Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All in Gear
I’ve come across a few interesting tidbits-bits of information over the past week that I wanted to share, but none of it was long enough to put into individual blog posts, so I thought I’d compile it all into a singe compilation. This is pretty random, but anyway.
I was up early the other day, and it was a lovely sunny, albeit cold May morning here in Dublin. I headed into the city with the intent of making a video I’d been planning for a little while. I wanted to do a “retro review” of the original Canon 5D, which I still own, and I’ve been shooting with on and off for 12 years or so. It was going really well too, that was until something broke inside my camera. That turned out to be the mirror. It fell off.
Sony has just announced the newest iteration of their full frame “A7” series. The A7III is the new “basic” model in the A7 lineup. This is the third generation of Sony’s first full frame mirrorless camera, and it feels like the line has reached a level of maturity with this new version. Sony may call it “basic”, but based on the specs it is anything but.
Canon has just announced the company’s newest mirrorless offering, the Eos-50. While Canon hasn’t exactly excited the photographic community with their previous offerings, apparently they do sell well. The new Eos-m has some nice new features, including 4K video, which will have many Canon fans saying “finally”, although it does come with a lot of caveats. They have also changed the form factor slightly, and put a proper articulating screen on the camera, as opposed to the weird flip down model which was on the previous Eos M-5. While some people might scoff at this camera compared to those from Sony or Fuji, it does seem to be perfectly suited to the one market most other manufacturers seem to be ignoring: Vloggers. Well, almost perfect.
Sometimes I think a tripod is like a good pair of shoes. While anyone that fits will do for walking around, you really need to find the right one for you in order to be comfortable with it. I have three different tripods, all of which work perfectly fine, but none are exactly comfortable. With that in mind, I’ve been looking for something that fits my needs a little better, so when the folks at K&F sent me a tripod to review I thought that this was a combination of good timing and good fortune, as I wanted to try out this exact type.
As mentioned in several previous posts, I’ve been planning to do some more vlogging and videos, and I’ve wanted to get a small and unobtrusive camera for that purpose. I’ve been trying out several options, and so I used a christmas gift voucher haul to splash out on a new one. I settled on the Canon G7X Mark II. It’s a small, 1inch sensor compact camera, that does good video, and it has a flip over screen for self monitoring.
I was recently contacted by a representative from K&F concept who wanted to know if I would be interested in reviewing one of their camera bags. I actually have some of their other products, in particular some of their adaptor rings, and I’m really impressed with the quality for the price. So I said sure, why not! so they sent me one of their DSLR backpacks to try.
With cameras constantly being released, I have found that a lot of the commentary around certain brands and models revolves around comparing the tech specs. People argue about things like minute differences in dynamic range or noise response as reasons to pick one camera over another. But there's so much more to choosing a camera.
When Nikon pre-announced the D850 a little while ago, I was filled with a mix of excitement and a sense of trying not to get my hopes up. I have long been an owner of the Nikon D700, which was Nikon’s first model in this style of full frame smaller body cameras. I love the D700 and I still use it all the time, but it’s starting to show its age. I really want a high resolution camera for landscape and nature work, but I also want one that does video. I had hoped when the rumours started of the D850, that Nikon would come out with something similar to the Sony A7RII. I was not disappointed.
Last week I posted the latest issue of my on-going Street Photo Diary series to my PhotoJournal blog. I had taken those shots in a single session and I felt that they worked well together as a set, however, I have a few more images that I took recently too. They didn’t really fit into the narrative that I was going with, so I thought that I would share them here in a separate post, with a bit more info on how I shot them.
A while ago I attempted my first “blog” style video, where I filmed myself shooting street photography and editing the results. I’ve done another similar video and in this one I spent some time shooting with the Sony A6000 using adapted lenses. I used two different lenses on this shoot: an old Nikon 105mm f2/2.8 macro lens, and a Canon 17-40 f/4 L wide angle lens. I started in a local park shooting some flowers and then did a little bit of street photography too.
I recently watched a video on YouTube where the use of a SonyA6000 was discussed as a low cost entry into shooting video. In the video they acquired an A6000 second hand for a very reasonable price, and it got me thinking that this makes a really good entry level camera for street photography. I have kept a lot of my old cameras over the years, and it got me thinking as to what else would work well too. So after doing a bit of research, here are my two suggestions.
When the rumours of the new Sony A6500 surfaced a few days before it was announced, I have to say, I was a little skeptical. I really didn’t think Sony would release another camera in the range so soon after the A6300 but I was happy to be proven wrong. The newly announced A6500 is a step above the 6300 and pretty much addresses all the criticism of the 63000 which is also still fairly new
Continuing on from my post the other day, I’ve done some more shooting with my borrowed Sony A7II using some of my Canon lenses. This time, I was back out in the city of Dublin. I wanted to do something a little different, and so I used my 17-40f4L Canon lens to get some cityscape shots.
With Photokina just around the corner, and with most of the major manufacturers probably going to announce new cameras, I’ve been thinking about what my ideal camera would be. Without getting into brand wars and camera maker loyalty, I am particularly keen to see what Nikon will announce. They’ve been on a roll lately with the D500 and the D5 and considering that the D810 and D750 starting to look a little old, an announcement might be on the cards.
I received a very generous and cool present from a good friend of mine for my birthday last year. It's a Russian Fed 2 range finder camera. My friend is a collector and I've always loved these old Russian cameras, so I was chuffed to get my hands on one.
It never ceases to amaze me the difference a good lens can make to your image quality. I know this sounds like an obvious thing, but until you've used some high end glass, you don't really know just how much of a difference it can make. There's a lot of misinformation out there on the internet (shocker) when it comes to what makes a good lens, or even the importance of good quality optics to begin with. One well known and somewhat infamous blogger, has even stated that the lens actually makes no difference in terms of image quality. Nothing could be further from the truth.
I've been using a defunct Pantone Huey Pro to calibrate my display, for pretty much as long as I can remember. While the device hasn't been officially supported for a while, it had continued to function until recently. Since El Capitan came out, the software hasn't been working properly, and my display has been slowly drifting. On top of that, somewhere along the way, the gamma got screwed up, which I didn't realise. So the upshot of this is that my screen was too bright, and so I was outputting my images too dark.
