Innholdsfortegnelse for March - May 2024 i Photo Review

It was a brochure-perfect summer morning in Forster. Tourism NSW could not have improved upon the view from our umbrella-shaded table at a beachfront cafe. Just beyond the kids squealing and leaping as the little waves scudded into the still uncrowded sand, a solitary swimmer made his leisurely progress in a glittering sea. Around us, the cafe was busy, with servers coming and going and patrons sipping coffee, studying their phones or just chatting while waiting for their orders to turn up. One group, finished with their breakfasts, stood up at a nearby table and made to leave for the beach. But two of their number, a couple I took to be in their late twenties, gestured that they’d follow the others soon. They were delayed because the young man…

Every Camera House store prides itself on being experts in photographic creativity and technology. Our longevity and success have been achieved through our store owners' and staff's passion for photography. This is a photographic showcase of three of our very talented Camera House staff members. Gus Wood I Works at Camera House in Lismore Winner of The 2023 Camera House Photo Award Initially, I started taking photos on my mum's old camera. I did a mix of learning through YouTube and teaching myself. I went on to study a course in film making and commercial video. After finishing the course I was excited to see that Camera House here in Lismore, was hiring. I applied and have happily been here since. I've learned more every day through working at Camera…

The camera dictates what type of memory card you can use since all cameras come pre-configured with dedicated memory card slots. Higher-featured cameras may have two card slots; sometimes with both accepting the same type of card but at other times one slot is designed for a different type of card. The market has changed in the past 10-12 years. CompactFlash (CF) cards predominated in the late 1990s and early 2000s but, since the technical specifications were last updated in November 2010, they’ve fallen out of favour. Fortunately for owners of older cameras, they’re still being sold, although not at ‘bargain’ prices and available capacities are limited. A variant of CompactFlash known as CFast was launched in late 2009, with the main usage being in video cameras. But since 2017,…

A camera's shutter is one of the two mechanisms that control a key aspect of exposure by determining how long the sensor is exposed to light to record the image. In the early days of photo-imaging, all shutters were mechanical. There were two types: leaf shutters and focal-plane shutters. Leaf shutters consist of a set of overlapping blades (or ‘leaves’) that open by moving outwards when the shutter is engaged and remain open for a set time. They’re used mainly in fixed-lens cameras and some lenses, where they are located between lens elements near the iris diaphragm blades that control the aperture diameter. This design minimises vignetting at high shutter speeds. Focal-plane shutters usually consist of two segmented blinds located close to the light-sensitive sensor plane. They work by creating…

The objective of High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is to capture the full range of tones within a scene, including those that are beyond the dynamic (brightness) range of the image sensor. Even the best sensors have cut-off points where highlights are recorded with the maximum raw value (i.e. pure white) and shadows are ‘blocked up’ to black. You can’t get any more image data out of the top end, while details in the shadows are obscured by increased noise. Because the shadows threshold depends on noise, it’s influenced by noise reduction processing and how much the image is enlarged or downscaled due to cropping and/or viewing parameters. When we last looked at it in May 2012, HDR was a mostly manual technique that required the photographer to shoot a…

In flash photography, the light emitted illuminates the scene for a tiny fraction of a second. The fastest mechanical shutters take about 1/250 second to travel across the sensor, so for any exposure shorter than this the second curtain must start closing before the first one has fully opened. The highest shutter speed at which the entire sensor receives light is the flash sync speed. Most recently-released cameras allow users to choose between slow sync, first curtain sync and rear sync as well as the normal ‘auto’ and ‘fill-flash’ modes that fire the flash whenever the shutter is triggered. It helps to know when each mode is best used. The auto mode will fire the flash when the camera detects low light levels that require additional illumination and also with…

If your camera comes with two card slots, there are several ways in which you can use them, regardless of whether both cards are the same type or if they’re different. Your camera’s menu should provide ways to access the options for directing files. Because different camera manufacturers put these settings in different parts of the menu and use different terminology to label them, we’ve used generic terms that describe what actually happens with your image files for each of the settings. 1. Overflow (or Auto switch card), the normal default setting, directs the camera to save all files on Card 1 and then swap to Card 2 once the first card is full. 2. Backup (or Rec. to multiple) sets both cards to record the same files each time…

Spotlight on Darktable ▶ www.bit.ly/pr99ne1 We’ve been watching Darktable, the open source photography workflow and raw file development suite of tools, for some years now. Quite apart from the fact that it’s free, this capable and well-featured raw converter not only has an exhaustively detailed user guide, but it also has a dedicated YouTube channel with nearly 60 tutorials on every dimension of this digital toolbox’s extensive capabilities. Well worth a look. BIF bodies ▶ www.bit.ly/pr99ne4 Over the last four years, professional photographer and co-owner of the Mirrorless Comparison website, Mathieu Gasquet has been tracking the Birds in Flight (BIF) performance of the cameras he reviews. The result is an ever-growing list of the latest mirrorless cameras, ranked from “best” to “worst” according to Gasquet’s simple assessment formula; Sharpness, Focus…