The frame counter reset on my Leica MP recently broke, so I took it to Samy’s Cam­era, the store I bought it from. I was afraid they’d tell me I had to send it back to Leica for repair (the last time I dealt with Leica it took them six months to repair a dam­aged lens), but for­tu­nately they told me it could be repaired in the store. To my sur­prise, it took only four days for them to fin­ish the work!

From a com­ment refer­ring to the Gestapo harass­ing photographers:

That’s right; I don’t want to be too tech­ni­cal, but the focal length of the lens is directly cor­re­lated with hatred of Amer­ica. It goes some­thing like this:

You have a a cell phone cam­era, point and shoot, or 20mm wide angle lens: you are a red blooded Amer­i­can who wants to cel­e­brate our national her­itage by tak­ing pic­tures of pop­u­lar tourist locations.

A 50mm lens: you are also, by and large, a good Amer­i­can, but you have a dis­turb­ing inter­est in “under­stand­ing” the ter­ror­ists and why they attack us.

An 85mm lens: you loath your own coun­try and secretly admire the 9/11 hijack­ers for giv­ing us our come-up-ins. You are not a ter­ror­ist, but your cam­era should prob­a­bly be con­fis­cated and your pic­tures deleted, lest they find their way to al Jazeera mes­sage boards. Your mid­dle name may be Hussein.

A 200mm lens: you are an al Qaeda hench­man actively scout­ing for secu­rity vulnerabilities.

A 300mm lens: you ARE bin Laden!

And yes, every tri­pod is suit­able for launch­ing RPGs, but you need a ball head to attach heat seek­ing missiles.

Another Matt

Rollei­flex

Two peo­ple who were inter­ested in one of my older cam­eras requested that I take this photo. The cam­era is a mid-1950s Rollei­flex, with attached Rollei­flash. The cam­era cost $135 on eBay, and the flash was $1.50 at KEH.

When scanned with my Nikon LS-9000, a 6×6 photo pro­duces a file of approx­i­mately 75 megapix­els, and with a dynamic range greater than the newest and most expen­sive dig­i­tal cam­era can produce.

Fujifilm’s killer medium for­mat film cam­era. It has long been only a pro­to­type. We first heard about at last year’s PMA trade show and were able to see a wooden ver­sion of it at Pho­tok­ina in Sep­tem­ber 2008. But now, it’s offi­cial. Fuji­film is weeks away from releas­ing its GF670 Pro­fes­sional medium for­mat film cam­era. Here is our full arti­cle about it.

Out­side of Japan, the cam­era should be released under the Voigt­lander Bessa III 667 name, which Cosina will dis­trib­ute. [The British Jour­nal of Pho­tog­ra­phy]

The ear­lier announce­ment had already raised my inter­est. From the addi­tional infor­ma­tion, it looks like it will be about the same size as a Leica, and smaller when folded. Still no price, but I’ll prob­a­bly buy one when they’re released.