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25 May

Posted at 09:44h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Go to your car. Start it up. Drive somewhere. Do your business, and drive back home again. Park it and go into the house. Note: This is not intended to encourage folly. Keep 1.5 metres away from the bumpers of concrete trucks at all times and wipe the dip-stick with hand sanitiser, even if he protests. And no driving past Rottnest without a permit. But consider what you do when you set off on a normal journey - you get into your regular car, do the normal things with the controls, and for part of the journey out and back are on very familiar ground. You do not get into the car and then decide what sort of petrol you need in the tank, what size of tyres to mount, what pressure to inflate them. You may consult a GPS monitor for some of the journey, but not when you're near home. If you are sensible you do not spend the journey envying or triumphing over other drivers in other cars - based upon whether your vehicle is the newest of the new....

22 May

Posted at 09:10h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

No, relax Vasco. I'm not going into competition with you. Good luck with Home Opens in the coming months and the jiggery-pokery of social distancing while trying to sell houses. I do not envy you the job. But I did find some empty space to sell when I took a Canon EOS R out of the display cabinet and fitted a 24-200 mm lens on it. The lens was the pull in the first instance as it looked newish and when I considered that I was looking at a full-frame 24 x 36 sensor camera...

20 May

Posted at 10:08h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

My daily trolling through the rest of the photo trade sites showed me that there was a great deal of waiting and whooping for the Fujifilm X-T4. Not mentioning any viruses, you understand, but some places that are bigger than us and grander than us had no chance of getting this new camera. It did my heart good to see good old WA and good old CE triumph for a change. It also did my heart good to set one out next to the previous model - the X-T3, and take pictures of them both with my X-T2. No, I'm not going to get a fresh camera, but yes, I would if I needed a change. The X-T4 embodies enough changes to make it a distinctive step from my X-T2. The bodies look very similar - see all the views. What you don't realise is that they have marginally increased the size of the X-T4 to accommodate an IBIS system. And they have further enlarged the grip so as to be able to take a new battery. I cannot say whether the...

18 May

Posted at 10:34h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

A. If you do YouTube right, no-one is looking at your camera. They are looking through it. That doesn't mean you have license to use a dusty video relic that you found in the back of the potato and onion bin - you need to have a certain level of technical ability in your camera. But you don't need to have every rig, monitor, microphone, and mixer in the shop to do it. B. If you have a camera and lens that shows a clear image in good light, do your filming in good light. No-one who saw the Ektachrome Horrors of 1970's grunge movies will ever forget them, despite drink. They were greeny-grainy blue, dark and horrible. And that was the comedies. The docos were worse. We have gotten past that. We can now show clear colour and sharp focus. Most of the digital cameras will do it despite your attempts to help out. In most cases stand back and let the hooks do their work. Your chief task will be to give the automatic eye something to see and the...

15 May

Posted at 10:27h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

And is it possible that we can do it all in one with one outfit? And never have to buy anything else ever again? I sincerely hope not, and I can tell you no-one else here likes the idea that much, either. This is the photo trade and the essence of the place is to sell cameras, lenses, lights, tripods, bags, etc. to all kinds of people with all kinds of needs. We don’t think one size fits all, and we’ve seen all sizes. I might rattle on here about an all-in-one tourist or travel cameras that you can take on your next cruise. Hold off on that particular ambition for a bit...

13 May

Posted at 09:22h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

It’s on our television right now. The Lockdown Girls are bingeing themselves on demons, gods, empresses, and subtitled love stories. I’m off in the corner typing this. The cat is quiet and asleep - a pleasant contrast to its normal noise. I always wondered about the Siamese cats in Walt Disney’s “Lady And The Tramp “ and now I know...

08 May

Posted at 12:46h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

We've all seen the memes floating through the internet that try to classify life with such terms as " Lawful Evil ", " Chaotic Good ", and some such. They can be on subjects as humble as how you store a loaf of bread. Well, what happens when you apply this game to photography...

06 May

Posted at 09:00h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

There I was, first day into Camera Electronic to do some illustration for this column and the old menace turned up. A former camera salesman, he called my attention to the Fujifilm 16mm f:2.8 WR prime lens and then started pestering me to buy it. Try as I might to concentrate on the new Fujifilm X-T4 he just wouldn’t let me alone. Kept suggesting that with the short focal length and minimum aperture it would be perfect for the toy airplane shots I love to do. And that it could be placed closer to the surface that the camera rests on to make it seem a more realistic point of view. When he started in on the landscape possibilities I cut him off - I don’t do landscapes unless they are indoors and anyway we are not allowed to go to where they keep the wild ones - at least not yet. But it was no good because he kept urging me to take a test picture on the tabletop and imagine what it would be like at home in the studio....

04 May

Posted at 08:43h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

In my daily routine of YouTube I try to include a session devoted to photography as well as one with scale model building. I daresay you are the same with your hobbies and interests. It makes a nice change from Facebook and the endless Trump and kitten videos. The host of the scale model show has a company in the UK that sells tools and supplies for model building - some of which are made in China. He's been concerned that the factory making a popular range of sanding blocks is closed now, and he's going to miss another window of production time for his stock. The situation is also repeated in Europe where a supplier of pigments is also closed. He says his biz is now on furlough until Christmas. Now you might say that the hobbyists just need to go down to their local Bunnings and get a few sheets of wet and dry and glue them to coffee stirrers...