ON OCTOBER 10th I left the UK London press launch complete with an Alpha 700 review camera. I’ll be covering the many aspects of the Alpha 700 performance in later reviews, but this camera is so good I wanted to get just something out to you right the next day. (more…)
Category: Opinion
Opinion pieces from our editors and contributors
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Stock image clanger in Sony-sponsored advertorial
To save a few dollars, whoever assembled a double page advert for Sony-sponsored photo workshops which (I gather) has just appeared in the US magazine Popular Photography went to cheap online stock library iStockphoto and downloaded this image: (more…)
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How anti-shake aids art exhibit shooting
I SELL digital images through Alamy, the on-line photo library. When an original piece of art is out of copyright, and displayed in public or by an owner permitting photography, the ability to get a good quality reproduction copy on the spot without lights, tripod or flash is valuable. Some 8 per cent of my overall Alamy images sales over the past four years have been of signs, notices and labels – disproportionately high, compared to the actual number of such shots. As someone has commented, editors like pictures which tell their own story, and sometimes have words in the pictures does just that. (more…)
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Frozen water – at 1/10th of a second?
WE spent a great week shooting mainly in Vaucluse, the district to the east of Avignon in the south of France, with Shirley using the 18-250mm Tamron f/3.5-6.3 lens exclusively. One object of this was to get some more example photos for a short article on the lens in our forthcoming Photoworld magazine. (more…)
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The colours of County Cork
IN 2006 before the Sony Alpha 100 was launched, my Dynax 7D went on its last serious travel shoot, spending a short week in the south-west of Ireland. (more…)
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No chance of widening my horizons…
SOME time ago I got hold a Soligor Pro 0.75X converter – a front-of-lens job. This is not something anyone should consider using on a DSLR. The Soligor was a bit different because it cost nearly as much as the ACW-100 wide angle converter for the Konica Minolta A1/A2/A200, which does an excellent job, and fitted a 62mm filter thread. That’s about the largest rear thread on any converter I have seen. (more…)
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16-80mm filter vignetting – myth or fact?
THE PROBLEM of darkened extreme corners with the 16-80mm CZ Sony lens definitely exists. They are there in many of my shots, with or without SSS anti-shake enabled, significant softly darkened corners. Everyone is saying this must be due to filters, and at least one of Forum regulars has emailed Zeiss about this issue (and got a reply almost admitting that the lens falls short of ideal design). But is it? (more…)
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When memory eludes me…
Here’s a thought for today, in the absence of Microsoft’s new Vista operating system. Don’t want to break the Dell which does all necessary PC stuff and seems happy on XP Home Edition, even if that makes people laugh. The last pre-Intel Mac OS and presumably the current Intel incarnation have a Find function in the ‘Finder’, not exactly analagous to Windows Explorer but the system’s interface for all operations and present no matter what you do.
This ‘Find’ function has been amended at some point to go right into the EXIF data (more…)
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The Fallen Geisha
An old Japanese folk-tale, discovered in a book of oriental myths and legends, and translated from the original Ancient Sumo script by David Kilpatrick.
THERE WAS once a beautiful Geisha called Minolta (here real name was Chiyoko but she adopted the stage name of Minolta once her fame spread abroad). She had many rivals, and was courted by many suitors. (more…)