Photoclub Alpha

While I appreciate the threads on dPreview calling for them to lift their ban on my using the dPreview forums, they have gone over the top - if they do unban me, what if have nothing useful to say? I can not be a permanent fixture on the dPreview Sony SLR forum although I am happy to participate in that, and several other dPreview forums. In a way I am hoping they do not lift the ban.

If you use Sigma lenses on your Alpha, you can join the Sigma User Club UK and enter their prize competitions (anyone can join, worldwide, but you must be in the UK to enter the competitions as the prizes are given by the UK distribution company).

The parallel development of Carl Zeiss lenses for Sony (AF lenses in the Alpha mount) and independent manual focus lenses for other makes continues. The latest CZ design is a revision of the classic 18mm Distagon last seen in the Contax system, optimised for colour balance and reflection supression with digital SLRs.

Sony has announced the September introduction of the most powerful flash yet for the Alpha system, which incorporates a brand new body design allowing optimum bounce flash illumination regardless of how you hold the camera.

Here’s a question which came in to my email just now:

“Could I process a RAW file in Photoshop to achieve a similar effect as if I had used a Polaroid lens filter?
Or would I be better just using the Polaroid filter?”

The answer is that you can never imitate the effect of polarizing light (which changes the way reflective surfaces look, and deepens or lightens the sky blue according to the zone of the sky relative to the sun’s position. But you can use Adobe Camera Raw (CS3 versions) to deepen skies you never thought could be rescued.

The introduction of a £399 (street price, RRP £449) DSLR with 14.2 megapixels – with or without a useful type of Live View – should have been applauded by reviewers. It’s the single most important point about the camera. No other DSLR approaches this image size and resolution at such a low price.

Now that there are five Sony Alpha DSLR bodies in circulation, with many owners of the original 2006 Alpha 100 considering a replacement, the differences between this ur-Alpha and the 2007-8 generation of Alpha 700, 200, 300 and 350 need examining.

Epson today announces the launch of its high specification professional A3+ photo printer - the Stylus Photo R2880. Aimed at professional photographers and keen amateurs, the printer utilises Epson’s advanced UltraChrome K3 with Vivid Magenta pigment inks

Epson has today launched an innovative new print plug-in for the Adobe Photoshop family of products that provides users with enhanced functionality and flexibility, making colour-managed printing quicker and easier.

Photoworld 2008 #2 is now being mailed to subscribers!

Our Spring edition features -

The first SONY World Photography Awards were presented in the late April sunshine of Cannes, to what must have been an exclusive gala dinner audience - at €250 a head, our ‘man on the spot’ Thomas Goseberg decided against the opportunity to take his wife out for a quiet meal…

Daniel Oi - who provided our most popular external link in recent weeks with his Glasgow Merchant City surround-vision stitched VR panorama - has created a superb view of the Kibble Palace glasshouse at Glasgow’s Botanical Gardens:

News tonight from Sony UK - great news for UK buyers…

As of the 1st of April 2008 the UK Sony Style business will transfer from a Belgian to a UK based company.* This will not affect your statutory rights or data protection in any way. This change will create a range of benefits for any future purchases that you may make.

The Sony Alpha 350 14.2 megapixel DSLR pioneers a new type of Live View, related to Olympus’s original Mode A of the E-330 where a beamsplitting arrangement allowed a video CCD to view the actual focusing screen of the SLR system.

Kenro has announced the release of a series of new hard plastic LCD panel protectors from Marumi - including one for the Sony Alpha 100. The price is very reasonable at only £6.99 retail.

The Sony DSLR A200 is now on sale, following the end of Alpha 100 production. Although it is without any doubt the Alpha 100 replacement mentioned by Sony executives in October 2007, when they first revealed that the 100 was no longer being made, it is not an exact equivalent and represents a mixture of upgraded performance and simplified specification. Because it has gone in two directions at the same time, the A200 poses a problem for A100 owners.

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

Sony Corporation today announced the development of a 35mm full size (diagonal:43.3mm) 24.81 effective megapixel, ultra-high speed high image quality CMOS image sensor designed to meet the increasing requirement for rapid image capture and advanced picture quality within digital SLR cameras.

In mid 2007, rumours of a 14.8 megapixel Sony sensor came from the usual Far Eastern ‘inside’ sources. As a full-frame Alpha model (the so-called 900) had been previewed at PMA 2007, it was possible this megapixel count related to full frame, or near-full frame. It now looks as if it may have been a leak of development for currently rumoured 14.2 megapixel (active) Alpha 350, which is an APS-C sensor camera.

A mention of 16mm Minoltas reminded me that a few years ago I found a perfect kit - without outer box or instructions, sadly - at an antique fair. A daylight developing tank for the film turned up in the closing-down stock from Konica Minolta’s warehouse. I decided they should really find a new home together via the normal eBay route, but before they went, a studio shoot was needed to record them for our virtual museum.

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.

SINCE September 2007 I have had for test the Canon EOS 40D, Sony Alpha 700, Nikon D300, Olympus E-3 and Nikon D3 in that order. The reports have been published in the British Journal of Photography, and later on in Master Photo Digital and f2 magazines (some are yet to appear, in February, in these titles). My own system is Sony Alpha but I have to be as objective as possible when field testing all makes. I also have to seek out the unique selling points, the reasons for owning any given model, rather than just compare them on a tick-chart feature basis.

With the Alpha 200 about to appear, I guess it’s time to sum up what I think about the Sony Alpha 700 and how it compares to the competition.

After reading Andrea Nivini’s article in Italian Tutti Fotografi, December 2007, which launches an attack on Adobe’s Camera Raw plug-in and its handling of many camera types - but specifically, the Sony Alpha 700 - I decided to check out whether the December 5th release, ACR 4.3.1, fixed the problems.

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!’…

The Sony Alpha Unseen Britain Challenge has embarked on its campaign to capture never seen before images of Britain with renowned photographer and climber Mike Robertson. Commissioned by Sony, Mike will tour the country scaling new heights and legendary landmarks to create totally new and exciting photographic images using the new Sony Alpha 700 (α700) Digital SLR camera.

OUR local dealer, Hector Innes in Kelso, used to be a totally Minolta-dedicated retail shop. Hector and his son Alastair have always been Minolta photographers, and Alastair currently uses the Dynax 7D as weapon of choice for weddings. Their shop is one of those few remaining which combines a professional studio (ABIPP, in Hector’s case) with processing and printing, and retail. On the wall there’s a Minolta clock from two or three changes of logo ago, and on the counter, I found a well-used and yellowed Minolta lens chart mat.

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.

Sony has released a firmware update for the Alpha 100 - version 1.04. This comes in four regional flavours and it is important to use the right one. Here are all the links you need plus instructions.

October 16, 2007, Burlingame, CA — FotoNation (www.fotonation.com), a leading provider of embedded imaging solutions for the imaging industry, announced today “FastTrack IPC” (IP-Core) hardware acceleration technology that improves Face-Tracking quality and performance up to 400% in digital cameras and camera phones.