Cameracraft magazine – Taking your practical photography further
Daniel Oi – who provided our most popular external link in recent weeks with his Glasgow Merchant City surround-vision stitched VR panorama – has created a superb view of the Kibble Palace glasshouse at Glasgow’s Botanical Gardens: Continue reading »
News tonight from Sony UK – great news for UK buyers…
As of the 1st of April 2008 the UK Sony Style business will transfer from a Belgian to a UK based company.* This will not affect your statutory rights or data protection in any way. This change will create a range of benefits for any future purchases that you may make. Continue reading »
Adobe has released updates to Photoshop Lightroom and the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in, both available immediately as free upgrades for existing users. The releases provide added raw file support for nine additional digital cameras, including the Sony Alpha 200 (already supported by 4.3.2 whether they knew it or not), Alpha 300 and Alpha 350. Lightroom 1.4 also provides updated printer driver compatibility for Apple Leopard Mac OS X 10.5. Continue reading »
Kenro has announced the release of a series of new LCD panel protectors from Marumi. Continue reading »
Kenro has announced the release of a series of new hard plastic LCD panel protectors from Marumi – including one for the Sony Alpha 100. The price is very reasonable at only £6.99 retail. Continue reading »
Moving a DSLR – preferably without vertical grip because of the further imbalance created – to portrait format shooting on a small tripod ballhead produces an unstable arrangement where the head is stressed. The camera may sag unless the head is tightened, and if the lens is heavy, it may also unscrew itself from the normal tripod bush tightening. A L-bracket is the ideal solution for mounting your camera for a portrait session or any other situation where most of the images will be vertical. Continue reading »
There’s a lot of controversy right now about whether or not the image structure of the Alpha 700 files at very high ISO – mainly 3200 and 6400 – is as clean as raw processed results from other comparable cameras like the Canon 40D (does not offer ISO 6400), the Olympus E-3 (does not offer ISO 6400) or the Nikon D300. At the heart of this is the way different raw processors handle file conversion, and most specifically, the current performance of Adobe Camera Raw 4.3.1. Continue reading »
The Sony DSLR A200 is now on sale, following the end of Alpha 100 production. Although it is without any doubt the Alpha 100 replacement mentioned by Sony executives in October 2007, when they first revealed that the 100 was no longer being made, it is not an exact equivalent and represents a mixture of upgraded performance and simplified specification. Because it has gone in two directions at the same time, the A200 poses a problem for A100 owners. Continue reading »
Apple’s Aperture 2.0 is a tedious program to test, with all its creation of ‘projects’ and ‘libraries’, ‘albums’, ‘vaults’ and nonstandard GUI, and it isn’t fast in processing files or passing them to Photoshop (which it does in 16-bit form, just another step to reverse before saving as far as I’m concerned). However, it’s handling Alpha 700 raw quite well. And it does things differently, with non-destructive raw editing, stacks of image versions, and so on. Continue reading »
Daniel Oi is a dedicated and experienced Alpha system user currently staying in Glasgow. He’s created a particularly impressive 360 degree panorama of a tiny area of the city centre which has unexpected magic in its Christmas lighting garb. Go down Buchanan Street, turn towards George Square, and you will walk through this Georgian enclave with street cafés, galleries, bookstore, museum and an atmosphere quite unlike the busy main drag or the vast square it links.
http://cnqo.phys.strath.ac.uk/~daniel/Panos/MerchantCity.movÂ
This is well worth a visit!
– David