31 Jul Saturday Daytime Fever
And you didn't need a white disco suit...
July 2018
30 Jul Friday Night Is Fight Night!
I'm sorry my Uncle Louie isn't alive - I'd have taken him to the Camera Electronic Special Eve Of Photo Live 2018 event and he'd have loved it. Oh, he never took a picture in his life, but he was a great boxing fan*. And Camera Electronic turned it on last Friday. The Novotel Langley isn't quite quite what you imagine Madison Square Garden to be. It's carpeted floors and mood lighting...
27 Jul Not Only But Also…
Do we all love the household trade pavilion at the Royal Show? I know I do - you can have the midway rides and the petting zoo - give me the spruikers demonstrating tomato slicers any day. If I miss out on seeing the Miracle Window Cleaner take half a kilo of margarine off a sheet of glass I reckon I haven't been to the show. And it's not just for the benefit of the rural seeds - I'm standing there gawping along with them. I get my Jethro on...
26 Jul Lions, Grizzlies, or Humming Birds?
No, it's not a dinner menu. It's news of a great opportunity for landscape and wildlife photographers next year - it's one of the kickers in a unique photo tour for 2019. Dennis Glennon Photography is the firm running the tour under the name Iconic Imagery. Instead of the usual round of African game parks or Alaskan grizzly bears, this tour offers...
25 Jul Press Release…Then Open Door And Jump Out…
It's few enough times we get in our lives when we can have a say in affairs of state. Most of us have never stormed a Bastille and quite a few don't even get past the CWA cake stall when it comes to voting in elections. In our photographic lives we're also mostly told rather than doing the telling...
24 Jul At Last Some Curves
I've been reviewing SanDisk products regularly since I started writing these columns - indeed as long as I have been playing with the digital side of photography - and I have come to trust them. Not to the extent that I insist that they can never fail, but well enough that I am prepared to entrust most memory tasks to them. A case in point is the card readers that the firm makes. From my first CF card reader to my current SD requirements, SanDisk is the one to transfer the goods from the card to the computer. I don't believe that I have lost any data in this stage of the workflow at all. Note: Cards can and do go belly-up from time to time. SanDisk are probably better than most and definitely better than bargain cards picked up on eBay or Alibaba. In my case, if it doesn't say SanDisk, Lexar, or Panasonic, it doesn't go in my camera bag. But back to the readers - They've come a ways since the early days and as they've progressed the data transfer...
22 Jul The Macro Button And The Landscape Badge
On a trip to Japan in 2014 I did the busman's holiday thing and went to visit a couple of camera shops. I was astounded at Bic Camera in the Ginza as well as another large one called Yodabashi, but found the familiarity of the core subject helped me to understand a great deal of what I saw - even though I could not translate the signage. Of course, the cameras were very similar to what we sold here..and the accessories were also familiar - with the exception of the wall of really bad camera straps. I tried to bring myself to buy one of the furry ones, but chickened out in the end as I did not want to weather the scorn of the staff. What I was most impressed with was the way Bic had made it easier for people who don't speak Japanese to find help. Every staff member who spoke a different language as well as Japanese wore a badge on their uniform that was the flag of the country that originated that language. I beetled over to...
20 Jul Monstrous Ink
I hope I don't get a lawyer's letter from Pixar over that one...
19 Jul If It No Gonna Go, You Gotta Get Out An’ Push, Man…
Not every car starts first time, every time - nor does it always travel smoothly on every road. The same with cameras - even the newest of the new. Oh, I'm not suggesting that the new Fujifilm X-T100 did not turn on - it popped to life as soon as I put in a W-126 battery and a small SD card. It even let me bypass the date, time, and place to get to the regular operation fairly quickly. You can probably get into the copyright and EXIF minutae somewhere in the back of the menu cupboard but that is not what you want when you are doing a review. In, bang, and out, please. Had I just taken it for a spin in the garden or out at the park under natural light I would have had no trouble - the Auto ISO and Auto WB would have rendered everything perfectly and I could have snapped to my heart's content. There's a continual - focus setting in the SR+ that seems to anticipate what I am looking at when I glance...
18 Jul Rival Sisters In The Studio
Normally that headline presages trouble - two dancer sisters or two actress sisters or two duchesses in one studio means that something is going to be broken - but in this case I hoped for better things. The two cameras that I have with the closest form and function - though they might have slightly different specifications - are the Fujifilm X-T100 from the shop and the Fujifilm X-T10 I own. The first has the XC15-45mm F3.5-5.6 OIS PZ and the latter the XF 18-55mm F2.8-4 R LM OIS - both considered " kit " lenses for their bodies. They differ in sensors - the X-T10 having an X-Trans sensor and the X-T100 a Bayer type. Much has been written about the inherent superiority of each one of these with much downstream fan-boy fighting on the internet forums. Those of you with the stamina to read them are welcome to whatever conclusions others have drawn. I was determined to draw my own in my own studio. Both cameras were set for RAW/jpeg, and both at the same ISO, 5600º custom white balance, and...