Cameracraft magazine – Taking your practical photography further
Epson has today launched an innovative new print plug-in for the Adobe Photoshop family of products that provides users with enhanced functionality and flexibility, making colour-managed printing quicker and easier. Continue reading »
FUJIFILM UK Ltd. (Managing Director Hiroshi Saigusa) has announced that it is to increase prices on its range of photographic papers and films in the United Kingdom. The price changes are being implemented on a worldwide basis.
Prices will be increased from July 2008 and will range between 10% and 20% depending on the product group.
To sustain its photo imaging business, FUJIFILM has been undertaking intensive structural reforms to reduce fixed costs and improve productivity, and has been absorbing the increasing costs of raw materials used to manufacture films and papers over the past few years. However, the recent soaring costs of such materials as silver and crude oil mean that FUJIFILM is no longer able to absorb these costs during the production process.
FUJIFILM’S photographic paper and film continues to set the standard in terms of image quality and they are appreciated by professionals and enthusiasts alike. Fujifilm remains fully committed to this important market and plans to continue its product development of new photosensitive material.
FUJIFILM UK Ltd. (Managing Director Hiroshi Saigusa) has announced that it is to increase prices on its range of photographic papers and films in the United Kingdom. The price changes are being implemented on a worldwide basis. Continue reading »
Libraries like Alamy are demanding model releases even for crowd scenes now, if the image is to be sold as Royalty Free or offered with Rights Protection for commercial advertising. Either way, they want signed paper! This restricts all street scenes and many place-shots to Licensed (normal, editorial-only) status. Other libraries or portals will not accept unreleased people shots of any kind at all
The latest DSLRs – notably the Pentax K20D, Samsung GX20 and Sony Alpha 350 – offer over 14 megapixels in the small 1.5X factor format. Later this year we get 24 megapixels in full frame, but 14 on APS-C is higher density and will reveal more detail in the cropped area of the shot.
Here, snapped with the Pentax K20D (14.6 megapixels) is a crowded beach in Gran Canaria on a Spanish bank holiday Sunday before Easter. At this stage it is relatively empty 🙂 No-one gives a second thought to a camera with an 18-55mm kit lens. It is not as if this overdressed British tourist is waving a big white tele at them.
What they do not realise is that every single person on this beach is identifiable right down to the wrinkles on their cellulite, and worse things. Today’s DSLRs can pull out a section worthy of Breughel (though parts look more like Bosch) and show as much detail as you would once have expected from rollfilm:
This is cropped and reduced from an export using Adobe Camera Raw from the original .PEF file up to 6144 pixels wide (75 megabytes file size) – to view the full size crop click the image. It is exported with Sharpening set to 0, NR set to 0, and no post processing is applied to enhance detail. It is, as you would expect, slightly softened by the anti-aliasing filter and de-Bayer process but with a wealth of detail present.
Ten years ago you would have been happy to see an 640 x 480 digital camera picture looking as sharp as this crop. So, given web use of images, the picture libraries are right. A model release is needed for any commercial use of any scenes with people in, no matter how many people and how far away.
Today’s and tomorrow’s digital SLRs are going to capture scenes the photographer is not even able to spot when composing the shot, and may cause anything from embarassment to lawsuits because of the clarity of their information.
Be warned! And remember, too much sunbathing is damaging. Cover up…
– David Kilpatrick
Photographic supplier www.photomart.co.uk is to hold a “Summer Show”, a
bumper day of photo workshops, in its huge London showrooms on June 18,
2008.
An all-star cast of photographers – including Keith Trainor, Jon Gray,
and Ian Brierley – will present a variety of photo workshops sponsored
by manufacturers including BOWENS, ExpressDigital, Fujifilm, ICI and
SONY, on topics ranging from Event Photography to Studio Lighting, Wide
Format & Canvas Printing, and Workflow Productivity.
Free food and refreshments will be provided throughout the day, and
www.photomart.co.uk are giving 15% off most accessories and consumables
purchased at the workshops.
A single ticket grants entry to any workshop, and all are presented
twice on the day (once in the morning, once in the afternoon). That
means you should be able to attend at least two different ones.
Tickets, priced at just £50 +vat, can be booked from the
www.photomart.co.uk website. (Directions to the London venue are there
too.) Just type the search code “SUMMER08” into the Search Box on the
www.photomart.co.uk website.
Photoworld 2008 #2 is now being mailed to subscribers!
Our Spring edition features – Continue reading »
WE trialled a ZMags version of the January 08 issue of Photoworld here. We then looked at Uniflip. However, all these places want a few hundred dollars to leave a slightly adjusted Flash or Java version of a PDF we create, on their server for 12 months. The ZMags trial is now removed and after testing Uniflip, it was clear we had no reason at all to use this service either.
You can simply download a modest sized PDF (72 dpi screen res) of the January08 Issue here instead…
– David
The first SONY World Photography Awards were presented in the late April sunshine of Cannes, to what must have been an exclusive gala dinner audience – at €250 a head, our ‘man on the spot’ Thomas Goseberg decided against the opportunity to take his wife out for a quiet meal…
USERS of the Nikon D3 downloading the latest firmware update have found information strings referring to the D3X and listing the file sizes the forthcoming camera will produce. The sizes match the pixel count of the Sony full-frame CMOS sensor due to be used in the ‘Alpha 900’ Sony full-frame body. Continue reading »
The launch of the Alpha 350, with its small 0.74X viewfinder, makes a proper eyepiece magnifier attachment an essential addition to the Sony accessory range. Olympus, Nikon and Pentax all have such magnifiers, which permit a full view of the screen for most wearers and make all the difference to the manual focusing and general comfort in composing shots. We tested two devices, one of them the highly affordable Seagull 1x-2.5x right angle finder, and the other Olympus’s ME-1 1.2X ocular magnifier. Continue reading »
