the last word

The is a guest post by Huntington Witherill, a prolific, versatile  photographer who has mastered both the technical and artistic parts of the pursuit. He’s also a great lecturer, teacher, and friend. You can see his work here. He’s been working on the a7R shutter slap for a couple of weeks now, and he’s come… [Read More]

Let’s take a break from the technical minutia and spend at least one post on a photographic issue that’s important – or should be important – no matter what you think of the a7R’s shutter. Brooks Jensen just posted a rumination on photographic quality. Rather than summarize Brooks’ post, I suggest you read it –… [Read More]

Ferrell McCullough proposed an idea a couple of days ago that sounded better and better the more I thought about it. Why not do some testing of the strobe-lit images with rear-curtain synch at various shutter speeds? We could then see blur that was big enough to show up during the strobe duration at discrete… [Read More]

Is an electronic flash fast enough to stop the a7R shutter slap motion? It depends: All equipment the same as the last post unless noted. Camera shutter release mode: 2 second self-timer, shutter speed: 1/160 second, first curtain synch: 90mm Leica f/2 APO Summicron, f/5.6 with ND filter at minimum absorption, flash duration 1/8000 second… [Read More]

A “to do” from some time ago was to verify that the Heliopan ND filter that I’m using for the shutter series testing does not itself introduce unsharpness that would invalidate the conclusions that I’ve been drawing in the previous posts. I’ve been waiting on a flash with shorter duration than my White Lightning X1600s,… [Read More]