Innehållsförteckning för V74 issue 4 från Pro Photo

There’s nothing like a dip into the archives to reveal just how much things have changed in the imaging industry, especially over the last couple of decades. In the late 1970s colour film had finally been accepted and the makers of 35mm SLR cameras were trying to break into the commercial photography market. Here’s a selection of what was on the pages of this magazine 40 years ago when it was called Professional Photography In Australia . This is a snapshot of the July/ August 1978 issue. TEST REPORTS / Mamiya RB67 Professional S 6x7cm SLR (revisited) PEOPLE AND PLACES / Judy Hallisey, portrait photographer, Dandenong, Victoria / John Pollard on shooting the stills for The Chant Of Jimmie Blacksmith / Peter Walton, advertising photographer, Melbourne /…

The many and varied facets of the food and wine industries have again been celebrated with the annual Pink Lady® Food Photographer Of The Year competition, attracting 8000 entries from photographers and film-makers in 60 countries. Bangladeshi photographer Noor Ahmed Gelal has won the 2018 Pink Lady® Food Photographer Of The Year competition, the world’s leading celebration of the art of food photography and film. Titled Praying With Food, the winning image depicted the breaking of a day-long fast at a Hindu temple in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Gelal was presented with the £5000 prize by Andy Macdonald, who heads up Pink Lady® in the United Kingdom, at a glittering Champagne Taittinger reception packed with celebrities from the food and photography world at the Mall Galleries in London. Host for the evening…

Exposure compensation dial is marked to +/-3.0 EV, but up to +/-5.0 EV can be accessed via the shooting menu. Main mode dial includes two settings for custom camera set-ups and the ‘S&Q’ (Slow & Quick Motion) position for accessing a range of video framing rates from 100›fps down to 1.0 fps. There are four Custom buttons which are fully multi-functional, but various other controls can also be customised to some degree. New joystick-type controller is primarily for AF point selection, but can also perform various navigational duties. A big upgrade is the provision of dual card slots with one being dual format for SD and Memory Stick Duo devices.…

Leica has established a new division to design and manufacture luxury mechanical watches. It makes more sense than you might initially think. For starters, the company’s founder back in 1869, Ernst Leitz, trained as a watch-maker in Switzerland before setting up his eponymous optics company in Germany. And many of the skills involved in making Leica’s classic M series rangefinder cameras – particularly the rangefinder module itself – translate into the creation of high-end watches which also requires precision engineering. Consequently, the new Leica watches have been entirely designed in-house and are being manufactured by a new entity called Ernst Leitz Werkstätten which is located in the same Leitz Park complex in Wetzlar as the camera and lens factory. The movement has been developed in conjunction with another German company,…

To be held on 13 and 14 October, The Portrait Conference is a new initiative for students, amateurs and professional portrait photographers in Australia and New Zealand who want to further enhance their talents and also have their work reviewed in a competitive environment by internationally-acclaimed judges. The accompanying competition is open for entries in three categories – Open, Amateur and Student – with online entries to be submitted by 31 July 2018. The Portrait Competition will be judged by Kelly Tunney, Peter Eastway and Damien Bowerman, who are each award-winning photographers in their own right. The Open and Amateur categories each have a first prize of $10,000 while the Student category’s first prize is $2000. Additionally, the top 30 entrants from all category will qualify for entry in The…

“I’m a fairly regular guy, I think,” says Melbourne-based photographer Chris Smith on his Website, but clearly that’s a regular guy with quite a bit of talent behind the camera. He started out shooting landscapes, then ventured into weddings mainly because he found all the emotion of these events very appealing. Now he’s also doing portraiture which also appeals to his sociable side. “I love meeting new people,” he states, adding that his portrait work mainly focuses on “moody emotive images, contrasting textures and the female form”. Chris’s interest in photography began when he was still quite small and the Smith family spent two years travelling around Australia. “I was six. Mum and Dad took so many photos and we have a massive bag of them that I love looking…

Test images captured as JPEG/large/extra-fine images with FE 28-70mm f3.5-5.6 OSS zoom and FE 100mm f2.8 STF GM OSS prime lenses. Definition, detailing, tonality and dynamic range are all exceptional, and the colour reproduction across the spectrum is much better handled than previously. The wide dynamic range translates into enhanced exposure latitude and more flexibility when shooting RAWs in low light, but the noise reduction processing ensures excellent JPEG image quality up to ISO 6400 and it’s still very good at ISO 12,800 and even ISO 25,600. The 7 III’s expanded sensitivity runs from ISO 50 to 208,400 and while the image is quite noisy even at the maximum setting, it’s still actually usable provided you don’t need a very big image. All these images were taken with the aperture…

“I left school at 14-and-a-half. Dad was working down at the Billingsgate fish markets in East London and, back in those days, you followed your father… an East End cockney thing. We’d start work at 5.30 in the morning and, in autumn, spring and summer you’d get the mist off the Thames River and they still had cobblestone streets and gas lighting along the embankment. It was warm lighting – like tungsten – and the reflections off the cobblestones were just amazing. Everything was a visual experience for me. “All the artists would move in after the markets wound up around 9.30 am. Photographers like Bill Brandt… go through any of his books and you will find a picture of people around Billingsgate markets. Also David Bailey and Lewis Morley.…

The ‘Vibration Compensation’ optical image stabilisation has two modes for normal shooting and for panning. It provides up to four stops of correction for camera shake. The minimum focusing distance is 1.5 metres, giving a useful maximum magnification ratio of 1:3.6. The weather protection measures include a substantial rubber gasket around the lens mount. Test images captured as JPEG/large/fines with a Nikon D4, using shutter-priority auto exposure control, auto white balance and the Vivid ‘Picture Control’ preset. Sharpness is exceptional across the focal range and at all apertures, but the best centre-to-edge uniformity is achieved between f5.6 and f11. The image quality at 400mm is superb, enabling the full potential of the focal range to be exploited. Chromatic aberrations are non-existent and vignetting is minimal. Flare and ghosting are well…

Picasso’s painting Guernica is confronting. In addition to the subject matter, there’s also its size, energy and passion to come to terms with. When standing in front of this 3.49 metres by 7.77 metres apocalyptic vision in grey, black and white, the viewer can’t help but feel the pain and suffering the people of the Basque town of Guernica must have felt in the face of their annihilation by the bombs being dropped from Nazi German and Fascist Italian warplanes. Picasso’s masterpiece is often referred to as the greatest anti-war painting in history. There is no colour – no saturated reds, yellows or blues; no pulsating pinks or eye watering orange. Just subtle shades of grey, black and white. The painting’s power is in the content – the violence and…

Nikon has announced it is in the process of developing a new 500mm f5.6 supertelephoto prime lens which will use a phase fresnel (PF) element to help reduce its size. Nikon says its new AF-S Nikkor 500mm f5.6E PF ED VR lens will offer “a compelling combination of portability and performance”. The phase fresnel element – which has been developed by Nikon – helps minimise chromatic aberrations and takes the place of several conventional extra-low dispersion (ED) elements thereby delivering significant reductions in a lens’s size and weight. The 500mm will actually be compact enough to be used hand-held assisted by the inclusion of optical image stabilisation. Full specifications and a launch date will be announced later in the year. Blackmagic Design reports that more than 30 of the 2018…

Acclaimed South African photographer DAVID GOLDBLATT died on 25 June, aged 87, in his hometown of Johannesburg. Goldblatt is best known for his documenting the injustices of apartheid from the 1950s to its end in the early 1990s, but photographed all aspects of contemporary South African life for six decades. He won numerous major awards for his documentary photography, including from the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation and the Hasselblad Foundation. His grandparents migrated from Lithuania to South Africa, and David was born in November 1930 in the mining town of Randfontein. He took up photography in 1948 and remained active right up until his death. Only recently, he donated his archive to Yale University in the USA. An exhibition of his work, titled David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948-2018, opens at Sydney’s Museum…

IT’S AN INDICATION OF HOW well executed Sony’s A series full-35mm mirrorless cameras were right from the start that all the original models are still available close to five years after their launch and now after third-generation upgrades for the original A7 and A7R. This has enabled Sony to market a wider range of bodies (numbering nine right now) with an entry-level price now at $1499 which is a lot cheaper than anything in the D-SLR world (except for Sony’s own A77 II). It’s all about making converts and, once you’re committed, you’re very unlikely to go anywhere else except upwards through the FE mount system. If you’re already an A7 user who skipped the Mark II upgrade, you’re probably about ready for the A7 III, but this model is…

Sony’s attitude to video appears to be to give all its mirrorless cameras what amounts to pro-level capabilities and then let pricing sort out who buys what model. After all, a lot of what drives a still camera’s video functionality is firmware or software related and, up to a point, doesn’t have a big impact on the bottom line. It makes a lot of sense, although of course, Sony has both the experience and expertise to make this work. Thus the A7 III follows the A7R III and A9 in having a feature set for video that good enough for professional applications and more than enough for the enthusiast-level film-maker. This starts with the recording of 4K video using the full width of the sensor with no pixel binning so…

Format: Full-35mm digital sensors. The focal range is effectively 150-600mm on an ‘APS-C’ format sensor (with a 1.5x focal length magnification factor). Angle-of-View: 24.24 to 6.12 degrees (diagonal). Construction: 17 elements/11 groups. Minimum Focus: 150 cm (across the focal range). Maximum Reproduction Ratio: 1:3.6 (at 400mm). Aperture Range: f4.5-6.3 to f32-45. Overall Length: 196.5 mm. Maximum Diameter: 86.2 mm. Filter Diameter: 67 mm. Weight: 1115 grams. Lens Mount(s): Canon EF and Nikon F (G-type AF). Features: Magnesium alloy barrel tubes, weather-proofed barrel and mount, fluorine coating on front element’s exposed surface, built-in ‘Vibration Compensation’ optical stabilisation (dual modes), zoom lock, USD autofocusing drive, internal focusing group, focus limiter, electromagnetic diaphragm control, nine-blade diaphragm, three LD (low dispersion) glass elements, ‘eBAND’ anti-reflection multi-coating. Bayonet mount lens hood supplied. Price: $1299. Optional…