Fuji’s FinePix X100 is designed around a 12.3MP APS-C format CMOS sensor and a fixed 23mm/f2 ASPH lens (8 elements in 6 groups) that emulates the field-of-view of a 35mm lens on a full-frame 35mm camera, which as mentioned above is the favored focal length of dyed-in-the-wool Leica shooters.

The X100 is constructed of magnesium alloy with metal control dials, shoots RAW+JPEG stills (with in-camera RAW processing), 720p @ 24f/p/s video with stereo sound (up to 10-minutes), has an ISO range of 100 to 12,800 for sharp imaging under a range of lighting conditions, and features  a 2.8”, 460,000-dot LCD for composing and reviewing imagery. And for those who still havewarm spots for the days of film, the FinePix X100 c an emulate the ‘look’ of  Fuji’s 
Provia, Velvia, and Astia film emulsions.

In keeping with the retro look and feel of traditional rangefinder cameras – Leica and otherwise – the FinePix X100 features the range of analog control dials, which should feel familiar to anyone who’s shot with a film-based rangefinder camera.

Of particular interest is the X100′s hybrid viewfinder, which offers the user to switch back and forth between a traditional window-type 0.5x magnification reverse-Galilean ‘bright-frame’ viewfinder (90% image area), and a  1,440,000-dot electronic viewfinder (100% image area) by simply flipping the switch located on the camera’s front panel adjacent to the viewfinder. This rather novel design allows the user the option of shooting in a traditional manner or ‘digitally’, complete with a display of all exposure data within the viewing frame.

Other features found on the FujiFilm FinePix X100 include close-focusing down to 1-cm, continuous shooting at a choice of 3 to 5 frames-per-second, a built-in 3-stop ND filter, a built-in Motion Panorama function that allows you to capture sweeping 180° and 120° panorama images, an HDMI port for exporting stills and videos to HD TVs, and bracketing functionality for AE, ISO, Dynamic Range and Film Simulation, and in keeping with the theme and concept of the camera, full manual focus and exposure control.

Canon EOS T31 with 18-55mm/3.5-5.6 IS II Zoom

Two new Canon EOS Rebels are coming our way in the form of the Rebel T3 and Rebel T3i. The Rebel T3i is the more ambitious of the two and it contains an 18MP APS-C format (1.6x) CMOS sensor, a DIGIC 4 image processor, 3.7 frames-per-second burst-rates for up to approximately 34 JPEGs or 6 RAW image files.

The Rebel T31 can also capture full HD video (30p-24p-25p), HD (60p-50p) and SD video (30p-25p) with full manual exposure control, and a new Movie Digital Zoom and VideoSnapShot function. The ISO range of the Rebel T3i is 100-6400, and can be expanded up to ISO 12,800 for when shooting truly miserable light levels.

Canon's EOS Rebel T3i features a swivel-based 3", 1.04-million dot Clear View LCD

Other Rebel T3i features include a 1.04-million dot, swivel-based 3″ Clear View LCD with Live View, a new Scene Intelligent Auto mode, and a Picture Style Auto mode that incorporates a new EOS Scene Detection System. The Canon EOS Rebel T3i is available as a body-only or as a kit, which includes a Canon EF-S 18-55mm/f3.5-5.6 IS II zoom lens.

For those with lesser needs Canon is introducing the EOS Rebel T3, which features a 12.2MP APS-C format (1.6x) CMOS sensor, a DIGIC 4 image processor, a 2.7″ (230,000-dot) Clear View LCD, and in addition to 3 frames-per-second still capture (up to 830 large JPEGs or 5 RAW) can also record HD video (30p-25p) with in-camera editing options.

Canon EOS T3 with 18-55mm/3.5-5.6 IS II Zoom lens

The Rebel T3 has an ISO sensitivity range of 100-6400, and for reviewing imagery – or previewing imagery in Live View mode. The Rebel T3 is available as a kit-only and includes a Canon EF-S 18-55mm/f3.5-5.6 IS II zoom lens

This AOV range, which is about half the AOV of a normal lens, adds just the right measure of compression to compliment the physiology of the human face. A protruding nose seemingly recedes to a more visually-pleasing appearance, and the spatial distances between the tip of the nose and far tips of the ears, and all of the facial elements in between, fall comfortably into place as a unit.

At this working distance the subject’s eyes also become an important part of the dynamics of the portrait, not to mention one that can be read into in any number of ways. Another advantage of shooting with a ‘portrait’ lens is that it enables you to isolate your subject from his or her environment, be it an office, a studio, on the street, or out in a warehouse. So why would you want to shoot portraits with a wider-angle lens?

A wide-angle lens allowed me to capture the Commodore of the Larchmont Yacht Club in the club's trophy room. (I later found out his wife fell in love with him all over again after she saw this picture.).

What wide angle lenses introduce a sense of place to a portrait, i.e., the subject’s work space, their home, or perhaps a place they simply feel comfortable being in or around. Wide angle lenses tell the story of the person – who they are, what they do, where they’ve been, or perhaps, where they’re going. If the eyes are the window to the soul, wide angle lenses can often fill in the blanks, or maybe even raise a few additional questions about the person staring back at the lens.

Shooting portraits using wide angle lenses requires a bit of extra thought before pressing the shutter button. Wide angle lenses can easily distort the dynamics of whatever you’re photographing, people included, and more-so if you’re using a ‘less expensive’ lens.

A 20m lens on a full-frame 35mm camera was used to photograph the late Malcomb Forbes surrounded by many of the oddities he love to collect and exhibit in his New York office.

Perhaps the number one rule of wide angle portraiture is never, never, ever place your subjects head towards the corners of the frame unless your goal is to make your subject look as if he or she is the result of several generations of inbreeding.

When shooting portraits with wide angle lenses, it’s also important to keep a careful distance from your subject in order to avoid having his or her face go Bozo on you. The last thing you want is a stretched nose or bulbous cheeks. If you come in too close you can easily distort your subject’s features. Conversely, if you place your subject too far from the lens you can easily lose the dynamics of the portrait by having them fade into the surroundings. Just as a landscape must have a center of attention, so too a strong portrait.

The keys to successful wide-angle portraiture boil down to keeping your subject centered in the frame with the camera aimed directly at your subject – tilting the camera up or down is an invitation to distortion. Lastly, mind the distance between your subject and the camera to avoid ‘Bozo’ distortions, and always, always, always keep an eye on everything going on in the background to eliminate the need of having to spend post-production Photoshop time cleaning up avoidable distractions.

Capturing a strong graphic image of an appropriately named 'Cigarette' speedboat for a square-format magazine cover sometimes requires a Bell Jet Ranger and a good pilot.

If you shoot for a living it’s a different story because more often than not you’re hired to take photographs that will reside within the bounds of a pre-determined layout. When shooting for a magazine cover or single page illustration, you’re most likely going to be shooting vertically (portrait). Conversely, if you’re shooting a double page spread or an image destined to fill the frame of a computer screen,  you’re most likely to be filling your frame horizontally (landscape). And regardless of format you’ll also have to make sure you leave ‘clean’ areas for headlines, barcodes, and any other graphic elements they might have thrown into the mix.

Photographers working in the music industry must often think square, which is and has been the default packaging format for vinyl LPs and CD covers. Back in the day many shooters in the music industry shot with medium-format cameras such as Hasselblads and Rolleiflex’s, which recorded images onto a 2- ¼” square canvas.

Today virtually all cameras record images in a rectangular format, which means if you want to shoot a square or wider-field image you need to think a bit before pressing the shutter button. If your camera offers the option of superimposing grid lines on the LCD or on the focusing screen in your viewfinder, now’s the time to make use of them.

Another challenge facing photographers working within pre-defined parameters has to do with the format of your subject. As an example, if you photograph cars or boats you’re often been faced with having to fit a long horizontal subject (the car or boat) into a vertical or square format magazine cover or full-page bleed.

For photographing longer boats a favored solution –budget and logistics permitting – is to shoot from above using a helicopter, or if there’s the option, a bridge will often do in a pinch. By framing the boat at a diagonal and/or three-quarter angle, it’s possible to illustrate the lines of the boat while fitting the needs of the page layout. Alternately, you can also approach the subject head-on with a bit of ‘air’ on all sides to allow cropping the image to a tight rectangle or square if necessary.

By shooting upwards with a Polarized wide-angle lens I was able to compose a strong, dynamic composition of what in reality is a long horizontal subject. the vertical frame

A  photograph of a Hinkley motor yacht I was hired to photograph for a cover of Signature magazine illustrates one of the more graphic approaches I’ve taken for fitting a square peg in a round hole. While there were plenty of fine boats to photograph at the Bar Harbor marina where Hinkleys are manufactured, the challenge was going to be capturing a tight vertical cover shot of boats that were all over 50’ long. As it turned out, my cover shot wasn’t in the harbor, but rather it was on a dry dock, where I was able to capture the dramatic sweep of the bow of a red-hulled yacht and it’s mast from a vantage point you usually don’t view these sort of vessels.

When faced with the challenge of having to fit 4-sided pegs into round holes, another solution is to shoot tight; creating a graphic image that illustrates the subject without going totally abstract. A simple trick when shooting in this manner is to zoom into the subject until you can no longer identify what it is, and then take a half step backwards. Nine out of ten times you’ll end up with a tight, graphic ‘portrait’ of whatever it is you’re photographing.

Alternatively, you can also play off the strengths of positive and negative spaces, which can be visually powerful when your subject and the background contrast one another. The cover and feature photographs taken on assignment for Nautical Quarterly illustrate both of these approaches. The format of Nautical Quarterly was a 10” square, and most every cover shot was of a boat. Full-page bleeds were also square, but the saving grace was a double-page spread, which offered an opportunity to photograph the subject broadside and truly fill the frame.

This cover photograph taken for Yachting magazine had to work in 'newsstand mode'...

When Yachting magazine decided to shoot its first (and only) gatefold cover, the challenge was two-fold also. The good news was that when opened, the horizontal format was perfect for the aspect ratio of the 44’ sailboat I was assigned to photograph. The tough part was going to be capturing a powerful double-page, horizontal photograph that would remain equally strong when folded in half to create the vertical cover that appears on the newsstand. The shot we ran with was ultimately one of he few shots that worked well full-frame and cropped in half. (And thank God we remembered to pack the red sweaters!)

... as well as opened as a gatefold photogrph.

My epiphany occurred while glancing down at the pavement passing beneath me. I realized that the shadows cast by the bright, overhead sunlight were projected as soft, rounded outlines of the trees and branches dancing back and forth above me. And like the outline of out-of-focus highlights in photographs that display “good bokeh,” the leaves and branches were rendered in the same soft, rounded, “natural-looking” manner.

The basic tenet of bokeh is that the human eye sees the world through a circular opening (the pupil), which in turn projects the image it sees to the rear of our eyeballs, which are also round. As a result, the portions of the scene we are not focusing on take on a softly rounded quality, which becomes increasingly softer and rounder farther from the central point of focus. What I was looking at was for lack of better words, pure bokeh.

When designing camera lenses, you can ‘build’ bokeh into the lens by using enough diaphragm blades to round out the shape of the diaphragm opening, or f-stop. Round diaphragms produce round out-of-focus highlights, and geometric openings, caused by too few blades, produce less-pleasing geometrically shaped highlights, a.k.a. not-so-pleasing bokeh.

Back in the day, good bokeh was primarily found in lenses from Leica, Zeiss and a handful of other manufacturers (usually from Germany) who took the time, effort and expense of incorporating up to twice as many aperture blades in the diaphragm design of their lenses, compared to the fast rising, consumer-centric manufacturers from the Far East. While f/8 is f/8 regardless of how pure their diaphragms’ circle is, the resulting imagery of  “comparable” lenses—exposure index aside—can often be noticeably less than comparable.

Note: The terms “bokeh” and ‘”selective focus” are often used interchangeably, which is incorrect. Selective focus is a term that describes the range of focus within a photograph, i.e., narrow depth-of-field or greater depth-of-field. Bokeh, on the other hand, describes the quality of the areas of the image that aren’t in focus, which is determined by the design characteristics of the aperture blades as well as the quality of the glass. Therefore, while you can control selective focus by choosing a wider or smaller aperture, the bokeh qualities of any given lens are determined by a combination of its optical quality and the design and/or number of aperture blades that form the lens’s f-stops.

The real differences between “good bokeh” and “bad bokeh” optics are most obvious when one examines the out-of-focus specular highlights of a photograph. In photographs taken with lenses containing fewer diaphragm blades, specular highlights are often rendered as octagons or hexagons. The image is directly affected by the optical limitations inherent in trying to create a perfect circle with only six or eight straight-edged blades in the diaphragm.

To circumvent this issue, and avoid the increased expense and precision required to add additional diaphragm blades, many manufacturers have adopted the stratagem of using not more, but curved diaphragm blades, which at the end of the day, seems to work well in practice.

So, the next time you read a press release for a new lens that touts, among other things, “curved” diaphragm blades for “natural-looking imagery,” you’ll know what they’re referring to is what enlightened shooters have long referred to as bokeh. And good bokeh, at that.

The picture to the left was taken by the light of a full moon, hand-hold, no tripod, using a camera that costs less than $300. The technologies that allowed me to take this photograph include a form of HDR (High Dynamic Range) that involves firing off a quick series of exposures, sampling each of these images for sharpness and detail in the highlights, shadows, and mid-tones, and combining the best of each into a single optimized image file.

As a bonus, if anything changes position or moves between frames, the image processor grabs the sharpest of the bunch and eliminates the others. And this all happens in-camera, and in a few seconds time. It’s also worth noting that though the ISO rating ofeach of the exposures was about 500 – which is high for a point-and-shoot, the picture is relatively noiseless and only moderately grainy. Not too shabby.

A second important part of the equation is is Image Stabilization (IS), a technology that’s been around for about a decade that in it’s latest updates, allows you to capture sharp photographs hand-held at shutter speeds 4 to 5 stops lower than the long-accepted rule mentioned in the opening paragraph. Thanks to IS technology, instead of having 1/500th-second as the minimally recommended shutter speed, you can now hand hold a 500mm lens as slow as 1/30th to 1/15th-second and still nail a sharp picture.

High ISO sensitivities are the third part of the equation. In the days of film, color transparency films topped out at a grainy ISO 1600, and black & white at an equally grainy 3200. Today, point-and-shoot digicams tout ISO ratings of 6400, and DSLRs are now ‘pushable’ up to ISO 104,800, which is about 7 to 8 times more sensitive as the human eye. And if you’re curious about how that translates into real-world exposure times, let’s just say you can shoot at 1/8000th-second @ f/1.4 on a rain-soaked night!

The net result of this technological trifecta is that we no longer have to tuck our cameras away when the sun goes down.

All text & photographs copyright Allan Weitz 2011.

In addition to traditional incident and reflected readings for ambient and flash stills, the new L-308DC DigiCineMate also displays exposure times in terms of shutter-speeds and frame-rates (8 – 128 f/p/s) for  HD video capture, as well as frame-rates and shutter angles(45˚, 90˚, 180˚, 270˚, 360˚) for traditional filmmakers. The L-308DC also displays Lux (2.50lx – 190,000lx) & foot-candles (0.23fc – 17,000fc) when taking readings for film & video applications.

For still capture, the Sekonic L-308DC features an ISO range of 3 – 8000 in 1/3-stop increments, an f-stop range of f0.5 – f/90.9 in 1, ½, or 1/3-stop increments, and a shutter-speed range of 60-seconds to 1/8000^th-second (1-second to 1/500^th-second for flash exposures).

The Sekonic L-308DL features an easy-to-read LCD panel, a built-in lumisphere with snap-on lumidisc for incident readings, and a sensor for taking 40˚reflected light readings.

Included with the Sekonic L-308DC DigiCineMate is a AA battery, a case, manual, Quick-Guide, strap, and a snap-on lumidisc (with pouch).

What makes the Canon FA-DC58B adapter so cool is that it has a spring-loaded mechanism that allows it to expand and contract whenever you turn the camera on or zoom the lens, which makes it a no-brainer solution for those who wish to use ND, UV, or Polarizing filters with Canon G-series  PowerShot cameras. The Canon Filter Adapter FA-DC58B sells for under $45.

For getting the ink from the cartridge to the paper surface, the Stylus Photo R3000 relies on a combination of AccuPhoto HD2 Image Technology and a 1-inch, 8-channel (180 nozzles-per-channel) MicroPiezo AMC Print Head that can lay down precise 2-picoliter dots at resolution levels up to 5670 x 1440 dpi. And according to the nice folks at Epson, the R3000 can produce grainless imagery regardless of the chosen print speed. As for color and archival quality, prints produced using Epson’s UltraChrome-series ink sets and Epson Fine art papers and canvas can be found in the finest museums and art collections.

In addition strong, well-saturated color rendition, the R3000’s UltraChrome K3 with Vivid Magenta ink set contains three levels of black – Photo or Matte Black, Light Black, and Light, Light Black, which enables the R3000 to produce black & white prints that rival the best silver-based print technologies. The new printer also features pre-sets for neutral, warm, cool, and sepia for monochrome editions.

When switching between glossy and matte print media, the Stylus Photo R3000 automatically swaps black ink cartridges, eliminating the time, effort, and ink loss of having to swap ink cartridges manually.

Other improvements found on the Epson Stylus Photo R3000 include a larger, easier-to-read color LCD, a new ‘front-in, front-out’ media handling system for easier processing of fine art paper and canvas up to 1.3 mil thick. In addition to cut sheet media 4×6” through 13×19”, the SP R3000 also accepts roll paper up to 13” wide.

With a suggested retail price of $849 (and undoubtedly less at Amazon and B&H Photo), the SP R3000 is priced squarely between the Epson Stylus Photo 2880, which is still available, and the larger format Epson Stylus Pro 3880, which accepts cut sheet media up to 17×22” and 17” roll paper.

The Epson Stylus Photo R3000 weighs 35lb, has a footprint of 24.2 x 14.5 x 9”, features USB 2.0 and Ethernet wireless 802.11 connectivity, and according to Epson, should be availalble sometime in mid-March..

Designed primarily for use on Sony DSLRs and camcorders, the CLM-V55 comes with an adapter that enables you to use the monitor on any DSLR or camcorder with a traditional hot-shoe. Once in place, you can adjust the screen’s brightness, contrast, color (phase), a ‘Qx1′ quick-zoom mode for focus checking, color temperature, and and audio quality using a small, spin-and-press control wheel. The CLM-V55 also features a small mono speaker as well as a stereo headphone jack, though you can only hear stereo separation in playback mode – live audio is monaural only.

In real-world use, shooting with the CLM-V55 is not unlike composing on the ground glass of a view camera, the difference being the image isn’t upside-down and backwards, it’s a hell of a bunch brighter, and you don’t have to hide under a dark cloth. And unlike peering through the smaller viewfinders afforded by compact DSLRs, being able to step back and view the composition with the actual scene you’re photographing just beyond the edges of the larger LCD introduces a new dimension to the traditional DSLR creative process.

Included with each Sony CLM-V55 field monitor is a snap-on folding shade, that does a terrific job keeping stray light off the monitor’s surface even under the brightest of lighting conditions. The Sony CLM-V55 is expected to sell for a bit under $400.