Once every summer the entire family (on my mother’s side) gets together for what we call “Christmas in August.” This way we avoid the whole issue of multi-family and ex-family scheduling that normally plagues the holiday season. I’m not a terribly social person, but it’s always good to see everyone and it’s also a great opportunity to take photos. This year someone suggested we do a group portrait. There were about 40 people to include.

Reading photography forums could lead one to believe Ken Rockwell is the devil. Or if not the devil, an idiot who has no business writing a blog about photography. I disagree. Rockwell’s site is so over the top with hyperbole and its associated affiliate links that one wonders whether or not to trust his opinion. The answer, for me, is “sort of.” Let’s start with a look at the footer on the home page…

About a month ago I bought a Bronica SQ-A kit after spotting it on Craigslist. I wanted to try medium format film and I’ve always liked the square 6×6 shape. The big negatives are amazing, and the camera works just fine. The only problem is that it isn’t a Hasselblad, which is what I’ve wanted for as long as I can remember. After putting a dozen or so rolls throught the Bronica I decided to buy the Hasselblad and be done with it.

I recently bought a Leica M8 and it seemed like such a great idea. I love my film M cameras and the convenience of digital could only make things better, right? The M8 is a great camera, but I sold it. I just couldn’t get used to the quirks. Things like lens coding, crop factors, and IR/cut filters were distracting and preventing me from loving the camera. I paid $2,600 for it, and didn’t love it.

Since I like to see what stuff other people use I thought maybe others would like to see what I use. So I wrote it down on a page called Stuff I Use.

As a kid, I would notice when someone on T.V. was taking photographs with a Hasselblad. I had no idea what it meant, just that it looked cool and I wanted one. Medium format photography is one of those things I’ve always regarded with respect, but not much interest. The gear is terribly expensive and everyone is using digital now anyway. The Hasselblad was something rich landscape photographers used, but now they all have 5Ds instead.

Let’s call it an experiment. For the next 30 days I am going to avoid as much online consumption as I can. It’s a social media fast. Lemme ‘splain. I spend a lot of time consuming things online. By the time I’ve read all my feeds for the day and caught up with 500 people, 140 characters at a time, there’s little time left, and I still can’t stop. The social media addiction is so very strong, and I’m all in.

I thought I’d share the latest iteration of my photography workflow. I recently bought a nice used Leica M8, rendering my Nikon workflow obsolete. Here’s how it looks today. Ingest I still use the terrific Photo Mechanic to ingest photos from the card. I tried giving it up but it’s the only thing that moves and renames files exactly how I want them, which is… Copy RAW files from card to the Capture One session folder (I’ll get to Capture One in a minute).

The Leica M8 is hard to hold. It’s basically the same size and shape as earlier film-based models, but it’s a little bigger and a little smoother. It feels as great as other M cameras, but doesn’t inspire the same confidence when holding it. It may be the covering. On my M4 the covering has more texture and feels a littler stickier than that of the M8. The M8 also does not have a film advance lever to snuggle your thumb under.

After 3 years of pretending I didn’t want an M8, I now have one. Much has already been written about Leica’s first digital M so I will stick to a few personal observations based on first impressions using the camera. I’ve been shooting with Leicas for while now, most recently with a nice M4. I get along well with the way rangefinders work. Leica also makes some damn fine lenses. Having 70 years of lenses by Leica, Zeiss and now Voigtlander to choose from is nice.

Enter the M8. Well almost. I don’t have one yet, but it’s in the works. But why an M8? Mostly because I want a quality digital option and love my film Ms so much that the M8 seems a natural progression. I ran into a gentleman online who is looking for an M6 and has an M8. Convenient, no? We’re going to trade my M6 and cash for his M8. Might be a few weeks before it all happens, but it looks to be a done deal.

When I wrote last year about the first things I install on a new computer I forgot what seems now to be another important list… the things I don’t install on a new computer. Appzapper Icon by Jasper Hauser Things – I’m a GTD junkie and I thought Things was like the second coming of David Allen. I just find that, as tweaky and addled with features as it is, OmniFocus still wins.