As some of you have noticed, beginning of 2023 I set up a Discord server for the Phillipreeve.net community and I am happy to report that there are many active members and it allowed me to be closer to the community as well.
Also some memes have been exchanged/created and I thought for those that aren’t members (yet) I will share my favorites here.
We always tell you about new gear here, but at the end of the day lenses are just tools needed to take nice pictures. Martin and I went through all the pictures we took in 2023 to choose our 10 favorites. You can find those pictures here with a bit of additional information, for which there is not always a place in the gear reviews.
…and only because something is good you don’t have to like it either.
I am an active member of several photography boards (Fred Miranda, DSLR-Forum, Leica Forum) and in addition to that plenty of Facebook groups and in a moment of weakness I might even have a look at the comment section of a Sonyalpharumors post. And of course I am also taking care of our own Discord community since early 2023.
What got me thinking and ultimately motivated me to write this piece: how useful is it to ask random people what lens you should buy?
The more time I spend on those boards (and I am trying to spend less time there), the more I think asking these questions there is pretty much pointless. Why is that?
Continue reading If you like something, that doesn’t necessarily mean it is good
By now I am pretty sure all of you have already heard of ChatGPT, Midjourney or any of the other artifical intelligences you can now talk to or make use of. Where it got interesting for me, was in early 2023, when Adobe released a Photoshop Beta version with AI features and staggering capabilities. Over the past months I have been using it (for professional work and private stuff) so I wanted to show you some examples where it was useful to me and also how it works.
One thing is for sure, this will vastly disrupt image editing workflows.
There have always been people adapting lenses to other camera systems, but it was really the release of the Sony A7 that completely changed the game, being the first affordable fullframe mirrorless camera with a short flange focal distance, Liveview and built-in EVF.
This not only made it possible to use long forgotten legacy lenses from decades ago on a modern camera, it also led to some of the most sophisticated adapters we have seen so far.
This was the end of 2014 and since then a lot has changed, so let us see what are the reasons to adapt lenses and in what cases it is still worth it today.