June 2016

"And I'll give you something for your film".These two statements were frequently heard in the analog era when someone wanted you to do a professional job of sports, event, or wedding coverage but did not want to pay a professional price for the result. You were foolish if you thought that it was going to excuse you from doing a professional job - that was still the standard. But you were not going to get paid. You were a relative. Or a mate. Or the relative of a mate.It always went the same way. The cost of the film and processing was never fully paid - they gave you something but that something was based upon their recollection of the price of a roll of Kodak Gold  or Sakura film seen at the checkout of the local supermarket. If you presented them with the actual cost of the pro neg film and the processing at the pro lab they recoiled in horror and accused you of being a gouger.Once the pictures were delivered they asked for the negs, and then...

There is an End-Of-Financial-Year sale email going out right now from Camera Electronic - you may be on the list that receives it. Normally I do not interfere with that section of the business or comment on the offers, but today another staff member pointed out that there is an exceptional good deal in there. So I grabbed an example of the camera, photographed it, and am adding the blog imprimature to it.This blog post is chiefly aimed at someone who up until now has been shooting crop-frame cameras, but has not advanced to the full-frame models yet. If you are the possessor of purely-crop frame lenses you can read on - if you have a mixed bag of crop and full frame lenses you must proceed with caution.Here's what I mean - if you have some crop or full frame lenses for the Canon or Nikon system, you will probably think of investigating the full-frame cameras from those makers. By all means - and you may find one of them in the same EOFY ad. Pass further down the...

Shooting an impromptu product coverage in the shop one morning meant making an improvised scoop out of a roll of Ilford printing paper. It's good paper, and gives a spotless finish.To get a neutral white balance in the mixed shop lighting I used the Custom White Balance provision on my Fujifilm X-T10 camera  to reset it in one go. Lots of cameras have this same feature - you point the lens at a plain white surface that is illuminated like your subject and the camera measures the colour temperature with one shot. If you say OK to the result you have a steady basis to shoot from, colour-wise.Only trouble is when I shot I had a real spot - obviously my sensor had picked up a lugie the size of a Volkswagen  and when I stopped down to f:14 it showed up something terrible. Well, I opened the lens a little, put on flash, and resigned myself to cloning it out in the finished products - I didn't have time to wait for a sensor clean.That's the three choices you...

June has seen the announcement of a new class of camera - the medium-format mirrorless model. Fittingly, Hasselblad have been the first in the field with it. It will have a new range of lenses and a new set of tasks to do. The owners may find themselves taking it further away from the environment that the other Hasselblad digital cameras normally occupy.Mind you, sometimes the current Hasselblad digital cameras are flying through the air or swimming under the water, so that must count as venturesome. And then there were the Hasselblad film cameras that NASA used to take moon pictures...

Make sure your battery is charged and you have a fresh card in your Leica X-U camera. Down to 15 metres you will be the king of your environment for an hour.Or you may elect to document harvest time in the wheatbelt from the top of a header in a dust storm. You'll still get great pictures and the camera will be in better shape than you are at the end of the day.The lens stays on - you don't change it. It's 23mm so the APS-C  CMOS sensor sees a moderate wide angle view. f: 1.7 - f:16 aperture and infinity to 20cm close focus. Just look for a sight and shoot it.If the lighting on the scene is too dim to be captured  - even by the 12500 ISO setting - there is a dedicated flash at the front edge of he lens that is never blocked off from the subject. (Bravo Leica. This is something camera designers needed to do for years and you have had the courage.)Note: for the underwater work, there is a apparently a...

Down the back of the sofa.In the car ashtray.All the pockets of your trousers in the wardrobe.The suitcase you brought back from Bali.Biscuit tin.Old glass jar in the shed.Wherever there might be some spare change - start looking for it. You're gonna need about $ 16,000 if my calculations are correct.If you can't manage this in the next three months, wait about 6 months and you might make do with  about $ 10,000.Okay - go. Get started.PS: do the children need to eat every day? I mean, really?...

Well, you've finally done it - closed the doors of the professional practice and sent a farewell notice to the ATO. You've tossed the letterhead, invoice forms, and business cards into the fire and told the accountant that you will be doing your own lying in the future. You are set to be a real amateur.No turning back. No doing jobs for money. From now on the only compensation you will be receiving will be "exposure", "a drink", and "recognition". And the occasional bucket of lemons from Mr. Valducci's tree. There will be more lemons than drinks.The demands on you will change - while no-one can compel you to deliver the goods on time, they will expect you to hand over every raw file that you have taken so that they can have them printed at Officeworks. This might have seemed unreasonable when you were a working professional but that was when you were a person with a camera in hand - now you are a camera with a person attached. The camera has remained sharp but you have become...