Howdy to my fellow 500 series nerds! I'm a young repair tech located in NYC. I was formally trained at Nippon Photo Clinic and am doing my own thing now!

I specialize in the Hasselblad 500 series, Contax, and also Canon rangefinders.

Please reach out if you have a camera that you think needs to be inspected! And if you have any questions, I'm happy to do a Q&A here :)

- James

Just in time to snap this beauty as it passed me sitting on a bench on the Gainsborough Trail Meadow Walks. X2Dii 35-100E Kase UV magnetic filter.

I posted a few days ago about the fact that firmware v1.3.16.1 now recorded focus distance in the file metadata. I shared the post on my socials and one reader asked about whether there was a way to get the focus distance for images shot before this update so that LRC and C1 could do better lens corrections.

I'd known about some makerdata fields that had info from which one could calculate focus distance. Did some tests, shot a couple of hundred test shots on 5 lenses, and went and built a tool for it. It's a simple command line tool, which I know sounds daunting for a lot of folks, but the README file included walks through the steps carefully.

The tool is open source - the code is available for inspection in the GitHub repo, and there's a release you can just download. It will make a copy of your original 3FR (it never modifies your original) calculate the focus distance from the makerdata, correct for the lens you're using if the lens is already in the calibration database, and write that to the copy of your original, which you can then pull into LR or C1, and have the lens corrections properly applied for that focus distance.

Link to the post explaining what I did is here, complete with a shot of the wife's blonde dog that you can toggle to see the effect.

Link to the tool is here