its much more than just fabrics - anyone who shoots on the city streets will find distant brickwork, air conditioning grills, car parts, mens suits, etc, giving it to them, if the lens is good enough.
Michael - I've had all those backs too, and was surprised to to find Moire reappearing strongly with the P65+, though it was indeed supposed to diminish from the previous generation. It might be that I swapped platforms to the Phase One camera, and shoot with the Digital 80mm (apparently their finest lens) which is pretty stunning at f5.6 to F8, but gives Moire in clothing of most every other candid city street shot in sunlight. Is that Leica territory ? - hell yes!
so unless you are just shooting nature, or your Leica's lens doesn't have the resolving power of Mamiya MF then Moire is going to be an issue.
I think there is a difference between need and want.
For still photography, all I really need is the 1ds 3's or 5d2's, they have pretty much covered all the territory, from medium format to 35mm, for my work and a lot of others.
I guess the same could be said for the Nikon D3/D3x.
They're fast, bulletproof, accurate, huge lens lines and the only drawback is they're quite large, though since I'm not a street photography guy, the size is not an issue either way.
I know, I know there will be 45 people that will say the aa filter smears the detail, or loses the 3d'ness of the look (I've never really understood what the 3dness was) but what the heck, everyone's entitled to their opinion.
Yesterday we did a series of lighting tests for a client we have worked with for 6 years and previously shot medium format and nobody looks at the files from the 1ds3 and says, uh, I think we're missing something, they just look at the light, the expression . . . the final image.
I also know that I'll have about a 1 in a million chance of getting moire, have no problem making jpegs, actually the camera makes jpegs, the battery will last forever, tethering to eos utility is stupid easy, unplugging and shooting to cards and using the camera lcd, even easier. With the Canons and Nikons you never really think about the camera, you just think about what your shooting. You light, you shoot, you go home. Any assistant that knows how to twitter can now run the computer, so having dedicated techs, watching focus, highlights, or batching jpegs until 3 am are kind of a think of the past.
In other words with still cameras I'm covered.
Now want is a different matter. I kind of want a Leica m9 and but when I think about where to place my resources and start thinking of what I will get as far as "new" imagery from the Leica, or any new still camera, I'm not too sure, especially since a new RED is probably around the corner that has the potential to change everything.
I think in still photography digital cameras the thrill is gone. We're now at a point where 20 to 40 megapixels just doesn't resonate with clients, or with me. 4:3 vs 2:3 formats doesn't either, because everybody crops to some kind of wierd proportion anyway, especially for the web, so I look at the Leica, think it's cute, somewhat of a throwback to traditional days, but I know in my heart it doesn't change anything that I do for commerce and for commerce the demands are about 1,000 times greater today than they were two years ago.
The assistants we're talking yesterday and two years ago it would have been about the next medium format back, or even this Leica, but since they are working assistants, they were talking now about small video dollys, matte boxes, the RED . . . in other words new things they have seen or worked with in Rental studios everywhere and not one of them even knew that there is a Leica coming out.
So, I wish Leica well, I think they'll sell a lot of m9's and probably a lot more lenses, but at the end of the day when I look at what I do for a living I don't see where any still camera will make much of difference.
I guess I gotta keep telling myself that as much fun a new camera can be, it's not about the camera, it's about the photograph, or now many multiple photographs.
BC
