You miss a lot if you don't look close enough to the products in the Camera Electronic shop. The new premises near the corner of Murray and Queen Street was where I saw the Lucky camera straps seen in these pictures. I am guessing they are also at the 230 Stirling Street address as well...
Look up. What's that flying by? A bird? A plane? A man dressed in red and blue tights?No, it's a DJI drone with a camera mounted on it. Someone is making an epic movie and they've decided to incorporate aerial views as well as the ground-based ones. They've gone further than the old trick of mounting a camera on a long boom - or of hanging out off a nearby building's roof. They've got the spectacle of the flying camera.Well, so has Camera Electronic. We've had the gear in the Stirling Street shop all along and now we're featuring a dedicated drone cabinet in our new Murray Street shop - please see enclosed pictures. And there's more - that's our own staff member Ricky calibrating the GPS system on a drone out the front of the shop. Don't panic - he's not flying combat missions from 230 Stirling Street. He hasn't attached the propellors or the ordnance to the machine in the picture. Yet. And you will be pleased to know that our Repairs Workshop is getting increased experience with drones...
Well, they say there's nothing new under the sun, but then they said that about digital photography and look at what happened. In particular look and see what happened at the new Camera Electronic shop near the corner of Murray and Queen Street in Perth.Imagine that you have a great picture in your digital camera or mobile phone and $1.25 in your pocket - and that you want a 6" x 8" enlarged print of it. You walk into Camera Electronic - choose one of the two Fujifilm screens at the front counter of the shop - and press the screen to start it up.It will ask you what you'd like to do about the picture and walk you though the steps from either a WiFi connection or a memory card. Then it will show you the pictures on your card and ask you which one. You'll get an editing screen that will allow dodging, burning, and cropping as well as overall colour control. When you're happy with the result it will print you a quote and send the electronic...
That may seem a fatuous headline, but I can assure you it is not. I have just seen the most marvellous sight at the new Camera Electronic premises in Murray Street - 6 clean shelves loaded with clean Sony lenses and cameras. As an old employee who worked his way through the wooden-shelf era at CE, this is a glorious thing to see.The Sony lenses are somewhat of a mystery in actual use - I operate a different mirror-less system and the mount is not compatible. But I can readily form a judgement about the design of the barrels and the finish - and if I were a Sony system user I would not hesitate to experiment and assemble a complete optical layout with these choices. They look superb. At this point I remember reading a weblog column written by another photographer who took time to compare Sony full-frame camera bodies and lenses when assembled with similar full-frame Canon equipment. Of course one is a mirror-less system and one a DSLR outfit - and the writer did not belabour any of...
The advent of the new shop in Murray Street - near the corner of Queen Street and apparently Open All Hours* - has meant some fresh thinking about items to be stocked. I am delighted to see the return of albums and frames.They once existed in the Stirling Street shop - I remember seeing some in 2008 when I started to work behind the counter there - but the stocks ran down and were never replenished. The business moved to catering for different parts of the market and these humble products were left to other retail shops.But now they are back - and as a focused offering that might just hit the mark for many city people -particularly with the advent of another new service that you'll see in another weblog column.Now, let's imagine that you are working in the city and you've got a packet of 6 x 4 pictures of a wedding or birthday that you have just shot. There they are in the paper envelope, but you need to present them to the family in something better...
How many items do you carry in your photographic kit that don't need electricity? Not many, I suspect. Even the lens cleaning cloths these days seem to have a battery door somewhere...
On a high shelf at our new Murray Street shop is a row of Lexar boxes that fooled the heck out of me. But now that I have researched what they are, I am mightily impressed.Firstly, the mistake I made; I thought that they were a set of multiple RAID-drive boxes like a Drobo array. AS I have a Drobo that has been working flawlessly, I was not interested, but i took a picture anyway...
As I get older I am a little dismayed by expansion - the increase in the size of bills for water and electricity and the greater role my local council seems to want me to play in sorting garbage. I am even worried about an expanding waistline, though when you get old enough, elastic waistbands and no belts come to the rescue. That's more information than you need.The new premises for Camera Electronic are also somewhat of an expansion - more floor space, more shelf space, more attractions for the customers. There is to be a 6-inch gun mount on the Murray Street frontage concealed with a dropping bulkhead, so we have nothing to fear from commerce raiders. The staff are a bit nervous but I am all for it.*Will we get new customers through the door? I hope so, but that is not meant to be a criticism of the old ones. They are welcome too. indeed an number of them have already responded that the new shop will be very close to their workplaces and much more convenient....
The whole point of this week's exercise is to save those images on my colour slides. Unfortunately some of them are dead...
Okay, you have your equipment assembled in a precise manner, as per our last posting...