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09 Oct

Posted at 10:34h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

I've gone through a number of photo eras here and in North America and can look back to compare and contrast them. So, very likely, have you. If you've not experienced them so far, here's hoping you'll get a chance to in the future. The great thing is if you could keep your eyes and ears open to what is being shown and said - you'll find this changes as new tech appears. And it also changes as new advertising agencies get hold of the trade. Way, way back ( dinosaurs, Elvis ) it was the era of the film SLR . They started small and got bigger, rising in price and bloating in size as new features like TTL metering were added. They got bulkier and blockier - I recommend you to some of the Topcon bodies if you fancy yourself something of a weight lifter. Then the size war turned to another front and the compact SLR came in - see the Pentax MX as prime example of small thinking - the Olympus OM series as well. Then the automatic...

07 Oct

Posted at 09:39h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

I am not a user of the action cameras. I don't disapprove of them - far from it - but I 'm not that active. People want to see themselves bicycling down Niagara Falls, not sitting in the workshop painting a model airplane. My pictures stay still, and so do I. But you may be different, and that is where the GoPro and other action cameras of the past decade have scored such success. They are mostly easy to use and mostly successful. There have been constant improvements in performance and the price has not soared past the point where most people can afford them. And they have been blessedly easy to use in most cases - all the way through to the bit where you show the vision on the family television screen and people wince in fear or embarrassment. And they have been remarkably sensible in keeping the mounting and operation design criteria constant through the development time - while making enough optional accessories to equip an army of enthusiasts. Sometimes it is almost like looking at an old Leica...

30 Sep

Posted at 09:50h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Our featured image is somewhat of a scoop for the Camera Electronic Weblog column Rumours Section. It is a hastily-snatched image of the new control panel on the Flapoflex Digital Overreacher camera. Taken on the testing track at a secret location outside of Northam, it shows the user-friendly nature of the streamlined interface that Flapoflex will be introducing in their new range of cameras. A lot of us have complained about the number of times we have had to push buttons to steer through a menu. On some of the smaller compact cameras nearly all the commands were done with the menu button and you daren't decide to change from one major setting to the next if there is any action going on - the fistfight in the ballerina's dressing room will be long over before you get all the darned buttons pushed. Plus sometimes the buttons are so small and so haphazardly-placed as to defeat us. Not so with the Flapoflex Overreacher. Every knob, slider, pushbutton, and socket on this camera is there right in front of you and they are...

29 Sep

Posted at 19:25h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

After guessing your way through the focus bracketing, shifting, or stacking settings on your camera and setting yourself up to take 25 shots of the flower in the garden you might set the thing going and be surprised at the results: a. The program refuses to stack all the pictures. Some of them are too far out of whack to stack. The subject moved in the interval of the shots and the Adobe goblin inside Photoshop refuses to work. Answer? Protect that flower from the wind with a big sheet of cardboard around it. Use light blue or neutral green. Reduce the interval of the shots to 0 and use the electronic rather than mechanical shutter. Use a tripod. b. The camera buzzes along merrily but stoped at 14 shots when you set it for 25. Don't feel bad. The processor that has been recording the shots has looked at the sharpness in each one and stopped taking them when it has judged that you've got enough. This could be when you reach infinity or when you just run past the edge of the flower...

28 Sep

Posted at 09:07h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

And if you hit the focus stacking piñata hard enough, all sort of cameras and systems fall out! I thought It was only me and the Olympus users who were in on the secret of automatic focus stacking. Hah. It looks as though lots of people using a modern mirrorless from one of the big Japanese makers - and some who are using DSLRs - can get lucky. My Fujifilm X-T2 and many subsequent models have the auto bracketing. Olympus cameras do - Panasonic cameras do ( though they use a slightly different idea that makes use of a 4k burst while running through the focus range ) and YouTube says newer Sony picture boxes will do it too. How about Nikon? Now that they are producing top-quality mirrorless cameras - the Z 5 , Z 6, and Z 7, surely they might be candidates? I called Michael Philips, our state Nikon Australia expert, and put the question to him. He confirmed the good news, and went off and did some experimenting of his own to find the answers to some of the questions....

25 Sep

Posted at 10:16h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

Well, the new computer was full of the new program - Photoshop 2019 - and I didn't understand 1/50 of the commands and shortcuts - but the YouTube teacher had shown the two or three steps to engage the focus stacking machinery - and I followed from an iPad as he did it. I took a series of pictures of a model airplane from the machine gun tripod - changing the focus with the lens ring along the model as I went. I used manual focus and just watched the red focus indicator line move along the wing from closest to furthest, producing 15 separate exposures. Fortunately the Elinchrom lights I use are very consistent from one shot to the next if you give about 5 seconds for a re-charge between shots and then 5 minutes for a cool-down at the end. I'd shot RAW images and then passed them through Lightroom for correction and onto Photoshop for the stacking. PS tries to automatically align the 15 shots - dead easy if the subject and camera are static. Then it makes masks...

21 Sep

Posted at 09:27h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

My colleagues at Camera Electronic called my attention to an LED ring light the other day that is fitted with a mount for your mobile phone and an adjustable slider to change the white balance of the diodes from blue to orange. Not completely, mind, but enough so that they influence the colour temperature of the ring light's white light. I think it is designed to make the selfie more attractive in odd lighting. This can only be good. I hope that there will be further development in this idea - and the next stage should be a light that analyses the ambient colour temperature and matches it with those adjustable LEDs. This would either involve a sensor that looked toward the subject and made the decision, or a light that could take instructions from the processor inside the phone ( or small camera ) as to what judgement it was making about the AWB setting. Then a quick electronic handshake and secret lodge nod between the various machines and the picture would be taken. This rather fetchingly-packaged light from Manfrotto would also be...

18 Sep

Posted at 10:15h in Blog, Dick's Rant by

I like to go to the camera events at CE when there is something new in the offing and the local representatives have a worked up a slide show and sample to introduce it. There is nearly always something to eat and drink and equally, there is nearly always something new to learn. Wednesday night was no exception. Sheryl Maugher is now working for the Sony people and she brought along the full-frame Sony Alpha 7s III camera*. As well as the factory slide show she was able to list all the new features of the camera. The surprising thing was that, though it is certainly suitable for still photography, the Sony concept is much broader and envisages this camera being used for some high-end video work. The first clue to this was when she said it has 12.1 megapixels on the sensor. 12.1? In a day when other cameras are being pressed upon us with 45+ megapixels? And this on a full-frame 24 x 36 sensor? By the people who make sensors for everyone else?  With a new Bionz XR processor? What...