmm.

There should be plenty to write about, and photographic in the upcoming months.

Stay tuned.

 

 

It has been a quiet summer here on the Pocono Plateau. The weather has been quite pleasant since mid June, though in the last week or so we’ve had several runs of severe afternoon thunderstorms that resulted in power outages  in our small community.  Otherwise the weather has been lovely.

I have noticed that my postings tend to fall off during the summer months. I think part of this is due to a certain contentment I feel with the onset of the season .

We had the usual march of summer flowers including honeysuckle, black-eyed susan’s, mountain laurel, foxglove and finally rhododendron.  Now the first cardinal flowers have appeared alongside stream beds.  I noticed yesterday that goldenrod is beginning to bloom.

In our neighborhood we had an abortive gypsy moth outbreak, but a fortuitous run of cool wet weather in early June encouraged several pathogens, which wiped out the caterpillars before they could do much damage. This undoubtedly saved several old Chestnut oak trees on my property who are already relatively marginal.

We have had the usual run of community events, including our Fourth of July celebration, summer cocktail parties, and the very pleasant wedding of the friend’s daughter that I help to photograph. I am really enjoying the combination of the X 100f, and the X Pro 2/56mmf1.2 for events like this.

The house is empty this summer. My daughter of course lives in Seattle, and my son, who is a graduate student, is doing an Google internship in that city. It is nice that they can be together.  We did meet up with them in State College, when they flew into attend a wedding.

Equipment wise, I have acquired a DJI Mavic Pro drone, and have been trying to master shooting smooth aerial video. Once I have something to show for it, I will share my experiences on these pages. It turns out there is definitely a learning curve to this.

Mostly though, I am enjoying the summer season. I am looking forward to some events with the potential to provide some content for these pages as the summer goes on.

So bear with me.  I’ll be back.

 

 

It starts the way it always does. In December, I check the Penn State schedule for spring break. Given that our daughter, and now our son have been students there over the last 6 years; that week will be our family ski trip, generally the first full week of March. We will spend it in Lake Placid.

I have had almost no regrets over the years. The Adirondacks in early March typically feature abundant snow cover, and moderate temperatures, and we generally we have a wonderful winter vacation.

2016, however, broke the mold, Last year in March, Lake Placid for the first time in 25 years was snowless. Though Whiteface, the downhill resort was open, given my deteriorating knee, it was of little use to me. My wife and son skied when it wasn’t raining. I did a little hiking, but a lot of eating and drinking. At the end, it didn’t seem like a good entertainment value for the long drive required to get there and return. Not to worry I thought; this year is clearly a fluke.

 

Winter 2017 seemed different. Though in Pennsylvania, the winter had been mild with minimal snow, the Adirondacks were far enough north for most of the precipitation to be white. I sat at my desk at work, scanning Facebook posts by my Lake Placid friends describing their latest winter adventures. In mid-February with my vacation weeks away, the backcountry ski conditions report was positively giddy with the wonderful snowpack that had accumulated. And, I had a brand new knee.

Then came the warmth, and several strong rain events. By late February, the giddy was gone, along with the snow. Our vacation loomed.

We tried to remain optimistic. But when the Friday Lake Placid forecast was in (we were set to leave Saturday) it called for a bitterly cold weekend, followed by three days of fifty-degree weather with rain. Our weather in Pa, though similar would be 5-10 degrees warmer, and with less precipitation.

After consulting with my wife, we threw in the towel, and unpacked.

My kid (and several friends) however, had purchased advance ski tickets that were nonrefundable. Twenty-two-year-olds have no issue with driving 6 hours for 2 days of frigid skiing. So we gave them the keys.

Now I don’t really have a problem with staying home. It gives me time to work around the house when the weather was bad, and at least hike when the weather is good. It did feel like we needed to do go somewhere. Given the 50-60 degree temps in the middle of the week (3/5-7), it occurred to me that we ought to go south, to where we might find even more spring-like conditions.

We decided to travel during the balmy mid-week weather, first to the inner harbor at Baltimore for a night and then drive up US 95 to stay at a 1780s hotel in our old neighborhood in Center City Philadelphia.

Baltimore was lovely, but quiet, given the time of year. I had brought along both my X Pro 2 (with the 18-55mm zoom in the bag, but with the 56mm f1.2 mounted). I also brought along my X100t with the 2 lens converters.  For some reason, I ended up shooting only the X100, mainly with the native lens or the teleconverter. This is not an uncommon circumstance, and the reason my X100f is on order. I shot in raw/ monochrome jpeg, and I really liked the images I was seeing in the LCD.

We had drinks at Fells Point, and seafood at the Rusty Scupper, a restaurant I had in the past generally avoided as a tourist trap but found was quite good. The evening and night images I acquired looked really promising. The following day we took in the highly recommended National Aquarium, before loading up for the 2-hour drive northeast to “Philly”.

My wife Cathy and I went to medical school there and later did our respective fellowships in the city.  For a time we lived at Tenth and Spruce, 4-5 blocks from the lovely Morris Hotel where we stayed. This location is central to much of Philly’s interesting neighborhoods, including Jeweler’s Row, the Independence Mall area, the Italian Market, and the “Old City” area near to the river. I wandered past my medical school. Formerly, it was named for the author of the Declaration of Independence. It now bears the name of a clothier (a very rich clothier). I ate a cheesesteak (onions, cheese whiz, mushrooms). And I shot a fair number of images. In the morning we had a lovely spring breakfast at an outdoor café on Washington Square.

Sometime on Thursday morning I filled the SD card I had been shooting, and changed it out. As is my practice over many years, I place it upside down in its case to indicate that it is full, and then placed it (along with spent batteries) at the bottom of my camera bag where I will notice them later. I shot a few more images on the new card before starting the trip for home.

Some of you may be noticing at this point the relative paucity of images from Baltimore and Philly in this article. Where are they? Well, I wish I knew. For when I returned home, I could not find the spent card with all of my files. Perhaps it fell out of my bag at some point later in the morning when I walked around town. Maybe it fell out in our room.

This is the first time this has happened to me and it is quite disturbing. I am hoping that perhaps the hotel cleaning staff will come upon it, but I am not hopeful.

Back in the mountains, as I write this it is 12 degrees. Roughly 8 inches of snow fell here yesterday, with the promise of a significant Nor’easter later this week. My road is again snow-covered and undoubtedly re-freezing. Damn. Maybe by next weekend, we will be skiing again. Oh well, such is March on the Pocono plateau.

 

Addendum: We did indeed have a nor’easter.  On March 14 and 15th, my little community in the mountains saw accumulations of 32 inches of new snow, breaking a previous 24-hour snow total, that was originally set in 1993.  The Valley cities had nearly as much.  It remained cold after the storm.

Needless to say, there is once again cross-country skiing on the Pocono plateau.

 

I gotta admit, I’m ready for spring.

 

 

 

Among Fujifilm “X” users, the unique characteristics of the Trans-X sensor used in most of the camera line is a very familiar topic. This sensor was developed in 2012, and was one of the first sensors to not include an  anti-aliasing filter,. These filters, which slightly blur the image (thus reducing apparent resolution) had been included in most digital imagers up to that time to prevent the phenomenon of moiré. The Trans-X sensor used a less symmetrical color filter array to prevent moiré effects.

Those a few that are unfamiliar with this topic can find more information here.

Because of  the unique design of this sensor, programs to convert the raw files generated by these cameras have at times struggled to optimize the resultant files. Part of this may have been at least in the beginning, Fujifilm was not particularly forthright with information on the sensor.

Over the years we have looked at the different raw converter options for the  Fujifilm cameras and in my case those compatible with a Windows environment (definitely not a Mac person).

For many years it seemed clear that Phase One’s Capture One software was then programmed to beat, besting Adobe Camera Raw, and even slightly better, then Fujifilm’s on Raw file converter, based on the Silkypix photo management product.

Ultimately Adobe refined its raw conversion process for X-trans, and Photoshop and Lightroom became more competitive. Recently the differences in conversion quality, though still favoring Capture One, have not been worth the workflow interruption required.

Then there was Irident X Transformer. This was a Fuji specific raw file converter, exclusive to IOS, that has long been said to produce the best, most detailed images, from Fuji raw files. But alas, it was unavailable to those of us in the Microsoft world.

Now a version of Irident has been released for the Windows platform. I was excited to give it a try.

This is a very simple product with one mission, to convert a photo file from the Fuji raw format to the Adobe native DNG format( which Adobe understands very well), where it then can be further processed into a Tiff, jpeg or other file type. In the process of conversion, the program also applies a unique sharpening algorithm, as well as noise reduction, and lens correction, all of which can be controlled by the user. There is also Irident developer, a full featured photo program for IOS and Windows, selling for US$99.00.

 

 

X Transformer is roughly analogous to Adobe’s own digital negative converter, a program they offer for users of older Photoshop versions, who now wished to convert files from newer cameras not compatible with their versions of Photoshop.

I was eager to apply the program, to raw files from both the 16mp and 24mp X-Trans sensors, and compare them to Adobe Camera Raw conversion alone. I also converted files from the original conventional sensor X100 to see whether there was any advantage with that camera’s output.  I also converted Raw files using Capture One, and Adobe digital negative converter (which then I finalized in Photoshop much like one needs to do with the Irident DNGs) for comparison.

I tried to pick images with a variety of color mixes mindful of the effect the X-Trans sensor is said to have on green foliage.

I processed all images using equivalent amounts of sharpening. I turned sharpening to low on the Irident converter.

Below is fairly typical of the differences in the 16 mp files, the Irident conversion pulling far more detail than ACR alone, with Capture 1 (version 9) in the middle. So you know, the jpg conversion needed to post these actually tends to minimize the differences.

 
Below is a file from my X Pro 2. Here the differences between the various conversions are more subtle, though the original TIFFs still favor the Irident workflow. Look at the small patch of lichen on the branch which is more detailed on the Irident version. I actually think that the Capture one version lags behind the ACR conversion, but I may have under sharpened that file slightly.

Out of curiosity, I dug out a file from the Bayer sensored X100. Here I could detect little advantage for adding an Irident conversion first.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

 

Now this is not scientific, but I have formed the following conclusions:

Pre-converting the raw files with Irident X Transformer into DNG seems to be helpful to extract the most realistic and detailed X Tran images from Adobe Camera Raw. This effect, however, is to me, more noticeable for the 16 mp imager where Irident is quite helpful. The advantage of Irident seems to be some less dramatic with the newer 24mp imager though not negligible. Is this because Adobe has done a better job in their algorithms for the Trans-X III? Or has Irident not quite figured things out for this sensor?

Also, Capture One remains a step ahead of ACR for 16mp Trans-X though not as good as Irident +ACR. For the 24 mp imagers is seems to have less advantage though I have not upgraded yet to version 10. All of this suggests to me that Adobe has done a better job with analyzing and coding for the new 24mp sensor. I did not test Capture One with the Bayer-sensored X100 because in the past I have noticed little difference between ACR and C1 with conventional sensors.

Finally, I should say something about the Workflow using Irident X Transformer. It certainly adds an extra step to processing. In my case the program wouldn’t display thumbnails, requiring me to go back to Adobe bridge and get the file #. This is annoying.

So, in summary, I would say if you want the simplest workflow with X-Trans files, go with Adobe products such ACR or Lightroom. Capture One is certainly an alternative with the potential to reveal a smidgen more detail, but for me, it is less streamlined. Finally, for big prints and critical results, adding Irident X Transformer to Adobe definitely allows you to extract more detail from your images.