January 2020

Well, you know me by now. Close-up pictures galore and somewhat of a Fujifilm fanboy, but there are still a lot of things I don't know about the subject or the equipment - and I am driven as much by idle curiosity as by scientific zeal. The good thing about idle curiosity is that you can do it when you're idle...

Let the readers decide for themselves. My jury is still out on this one, and they went out about 7 years ago. The foreman just keeps asking for coffee and pizza. The judge is getting impatient. Way Back When the first of the Peak Design camera clips were introduced the distributors generously came round and gave each one of the staff a sample to take home. It was a lighter and cruder version of the product they sell now but it worked very much on the same principle - you clamped the receiver onto your belt, screwed the foot onto the underside of the camera, and coupled the two together. A small button controlled a safety catch that kept the camera locked in until you reached for it. Some of the staff members thought it was great, and still use theirs. I tried it for a while but found that having the camera at my waist made it difficult to bend sideways. I was never nervous about it becoming detached, as the engineering of the system was good, but the location didn't...

If your camera could use a 100mm set of filters for effective light control during landscape or seascape shooting, NiSi have packaged up a holder kit to make it easy - and they have looked ahead to the conditions where you might be forced to use three filters at once with an additional circular polariser. Don't let people laugh at you for this or ask if any actual light gets in through the lens. They'll be sorry when you show them the seashore shot with a misty effect under the wooden pier pilings and the night sky above it with the Milky Way. What price their old pictures of sunsets now, eh? Apart from the one-upmanship of multiple filtration, there are valid reasons for using the kit. You may indeed have a bright sky and dim sea or land base that need equalising. You may have mountain slopes in similar tones. You might not be able to shade and blend the scene using your hat and an old cornflakes box cut apart. That's where professional filtration systems and their attendant holders come...

Filters! Filters For Everyone! Olé! Well, filters for those of us that use smaller cameras but want bigger results. I can see this idea being of use to the Fujifilm, Ricoh, Panasonic, and Olympus shooters in particular. In Carlos' case it will be his Ricoh GRIII in the tiny little field case he carries. The NiSi company make very large filters, of course, and some quite complex mounting systems for the wide and zoom lenses that go onto DSLR cameras. In some cases the apparatus that is used to hold a graduated neutral density filter in front of a wide lens can be considerably larger than the camera it serves. Like video rigs, you sometimes have to peer closely to find the camera inside the accessories. In the case of the Gr III or other small cameras, the frame can be as small as the front of the lens itself. This is particularly the case if the lens is a fixed focal length. Take a look - that NiSi is tiny. Not tiny, though, are the filters - they are full-size in relation to...

I am in the habit of pestering the sales staff at the Murray Street and Stirling Street shops for news about goods and good news about older stock. Each staff member has their own field of expertise, and I pick 'em in rotation. One day I asked Ricky in Stirling Street for something interesting. He went to the Sony cabinet - Ricky is the man to talk to about this brand as he uses some of their equipment and knows a lot of their expertise. He plucked out a tiny little tripod and tiny little camera...

I hope Fujifilm Australia will forgive me for pinching one of their internet images to accompany this post. I do not have a Fujifilm X-Pro2 camera to hand to illustrate it and my older X-Pro1 model is somewhat different  - but then if you are in the market for the featured product, you'll likely know exactly what an X-Pro2 looks like. Note: I am clutching my X-Pro1 firmly and defending it from all comers. I know it is the first model in this successful series and I know it doesn't have the processing or sensor power of the Pro2 or Pro3, but I love it dearly - it's never failed me in the studio or dance hall. It is the go-to body for the Little Workshop to record aircraft builds...