Photoclub Alpha

Adobe has announced the Lightroom 3.2 and Camera Raw 6.2 Release Candidates, available for immediate download on Adobe Labs. The updates extend raw file support to 12 new popular camera models including the Sony NEX-3 and NEX-5, Alpha 290 and 390; improve on several of the lens correction profiles introduced as part of the Lightroom 3 and Camera Raw 6.1 releases; and add over 50 new lens profiles to help photographers automatically correct for undesirable distortion and aberration effects.

But they let Sony down in a big way by only including the 18-55mm OSS lens for NEX, omitting the 16mm which must be very simple to profile (after all folks, there are only TWO officially available lenses for NEX right now – you found time to profile no fewer than 15 lenses for the Pentax AF645, for the benefit of all two dozen worldwide users of this outstandingly popular digital option…)

For ACR 3.2 Release Candidate download – http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Camera_Raw_6.2

For LR 3.2 Release Candidate download – http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Lightroom_3.2

In addition, the Lightroom 3.2 Release Candidate now allows Lightroom 3 customers the ability to publish their photos directly to Facebook from within the application, and addresses issues reported by customers on the Lightroom 3.0 release. Adobe continues to encourage the community to provide feedback on the updates so it can ensure the highest quality experience for customers working on a variety of hardware and software configurations.

Pricing and Availability
The Lightroom 3.2 Release Candidate is available as a free download for Lightroom 3 customers, and the Photoshop Camera Raw 6.2 Release Candidate is available as a free download for Photoshop CS5 customers. For more information and to test out the updates visit http://labs.adobe.com. Feedback can be provided on the Adobe User to User forum at http://forums.adobe.com.

*Please visit the Lightroom Journal for more information on these Release Candidates and a full list of the improved and newly added lens profiles: http://blogs.adobe.com/lightroomjournal

Newly Supported Camera Models
Panasonic DMC-FZ100, Panasonic DMC-FZ40 (FZ45), Panasonic DMC-LX5, Pentax 645D, Samsung NX10, Samsung TL500 (EX1), Sony A290, Sony A390, Sony Alpha NEX-3, Sony Alpha NEX-5

Also, this update improves the colour and noise profiles for the following cameras that utilise the DNG raw file format already supported in previous versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw: Casio EXILIM EX-FH100 (DNG) and Leica S2 (DNG).

I was going to post this on our Forum for NEX originally. It’s not good form to launch into what may be seen as ‘rival’ publications or journalists, so it’s the kind of thing which is often kept to blog pages or forum discussion. But Practical Photography is one the best-selling, and most powerful, photo magazines in the world.

So, I copied my ramblings and moved them here, instead of putting them in a forum post where just a few hundred people would see them. Tens of thousands of visitors see Photoclubalpha’s main site articles, and I want this to be seen, because it matters.

Are you an Alpha Male or an Alpha Female?

Never feel that your chosen camera makes you the odd one out in a herd of Canon and Nikon users! You are the leader not the follower…

Perhaps you are the only one at your college or your camera club with an Alpha. Well, we reckon that makes you Alpha material, so we have designed two neat logos combining the symbols for Male and Female with the Alpha glyph. It’s an official Photoclubalpha garment not official Sony!

It would have been great to start with a low-cost almost giveaway T-shirt, but the quality of these can be poor especially in black. Yes, even the best black cotton will fade with wear and washing but it is a good quality garment to start with. That’s why it has to be £13.95 including VAT and postage* to cover our costs.

The Polo Shirt is, we think, a real bargain. Various local clubs and societies, as well as sports teams, have had similar polo and rugger shirts made by our supplier with embroidered logos. They look great and wear well at £17.95 each including VAT and postage. Photo above: white male T-shirt, black female T-shirt, black female polo shirt. The polo shirts with the female logo are tailored for women’s fit. T-shirts are unisex.

The T-shirts have the web address of Photoclubalpha written neatly in the classic Minolta typeface across the shoulders on the back. The logo and male or female text line are printed centrally on the front.

The Polo shirts only have the logo motif on the front, to a smaller size, in chest pocket position. There is no text, if anyone asks you what it means, you’ll have to explain it. The Polo shirts feature embroidered logos, the T-shirts are printed.

The T-shirt sizing is fairly generous – for example, size L is a neat fit for female size 20, loose on size 18.

Men’s Polos/all T-Shirts
XS – 34/46″
S – 36/38″
M – 38/40″
L – 40/42″
XL – 42/44″
XXL – 44/46″
3XL – 46/48″
4XL – 48/50″

Women’s Polos
(British Sizes – US sizes are one step smaller, XS=6 for example)
XS – 8
S – 10
M – 12
L – 14
XL – 16
XXL – 18

T-Shirts are unisex not tailored. Polo shirts are supplied in male tailored cut for Alpha Male, female cut for Alpha Female. T-Shirts are Heavyweight 100% Ringspun Cotton (175-180gsm); Polo Shirts are the same material, but a little heavier in weight.

Ordering by post

T-Shirts – available to in black or white, sizes XS to 4XL
Alpha Male – Black or White, with Alpha Male text line    £13.95
Alpha Female – Black or White, with Alpha Female text line    £13.95

Polo Shirts – available in sizes S to 3XL (M) XS to XXL (F)
Alpha Male – Black or White without text small symbol    £17.95
Alpha Female – Black or White without text small symbol    £17.95

The shirts are printed (for T-Shirts) or embroidered (for Polo Shirts) locally in Kelso and you may specify any size within the range shown; depending on demand, it may take up to 28 days for orders to be completed and despatched. We hope to keep stocks of popular sizes for faster delivery. Prices include VAT and postage*.

Cheques payable to ‘Icon Publications Ltd’ – orders to Alpha Shirts Offer, Icon Publications Ltd, Maxwell Place, Maxwell Lane, Kelso, Scottish Borders TD5 7BB. You may also post an order using the method described for fax orders below.

Ordering by email or fax

FAX your order with credit card (long number, cardholder name, security number and expiry date) and address information, written out with clear instructions for the garment/s, male/female design, colour and size required, to +44 (0) 1573 226000. Faxes are retained until you confirm receipt of order and shredded afterwards; we do not store credit card details, repeat orders need information repeating.

Alternatively, scan your document and attach it to an email sent to david@photoclubalpha.com

Ordering by Paypal BUY IT NOW - you must detail your size requirements using the Comments or Message field provided by Paypal, or in a clearly linked email. If you do not state size requirements, we will send size L.

Alpha Male T-shirt White

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Alpha Male T-shirt Black

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Alpha Female T-shirt White

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Alpha Female T-shirt Black

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Alpha Male Polo Shirt White

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Alpha Male Polo Shirt Black

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Alpha Female Ladies’ Polo Shirt White

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Alpha Female Ladies’ Polo Shirt Black

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View Order Cart

* For orders outside Europe, VAT is not applied. The 17.5% VAT saving is used to cover additional postage costs for worldwide buyers. The prices remain the same for all geographical areas. UK and European orders include VAT.

The Alpha System celebrates its Silver Jubilee or 25th Anniversary this month – though left uncelebrated by the inheritors of the Minolta AF legacy, Sony. They have no reason to draw fresh attention to the age of the system, as in four years they have taken it the same sort of distance that Minolta took the world’s first AF system in the late 1980s.

It’s not only Alpha’s 25th birthday. This is also the 25th birthday of modern AF SLR systems – all of them!

This is a multi-page article. See the links at the bottom of the page to Continue Reading after each page.

For Photoclubalpha and the historic Minolta Club of Great Britain, the anniversary does matter. A good many of you out there have been members since the launch of the system, often using the earlier SR and X manual focus systems before that. We still have a 1985 Minolta 7000AF and it’s still working just as it did when new.

25 years before the first Minolta SLRs appeared – a folding Minolta Six of 1935

I don’t mind showing my age to make a comparison. I was 11 in 1963 when I took my first pictures with an SLR camera. My father had bought himself a Pentax S3 – and the camera it replaced was 25 years old, a pre-war Zeiss Ikon Kolibri collapsible 16-on-127 model.

When the Kolibri was made, 127 was the ‘vest pocket’ format of choice. 35mm was on the rise, but 35mm SLRs had not yet arrived. They were as much a thing of the future as digital SLRs were when the Minolta 7000AF was launched.

But within that 25 years, there was hardly a single camera system made with interchangeable lenses that did not become obsolete. Only the ‘frozen assets’ of the cold war kept some systems, like the Exakta bayonet and the Praktina, alive. New brands were launched, from the British Wrayflex and Periflex to the Italian Rectaflex and many German oddities. It was not unusual for an entire system to be come and gone within a few years.

Even in the following quarter-century, the high years of the Japanese 35mm SLR, the succession of lens mount changes was bewildering. Independent lens makers like Tamron and Sigma were forced to make systems using interchangeable mounts not just because the public wanted it. A dozen or more mounts were made for every lens and in the 42mm screw thread fit alone there were endless variants – Praktica LLC (Pentacon Electric), Olympus FTL, Pentax ES and more.

It was more or less a 25-year cycle – the SR system was announced in 1958, and really got underway by 1960. It was to be another quarter century before the AF system arrived. We are now a further 25 years on – can we expect a totally new camera system, once again, in 2010?

Minolta’s SR bayonet mount, introduced in 1958/9, actually remained basically unchanged all the way through to 2005 when the last manual focus model, the X-370S, was available. It survives even now as a mount popular in China where the Seagull range from Shanghai Optical includes Minolta fit models. That mount only ever had one major revision, to add a linkage for open aperture TTL metering. The introduction of programmed exposure and shutter priority was cleverly enabled by using the existing design of lens mechanism and improving its accuracy, while adding a simple reference lug to the ƒ-stop setting ring.

Nikon’s 1959 F-mount proved similarly easy to improve without any basic modification. Both these bayonet mounts celebrated half a century of production in 2008/9 – another landmark, which Nikon was able to celebrate but Minolta of course could not.

My review of the Sony Alpha 550 was supposed to appear at the end of November, allowing one week abroad in good weather with plenty of subject-matter, in Tenerife. Sadly that trip had to be cancelled, and the Nikon D3S arrived for review on the day we were meant to have travelled. So, with far too much work to do on the D3S, I’m “going to press” here with my initial thoughts based on a fairly short time using the Alpha 550.

There are 11 pages in this review, please use the Next Page navigation at the end of each page to continue reading. A sponsor link appears before the end of each page – “Get camera lenses at Shopping.com’s affordable deals.” Our thanks to Shopping.com for spotting and sponsoring this review!

This review has been updated August 2010 – see the second to last page for new Adobe Camera Raw Process 2010 results, a massive improvement with Alpha 550 files.

In an unusual move, probably designed to cut down the work of rejecting submissions which fail to make the grade, the on-line picture library Alamy has published lists of cameras (by make) which will NEVER produce a file acceptable to pass their Quality Control. It includes all the Sony Cyber-shots ever made as far as we can tell! They say: “Check your camera – do NOT submit any images from camera models featured on the list below. Camera models featured on this list do not produce files that are capable of passing Alamy’s QC standards.”

I don’t have an Alpha 500 or 550 here yet, even though Photoclubalpha has been second in the Google search results for ‘Sony Alpha 550′ for some time and remains so as I write (the New York Times is first). That’s not bad for a Wordpress blog website which does NOT employ the services of the dozen or so ‘search engine optimisation’ experts who contact us each week! Hopefully we’ll have a review camera very soon, preferably the 550.

In the meantime, a few samples have been posted on various sites which show the raw conversion engine of the camera/s (not necessarily the JPEG compression stage, as always seems to be assumed) has been radically revised. Sony call this ‘enhanced BIONZ’ and I think there’s a clue to how it has been enhanced in the relationship of Sony Europe and DxO Labs, the French company which specialises in in-camera process analysis and development.

ALL the current DSLRs made – whether by Canon, Nikon or even Sony with the A700 and A900 – state their maximum fps continuous shooting speed as being with NO autofocus, and NO exposure metering changes. There’s a lot of talk on forums about the 7fps of the new Alpha 550 – 14.3 megapixel CMOS APS-C with a good high ISO capacity – being in some way crippled because it has been made clear by Sony that this speed applies to a ‘lockdown’ of focus and exposure with the first frame. This is not surprising as it’s a quiet, mirror-up mode using the off-sensor live view to maintain contact.

A long-demanded 1.15X eyepiece magnifier – compatible with all APS-C format Sony Alpha DSLRs – is just one of a rollout of new minor accessories for the system. The Magnifying Eyepiece FDA-ME1AM is designed to fit the A700, A380, A330, A230, A350, A300 and A200 and should also be fully compatible with A100, Konica Minolta 7D and 5D.

Sony’s September launch for 2009 looks set to include three new models – the Alpha 500, 550 and 850. The model numbers are confirmed by the usual backdoor leak, appearing in the registration database for SonyStyle USA in this case (Canada has been a past culprit, updating databases associated with their site before the product is officially released). However, only a few people know what these cameras will be, and they are limited by non-disclosure contracts.