Photoshop Time Travel and New Fuji Camera!

 "1982+2005, Paris, France" by Chino Otsuka

Chino Otsuka, a London-based photographer, is working on an interesting series of self-portraits, which pairs the present day photographer with herself from the past. She takes old family photographs of herself and inserts new self-portraits of herself into the old pictures, using Photoshop to age the new images to match the old. This is done seamlessly and the images play with the notions of self and the passing of time. Otsuka wrote this passage about this series:

If,

again

I have a chance to meet,

there is so much I want to ask,

and so much I want to tell.

"1980+2009, Nagayama, Japan" by Chino Otsuka

You can see her images at her own website and at the blog, My Modern Met. Otsuka has also published a book of these images, titled Photo Album. Check them out.

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Also, in a bit of unrelated news, Fuji will officially announce a new camera in their X-series of cameras, the X-T1. They released a teaser photo of it and it looks like Fuji is aiming for some of Olympus' territory. The X-T1 is styled after SLR's of the past with a faux-pentaprism in the middle of the top and plenty of dials to complete that nostaglia-ridden aesthetic. They will formally announce the camera on January 28th and we will discover what it can do then. I'm not sure this camera is really needed, since Fuji already has the excellent and well-regarded X-E2, but what do I know? Camera companies seem to be spending a lot of time looking backwards for inspiration these days.

"M" is for Mystery!

Leica has released a new chart showing a new camera, called the Leica Mini M, that falls between the full-sized, interchangeable lens Leica M and the petite, fixed lens X2, which in the chart is also labeled the Micro M. And the D-LUX6 is called the Nano M in this chart. Nothing is really said about the new camera, other than its placement in the Leica scheme of things. So here is where I will speculate and I really don't know anything of substance, so this is strictly guessing on my part. The Mini M could be Leica's version of the Micro 4/3s cameras, a small, interchangeable lens system camera with its own new range of lenses, though if it was M 4/3s that would be cool. Another proprietary lens mount would not be cool. Or it could be an all-electronic version of an Leica M camera, along the lines of the Fuji X-E1, with an internal electronic viewfinder, that still takes regular Leica M-mount lenses and maybe still has a full-sized sensor. It could be smaller than the full-sized Leica M, but still take advantage of the Leica glass. This could be fun, too. But of course, what do I know? Only time will tell. Leica's formal announcement of the new camera will happen on June 11th.

Zeiss Launches New Lenses

Zeiss is launching a new line of lenses for Sony E-mount and Fuji X-mount cameras. Called the Touit series, named after a small Central American parrot, the first lenses are a 12mm f/2.8 and a 32mm f/1.8. Known for their image quality and their impeccable construction quality, Zeiss is making a smart move in making lenses for these two camera formats. Both Sony, with its NEX 7 and NEX 6, and Fuji, with its X-Pro 1 and EX-1, are making serious in-roads into professionals' camera arsenals, much to the chagrin of Canon and Nikon, so having top quality lenses for Zeiss for these cameras is just going to make them even more desirable. I'm sure they won't be cheap, but serious A-level equipment seldom is cheap.