Lets face it, tripods are not the most exciting accessory to talk about in the photography world. One thing that cannot be denied though is just how important it is to have a strong, sturdy tripod when you head outside to do landscape photography.
On the field, Beth Saravo is, quite literally, one of the boys. More often than not, the 24-year-old live music and lifestyle photographer from Los Angeles, California finds herself the only female in the pool of photographers shooting gigs, tours, and festivals.
When it comes to landscape photography most people think about using wide, and ultra-wide lenses so that they can shoot images that show wide sweeping vistas, mountain ranges, or large portions of countryside, but sometimes focusing on one tiny area of detail can offer much more impact. Telephoto lenses are able to bring far away objects to us, and they offer amazing compression which can lead to some incredibly dramatic shots.
Before the world all agrees with a sigh of relief, I think that Sigma should be given adequate amount of brownie points for keeping the Sigma SA mount alive for so many years. It is a mount that dates back to the film days as the company tried to create and push their own cameras. With the transition to the digital world, we saw that the Sigma SA mount cameras on the market just really couldn’t keep up with the far less Jurassic feeling products made by a number of other companies. Sony, Canon, Nikon, and even Ricoh tended to run marathons around Sigma’s autofocus and Sigma’s battery life was just never all there. But now, there potentially is a large amount of hope.
ZEISS unveiled yesterday at the Photokina 2018 its first Full Frame mirrorless camera, the sleek-looking ZEISS ZX1. It features a ZEISS lens and sensor developed in-house at ZEISS, and promises to deliver first-class image quality plus an intuitive operational concept, user experience, and connectivity like that of a smartphone. This camera concept, according to ZEISS, is ” just the first step to opening up a new world of possibilities for ambitious photographers – from taking the shot to editing the image and sharing it on the web.”
This post is being written around Photokina 2018 and is in regards to a question that’s been quietly popping up amongst press and a number of other folks in the industry: what’s going to happen to Olympus. They’re a company that has been super quiet this year. There have been very few product announcements, their last major innovation was at last Photokina despite releasing some very nice lenses, and they seem to be the company who is sort of left in the dust. What do I mean by this? Well, look at Panasonic. They’re not giving up on Micro Four Thirds; the format in and of itself still has some merit despite what folks may moan about. But Panasonic’s cooperation with Leica and Sigma on the L mount combined with some serious competition for Sony is stealing the show in many ways.
uawei has just announced the winners of the second annual Next-Image Awards. The Next-Image Awards is a global competition in partnership with the International Center for Photography and judged by some of the world’s foremost photography experts. All submissions were taken with Huawei devices. The 2018 Next-Image Awards competition includes six categories: “Good Night,” “Faces,” “Hello, Life!”, “Check-In,” “Timeline,” and “Storyboard.” Winners from each category were selected by a panel composed of five industry experts including Mark Lubell, executive director of the International Center for Photography, along with five up-and-coming young visual storytellers — many of whom are recent ICP graduates — as mobile photography cannot just be defined by experts, but also by a young generation who use their phones on a daily basis to take pictures to share on social media.
If you liked the M1-Series Quick-Release Camera Straps, Simplr has just made them even more streamlined in their latest offering. The F1 Sling-Style Camera Strap was in fact inspired by this earlier model, just without the quick release connection. If you think you won’t have much use for the M1a’s quick release feature but would like to have its fuss-free form and function, Simplr recommends opting for the new F1 instead.
ONA and Japan Camera Hunter announced last night at Photokina 2018 their collaboration for a limited edition ONA x Japan Camera Hunter Bowery camera bag, which is designed with the film street photographer in mind.
A few months ago, Skylum launched version 1.3.0 of their popular image processing software Luminar, along with the promise to follow it up with a digital asset management (DAM). If you’ve been curious about where that is going, the company has recently released a teaser video of the new Luminar and its image browsing support in action, followed by a blog post a few days later explaining the upcoming updates.