September 2016

Ah, that is the universal motto of the photo enthusiast. We read a little, think a little, google a little, and then go out and fiddle a lot. We invent things to do that need not be done, and ways to do them that make no sense, and then lash the ideas together with 1/4" bolts and gaffer tape.Just as well we are playing with cameras. If we were amateur explosives enthusiasts there would be smoking holes in the ground all over Perth...

Every couple of weeks I am tasked with writing an advertisement for our local daily newspaper - it goes into a section entitled " Market Place".The criteria for the products featured are price, providence, and practicality. It can be quite a complex choice: a. No good trying to sell a multi-thousand dollar item in a small column - the people who are going to enter into a large camera system or select a premium-quality lens are going to do it with a great deal of care and research. Trying to sell a Leica in a one column ad would be like trying to sell a Ferrari sports car in the back of a comic book.The item selected needs to be affordable by a large number of people. People who read newspapers...

We have just come down off the Photokina 2016 high and are sitting with our heads in our hands. The  lucky ones who went to see the show have hangovers, sore feet, and credit card statements to deal with. The rest of us have our hopes, fears, desires, and aversions to consider - all fuelled by the internet reports of new equipment. We'll need to keep our wits about us in the coming months.It is not the fact that there will be new equipment coming that will stress us - new equipment is always entering the market, just as old equipment leaves it - it will be how we feel we must react to it.Feel? React? What the heck is this? A camera column or a new-age forum? Well, follow along and you'll see what I mean. I'll be honest with you and you should be too...

I realise that there will be camera historians reading this column who will take umbrage at the title - they'll be able to find lots of Leica and Contax and Exakta grip designs that have been sold long before the current Olymopus digital camera grips. Okay - I'll modify it for you:Get A Grip Week- Day Two - The Grip Discovers OlympusOlympus have always known where their chief marketing points are, and for a great deal of the time that they've been selling 35mm film and micro 4/3 digital cameras one of them has been the size of the apparatus. Olympus cameras are made compact - they contain all the good ingrediants, but they are small in the hand.Good if you are a person with a small hand, as many of the people in the land where Olympus comes from may be. Targeted design. But the target shifted overseas decades ago, and much of the rest of the world has larger hands. This is not a problem - this is an opportunity - an opportunity to sell an accessory.Grip One:This...

 This is the week when you get a firm grasp of getting a firm grip - when you go from the ridiculous to the sublime and then back again.We promise ridiculous, and the heading image might suggest it, but if you were shooting a medium format TLR camera 20 years ago, you would have a different opinion. Because TLR cameras were made to be particularly hard to operate...