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October 2015

18 Oct

Posted at 23:16h in News by [social_share]

Saturday afternoon in Perth used to be dead - the only life was in the cinema matinees and the pubs. How times have changed.Disregarding the stores being open and trying to get more buyers - and the coffee shops and restaurants being open and trying to get more eaters - this last Saturday saw a dedicated band of photo enthusiasts following Dom and Dick on a Leica Photo Walk around Supreme Court Gardens.The walk started at the Perth Town Hall with a volunteer guide - in case we got lost  - and  wended down to the gardens along  Barrack Street. For some reason it is fenced off but then it never was all that spectacular. Thank goodness they haven't moved old Forrest from the Terrace and even Ritter's Pole is still up - something for the visitors to picture.A great deal of photography in this area is pointed up at various angles. Looking down is risky - you get to see the Elisabeth Quay development site in all its industrial glory. Perhaps it will be the subject of a Photo...

16 Oct

Posted at 02:54h in News by [social_share]

Go to the magazine rack of any newsagency and look at the car magazines. Bypass the 4WD and luxury European sedans and look for the hot rod and street car magazines*.Somewhere in there will be one that refers to Old Skool cars. The definition is a little fuzzy - they're talking about vehicles that are prior to 1966...

15 Oct

Posted at 06:46h in News by [social_share]

Because not all K's are created equal. OK?You all know about the Kelvin scale of colour temperature measurement - named after Lord Kelvin - that measures the relative redness, orangeness, yellowness, blueness, and  eventual whiteness of light and strings it out on a numerical scale. The scale starts at 1, which is the colour and intensity of a mechanic's fingernails and goes to 10,000 which is he whiteness of sunlight as you come off a three-day bender and someone throws the window blinds open. I suspect Kelvin also had a scale for the screams as well.Well, a lot of cameras skirt around this question by having automatic white balance programs in their software that measures the light, quantifies it on the Kelvin scale, and then gives you whatever the heck it wants to. If you include a dominant colour in your composition, it sometimes agrees with you and renders it accurately and sometimes argues the case by tipping the white balance over the other way to compensate for what it thinks is your error. If you are easily persuaded, you...

30 Sep

Posted at 08:10h in News by [social_share]

No, it is not the horrors of the dance floor. You can do what you wish at the disco without my let or hindrance.I refers to weekend experiments with stereo shots using the Fujifilm X-E2 camera. They are on-going , so you'll need to follow them on the wordpress site:frontierandcolonial.wordpress.comThe preliminary trial involved seeing whether a Cullmann Concept One tripod quick release plate - the medium ones - could be used as a stereo slide. It did work when sliding in a Cullmann Concept One head but not quite enough for normal interpupilary distance of 66 mm. You could get a bare 50mm for the medium plate. This, of course, was more than enough for macro stereo.The answer will be the 200mm Cullman Concept One OCX388 plate - this will leave more than enough slide for regular work and can be extended for hyper stereo trials.You need still subjects for two-shot stereo - the garden plants were cooperative. It was easy to shoot left then right with a slide between them and the exposures on the Fujifilm X-E2 are the...

30 Sep

Posted at 06:15h in News by [social_share]

We've been looking at an intriguing new item from Manfrotto for the digitally delighted - those photographers who are so connected that they have App dreams instead of nightmares.It's a cradle for an iPad that allows all the things that the camera you are using at the time to appear on the pad - but without making it hard to do. Tethering, if you will, for dummies. It is going to need one of the later generation of DSLR or mirror-less cameras to work but the facility it will give for the shooter is magic.Shooting a composition that someone else has to okay before you press the button? Let them see the iPad image as you compose and focus. It won't make art directors any better but it might make them quieter.Need to see the framing for your own shot? For a video you are recording? Attach the Digital Director to a bracket on your tripod and swivel it around until you are taking a high-quality selfie. No duck faces, now...

30 Sep

Posted at 02:35h in News by [social_share]

Anyone who has a large collection of photo books and magazines can look at the images reproduced in them and trace the rise and fall of fads in the art. We are assuming that the work we see has been fairly submitted and presented and that we are not seeing the effects of a conspiracy or dogma or commercial ramp. We credit the bulk of the publications with presenting a genuine body of work.Maybe we shouldn't. Let's face it - SIGNAL magazine had their own standards, agenda, and look - but who wants to base a quality judgement on them...

30 Sep

Posted at 00:32h in News by [social_share]

It's an old photographic joke - the collapsible bottles look like concertinas. No end of darkroom workers have squeezed them while dancing around in the dark whistling Lady Of Spain.  Their wives and children wince but there is nothing that can be done about it.We discovered a mother lode of them in the back shelves of the storage area recently. Buy a set to put your darkroom chemistry in - If you've mixed up a big batch of developer and want to use it in small increments you can squeeze the bottle down to reduce the amount of trapped air and thus retard oxidation of the mix.They're only $ 7.50 so there must be a lot more things you can think to do with them. Hornpipes...