Derek Zeanah

Fuji GFX 50S II system for sale

derek — Sun, 09 Mar 2025 23:28:01 +0000

As I get older I find I’m using smaller gear – most recently micro 4/3rds. The image quality from this camera and lens is shockingly good, but I can’t justify keeping this, a full Panasonic G kit, and a full-frame Pentax kit, so this needs to go.

I bought it new, and condition is probably a 9 – looks perfect to me, but I’m bad at judging used gear. Works perfectly, makes great, sharp, easy to edit images, but it’s just sitting here in its bag.

Asking $2790. If you need more photos, please ask.

Cameras being evaluated, and my biases

derek — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 14:52:09 +0000

Preferences and Prejudices

My goal here is to produce pleasing images, ideally on paper.

This means, for me, character trumps technical perfection. By this I mean that I’m looking for lenses that draw in a pleasing manner. Yes, I want high contrast, and great resolution, and all that, but when I look back into the photos I’ve created in the past that I’ve loved the most I’m drawn to certain lenses that see the world in a particular way. I’m a photographer, so I love images that I can view on a pixel level that amaze me with their resolution and clarity, but I care more about compelling images than something that’s more perfect but a bit sterile.

My personal bias is for lenses that can isolate a subject in a pleasing manner. This tends to mean high local contrast around the subject, and a gradual, pleasing fall-off into the out of focus areas. This means good bokeh lots of times, but not necessarily – there are some lenses that didn’t have good bokeh that still produced lovely renditions of scenes (the lens that comes to mind is the 90mm Zeiss Planar on the Hasselblad 500C). This was a 150mm on Bronica 645 format:

What’s compelling to me about that image (technically) is how well the subject is isolated, and the rest of the image just sort of drifts off into nonexistence. It’s got a pleasing overall feel, is sharp enough where it needs to be, and is pleasant to look at. It’s got character. You’re drawn in to the subject, and you are interacting with her rather than with a scene with her in it, because the design of the lens facilitates that subtly but effectively.

Now, lenses that have the sort of character that I like tend to be older lens designs that have stood the test of time. They have weird names like Distagon, or Planar, or Summicron or Summilux. Well tested, well loved, and just good. Most of these are from an age where lenses were designed on paper using a pencil, and now we live in an age where lenses are designed in software.

And software lens design is good. We get great, measurable performance from lenses that are designed from the first principles in physics, and we get good resolution, little to no light fall-off across the frame, minimization of “defects” that cause things like purple fringing or glare when a powerful light source is in the frame; often though, these lenses are optimized for performance on test charts rather than for their overall pleasing rendition of the scenes they are photographing.

In the modern era, there are a few companies that try hard to create lenses that have both character and great optical performance, and these are the sorts of lenses and systems I buy.

I would say that Leica, Fuji, and Olympus are among the lens designers that really try to maximize character in their lenses, or at least are designers that have some “character-above-all” lenses in their lens catalogs.

PanaLeica

This is the system I am evaluating – a Panasonic G9 II which is a small (micro-Four-Thirds) sensor camera with 25 megapixels of resolution.

The nice thing about this system is that they have a series of lenses that are Leica branded, where Leica (known for the character of their lenses and their uncompromising build quality) influences the design of the lens and signs off on the quality of the finished product. These tend to be those lovely, time-tested designs that are tweaked for optimal performance using software and technically advanced lens coatings.

My hope is that this will be a Poor Man’s Leica, because while I would prefer to shoot with a Leica SL3, I find $900 for a new lens much more palatable than $6,000 for a comparable lens.

All of the m4/3 lenses I am evaluating are part of the Panasonic/Leica collaboration.

Pentax Full Frame

The Pentax comparison camera is a K-1, which many might consider old because it was introduced in 2016, but the images this sensor produces still hold up. This is a full-frame 36 megapixel camera that I think is (still) a great platform. It also offers IBIS, as do all cameras being evaluated.

The lenses used in these comparisons will be the Limited lens line. These are a bit special – Pentax brought in renowned photographers to guide the design process, and the designs were not evaluated based on MTF charts and objective and measurable performance tests. Instead, all the designs were evaluated by reviewing large prints, and those that created the best images were moved into production and assembled by hand, using the best materials available at the time.

These lenses are something special, and are well loved by the Pentax community. They aren’t perfect though – they were created in the film era (mostly), and they show some flaws (like purple fringing on bright edges) that more modern designs don’t show, but overall they are wonderful performers.

These are all fast prime lenses. Most are faster than f2 (the exception being the 21mm f2.4) and are lightweight and portable, which I’m looking for.

The exception here is the 100mm Macro lens, which is the exact same design as the Schneider-Kreuznach D-Xenon lens. This is known to be about perfect in all those testable performance metrics, but it also renders subjects in a very pleasing way. This may be the perfect macro lens.

Here’s a test shot I took of this lens last week when I took it out of storage to make sure it still worked well. Look at how well the salt shaker is rendered, and how cleanly everything out of focus just kind of blends into the background in a visually pleasing manner. It’s just smooth, and this photo was taken at f5.6 – opening it up wider gives an even more profound look.

Fuji GFX

This might be the best camera system for people who value image quality above all else. This is a “medium format” camera with lenses of uncompromising quality. While this isn’t medium format in the traditional sense (which I interpret as a sensor at least 6cm x 4,5cm in dimensions), it’s larger than full-frame 35mm format, and as such it has great advantages as far as light gathering, the quality of the pixels, and the additional subject separation you can get because at a given perspective a larger lens is required than with smaller formats, so you get shorter depth of field.

This is great for portraits, but for landscapes or other images where you want everything from near to far to be in focus this requires some planning and workarounds.

But the cameras are very high resolution and produce amazing images. The lenses are quite nice as well, though I only have one lens at the moment (the cheapest one.) The biggest problems with this platform are:

Size and weight. It’s bigger than a DSLR, and the lenses are bigger than DSLR lenses, because of physics. This isn’t a deal killer – if women can suffer through wearing high heals for Beauty, I can carry a heavier bag for Art.
Cost. These lenses aren’t cheap. If I were to splurge on the lenses I want to have, new, I’d be putting used car money into my photo bag.
The lens range isn’t ideal. With the Leica lenses for the m4/3 kit, I can buy three lenses and cover wide angle (16mm full frame equivalent) to moderate telephoto (200mm equivalent) perspectives and do so at f2.8 across most of the lens range. With the Fuji, it’s kind of a sparse lens landscape, and real sacrifices need to be made. What is available is amazing, but I want more than exists.

With that said, this platform is amazing as far as quality is concerned. I have the 50S II camera body (because 50 megapixels is enough for my printing needs), and the images this produces are amazing.

This is an unedited RAW file from the camera, followed by a close-up showing pixel level detail:

That’s an incredible amount of detail, and the files are very easy to work with. While I haven’t printed big prints from this system yet, I’m confident I can print big prints from it and be happy.

But do I need that level of detail?

That’s what I’m trying to answer with this series. Is it possible to scale back from the “best” to something more affordable and manageable, and stillproduce results I’m proud of?

I’ll let you know in the coming weeks and months.

Wall prints and megapixels: maybe less is enough?

derek — Mon, 24 Feb 2025 12:13:13 +0000

My wife just ordered a bunch of new prints for her office, and the quality was astounding. Especially since many of the prints she chose were photos taken in 2007, using a Fuji S2 Pro that was released in 2002. This camera captured a “huge 12 megapixel image” that we all know actually contained maybe 9 megabytes of information (no need to go into the Bayer layout vs SuperCCD debate), but these 20 year old images looked good. Like, really good. At 20×30 inches.

So why the hell am I shooting with full frame and medium format?

The Source of my Bias

I’ve been taking photography seriously since the 1990’s. I learned on black and white film in a darkroom, earned my living shooting portraits and weddings on film (mostly) and early digital, and I was always driven by image quality. So, I was drawn to the equipment that produced the best images – this generally meant really expensive lenses and the largest piece of film I could reasonably carry.

With digital the struggle continued. Costs went up, and quality was marginal but “good enough,” with the real shift coming from cost reduction – shooting 1,000 frames at a wedding on Leica M gear produced much better images than shooting on that S2 Pro that produced the images in this article, but just having my lab process and print 4×6 proof prints was $1,000. Compare that to the $3,000 cost of that Fuji digital camera, and whatever it costs to burn a CD of the images it produced along with a set of “contact prints” run off on an Epson printer.

Digital photography, to me, was about efficiency and cost. Not quality.

Wall Prints

These are some vacation prints of mine. They aren’t amazing, but they’re good memories. I enjoy taking vacation photos and I print them at up to 30×40″ in size, and so I tend to carry a big bag of gear with me because that was the price I thought I had to pay for image quality.

That photo on the left of the sculpted stairwell? Gorgeous architecture shot on a m4/3 camera that I tried to use to replace the bulky DSLR I was otherwise using. That was a camera with an honest 12 megapixels of capture, built a decade after that S2 Pro, and the details in the stairwell photo are just about nonexistent to my eye. It’s disappointing to walk up to it and not see the detail I know was in the original frame. Luckily that’s not how we view wall prints, so these images work on the wall like this.

But I’ve been shooting with “better” gear (full frame DSLRs with prime lenses, or a Fuji GFX camera) so I’ll have the resolution I want for the next wall print.

The Re-evaluation

But these prints, from 20 year old images that don’t look amazing in Lightroom have me rethinking all this.

Here is a closer shot from that print. It’s not amazingly sharp, but it doesn’t need to be, as the canvas doesn’t really have the resolution to show more detail than is there.

So you’ve got this image, taken on a 23 year old 6 megapixel sensor with illusions of grandeur, and it holds up at 20″ x 30″ in an office environment. Look at the setae (call them hairs) on the bee’s legs and abdomen – plenty of detail there for my eyes. And all of the prints are coming out that good.

So Why are these Prints So Good?

Well, to start with these prints from from mpix.com, which is the consumer division of the image processor I used years ago for my portrait and wedding work – they’ve always done a great job.

But I think to a larger degree we are looking at a couple of changes that have happened over the last two decades:

I’m printing on canvas rather than a glossy print, and as a result the resolution of the canvas is hit before the resolution of the image runs out.
Software, and our understanding of digital imaging, is simply an order of magnitude better than it was when these images were taken. It’s possible to produce prints from the same source image that are simply better. Ai-based sharpening and upscaling software, digital workflows at the printer that are optimized to start with a mediocre image and apply settings to really bring out the best in that image, and so on.

I think, when it comes down to it, the biases I developed in the early 21st Century may have been invalidated by the march of technology. I no longer need what I thought I needed to produce a quality large print. Or at least, the photo equipment I had was producing images that were capable of much greater enlargements than I realized, and I can scale back and still get the quality of output I need.

Downsizing and Testing the Results

So this will start a new series of posts here.

I’m currently shooting with full-frame and medium format kits (Pentax and Fuji, respectively.) I just ordered a m4/3 replacement setup from Pentax that should be here next week. I went with 3 Leica-badged zoom lenses (and I traditionally hate zoom lenses and always wish I’d had a prime instead) this time because I want to test what a light, portable kit can do.

This is about embracing compromise (in sensor size and giving up prime lenses for the compromises zooms always entail) and checking to see if the output is still “good enough” by my standards. I’ve got a new photo printer coming in that prints 13 x 19 inch prints affordably, so I should be able to test without a whole lot of effort.

At the end of the day, for me, the final product of photography is an actual photograph, preferably hanging on a wall. So that’s what I’ll be judging this on.

Stay tuned.

Fresh Start

derek — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 04:20:16 +0000

I’ve been hosting web sites on my own hardware for over 20 years. Some of this was as a hobby, and some was for clients, but I’ve never pursued hosting in any serious way. That doesn’t mean I’m not good at it; rather, I was always pursuing something that seemed more important or more alluring.

That’s changed a bit, and as I’m revamping web sites and polishing business models, I’ve spent the last couple of weeks evaluating a new web hosting platform called Enhance. I like it quite a bit, and it suits the sort of web hosting I’d like to provide. As part of that I’ve been pulling web sites off of Direct Admin and Virtualmin servers and migrating them to the new cluster.

Just now, it was time to migrate this domain from an old machine, and I was struggling to get the first two automated tools to work. Before I fell back to using a remote backup and restore tool I looked at the content and decided to just let the past go. There wasn’t really anything here that represented “me” in any real sense as I am today.

So, new site, and new content. I suppose I’ll archive the old one for nostalgia’s sake. Or maybe not – I rarely resort to nostalgia.