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16 Mar

Posted at 04:36h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Said the Government. And two weeks it will be - self isolating to keep company with someone who's flying in from overseas. I have laid in stocks of canned soup and two-minute noodles and the Tuna Surprise will startle everyone. On the photographic side, This is precisely the time when the digital revolution shines - it is an opportunity for someone separated from the shops and the studio to go into the archives and finally do what I have been promising myself  for years: Scan the colour slides. They'll need a clean with some film cleaner and a blower brush, and the dreadful old Agfachrome CT 18's will never look good anyway...

13 Mar

Posted at 08:45h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Watch the stores these coming weeks as people are panicked into buying things in fear of a viral quarantine. Note the social media as it fans the flames. Watch as silly things creep into the equation; buy up twenty years supply of socks in case no-one ever shears a sheep again...

12 Mar

Posted at 07:21h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

I attended a rather pleasant do last night put on by C.C.Kennedy and Camera Electronic at the Oxford Hotel. It was to introduce the Sigma FP camera to Western Australia. I had already been privileged to play with this camera in the Stirling Street shop some time ago - see our weblog column of the 21st of November, 2019 - and I thought it a very novel and exciting still camera. I was right and wrong at the same time. The real forte of this camera would appear to be video work - at least that was the impression gained from last night's show. Perhaps I should amend that to fortissimo - for that is the F part of the name. The P stands for pianissimo. The basic idea is the biggest performance from the smallest space, and in this I think Sigma have succeeded. Of course it is no surprise to find an innovative product coming from this firm - they make everything they sell in Japan and even go so far as to make their own magnesium metal for the...

11 Mar

Posted at 08:42h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Stefan spoke to a room full of enthusiasts at the PhotoLive 2019 about photographing fashion shows. It was the night before bash at the Novotel Langley and as well as the people models we had rescue greyhounds in pyjamas. A glorious evening. Stefan's advice was to shoot the models from the front, get them with both feet on the ground, and get them with their bodies moving but their faces in neutral. All good points if the pictures are going to be taken up by fashion editors and published for money. Stefan said nothing about making any judgement on the actual clothing or concepts being displayed, and that is a very wise attitude...

10 Mar

Posted at 07:28h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

I have no idea if you can do this. But the thought of pod of scuba divers with the munchies putting through an order to Dominos while off the Busselton Jetty is fascinating. Does Uber deliver beyond the surf line? How do you keep the Neapolitan Special from getting soggy? Do the prawns swim off the top of the thin 'n crispy? As it is, I suspect the AXIS Go smart phone cases are intended to let you take pictures underwater, rather than call people up. The housings look to be extremely well made, durable and versatile. The all-important sealing function is down with a proper rubber seals and O-ring grease. The opreerating buttons are ring-sealed. The latching is positive and protected against inadvertent release. There are enough standardised attachment points to construct a comprehensive rig - or to anchor the thing to you so that it cannot fall away and be lost. The housing is not cheap, and neither is your phone. If this was not enough, there are accessory lenses to extent the vision - including a fish-eye dome port. The daunting prospect...

06 Mar

Posted at 08:04h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Fujifilm X-100V, please, and step on it. I don't want to be late. I am a man of my word - I brought down suitable models for the Fujifilm X-100V test as I said I would. 1:43 scale models of a taxi and a mustard van. And yes, I would trade my car for a 30's Ford sedan or a Citroen H van in a second. Not sure if I'd haul mustard in it but it would make a cool camper conversion. The reason for the toy cars was to test out the new lens formulation on the x-100V. The original lens of the X-100 and the three subsequent iterations was glorious for general photography but started to soften up at the edges when you moved into extremely close-up range with the camera. For a model shooter it limited the use to medium distances. Otherwise, the fact that the camera never had dust-bunnies on the sensor and synched at all speeds with the studio lights made it a dream to use. Roll on to now and look at the Ford. Excellent focus  -...

05 Mar

Posted at 08:51h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

What have we here? Exactly the camera I have been waiting to test! And no-one told me it was lurking in the Fujifilm cabinet.  Luckily I peer everywhere in the Camera Electronic shops and always have done. I would recommend it to all the readers. You can discover more in Stirling and Murray Street than you can wading through a steamy jungle. The new Fujifilm X-100V is here in silver with the black version set to arrive in a few months. You can decide yourself which looks best to you, but I must say the silver is elegant. If you are an Adobe user you'll be restricted at present to the jpeg settings - ACR on lightroom doesn't open its RAW files yet. I daresay this is coming soon. No matter- the Fujifilm jpegs are excellent and the camera seems to cope very will with exposures under varying lighting conditions.   The two front views of the camera show it to be very similar to the basic outline of the previous X-100 series cameras. You'll be hard pressed to see the subtle casing differences...

04 Mar

Posted at 08:50h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

We normally don't promote a manufacturer's range of products with a picture of someone else's goods in the same advertisement - it certainly wasn't done in the golden age of Madison Avenue. They might have hinted about " Brand X" and " Brand Y " and made fake motor-car tyres out of plaster and wood to pretend that one was superior ( and they did...