Markus

Simply love the ones wirh trees! Great stuff! Markus

I do like the focus stacking feature of Fujifilm (GFX in my case) and use it quite often! With flowers in the wild it is a gamble every time because the slightest breeze of wind can hurt. EShutter gives deformed objects when they move while reading out the pixels. But when wind is cooperating it is easy to do. The work follows at home in front of the PC ;-/ And I had to invest in a very fast SD-card. With a 90MB/s card after some shots the in camera buffer was full and it picture taking slowed down considerably - mayby to one shot a second. With a 300MB/s card that is a lot faster. If I have a pronounced (near) foreground in wide-angle shots, I do some focus stacking, too.

For a beginning: I´m guilty, too 😅 I like the technical side of my hobby, and from time to time I´m thrilled by new additions to my photo equipment. And btw, the new XT-5 ticks a lot of boxes 😉 Maybe a crucial difference between a (real) Pro and most amateurs is that the Pro a) knows exactly what he needs (and what he doesn´t need) and b) knows whether a feature "pays off" for him, literally. So naming something "Pro" is more of a marketing thing, targeted to the photographing crowd. If it´s "Pro", it doesn´t get any better. You can even make a living using that tool. Serious Stuff... What is better to show to others (photographers!) that you are serious than to use the Pro-labeled tools? And people, especially enthousiasts sometimes buy things just because it feels good to have them - in the end it´s a hobby meant to have fun and feel good. And it is a nice thougt to use a tool that you might not be able to bring to its boundaries, so in the decisive moment it´s just depending on you - the Pro-tool will do its job. But if you really know what you need to make the pictures you want, most of the time some used equipment well just do fine 😉 Especially in these times...

Best value everyone has to decide for himself. For me I want resolution, the lenses and their qualities play a role as does the interface. The future of "my" system should be bright and if I like the company that helps, too ;-). So my very personal reasoning concerning brands and sensor sizes is the following: As much as I like Olympus (my first cameras) and Panasonic (one of my favourite brands) I won´t count on m4/3 for my part, it will get more and more niche and eventually will become eaten up from below (phones). APS-C might stay, but maybe not as a full blown system at the side of a full frame manufacturers full frame system, more like an entry thing. APS-C could live longer at Fujifilm because they don´t have full frame and it is their volume product compared to GFX and they really put effort in the X-System. Full frame I think will stay and become standard again (like in the old days) and the bigger the companies market share the better the chances are for that system. Besides all that there is plenty room for niche products or companies, but they won´t have the same pace for bringing new products as the big companies, so if you like new stuff from time to time better stick with one of the big ones... And for all the others there is an ever growing and fascinating used market, especially for glass. My vote was for Fujifilm. Was I to start from scrach these days I´d consider Fujifilm, Sony, Nikon and Canon.

For me the hypothesis "mobile phones take over smaller sensor cams work" is the most probable. Phones have incredible computing power and software and a big market that makes further development on phones an interesting business model. And phones occupy the "small and pocketable" niche perfectly. So problably we won´t see something like that from the camera companies from now on. Following that thinking (new) cameras these days have to bring something different to the custumer like: - better raw quality for the ones doing their own digital development ( => bigger sensor for more dynamic range, less noise, ...) - better operability for the ones knowing what to change to reach a certain "look" ( => more direct operable switches, ...) - other things phones cannot do like ultrafast AF, etc Maybe fullframe is getting a standard again, like in the old days because all smaller sensors are just phones in the future 😉 And maybe the next sensor (and therefore camera) generations are making even less of a difference than the actual ones so that one can use the same body longer without loosing anything. Well, for internet-use only that´s a fact for some time now. Just describing what I´m seeing - not everything that happens is to my liking... Markus

one i made yesterday - autumn is coming here... GFX + GF110 Markus

Love it! A swirl of colors...

I made a complete change to mirrorlesss. It came with my move from Nikon to Fuji Gfx and being mirrorless helped Fuji to be in a comparable league size and weight wise compared to my former Nikon and Zeiss equipment. For my type of photography (landscape and flowers) and always working from a tripod I habe been using liveview most of the time with my D800 - i find composing my pictures much easier on the backscreen of the camera than using the finder. So the mirror has no advantages for me. But if I had not changed system I would still use DSLR with liveview, it was not that bad 😉 Markus

Thanks for that theme, Anthony! I really like that sort of flower photography and did even more of it during the pandemic when landscape and leaving home was not possible. We have some nice flowers in our garden and I spend quite a bit of my free time every year with them, using the warm late afternoon light. Some of my shots are stacked to get a smoother background (then using the GF120), some are not (then using the Contax 120/4). Btw, the tiny blue on dark green one is in the (shadowy) woods, not in our garden

I like them all, but Nr.7 in first post is stunning! Whow…. Congrats! Markus

I´m on holidays at the moment - at the coast - and that´s one from today evening

another one, this time quiter. I first thougt I need to clean my sensor, but it´s just two birds that could not stand still long enough 😉

Nice picture and mood, complementary colours, picturing a summer feeling And having a new camera it is especially nice to have some shots you like 👍 cool camera, btw 😎 Markus

Coastal photography is one of my favourite things to do, once a year in my holidays, that is... From my last trip (2021) I like this one:

a bit late, but since I like photographing trees here´s a contributions from me, made this January at a really nice walk in our region...