Tabla de contenidos para July - August 2019 en Camera

You probably won’t be surprised to learn that I absolutely love magazines. It all started from when I started earning pocket money and, as with a great many of my vintage growing up in the UK, purchases were driven by hobbies. Just in my case there were (and still are) multiple hobbies and, in those days, quite a number of magazines were weeklies… Motor and Autocar to feed the car passion, Amateur Photographer (which is still published every Tuesday) and Flight International. These were then topped up with the monthlies, of which there were a number of aviation and photography titles. It required judicious financial planning (often involving extra hedge-cutting or lawn-mowing) and, over time, began to present something of a storage crisis. Still does. I’ve taken to rationing my…

FUJIFILM AUSTRALIA HAS launched a professional support program for photographers which provides a number of services, including complementary telephone and email support, equipment check-ups and cleaning, express repairs and emergency equipment loans. Fujifilm Professional Services (FPS) is available to photographers – both professionals and enthusiast-level – who qualify for membership via the purchase of selected GFX and X series products over the last two years from an authorised Fujifilm retailer. You must also be resident in Australia. If you’re not a working photographer, you’ll need to have bought a GFX medium format mirrorless camera body and at least one lens; or two qualifying X mount bodies and three lenses. Professional photographers (i.e. somebody who is earning the majority of their annual income from photography) must have purchased one qualifying camera…

Current to 21 July: Exhibition. Street Photography 1930s – 1960s. Photographs drawn from private collections documenting Sydney’s busy streets shown alongside contemporary street photography by photomedia artist Anne Zahalka. At the Museum Of Sydney, corner Phillip and Bridge Streets, Sydney, NSW 2000. Gallery hours are 10.00am to 5.00pm daily. Museum admission fees apply. For more information call (02) 9251 5988 or visit wwwsydneylivingmuseums. com.au Current to 25 August: Exhibition. Wildlife Photographer Of The Year. One hundred images from the finalists and winners in the 2018 edition of the world’s biggest wildlife photography competition. At the Australian National Maritime Museum, 2 Murray Street, Darling Harbour, Sydney, NSW 2000. Entry is $20 which includes admission to the museum’s permanent galleries. Museum hours are 9.30am to 5.00pm daily. For more information telephone (02)…

THOSE CRAZY ITALIANS! Accessory company Celly – which is based just outside Milan – has been making gadgets for mobile phones for many years, but now has some interesting products for compact cameras such as video actioncams. At the top of the list is the Squiddy, so-named because it looks a bit like an octopus and works like one too. The Squiddy is a flexible support for an actioncam or a smartphone, and it has six tentacle-like legs with a total of 23 suckers, so you can basically attach it to anything. It’s supplied with an adjustable clamp for holding a smartphone (up to 8.0 cm in width) or, alternatively, there’s a standard ¼-inch tripod screw mount or an actioncam fitting. The Squiddy is available in a choice of six…

BODYSHELL: Magnesium alloy covers with full sealing (at 95 points) against dust and moisture plus insulation to allow shooing at temperatures down to -10 degrees Celsius. A ‘double structure’ construction isolates key internal components from external knocks and shocks. Integrated horizontal and vertical grips with replicated controls. Top panel has a 4.6 cm B&W multi-functional LCD info display and there’s a secondary ‘rear sub monitor’ OLED-type display on the back panel (similar to the Nikon D5). Control layout is more contemporary than that of the GFX 50S so there are no classic dials, but nifty ‘virtual’ dials can be displayed in the top info screen. Weight is 1.4 kilograms with EVF, batteries and a memory card. Graphite grey finish is standard. EVF: Detachable module using a 0.5-inch OLED panel with…

Fujifilm hasn’t taken the X-T30 quite as far as a video camera as the X-T3, but that would have been giving too much away. Nevertheless, the T30 represents a big advance over the T20 when it comes to shooting video and certainly means that the Fujifilm camera can hold its own against its rivals from Sony and Panasonic. The value proposition is as big for video as it is for photography, if not bigger. For starters, the X-T30 is able to shoot 4K video in the cinematic 17:9 aspect ratio with the Cinema 4K resolution of 4096x2160 pixels (4K DCI) and at 30, 25 or 24 fps. There aren’t any options as far as setting the compression regime is concerned, but you can adjust the bit-rate to 200 or 100…

Organised by the World Photography Organisation, the annual Sony World Photography Awards is now the world’s biggest and most diverse photography competition. This year, it again attracted a huge number of entries – 326,000 in total – and these photographers represented a total of 195 different countries. The competition comprises Open and Professional sections, with the former comprising ten subject- or theme-based categories. In each of the Open categories the judges were looking for the best single image which met each category’s brief. In addition to the Open category winners, a total of 62 National Awards winners have also been selected – judged to be the strongest single image taken by a local photographer – with submissions coming from all over the globe, from Myanmar to Peru, Mexico to Vietnam.…

In early May 1995 I was visiting Leica Camera’s factory at Solms which isn’t very far from Wetzlar – its old and now new headquarters – about 80 kilometres north of Frankfurt. Back in those days Leica Akadamie was more about product knowledge than anything else so we’d spent two days being indoctrinated into the ways of M and R (I have a certificate to prove it)… specifically R7, R6.2 and M6. Part of the program involved a tour of the factory and, as we passed along a drab corridor, through a window into a small lab, I spotted something very unusual looking. It was a number of camera top cover pressings with different finishes, clearly for a 35mm SLR, but equally clearly not either the R7 or R6.2. I…

THE LAUNCH OF a new D-SLR is increasingly becoming a cause for celebration these days, even if it is essentially only an upgrade of an existing model. The new Canon EOS 200D Mark II (EOS 250D in some markets) is the first new D-SLR since Nikon’s D3500 which was introduced back in late August 2018, which means we’ve actually gone well beyond a year between drinks. Yep, the wick has definitely been turned down in the D-SLR development engine room. Like the D3500, the EOS 200D Mark II is an entry-level model that’s been given a few important updates to keep it competitive, including 4K video and enhanced autofocusing capabilities. Canon’s says the 200D II is actually smallest and lightest D-SLR to date, so it has a slightly different bodyshell…

Type: Enthusiast-level digital mirrorless camera with Fujifilm X bayonet lens mount. Focusing: TTL automatic hybrid system using phase-difference detection and contrast-detection measurements. 425 measuring points (25x17 pattern) in total, giving 100 percent frame coverage, or 117 points (13x9 pattern). Single-point, zone (7x7, 5x5 or 3x3 point clusters selected from 91 points) and wide/ tracking modes. Five AF-C custom settings for optimising tracking plus a user-definable setting. Face/eye detection with left/right priority. Manual switching between one-shot and continuous AF modes. AF+MF mode. Low-light assist via illuminator. Manual focus assist via magnified image, ‘Digital Split Image’ display (colour or B&W), ‘Digital Microprism’ display or focus peaking display (white, red or blue; low or high levels). Sensitivity range is EV -3.0 - 18 (ISO 100). Metering: 256-point multi-zone, centre-weighted average, full average, spot…

“It takes 200 minutes to screw together a GFX 100, with a myriad of tests performed at various stages during the process.” Over the next couple of months somebody somewhere is going to buy a Fujinon GF 100-200mm f5.6 R LM OIS WR zoom that contains a very special lens element. It was cleaned personally by yours truly, and passed the critical inspection that would enable it to proceed to the production line. OK, so it may have just been a demo element, but I’d like to think it’s now installed in a 100-200mm zoom that’s being used by the owner of a GFX camera body somewhere in the world. We were at Fujifilm’s Taiwa factory, just outside the city of Sendai in the north-east of Japan and about two…

DIGITAL SLR CAMERAS BUYER’S CHECK LIST JULY/AUGUST 2019 THIS CHECKLIST is designed to allow direct comparisons between different camera models, here listed in price order within each brand. The published prices are mostly supplied by the distributors as recommended retail prices (RRPs). However, some distributors are no longer supplying RRPs to the media so it has become necessary to determine an ‘estimated street price’ derived from the range of prices for a model published by retailers. Where this has been necessary, the letter ‘E’ appears at the start of the entry. A dot appearing in a column indicates that the feature is available on the camera model listed. Where a specification or product detail hasn’t yet been published or confirmed, the letters TBA (to be announced) or TBC (to…

ATTHETIME it unveiled its second RF mount mirrorless camera body the EOS RP, Canon also revealed its plans for six new RF lenses, all scheduled for launch sometime this year. The first of these is the RF 85mm f1.2L USM which is designed to make the most of the mirrorless camera configuration, so its optical construction employs Canon’s new ‘Blue Spectrum Refractive Optics’ (BR) element. First introduced with the EF 35mm f1.4L II USM, the BR element is designed to deliver, among other things, superior correction for chromatic aberrations. The BR element is specifically located in the lens so that it refracts blue light between the concave and convex lenses. Canon says that this arrangement enables the convergence of the entire wavelength of light to one point, resulting in higher…

Things were very different back in the early 1980s, when I was a regular contributor to Camera Craft (now Australian Camera). Although the first digital camera had been shown in 1975 (by, incidentally, Kodak), the technology was still a long way from entering the world of everyday photography, where it’s become ubiquitous today. The first personal computers were on the horizon, but the first commercial dial-up Internet service was still a decade away. Back then we wrote with typewriters and cut-and-paste editing involved scissors and glue – and a lot of ‘white-out’. We loaded our cameras with film, mostly Kodak’s Tri-X or Ilford’s Pan F, FP4 and HP5 for shooting in black and white, Kodachrome or Ektachrome for colour slides, and any of a number of colour negative films from…