Cameracraft magazine – Taking your practical photography further

Author: David Kilpatrick

  • Alpha Live View in the studio – solved!

    One of the problems with the Alpha 350/300 is that the Live View is linked to the settings when you use Manual exposure. It provides a form of metering, a relatively accurate preview of under or over exposure. This makes it impossible to use Manual with studio flash (AC mains strobe) setups. Currently, there is no menu setting to turn off ‘exposure preview with manual’ and enable ‘auto LV gain with manual’. But there is a solution.
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  • Sony unveils ‘ACE’ dealers in UK

    What we thought would be the ‘Alpha Pro’ project – display centres for the entire system sited at key retail outlets through Britain – turned out to be the ‘ACE’ project. That is, Sony Alpha Centres of Excellence. London Camera Exchange Colchester, one of the selected dealers, supplied these shots of the new showcase.

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  • PDSA photogenic pet photo contest

    Leading UK veterinary charity, PDSA, has launched its search to discover the UK’s most photogenic pet. If your pet has star quality and is always posing for the camera, then why not enter their photograph into the PDSA pets’ gallery competition?  (more…)

  • Win a Sigma 20mm f/1.8 and fly the Alpha flag

    If you use Sigma lenses on your Alpha, you can join the Sigma User Club UK and enter their prize competitions (anyone can join, worldwide, but you must be in the UK to enter the competitions as the prizes are given by the UK distribution company).

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  • Field Guide for Alpha 700

    Alan Hess is the author of a new field guide to using the Sony Alpha 700, published by Wileys, with 281 pages and the usual contents covering basic photographic techniques as well as the camera’s operation.

    The cost of the guide is 16 Euros by mail order from Research & Markets of Dublin website; the title is ‘Sony Alpha DSLR A700 Digital Field Guide‘.


  • Zeiss announce 18mm f3.5 – not for Alpha

    The parallel development of Carl Zeiss lenses for Sony (AF lenses in the Alpha mount) and independent manual focus lenses for other makes continues. The latest CZ design is a revision of the classic 18mm Distagon last seen in the Contax system, optimised for colour balance and reflection supression with digital SLRs.

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  • A flash ‘revolution’ – the Sony HVL-F58AM

    Sony has announced the September introduction of the most powerful flash yet for the Alpha system, the Sony HVL-F58AM which incorporates a brand new body design allowing optimum bounce flash illumination regardless of how you hold the camera.

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  • Megapixels and perceived detail

    Increases in pixel count are often dismissed because to ‘double’ the resolution of a 6 megapixel sensor you would need 24 megapixels. Indeed, to double it linearly you would – but the human eye judges density of detail on an area basis.
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  • Faking a polarizer using RAW

    Here’s a question which came in to my email just now:

    “Could I process a RAW file in Photoshop to achieve a similar effect as if I had used a Polaroid lens filter?
    Or would I be better just using the Polaroid filter?”

    The answer is that you can never imitate the effect of polarizing light (which changes the way reflective surfaces look, and deepens or lightens the sky blue according to the zone of the sky relative to the sun’s position. But you can use Adobe Camera Raw (CS3 versions) to deepen skies you never thought could be rescued.

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  • Sony Alpha 350 – a Creative Review

    The introduction of a £399 (street price, RRP £449) DSLR with 14.2 megapixels – with or without a useful type of Live View – should have been applauded by reviewers. It’s the single most important point about the camera. No other DSLR approaches this image size and resolution at such a low price. (more…)