Photoclub Alpha

Daniel Oi is a dedicated and experienced Alpha system user currently staying in Glasgow. He’s created a particularly impressive 360 degree panorama of a tiny area of the city centre which has unexpected magic in its Christmas lighting garb. Go down Buchanan Street, turn towards George Square, and you will walk through this Georgian enclave with street cafés, galleries, bookstore, museum and an atmosphere quite unlike the busy main drag or the vast square it links.

http://cnqo.phys.strath.ac.uk/~daniel/Panos/MerchantCity.mov 

This is well worth a visit!

- David

On January 5th, Photoworld was lucky enough to be able to attend the dress rehearsal and official photo-call for the new Cirque du Soleil production at the Royal Albert Hall in London, and to put the Alpha 700 through its paces for high ISO fast action stage show capture. This article with large reproductions of the images appears in our Photoworld issue due out later in January.

It’s the same on every web forum – if you post a digital picture which would be acceptable to a photo library or professional buyer, half a dozen grumpy one-liners will come out saying ‘That don’t look sharp to me’ or ‘there must be something wrong with your XXX’ (fill in D300, A700, E-3, D3, 40D as required). Then someone posts a hugely messed up image and people say ‘Wow! What sharpness!’…

I HAVE set up a pBase gallery with a large number of comparison studio shots, all the way from ISO 100 to the maximum, using the A700 and Nikon D300. It has some minor discrepancies in shooting conditions which I need to explain to anyone visiting the gallery.

BEFORE we publish a fuller assessment of the Sony Alpha 700, here is a taster of just one improved function, the Dynamic Range Optimisation (DRO) system built into the camera. For social, wedding, sports, music, theatre, news and event photographers DRO Advanced Manual settings are a real magic bullet zapping the bugbears of excess contrast, poor lighting, and inadequate flash penetration.

I’m still testing the Alpha 700 and still struggling with aspects of image quality, notably the failure to get much wow factor from straightforward shots in good light. It seems easy enough to get exceptional high ISO images, of the type they are expected to be, but even then many examples seen are marred by a very coarse noise structure.

ON OCTOBER 10th I left the UK London press launch complete with an Alpha 700 review camera. I’ll be covering the many aspects of the Alpha 700 performance in later reviews, but this camera is so good I wanted to get just something out to you right the next day.

IT IS very difficult to find a good JPEG from the Alpha 700 pre-production model tests shot in Italy, because too few cameras were available for too short a time – and many of the journalists present were not photographers. But we have found one image you will love.

THE Konica Minolta Maxxum/Dynax 5D colour modes and conversions are like a whole box of film choices in one roll. This article was written using the 5D in 2005. The modes of the Sony Alpha 100 are similar, but the colour palettes will vary from these results.

I SELL digital images through Alamy, the on-line photo library. When an original piece of art is out of copyright, and displayed in public or by an owner permitting photography, the ability to get a good quality reproduction copy on the spot without lights, tripod or flash is valuable. Some 8 per cent of my overall Alamy images sales over the past four years have been of signs, notices and labels – disproportionately high, compared to the actual number of such shots. As someone has commented, editors like pictures which tell their own story, and sometimes have words in the pictures does just that.

WE spent a great week shooting mainly in Vaucluse, the district to the east of Avignon in the south of France, with Shirley using the 18-250mm Tamron f/3.5-6.3 lens exclusively. One object of this was to get some more example photos for a short article on the lens in our forthcoming Photoworld magazine.

YOU MAY want to learn exactly how I shoot the product photographs which appear in my own articles here at Photoclubalpha. I use a studio light table with an opal plexiglass transilluminated scoop. This is the method I have used now for over 25 years and it’s saved me a lot of time, and earned me a lot of money.

I CARRY a camera everywhere, because you never know when a good photograph is round the corner. I also just grab the camera from my office, and rarely think to check the settings. Today, I managed to shoot everything with Super Steady Shot (Anti-Shake) carefully switched off on my Alpha 100.

IT IS not a good idea to have flash cables trailing around an aquarium, and the typical home setup will not be suitable for available light shooting