20 Jul Monstrous Ink
I hope I don't get a lawyer's letter from Pixar over that one...
July 2018
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...
17 Jul The Turn Of The Screen
A gothic mystery story by henry James with heroines and villains. Creepy mansions and ghostly figures. And nearly all of them in the Fujifilm design bureau...
16 Jul Look Carefully At The Lettering On The Box…
Yes. Yes, this is the new Fujifilm camera; X-T100. Gotta look intently at Fujifilm packs because they are all so very alike. And the people in the company who name the new products often get the letters and numbers frighteningly close to the old designations. It pays to peer closely. If I'd been more casual about it I might have mistaken this for the X-100 or the T-T10. The internet is no help - a Google search often turns up a mixture of old and new posts that can send you out past where the buses run in short order. Well, with the box at home, the package opened like most other Fujifilm gear - well packed without being buried in frustration and sharp edges. I assembled the lens and camera and dropped in a charged W 126 battery and away we went. The beauty of Fujifilm now is the standardisation of the battery requirements - no more hauling three chargers in the suitcase for three different levels of performance. The body is sleek - in this case the graphite shade that hovers between...
13 Jul ” My Lens Is Only A Kit Lens So They Say I Need Another One…”
Hmmmm. Let's think about this for a bit. Your nose. That one there between your eyes. The one with the spectacles perched on it. Have a feel of it...
12 Jul One Light Is All You Need
Provided you have two lights...
11 Jul Somebody Got Smart – They Used My Head…
It might seem difficult to report anything new about the Joby Gorilla Pod these days - after all the original little Gorilla Pods have been in the shop long enough to register on the inventory of the British Museum.* Well, that is because they actually work. They are a silly little answer to a serious little question for the travelling photographer. The fact that they have contributed to the Selfie Plague on Facebook and Instagram is neither here nor there. If we must have selfies, at least we deserve sharp ones. This, Gorilla Pods will do. The 3K kit was new on the storeroom shelves when I swanned through this week. The legs are no new thing - Gorilla Pod ABS plastic sockets that wrap around solid objects and rubberised feet at the end to act as a small tripod. You can exercise your ingenuity with this sort of thing when you need to support a camera or an off-camera flash. You'll never get the legs as straight as they come out of the packet ever again, but that is not a...
10 Jul A Ramble Through the Chemical Side
We're lucky at Camera Electronic - we still have ties to the chemical side of photography. Unlike so many stores that have embraced digiatalisation, we find that it pays to remember the older analog processes. There are a steady stream of clients who also remember this and pursue their art in that way. Thank goodness they are also supported here in Perth by good professional laboratories like Fitzgerald Photo Imaging. The delights of a good film camera are not debarred from us. And sometimes we discover some interesting things on the shelves: A. The Ilford company...
09 Jul The Microphone For The Me Generation
Or the you generation, if you insist. The important thing is that it is a microphone that will make us sound good when we use our smart devices. The Apple iPhone and iPad are wonderful things for communication - they can be as complex as any millennial would wish for communicating with each other or catching Japanese electronic monsters. They can be simple enough for this writer to Skype his family from interstate. The battery life is even sufficient to allow me to annoy them until they hang up...