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August 2017

17 Aug

Posted at 07:09h in Dick's Rant by [social_share]

Recipe for a good night out as cooked up by Camera Electronic. Perfect for a winter night. Ingredients: Talented people. Good food. Excellent drinks. Cozy urban atmosphere. Interesting art. Short speeches. Last night saw the Camera Electronic directors and family, together with a goodly selection of Perth's fashion professionals, crowd into Rockefellers on Beaufort Street for just such an event. Rockefellers seems to be a combo of a deli and a bar and in both divisions, Michael, the proprietor, served his visitors very well. If you go there, try the reuben sandwiches and the dill pickles. Suberb. The occasion marked the opening of Clique - an exhibition of WA Fashion Through The Lens. It is all a part of the Telstra Perth Fashion Festival. The art featured was the fashion work of three Western Australian favourites; Christian Blanchard, Stefan Gosatti, and Simon Lekias. Their editorial and catwalk work is, as you can imagine, at the top of the professional tree. But one thing that photo-fans sometimes don't realise - we see most of what they do through printed magazines or phosphor screens, and thesemay sometimes make for visual compromises -...

16 Aug

Posted at 09:17h in Dick's Rant by [social_share]

People ask me what makes my mind up about a product to feature here in the column - seeing as I am tasked with banging out a piece a day all week. Of course there are the promotional briefs from major manufacturers and the announcements of product launch days. These are all necessary to satisfy the urge for novelty on the part of the clients and the urge for money on the part of the management. I understand both urges, and am sympathetic. I go to all the launches I can manage as there is bound to be something to see and hopefully something to eat and drink. That satisfies my urges. But as far as the goods that just sit on the shelf without any especial occasion attached to them, it is really a case of sudden inspiration. As it is a photo safari into the wild warehouse, I suppose you could say the choice is just a whim away...

15 Aug

Posted at 09:21h in Dick's Rant by [social_share]

The whole idea of taking pictures of toy cars - or silverware, jewellery, football fields, etc. - for illustration is to show all of the subject in focus. And to show some part of the surroundings in focus as well. Oh, it is fashionable to have one eye on a bride and groom in focus and everything else fuzzy - the same applies to kittens - and it is easy to get things fuzzy on kittens. But when you are selling something people want to see how good it is rather than how arty you are, and they want to see it all over. Thus the fight on the tabletop for every millimetre of sharpness. The optical facts of life say depth of field is greater with a shorter focal length and this applies to little lenses as well as big ones. The rules that smaller apertures produce more DOF and that moving closer reduces the DOF also stay. It is a balancing act. So far, I have found that, for my purposes, the act balances better with an APS-C sensor. Now...

14 Aug

Posted at 07:47h in Dick's Rant by [social_share]

There is nothing that excites a photographer more than a big, new, complex, camera. A close second is an equally imposing lens - and photographers can be seduced with ease if the gear has some new feature. I often used to think that the lens makers chortled evilly to themselves in their secret laboratories until I saw a not-so-secret Panasonic laboratory at Yamagata in Japan. No-one chortled - they were very serious and careful people. This report has no chortling either, and very little in the way of complexity or imposition. The equipment is not flash-bang pre-order Photokina stuff either - it is readily available goods that Camera Electronic has in stock. But the idea is to see if there is a better way to do a certain task - a task that may be similar to ones that you, the reader, want to do. The brief I gave myself was to see if the smaller sort of compact digital camera was up to the task of small-scale studio illustration. To see whether I had overlooked a resource for my specialised subjects. To...

08 Aug

Posted at 08:09h in Dick's Rant by [social_share]

If there was ever a product category that calls forth innovative design, it's the table-top tripod. It would be crass to name competitor's products in a post about a Manfrotto design, but if you go back over the years in this column you'll see at least five other charming little things - one of which has a design history stretching back over 50 years. And a price tag that looks like a government contract...

07 Aug

Posted at 08:43h in Dick's Rant by [social_share]

This week you sell yourself a tripod. I'll help out here in the column, but you have to do the ( three ) leg work yourself. First thing you'll need to do is find your camera and see how big it is. if it's a moderately-sized DLR or mirror-less camera, read on today. This is your day. Your camera is not all that heavy, though it can gain some grammes when you put a long lens or zoom on it. You'll likely be thinking of astral photography, as well as landscape shoots. You want a tripod that is easy enough to carry out into the boondocks but still has enough stiffness to stay steady in a wind. If the operating field is muddy or wet, you'll want something that can c0pe with this. Waterproof tripods are not new to the market, and now that newer materails are avaiable for their construction, they can be within the reach of most people. There are still oddities like the ones that are built with their legs upside down, but these are rare. Sirui. Strange name, but...