Me

Ken Ball. Amateur street photographer and professional product studio photographer, www.f64PhotoStudio.com. I also am the founder and CEO of Audio Line Out,  ALOaudio.com as well as founder and CEO of www.CampfireAudio.com.

The photos on this website are compressed .jpg images. Because Squarespace does not allow for actual size photographs they do not look nearly as good as they do after I edit them out of my camera. I am using Lightroom with a little post processing.

I am currently using a Leica Monochrom and one of 3 lenses, 50mm Summilux-M f1.4, 28mm Elmarit-M f2.8 and a 21mm Voigtlander Color-Skopar. The Leica Monochrom is a black and white only digital camera, so it does not have a the bits that process color (the standard color array - bayer array) The bayer array divides the sensor for red green and blue to construct the final image. With this gone 100% of the pixels are now devoted to capturing luminance information in black and white. The result is a far more pure image with superior resolution vs a normal digital camera. In my opinion the Leica Monochrom is somewhat of a camera breakthrough in that it truly rivals traditional black and white film with the added benefit having far superior speed, and usability. I started out shooting in high school with a Pentax 35mm camera. Later I had a full black and white darkroom, processing 4x5, 6x6, 35mm and half frame negatives as well as processing prints. Then trimmed down to processing negatives then scanning them instead of paper printing. With the Monochrom I now feel like my black and white camera gear has finally become obsolete, at least for ease of use and quality of photos. The Monochrom is grossly expensive but in my opinion is a revolutionary camera for what it can do. You would have to really try hard not to make amazing photos with it. 

These I rented from http://www.lensrentals.com/ before buying the Monochrom. Prior to renting these I owned a Leica M8. The older M8 and newer M9 were too slow requiring a lot of light to be useable. The M8 does not have a full frame sensor so there is a crop factor that was a problem for me. The M8s sensor however ended up being sensitive to infrared light so I had some fun taking IR photos using the M8. Other than IR use the M8 was not really useable like the Monochrom. The Leica M was great but I found the slightly thicker color M not as good for black and white as the Monochrom. 

I use a Pentax 645Z and a Nikon D800E a for studio work. I mostly use the medium format Pentax 645Z  for all my studio work.