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Archives for May 2025

05/08/25 Capture One, big announcement, at least for portrait photographers

Posted on May 8, 2025 // Leave a Comment

After all the hype, and talk about supporting the photographic community, it appears that the folks at Capture One, do care about certain photographers, (portrait), but have no love for the landscape shooter.

There was a live stream video that was sponsored by C1 today. NOTE, they were very clear about being an independent company, i.e. separate from Phase One. That is BS, as if they were totally separate, their single biggest concern would be GENERATING MORE SUBSCRIPTIONS AND THUS REVENUE. To do this, they need to add support for the Hasselblad, which I guess will never happen. Hasselblad continues to step on themselves with Phocus Desktop and Capture One would be a perfect fit. The folks at Capture One made a point of stating just how dedicated they were to color science, so figuring out how to get HNCS into C1 should not be that damn hard.

As for tools, C1 announced a retouch tool, strictly aimed at portrait photography. Looks nice and uses AI, big surprise, but it is only going to assist studio shooters. In fact all that the video talked about today was tethered work, they must have mentioned tethered shooting at least 25 times. NOT, too many photographers in landscape settings are going to carry around a 4 pound MacBook Pro to tether, and personally I can’t see any advantage to tethering in the field.

Sadly, NO new features were announced for landscape shooter, especially new masking tools, like sky select. Capture One is woefully behind the curve on this. Their current AI brush can’t being to mask a sky. If you are working landscape, by far one of the first things you attempt to finish out is the variance between sky and foreground and without a good Sky Select masking, it takes forever. Also if you are working with exposure bracketing, the current Capture One masking tool does not copy well to other images.

Oh well, time to move on and wait for the next BIG ANNOUNCEMENT.

Filed Under: Camera software, Computers and processing, Phase One Cameras // Tagged: , , , ,

05/03/25 Trump’s Tariffs finally start to hit Photography Equipment.

Posted on May 3, 2025 // 1 Comment
Price increase of 90% on Leica Batteries

Well, the Rump’s tariffs have finally started to hit the photography market here in the U.S. Leica had announced back in late April that they would start increases prices across the board on all U.S. camera purchases by 7%. Strange that a lot of folks either missed this or don’t believe that Rump has really implemented such strong tariffs. (There are always the folks that would rather walk off a cliff rather than wake up).

Well, Leica has done it folks. The price of a new SL3 is now 7.5K and the price of a 90-280mm lens is now 7.8K. Don’t forget that unless you are purchasing from B&H photo with their payboo card, you will also need to add more for sales tax. In Arkansas that would be an additional $50.00. So the total increase for a SL3 is now $550.00. For nothing new, just a stupid tax that Rump feels is justified and will get Leica, Panasonic, Nikon, Canon, Fuji etc. to open plants in the U.S. Really? For sure that wont’ happen.

You can also expect to see Nikon, Fuji, and Canon to start this process. Canon has already stated that their prices will increase to cover the cost of the tariffs, just not when. Nothing from Nikon. Fuji has slowed down shipping new products like the GFX100RF to the U.S.

Note, the battery on the Leica SL3 is now $380.00. Basically 2x what it cost before May 1st, as Leica increased that product by 90%. I guess that battery is made in China? I can’t wait to see if DJI decides to even release the upcoming Mavic 4, as the cost will be excessive for most of the MAGA folk. Around 4.5K or as much as 6K if you purchase the full package.

Also note, don’t expect any of these prices to ever come back down, THEY NEVER DO!. Once up there, they will stay. I can also expect to see the cost of out of warranty repairs go off the scale too as most of the parts are made in China or in countries where the tariffs are over 100%.

The only company that has not responded is Hasselblad, (but note they are always behind the times just look at the Phocus software). But they are owned outright by DJI, which is a Chinese company and many of their latest products are being made in China. The 28P and 75P are examples. So they both should increase by over 100% as the current tariff on China is 145%. However the rest of the product line should have also increase by some amount as Sweden is in 10% tariff amount that has been in effect for some time.

I guess it’s a good time to start selling off some of my used equipment.

Filed Under: Cameras, General World Wide Issues // Tagged: , , , , , , , ,