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September 25, 2008

[REVIEW—SONY A300 DSLR]

Price: $1000 with 18-70mm lens.

Interesting camera, poor kit lens

The low-down: This 10 megapixel DSLR is a sub-$1000 camera in basic kit form. Construction is acceptable with plain plastic much in evidence. It comes with the Sony 18-70mm kit lens and can also be bought in a two lens kit with a 55-200mm tele zoom. The lenses are slow and rough in operation as well as being optically unimpressive. However, they are cheap! There is effective in-body image stabilisation and dust removal. The LCD screen is articulated and will swivel through a front/back axis but not sideways. The viewfinder is cramped and dim, which is average for this level camera. Image storage is on expensive Memory Stick or inexpensive CF card. The implementation of live view is excellent.

Like: This camera has two stand-out features – the swivelling LCD screen and the live view function. Although the LCD is relatively small and only moves through limited angles it is wonderful for overhead and low level shooting. And this is the first DSLR with live view that works pretty much as it does on a compact. You just point and shoot. Focus is fast and fairly accurate and there is no double-clunk as on other SLRs with live view.

Dislike: JPEG images straight from the camera are soft. We suspect that this is not a camera fault but a lens issue. We would strongly recommend buying the body plus one of the excellent Zeiss lenses that Sony offer as an option – expensive but good.

Verdict: This camera will appeal to customers moving up from a compact because the live view arrangement will feel immediately familiar. But can anyone explain why holding a heavy DSLR at arm’s length makes more sense than using the optical viewfinder? We feel that image quality is not up to par, even shooting RAW, mainly because of the indifferent performance of the lenses. Compared with the Canon 1000D and the Nikon D60 the Sony stands out in features and falls behind in kit lens quality.

Posted by terry at 01:32 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

[THE ESSENTIAL DIGITAL DARKROOM]

A pal came around the other day to pick our brains about what he needs to start post-camera processing of his digital photographs.

He is an experienced photographer with excellent picture taking hardware, a Nikon D200 and lenses, but not enough time to do the photo editing and printing. He has preferred to leave that to someone else.

Recently he was taking some important pictures and the camera slipped into RAW mode. Well, that’s his story. And faced with a bunch of RAW files on his memory card he didn’t know what to do with them. He couldn’t even open them on his computer to review them.

In fact he could, he didn’t know how. He has Irfanview installed on his PC and to view NEF files – Nikon’s RAW format – he only needed to download and install the plug-in file from www.irfanview.com. So at least we were able to talk him through those steps over the phone.

Once the files are open in Irfanview they can be saved as JPEGs or TIFFs, but that’s a pretty crude way to treat RAW files. The best way is todownload Adobe Camera RAW, the versatile free RAW processor and converter. It would be easy – except that our friend has Photoshop 7 on his computer and Camera RAW won’t work with older versions of Photoshop.

We looked at software prices from one of our advertisers in these pages and found that Photoshop CS3 (soon to be replaced by CS4) costs $898. But there is another way to approach the conversion process. Adobe Camera RAW works with the latest version of Photoshop Elements 6 (about to be replaced with 7). The price of Elements 6 is $124 and 7 will be about the same.

There are other RAW converters, but we think that the Camera RAW/Elements combination is good value for money. Elements is a drastic cut-down version of Photoshop and it has an annoyingly patronising gee-whiz interface, but it has the essentials for photo editing. And he still has Photoshop 7 to fall back on for more complex processes, because it is still a supremely competent program. Where he feels the need for more comprehensive editing tools he can save his photo in Elements as a PSD – the Photoshop default lossless format – and open it in 7.

Our friend could approach the business from another angle. Adobe Lightroom 2 (a review is coming soon) is a combination RAW converter and image editor. It is not cheap at $386, but that’s $500 less than Photoshop CS3.

Lightroom 2 is a fully featured application that provides an extraordinary degree of control over what it calls the “develop” process in the digital darkroom.

You can print from Lightroom but without the same degree of printer control that is provided in Photoshop. It is still better to save the edited image as a PSD file and reopen it in Photoshop for printing.

In the end our recommendation came down to three possibilities. The best, and most expensive, is to opt for Photoshop CS3 or 4. Then the free plug-in, Adobe Camera RAW, takes care of the conversion. The second best is the Lightroom/Photoshop 7 combination. And the third and cheapest option is Photoshop Elements with the RAW plug-in and keeping Photoshop 7 for special cases requiring more fastidious editing.

Posted by terry at 01:28 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

September 18, 2008

[REVIEW—RICOH GX200 VF kit]

Price: $900 with electronic viewfinder

OK camera with bad noise

The low-down: This 12 megapixel camera has a 24-72mm (film equivalent) zoom that is reasonably fast with an f2.5 maximum aperture. In other words this is a true wide angle optic. The build quality is excellent and ergonomics are good. Appearance is austere and purposeful and the camera is a little larger than most compacts, with a useful hand-grip bulge at one end. In its basic state there is no optical viewfinder but an electronic viewfinder is offered as an option. It slots into the flash shoe and can be tilted forward, making low-level photography easier. And adding the viewfinder doesn’t interfere with the on-camera flash. This is one of the very few compacts that will capture in RAW, in three different sizes and aspect ratios, using the Adobe universal DNG format.

Like: The wide angle lens is ideal for travellers. Distortion is reasonably well controlled and there is a Distortion Correction function that almost, but not quite, eliminates barrel distortion. The RAW recording ability should be a plus but we found that the JPEG output was almost as good.

Dislike: This camera suffers from extreme image noise. Even with noise reduction turned on full-time we couldn’t get the graininess under control, except at speeds below ISO100. Unfortunately the shadow noise coagulates into ugly black clumps.

Verdict: This camera has a lot going for it. It feels like it has been made by serious photographers for serious photographers. The electronic viewfinder is a useful accessory. And for anyone content to stick with ISO speeds under 100 it produces good images, well exposed and with very good white balance and lovely skin tones. 12 megapixels on such a small sensor is asking for trouble and Ricoh haven’t worked out how to improve the signal-to-noise ratio as well as Sony, for instance, have done. Now if we could only put the Sony image processor into the Ricoh we would have a great little camera.

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Posted by terry at 01:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

[ FLASH FOOD ]

A pal phoned last month, wanting advice on photographing food. He knows a good cook and he wants to make a photographic record of her culinary creations.

The best advice we can give him is to look in recipe books. No matter what the style of photography we have in mind we can always learn from the work of the experts.

But it so happens that we know an expert in the trade. His name is Jim McFarlane, and he has been immortalising photogenic carrots and chops for the past fifteen years. If anyone knows how to take portraits of comestibles Jim does.

So we took ourselves to his cutely named studio, Decent Exposure, to watch the master at work, photographing food in which the vital ingredient today, supplied by the client for whom he is working, is mustard. In other words, juicy roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and gravy.

Over the fifteen years of working with food Jim has established a partnership with food stylist, Caroline Westmore. A good food stylist, we are told, has a keen sense of colour, composition and the play of light on surfaces and textures. Caroline makes the subject look delicious and Jim takes the photo.

The camera he uses for this particular job is a Sinar view camera, fitted with an adapted Hasselblad digital back. It occurs to us that our pal, the would-be amateur, is not going to invest in this sort of gear, but Jim also uses his Nikon D3.

The Sinar is tethered to a Mac computer and images are saved to the hard drive and are immediately available for review and editing. We watch as Jim eliminates undesirable reflections and patches up spots of stray mustard powder and a speck or two of who-knows-what. He also plays with colour and saturation. He has no nostalgic longing for film and its delayed gratification and limited post-camera editing. He reckons that his digital output is more than double his best with film.

Jim works with available light, coming through a very big window over which a diffusing screen has been mounted. The light is soft and even, but directional. To lighten the shadow side of the subject he puts up white or silver reflectors – simply sheets of white and silver card.

Today the roast beef is cooked in the studio kitchen by chef Simone Fergie, and brought straight to the set table. Jim has already marked the positions where the various meat and vegetables will stand, and the cooked food is placed immediately on those spots. The time that elapses between straight-from-the-oven scrumptious and yesterday’s leftovers is pretty short, so there’s no time to mess around with exposures, focus and light. And if there is a salad involved the studio must be kept as cold as possible to prevent limp lettuce syndrome.

These photos are for a recipe book and the formula is to get the most expensive ingredient in sharp focus and the rest of the picture a pretty blur. If he had been shooting for a package to go on the supermarket shelf then everything would be in sharp focus, front to back.

And yes, we did get to eat the roast beef. Waste not, want not, we say.

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Posted by terry at 01:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 11, 2008

[REVIEW—OLYMPUS E-520 DSLR]

 

Price: $1300 two lens kit

Light and sweet

The low-down: This 10 megapixel camera has a Four Thirds sensor as used also by Panasonic/Leica. The sensor is smaller in area than the conventional APS sized unit used by other makers. It has an aspect ratio of 4:3 rather than 3:2. Olympus have been refining “live view” since the E-330 and it now works reasonably well -- there is at least auto focussing, albeit slow and noisy. The stand-out feature of the E-520 is the highly effective in-camera image stabilisation. The wireless flash capability is excellent and unexpected at this price. Camera construction is rugged, while being small and light. The dust removal system is reassuring. The two kit lenses are among the best of the type and provide a focal length range (35mm equivalent) of 28-300mm. Storage is by Compact Flash or xD card and continuous shooting speed is 3.5 fps. There is no body-top camera status LCD.

Like: There is nothing cut-down about this camera. It has all the functions a serious photographer expects, in a small and light system of body and lenses. Focus, exposure and white balance are good. Ergonomics – the placing of external controls around the body – are good.

Dislike: The lenses are optically very good for the price but they are mechanically a tad rough. The zoom is stiff and gritty but the manual focus is smooth and well damped. The dynamic range is restricted compared with the competition and the viewfinder is small and dim.

Verdict: This two lens kit is excellent value for the traveller because it is so light and compact. Having spent a couple of days walking around with the full kit in a small bag it was a shock to the system to come back to the heavy Nikon and Canon DSLRs. Do they really need to be that big? Of course the Olympus can be small because its sensor is small and that is not always a good thing. At ISO speeds above 100 the image quality is not quite up to the standards of the competition. Still, a fine camera/lens combination for the price.

 

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[ YOU TOO CAN BE A PRO ]

 

IF YOU HAVE EVER DREAMED OF TURNING YOUR HOBBY INTO A BUSINESS, but thought that it was too late or too hard, consider the story of Queenslander, Amanda Rohde.

In 2003 Amanda owned a simple 3 megapixel point-and-shoot camera that she barely knew how to use. Now, in this last year, she has made enough money from her photography business to support herself and take on her husband as her business manager. And, as a photographer, she is completely self-taught.

Five years ago, at the age of 23, Amanda discovered the stock photo service, www.istockphoto.com, which sells royalty-free photos to designers, publishers, advertisers and so on. (A similar service, which Imaging has used, is www.fotolia.com) These on-line image libraries work on the basis of micro-charges for image use, so that images may be downloaded and reproduced for a flat payment of just a few dollars. The contributors are paid a percentage of the fee collected which varies, depending on size, resolution and popularity of a picture.

Amanda took one look at istockphoto examples and decided that she could do that. Her only real experience with photography to that point was doing Photoshop image retouching for professionals.

So, with her little point-and-shoot, she took some photos, went through the enrolment procedure for istockphoto, and sent off her samples. From that point she hasn’t looked back. Right now she has over 10,000 photos on istockphoto and the annual paid download of her pictures is approaching 140,000.

Amanda says, with a straight face, that when her pictures were rejected because of “motion blur” she had no idea what it meant. She says that she googled every fault that caused a rejection and, one by one, she eliminated the faults and over-compensated. Her images are technically meticulous, beautifully lit, composed and sharply focussed, front to back.

These stock photo libraries rely on cliché images for their business and Amanda says that the big sellers are attractive young women, wearing headsets and smiling a huge smile of the “I’m just here to help” style. And generally speaking the best selling photos are those against a stark white background into which the designer can place the editorial or advertising text.

These days she uses a Canon 1Ds MkII, the camera of choice of many professionals. And she has a studio set up in her house. Some models, whose pictures sell well, she pays and with some she trades photos for their folios in return for their service.

One of her favourite models is her mother – or, at least, her mother’s hands. After a lifetime of dedication to the garden her hands are worn and strong and, according to Amanda, beautiful. They appear in many of her photos.

iStockphoto grades its contributors according to the number of images held in stock and the demand for the pictures. Amanda is a Black Diamond member, and that is as high as it gets.

Her technical mastery of the medium is impressive, but the sheer volume of images is a product of a remarkable imagination. Remember, these are not commissioned photos – every one is an invention, the product of constant observation and analysis of advertising, publishing and photographic representation of ideas and concepts.

You can see Amanda Rohde’s istockphoto portfolio at http://tinyurl.com/5s5kw4 (She goes by the cybernym Hidesy).

 

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September 05, 2008

[REVIEW—NIKON D700 camera]

Price: $4000 (body only)

Simply magnificent

The low-down: This 12 megapixel camera has an FX sensor (full 35mm film frame size) as used in the professional D3. The camera body is more akin to the DX (APS size sensor) D300, but without some of the touches like extra dust and moisture sealing. It lacks the extreme ruggedness of the D300 and the D3, but it sports the wonderful FX sensor. Ergonomics are excellent, with every important function accessible from external buttons, thumb wheels and knobs. The 7.5cm high resolution LCD is a dream. The auto focus and exposure systems, as shared with the D300 and D3, are class-leading. There is “live view” and continuous shooting with the standard battery is 5 frames per second. There is an HDMI video out for viewing images on high definition TV and monitors. There is automatic dust removal. And there is an artificial horizon – just like in an aeroplane – to check for horizontal precision!

Like: Like the D3 the D700 automatically detects DX lenses, which have a smaller exposure circle, and shows a crop rectangle in the viewfinder. You lose some pixels but you get a perfect picture. Images are noise free with wide dynamic range and beautiful tonal gradation. Auto bracketing can produce an amazing nine images at varied exposures or white balance.

Dislike: This is not a complaint, merely an observation. With a full frame sensor depth of field is reduced, by comparison with an APS sized sensor, for any given f stop. Closer attention needs to be paid of ISO, aperture and shutter speed. Fortunately the sensor is so free of image noise that you lose nothing by operating at a higher ISO.

Verdict: Someone has calculated that for a digital camera to match the resolving power of film it needs to have 14 megapixels on a full frame sensor. If that is right then this camera comes close to the ideal. Like its close siblings, the D300 and the D3, the D700 is superbly responsive. All functions are lightning fast and the 51 point auto-focus is outstanding. If you can afford it then run, don’t walk, to your nearest camera shop.

Posted by terry at 01:42 AM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

[ PHOTOGRAPHIC ART DECO ]

 

If you have ever wondered what it was that the black burlesque dancer, Josephine Baker, did in her act that made her famous in 30s Paris then wonder no longer. It seems that she bounced around, shirtless, like a demented marionette with tangled strings, all the while crossing her eyes in pantomime fashion. Decidedly un-erotic.

You can see for yourself at the great Art Deco exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, where there is film of La Baker in performance. Mind you, that is not why Imaging went to the Gallery. It was an unexpected bonus.

We went to look at the small photographic content on show. There are prints by Cecil Beaton and Man Ray (one of Mlle Baker) and, from closer to home, a few of Harold Cazneaux’s pictorials of the Sydney Harbour Bridge under construction. It is interesting to see how photographers integrated their art into the prevailing graphic style of the time. Cazneaux was influenced by the British school of pictorial photography and that led him into  making photographs of Sydney as a place of soft mists and shadows. It’s a gorgeous look, but it looks more like Manchester on a foggy winter’s day than Sydney at any time.

Photography is verboten in the exhibition itself, but it’s still worth taking a camera. In the central courtyard, standing in magnificent isolation, is a red 1936 Mercedes straight eight, supercharged convertible. And you can snap away at this photogenic motorcar to your heart’s content.

Melbourne city itself is significant gallery of art deco works. There are a number of buildings built in the thirties, several with the characteristic feature of the “crown” on top – a short tower that doesn’t seem to serve any purpose except decoration.

There is one vital word of advice for photographers wandering around Melbourne in search of a subject: Look up! Melbourne at street level is dire in its drabness, but up above the cantilevered awnings, where no attempt has been made to modernise, the original architectural vision is, in most cases, intact.

There is a photographic catalogue of Melbourne’s art deco buildings at www.artdecoworld.com/melbcity1.htm and ~/melbcity2.htm This is a handy walker’s guide, but be warned. The names of some of the buildings have changed and you need to be old enough to remember that Buckley and Nunn’s is now David Jones.

Look for the details in these edifices. The little bits of sculpture and the geometric patterns in the windows and the mosaic at the old Newspaper House in Collins street are an important part of the style. And the typography also marks a building as art deco when it is boldly chiselled, sans serif lettering, often compressed.

This is another occasion on which we went out kitted with the Olympus E-520 and two lenses, covering a film equivalent range of 28–300mm between them. We love these small, light lenses which are so sharp and fast in focus, and the camera gives us the advantage of its truly effective image stabilisation system. (A full camera review is on the way.)

 

NOTE: Recently Imaging compared the price of a Canon iP100 portable printer in Australia with the American price, and we wondered why we pay almost double. The answer, we are told, is that the Australian package contains a battery, which in the American package is an option for an extra US $100.

 

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