Tabla de contenidos para January - February 2021 en Camera

Due to the social distancing requirements demanded by the on-going COVID-19 pandemic, galleries, exhibition spaces and museums are only allowing limited admission or are open for shorter times, depending on the local situation. However, many are still staging online events or virtual tours. Check with the individual venues for which exhibitions are open for physical visits and any changes to opening hours. Current to 28 February: Exhibition. Wildlife Photographer Of The Year 2019. Winners and finalists – 100 images in all – displayed on special light panels. At the Australian National Maritime Museum, 2 Murray Street, Darling Harbour, Sydney, NSW 2000. Ticketed event. Museum hours are 9.30am to 5.00pm daily. For more information and bookings visit www.sea.museum/whats-on/exhibitions. Exhibition open and also available as an online tour. Current to 30 May:…

While Nikon was a latecomer to the category of full-frame mirrorless cameras, the original Z 6 and Z 7 were immediately big hits. They’re both now upgraded to Mark II versions to address the few initial criticisms, but the fact that we’re only talking upgrades here – and not brand-new models – is an indication of how much Nikon got right straight off the bat. The basic feature sets, ergonomics and performance were all classic Nikon in their execution and application, sprinkled with the magic dust of desirability that has been a key element of the company’s higher-end reflex cameras since the beginning. The APS-C format Z 50 is the current winner of the Consumer Mirrorless Camera category in our annual Camera Magazine Imaging Awards (winning against some pretty stiff…

If you’re a lens maker then, after the obligatory ‘fast fifty’, the next badge of honour is an f/1.4-speed 85mm short telephoto prime – the classic portrait lens. You just have to do one, but the optical design leaves nowhere to hide. It looks deceptively simple, but there are many challenges related to the large diameter and the need to effectively deal with a range of aberrations – spherical, comatic and chromatic, both longitudinal and lateral – while also delivering high contrast, low flare and a uniformity of both brightness and sharpness across the frame, even when shooting wide-open at f/1.4. Samyang has built quite a few 85mm f/1.4 primes over the years – in fact, there are least four different versions in the current line-up – and these have…

You’d expect a new Panasonic mirrorless camera to have pretty decent video capabilities, but the Lumix S5 goes a lot further than that, and there’s more to come with an imminent firmware upgrade. Of course, Panasonic isn’t giving everything away, but the S5 has everything that many video-makers want, even at the professional level. The smaller size is obviously a plus, along with IBIS, while the lower-res EVF (compared to the S1 or S1H) and smaller display obviously aren’t going to be issues for anybody using an external monitor and recorder. It all starts with 4K UHD recording internally with 10-bit 4:2:2 colour using the full sensor width, and at 24, 25 or 30fps, giving a bit rate of 150 Mbps. You can shoot at 50 or 60fps, but this…

The first Luminar Bug Photography Awards – run in assoc¡at¡on with Europe’s leading ¡nvertebrate charity, Buglife – attracted over 5,000 entries from around the world, competing in 11 categories. What will become an annual competition was launched in 2020 as a way of simultaneously celebrating invertebrate photography, and raising awareness of the plight of so many invertebrate species, which have seen large declines in their populations. The awards have also raised valuable funds for the conservation efforts of Buglife. The judging panel contained a number of well-known personalities, including Buglife President, Germaine Greer; TV presenter and naturalist Nick Baker; and ground-breaking invertebrates photographer Levon Biss. The grand prize winner and Luminar Bug Photographer Of The Year for 2020 is Mofeed Abu Shalwa, a Saudi Arabian photographer who started photographing invertebrates…

IT’S A LENS that couldn’t be done – at least in practical terms – with a sensor any bigger than Micro Four Thirds, but Olympus has gone all-out to make the most of the 1.97x magnification factor. The much-awaited M.Zuiko Digital ED 150-400mm f/4.5 TC1.25x IS PRO supertelephoto zoom is still a physically big lens – measuring 31.4cm in length and weighing in at 1,875g – but this needs to be put into perspective because it’s equivalent to a 300-800mm with a constant aperture of f/4.5. If you then engage the built-in 1.25 teleconverter, you get 375-1000mm for the loss of two-thirds of a stop of speed… so the constant aperture is now f/5.6. This is some lens. To add to the versatility, it has optical image stabilisation which, when…

The Epson International Pano Awards was founded in 2009 by Australian landscape photographer David Evans (the 2015 AIPP Australian Landscape Photographer Of The Year) with the support of Epson Australia, and has since grown into a collaboration between dedicated professional photographers, industry professionals and sponsors. It is now the largest competition in the world for panoramic photography. This year the competition attracted a record 5,859 entries from 1,452 professional and amateur photographers from 96 countries. They were competing for thousands of dollars cash and prizes, with the main sponsor Epson Australia alone providing prizes that included an Epson SureColor P7070 24-inch large format photo printer, a SureColor P5070 17-inch format printer and an Epson EB-1781W ultra-slim projector. The overall winner of the 2020 Open Competition was Matt Jackisch from Canada,…

There’s little doubt Nikon decided to prioritise the wants and needs of still photographers with the Z 5, although if you only want to shoot in Full HD, it’s still a pretty decent video camera. Bear in mind, despite all hoopla surrounding 4K (and now 8K), Full HD still makes a lot of sense if you’re making videos for fun, though there are plenty of pro productions still being made at this resolution. The key drawback with the Z 5 when shooting 4K is a massive 1.7x crop, meaning you’ll struggle to have a super-wide view, at least with the current line-up of Z mount lenses (the 14mm effectively becomes a 24mm). Needless to say, there’s no 50fps frame rate (but there is the cinematic 24fps), 10-bit colour or N-Log…

Back in early 2018 when he was interviewed for sister magazine, ProPhoto, Stuart Spence talked about his move into what could loosely be described as fine-art photography. He was, however, reluctant to call himself a fine-art photographer and thought he was better served calling “a spade a spade, and referring to myself simply as a reportage photo artist. Irrepressible, like instinctual... it’s where all the good stuff lives, I believe. Thinking is the enemy.” In the same interview, Sydney based freelance photographer, Wendy McDougall, who had been mentored by Stu, recalled him telling her in the early 1990s about his growing desire to make out-of-focus photographs. “This was maybe initially out of the frustration at how he saw the advertising world operating, as much as a form of self-expression,” Wendy…

WINNER Some of the greatest photographs have been well-spot-ted juxtapositions of elements that most people simply wouldn’t have noticed. John Walker has added to his visual joke by titling it Window Pain and, ironically, the location is an old asylum in Tasmania. John comments, “Afterwards, I did wonder if I should have checked to make sure they weren’t real.” John used a Canon EOS 90D with an 18-135mm zoom lens. HIGHLY COMMENDED Atmosphere and composition combine convincingly in this appealing study by Alison Faith Tjahjadi. The bridge works very effectively as a device to lead the viewer right into the middle of the picture. Alison used a Nikon Coolpix B500 superzoom camera. FUJIFILM SHOWCASE 2021 The 2021 Fujifilm Showcase runs until 31 August 2021. You can enter the Fujifilm Showcase…

AN INTERESTING BIT of information to emerge from Leica Camera Australia’s online launch of the Q2 Monochrom was just how much film photography had taken off in Covid times. Obviously, in this instance, film photography with Leica cameras. Apparently, the price of secondhand M6s has doubled in the last six months, and LCA has sold out of the MP, the last-of-the-line 35mm M you can still buy brand new. Plus the service department has been flat out resurrecting and repairing old Leica film cameras of all flavours. Of course, it makes sense that, with more time on their hands – and probably more funds at their disposal too – many photographers might think about giving film a shot or, if you’re of my vintage, dragging out the old gear for…

The Picture Highly commended in the Urban Wildlife category of the 2020 Wildlife Photographer Of The Year competition. The Photographer Gary Meredith, Western Australia. The Equipment Nikon D850 with a 24-70mm f/2.8 lens at 62mm; 1/250 second at f/16 and ISO 640. Nikon SB-700 flash with Godox Xpro wireless flash system. The Story Two common brushtail possums – a mother (left) and her joey – peek out of their hiding place under the roof of a shower block in a holiday park in Yallingup, Western Australia. Gary had watched them all week. They would pop up at sunset, keep an eye on the campers till dark, then squeeze out through the gap and head for the trees to feed on the leaves of a peppermint tree. These small, adaptable marsupials…

Big camera or small camera? What’s your preference? There’s no question that plenty of photographers rank many other things ahead of a camera size, especially if they’ve been used to using a higher-end DSLR with a full-frame sensor. It’s equally true that for many, having something that’s smaller and lighter is a priority for a variety of reasons. This where the smaller sensor sizes have proved popular, especially for anybody who regularly uses longer focal length lenses. But there are a growing number of shooters who want the bigger sensor in a more compact package, and this is where Sony has been cleaning up with its A7 series models, with a new challenger in the shape of the even more compact A7C. In comparison, Panasonic’s Lumix S series bodies have…

We all know that the monitors in desktop and laptop computers are usually the cheapest displays manufacturers can get away with. We also know that a calibrated monitor is essential for image editing, especially if you’re planning to make accurate prints. But then the inevitable questions about photo monitors are – does it have to be so big and do I really have to spend that much money? The answers are ‘no’ and ‘no’. The good news is that the choice of more affordable photo monitors is on the increase and Acer is the latest arrival with its ConceptD CM2 series. The CM2241W is the 24-inch monitor and this display size strikes a good balance between something that’s big enough to be useful for applications such as image editing, but…

www.teds.com.au THIS CHECKLIST is designed to allow direct comparisons between different camera models, listed here 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 be confirmed) are used. If a feature is…