Can it order pizza? Pardon the cynicism of someone who used to shoot motion pictures with a Kodak magazine 8 camera and provide his own sound track when the film was projected by singing to the audience. It all seems so complex now...
We've all bought 'em - either at the Army Surplus store, from eBay, or at the secondhand camera markets...
I wonder if the lawyers for the Hasbro Toy company are on to this one? I thought I had seen that word before but I couldn't put my finger on it. Google turned up the answer - the Weebles were a tipping toy produced by Hasbro in the 70's for Playskool. They could be tipped over but rocked back upright as soon as you let go. Did this influence the designers of the Zhiyun Weebill Lab? It's a video stabilising rig that could conceivably be said to right itself as well. It also can be programmed to do a number of actions with a DSLR or mirror-less camera attached to it. Another suggestion that avoids the suits is that it is named after a small bird - and this is related to the fact that the same company makes a larger gimbal rig that is called a Crane. That's a nicer idea. In any case it is a device for dedicated video shooters who want steadiness in shaky situations, the ability to pan and tilt to order, and the sort of ergonomics that...
To cast me off discourteously...
One. Or none at all, if you've got a jacket with a pocket. Hello. It's the Shrinking Photographer here. Off on another adventure to see if he can get away with not carrying a bucket full of camera gear to his latest photoshoot. He's long given up the business of the monorail 4 x 5 in the field, the 6x6 and the suitcase of lenses, the DSLR and the rolling bag, and has come down to the mirror-less Gladstone bag. Now he is trying to ditch that and go with a shoulder bag and/or padded envelope from Australia Post to contain his kit. It's not laziness - really it's not. I do lots of hard work and hobby activities that involve heavy lifting. You've no idea how much effort it takes to bombard Coolbellup from Bull Creek if you have to lift your own howitzer shells. But the increasing advances in camera and sensor performance mean that so much more can be done than heretofore with so much less weight - it's time to see if the next step is possible. I took...
Photographers who may find themselves confined to their home for some time due to various reasons - illness, financial straits, or a court order, for instance - can still have a lot of fun and learn many new facts by resorting to their computer and the resources of the internet. We'll leave aside the visual temptations of Icker, Monstagram, or any of the other purely presentational sites and direct you to technical ones. I mean, beautiful images are all very well for the professionals, but when you come right down to it, the amateur photographer wants specifications and technical comparisons, eh? So today's site is Dofmaster. Go to dofmaster.com and look at the variety of products you can get for your information devices. They do a number of electronic programs for the different forms of mobile phone or tablet and for the fixed computers. You can pop right into the depth of field calculator and experiment with the idea before you commit to anything. I use the free bit all the time to compare and contrast different lenses. The idea is you...
Ever see a Speed Graphic or Crown Graphic press camera - or any of the other US or British cameras of the 40's and 50's? Note that every one of them seems to have two things in common - a big silver handle flash on one side of the camera and Jimmy Olsen behind it. Golly Superman! The big silver handle contained as many " D " cells as they could cram in as a way of providing enough electricity to fire the big press flash bulbs. It could also provide synchronising ports for cables and a button to trigger a solenoid on the shutter. Whatever you were doing with the other hand - focusing the camera, pulling a dark slide, or fighting crime, the handle gave you a massive grip on the massive camera. The users decided which side they wanted to hang on to about evenly - the handles could be slung either left or right. Even when the smaller Leica-style rangefinders moved in for some press work, there were big handle flashes to let you keep it all in...
And you're darned lucky at that. It's a piece of junk. The legs are thin-wall aluminium tubing with a profile pressed into them - so far so normal. They ride in white plastic bushes that are held in place by cutouts in the tubes - again pretty much what you might see in better tripods, albeit a bit flimsy here. But the whole edifice falls into a heap with the leg clamps - they are cheap plastic clipovers that compress a rubber block onto the next smaller tube. I do not decry clipovers - Manfrotto have used them on some of their new tripods and they are a model of good design. Their clips are metal and they have adjustment bolts to let you take up slack as they wear in. But these flimsy clips are just disasters waiting to happen. One's broken - and has been replaced by the only sensible alternative - a car hose clamp. The other two at the same level of the tripod are showing the same cracks that broke the first one, so it's off to Supercheap...
There is no doubt that two camera makers in the current market have been most successful in embracing the concept of retro style - I should have said three, but if I used the term Lomo in the same breath as Leica and Fujifilm, I would be chased from the place. And I haven't been chaste for years...