Capturing the Noble Audio 6

Few high-calibre commercial photographers bother shooting headphones. Fewer still bother with earphones. Jewellery, watches, and the like cater to customers used to precious products and precious prices. 

But the world of mid to high-tier portable audiophile equipment abounds with jewellery-like marvels.  

The Noble Audio 6, a 108.000¥ earphone, is as much a looker as it was fun to shoot. 

Noble 6's clean lines, delicate logo, and subtle hues look great under the right light. And the right light isn't a simple exercise beginning and ending with soft box to the left, soft box to the right, upon which many self-styled commercial still life photographers rely. Soft boxes are great tools for certain photography. And just like an Estwing and a Stanley, both hammers, cater to specific users, soft boxes have their users and their uses. 

But I rarely use them in my studio.

Coaxing out that light, and nailing the sharp reflections necessary to define Classics's curves, were labours of love. I crafted dozens of reflection panels, holders, gobos, and spent hours placing my lights just right. My goals were many but I focused on contrasting the gentle curve of the Noble logo against the chassis panels, bolts, and pulling the eyes down and down until they exited off the sound tubes.

The bolts fastening Noble's Classic Line chassis are its headlamps. Its countersunk cable port is its cockpit. Its chiselled sound tubes are its exhaust system. And while I reckon my metaphors are off, I'm very happy with how each earphone looks. Noble were, and are, ecstatic.

At Fujiya Avic's 2015 Spring Headphone festival, Noble had a single side printed out, the short side of which was just over a metre. It looked fantastic and helped to draw crowds that constantly hugged their booth.

Both Noble Audio and I have received no end of compliments. My greatest joy is making a great something look stellar. It is the main reason that I turn down commercial requests from clients that obviously don't put much effort into their work. 

In this instance, Noble Audio's hard work begat mine. 

For those of you interested, I captured most of Noble Audio's earphones through a Sony A7r mounted to a Rolleiflex X-ACT 2 technical camera. I exclusively shoot Rodenstock digital lenses.

A shallow review of the Sony A7 MKII

Beating search engine spiders in order to maintain traffic, and Google rank, requires verbosia. It requires cut-copy-insert-paste style reviews. Here's what I mean:

Here are some images taken by (name of camera) which just got released. It is so new and hot. And the (name of feature) is vastly improved. This review of the (name of camera) will show you how (name of city) looks like [sic] through the great (name of lens) and (name of camera) combination.

Do that as often as possible. You will beat Google. Your If you're an honest blog like the super-honest The Phoblographer, you'll even put out out a proviso:

“At the moment of initially publishing this review, we haven’t done a lot of in-depth testing for the reason that Adobe Lightroom doesn’t support the RAW files at the moment, so we’re going to update this section when that happens.”

Why thank you, The Phoblographer. And congrats. You have just beat Google. Later on, all you got to do is change the wording of the title from 'Impressions' to 'Review', paste in some Lightroom comparos, and voila! Review!

But I prefer to have my leek soup with leeks.

Source: Review: Sony A7 MK II

Lens Rentals: A Thinner Sensor Stack

Lens Rentals's Roger Cicala and Aaron Closz confirm: thinning the sensor stack on the Sony A7r yields incredible improvements in corner resolution from wide-angle M-mount lenses. The modification tested was from Kolarivision.

If you're a user of M-mount lenses, Kolarivision's 399$ modification may be worth your time, and money. 

Source: A Thinner Sensor Stack

Zeiss Loxia lenses are changing things

It's not just end users that are picking up on mirrorless. It's optical companies, like Zeiss, that are capitalising on the possibilities afforded by still-youthful mirrorless mounts that don't already have legions of long-time users.

Background Blur have a great writeup comparing the Sony 35/2,8, a Panasonic 20/1,7, and the Loxia 35/2. While I disagree with them regarding the Panasonic 20/1,7's OOF rendering (they call it 'distracting' and 'harsh'), I do agree that Loxia is a powerful alternative. 

I'd like to see high-quality native manual focus lenses with electronic coupling come to more mounts.

Background Blur: Zeiss Loxia 2/35 First Impressions

Sansmirror: Sony is FUDing themselves

While I agree 100% with Thom Hogan, the man doesn't live in Japan. Sony are a consumer company. And there exist no electronic companies in Japan that pay attention to customer retention and brand image.

Sony suddenly end-of-lifing the original A7 and creating an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty, and doubt regarding the A7r and A7s, isn't unusual. It's part and parcel of the game here. 

But it shouldn't be. 

“Still, Sony is FUDing themselves with the A7II: given the sudden price drop on the A7 and the appearance of the A7II at the old price point, why would you want to buy an A7s or A7r right now? You have to believe that Sony will pull the same game on those models in coming months. Moreover, Sony is being more aggressive than most camera makers in cycling products. The A7 barely makes it more than a year before it gets the usual ~25% end of life price drop. That kind of thing used to be done only in consumer DSLRs and compact cameras, and that too rapid iteration in a declining market is what flooded the shelves with multiple generations of products simultaneously. It’s looking like the rapid iteration of the RX100 and the old NEX models is now sneaking across Sony’s entire lineup, to where one year life spans for cameras are becoming more and more the norm at every level. This, too, will tend to make people hesitate once they realize that, because Mark II and Mark III and Mark IV are all coming. Soon. ”

Source: Why Announce a Camera You Can’t Get?