Following on from our previous blog about a disaster averted, here is one that deals with the situation when disaster arrives, unpacks its bags, and sets up a deckchair and an esky - in short when things really do go wrong.If you have a camera/lens/flash that becomes wet/crushed/scratched/full of sand/abused...
Being old enough to know better doesn't help. Being rich, or pretty, or powerful doesn't help. Being witty doesn't even help...
We are all familiar with the dashboards of our motor cars and the usual layout of controls - so much so that we can generally get into a strange car and tell at a glance what speed we are doing, what the engine revs are, and how much petrol is in there. We'll get some indication of the engine temperature and at least a warning light for the presence - or absence of oil. Enthusiast cars can tell us the state of the electrical system, cooling system, and many other measurements.Camera systems can be similarly complex but there are few agreed symbols to let you know what the engineers know. Apart from the on/off button and the little playback arrow, there can be a real designers and artists festival in the choice of the icons. One of the worst is the one that deals with the battery life.It can be a little symbol of a battery, or a percentage of charge, or a complex diagram to track total battery life. It might be white to start with, then turn red...
Death and taxes are becoming optional - particularly if you are connected with merchant banking or the ownership of resource mines...
Things these days get faster and faster ( except the lines at Coles and Woolies out near my house...
I was shooting pictures yesterday of the flight of the Spokane Sun God over the Umgawa waterhole in Zumba and ran into a problem that is rare - too much sunlight. And I had foolishly not equipped myself to deal with it.The problem was that I did not want to have the waterhole in sharp focus as the Buhl sesquiplane passed over it - just a little out of focus so as not to scare the elephants out of the waterhole. The aircraft was going to have to pass fairly low to have the waterhole appear large underneath it and the depth of field of the lens at small aperture meant that the elephants were going to be in sharp focus.There was too much light for this - the lowest ISO that the Fujifilm X-E2 goes with a good dynamic range is ISO 200. I would have been forced to use f:16. I really wanted f:2.8.Had I been wise, I would have employed the Fujifilm X-100, 100s, or 100t because these have an inbuilt switchable 3X ND filter. Or I...
Okay, that's a bit dramatic. I'm not an industrial spy as such. I'm a guy who works in a camera shop who goes to other people's camera shops when I am on holiday in Melbourne. Not so much evil as sad...
Faith and Begorrah! The Little People have visited us...
If you didn't buy a barrow-load of Nikon lenses before Christmas, now is the time to wheel on in. The money part is good.Nikon is extending the idea of cash back until the end of this month on the following cameras and lenses:1. Nikon D3300...
What do Cambodia, Bhutan, and Iceland have in common - apart from really bad songs in the Eurovision Song Contest? They have Adam Monk.Well, they have him, and a dedicated band of photography tourists taking an insanely large number of images as they tour the various areas. All under the aegis of Adam who can make sure that they do not go wrong - and that the images they bring back will have a proper professional quality.Photo tours are not a new thing - Francis Frith was taking pictures in Egypt in the middle of the 19th century, and photojournalists are always going somewhere and trying to get to the center of a riot ...