I know there haven’t been any updated for quite a while, I hope to be able to catch up soon, otherwise check out my social media profiles for the latest pictures and news (see “About” section).
And here are the news: There will be a calendar for next year again!
And it will contain a few unpublished images, which I’m going to officially publish in the upcoming weeks.
If you are interested and have not yet a new wall calendar for next year or you’re already looking for Christmas gifts go ahead and drop me a message or write me an e-Mail at kontakt(at)philipp-lutz.net.
The calendar is going to be available as matte print on premium paper in A3 format.
It will be 20€ for the calendar + 4€ shipping (DE). If you live outside of Germany just ask me for the shipping costs.
At the beginning of 2021 I realized that my lower leg segments have almost lost all their grippy rubber cover and only the aluminum structure was left, see the following image.
This is especially a problem when working on very hard and smooth surfaces, there will be always a lack of grip when placing the tripod legs.
New lower tripod legs arrived!
I was once again getting in touch with the Sirui Europe service and send this image to show the problem. I got an answer the next day saying that they are going to send me replacements for the lower leg segments, containing the rubber. They were only asking for the purchase receipt. Then I had to wait almost 3 months until the parts were delivered to me free of charge, because the parts were not on stock anywhere.
Either they were screening all warehouses in China for this spare-part or even manufacturing it from scratch as it seems that my tripod (Sirui M-3204X) is long out of its lifecycle.
New shims
When the new lower tripod legs finally arrived I was surprised to the the new transparent shims, which were not made from two halves. They are very similar to the upper leg segment shims which were highlighted in Sirui-tripod-repairs – part 2 but seem to be made from a different material which seems to glide smoother.
Overall I’m still very happy with my Sirui tripod and the service, which has always been very professional and accommodating.
Happy belated new year to all readers of this blog 😉
I hope you all had a good and relaxing time over the Christmas holiday season too.
I used the time to process some old gems from my ever-growing backlog of images. This backlog is still huge, but thanks to the Covid pandemic I’ve had more time to process photos than taking photos, which is usually vice-versa in times where I could freely travel and discover new places.
Here are the recent additions from Germany and Iceland.
Surprise surprise, there will be a calendar for next year again!
And it will contain plenty of fresh and unpublished images, which I’m going to officially publish in the upcoming weeks.
If you are interested and have not yet a new wall calendar for next year or you’re already looking for Christmas gifts go ahead and drop me a message below or write me an e-Mail at kontakt(at)philipp-lutz.net.
It’s going to be available as glossy or matte print on premium paper in A3 format. So just pick your favourite finish.
It will be 20€ for the calendar + 4€ shipping (DE). If you live outside of Germany just ask me for the shipping costs.
It was only 2 weeks after Olympus announced that they are going to sell their camera business, I finally had the reason to switch to Sony, an idea I was contemplating about for quite a while. Only some months before this announcement Olympus released the successor of the legendary OM-D E-M1 mk2, which I own and consider as the best mirrorless camera that has been around for some years. The successor had rather disappointing specs, there was hardly and hardware upgrades (e.g. still same sensor sensor) and mostly gimmicky software features and the capability of shooting high-res pictures free-hand. None of which I was interested about. I wanted to benefit from the most recent achievements in image sensor design, lower noise and maybe the capability of writing 14-bit RAW files (VS 12-bit currently).
Now, on top of that, hearing that Olympus’ camera business is going to shift down some gears or maybe even close down depending on the kind of investor they will find I knew that Olympus is going to be a dead-end for me. But to be honest, it’s really sad, because I was always fascinated about the tech only Olympus provided among all the other camera manufacturers, such as ” Live Bulb/ Time” or “Live Composite” and the ruggedness of their camera bodies, Sony is going to have a long way to catch up with that…
To make the story short: immediately after hearing about the news I looked for used Sony gear and got myself an Sony A7mk3 with the “holy trinity” lens setup (see photo):
Sony FE G-master 16-35mm f/2.8
Sony FE G-master 24-70mm f/2.8
Sony FE 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G OSS
My new camera system
So far I’m still quite happy with the Sony system, although it was inevitable to gain some weight in my camera bag, but at least I finally have a sensor which is 4x the area and I’m going to have less pain in post-processing when I’ve to go down some rabbit holes to make the visible noise less noticeable in available light photos or photos which required stretching the histogram really hard. The configurability of the Sony camera is also quite nice. The only thing which still bothers me a lot is not having the option to see both the spirit level as well as the histogram at the same time in live-view. My girlfriend recently bought a cheap entry-level MFT Panasonic camera and this very setting is the default setting in this camera. Why can’t a professional line FF Sony camera have this?
In the meantime I’m glad that Nikon and Canon caught up with their mirrorless cameras too, which should create more competition and more competition is always worth to drive innovation 😉
