9:20 AM

You have no idea how amazing it is to see this button. Canon have made it a custom button too, but it is a direct descendent of the spot metering button from the Canon T90 in the 80s. That camera remains a milestone, a landmark, an amazing waypoint in camera design and its multi-spot metering with shadow/highlight correction remains the finest in-camera metering system that has ever been. Until now. The 1DX offers the very same multi-spot metering. At its simplest, you would spot meter from the shadows and then the highlights, and immediately see in the viewfinder the dynamic range of your image, and then shift the whole range up or down to favour the shadows or highlights. Modern sensors have a huge range, of course, but understanding spot metering is a fundamental skill for any photographer seeking fine-grained control over every aspect of the picture-making process. #canon #eos1dx #dslr #photography #spotmetering

9:13 AM

This is a peculiar set of controls: duplicate buttons which can be customized, but of course, these are really here to present an identical configuration when shooting in landscape or portrait. The back of the camera also has duplicate controls for everything. It’s very, very impressive. #canon #eos1dx #dslr #photography

9:09 AM

Two Compact Flash bays are quite something. They have multiple configurations, such as RAW to one and JPEG to the other, which makes for an ultra-flexible workflow, not to mention unstoppable shooting given two massive cards and switching to JPEG all-round. At 14 frames a second, it’s easy to use vast amounts of storage. #canon #eos1dx #dslr #photography #compactflash

9:04 AM

This is a series of posts on the Canon EOS-1DX. The EOS-1 has always been a highly impressive flagship, from back in the 1980s to the present day. The camera has become larger and incredibly sophisticated, diverging into full-frame and APS-sized before merging back with this camera. It’s packed with features above and beyond the rest of their lineup, starting with this, an Ethernet port. #canon #eos1dx #dslr #photography #ethernet

7:43 PM

Giles Duley at #lseduley teaching us all a few lessons from the world of #humanitarian #photography

4:56 PM

#Fuji are having a fire sale right before the launch of the X-Pro 2, so get in there. #photography #mirrorless

10:15 PM

Wow. JP gave me a stash of Tri-X. The old TX400 formula, not the modern 400TX formula. Five rolls worth! #tri-x #kodak #film #photography #filmwasters #filmphotography #35mm

11:18 PM

And we are back in action. #contax #g2 #film #photography #camera #titanium

10:47 PM

Anyhoooo, the reason all this gear is out, is because I’m going #street shooting tomorrow for the first time in about three or four years. Anyone who wants to join in, you know where I am. Film or digital welcome. And if you want to use any of the kit in these pics, that is cool too. See some of you tomorrow. #London #photography #street #filmwasters

These days, I spend too much time behind a camera hunting for pretty pictures, and too little simply documenting what I see around me. The latter is very satisfying, very amateur (in a good way) and largely what I did for ten years before getting slightly more serious about it all. The upcoming project documentary is going to take more observation than perhaps I’m used to these days, but the more observational work I do meets a positive response - The Council Estate and just yesterday, The House - and it’s all good practice for the big project. I’ve spent a lot of time in Pondicherry since I was a baby, and there’s a familiarity which prevents me wandering around as I might in a new town or city. So much of this place is tied to my family and its history, that I’m looking at my own family more closely, even as I’m stared at in the street… Christina found a splendid internet cafe last time she was here, and where I sit right now, and of course the people here know my family, don’t they? Pretty much everyone and anyone in the ashram knows Atma, my eldest cousin, and ashramites all know each other anyway. So I’m being observed too, as it happens, and noting that, I’m off to photograph the derelict patch of land that my father and his two brothers have owned since the 1960s.