Tag Archives: image

Another Home Run For Sony

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English: Sony Alpha 55 with Sony DT 18-55 mm F...

Sony Alpha SLT-A55. Image via Wikipedia

Sony has announced the replacement to the ground-breaking SLT-A55, the first of their translucent-mirror digital cameras. The A55 was rated camera-of-the-year by one of the major photo magazines when it was released, and Sony’s had a string of hits ever since. The new model, the SLT-A57, maintains or improves all the best bits of the original A55, adds a few features, and addresses a few consumer concerns.

The new camera has been built-in a larger body almost identical to the new SLT-A65, which removes the objection that many had to the older camera’s grip. That also made space for the bigger battery used in the A65 and A77. That means about 550 exposures per charge. The price has also been kept down at a price similar to the A55, about $700 for the body alone and about $800 with the 18-55mm kit lens.

So, other than the size and the model number what’s new? Continue reading →

Another “Future of Photography” post

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Much in the news of photography today, much of which is not good. First up, our favorite camera store, Penn Camera, has filed for bankruptcy. They’ll be closing stores almost immediately. That leaves only a very few, scattered independent shops in our area, most of which suffer from small product lines.

The logo from 1987 to 2006. "Evolution of...

Image via Wikipedia

Second, Kodak is also filing for bankruptcy. In my opinion, this has been a long time coming, and taking our Kodachrome away was the nail in the coffin. Not that I ever liked Kodachrome. I always thought Fujichrome was a much better film.

Sony Alpha NEX-7

Sony Alpha NEX-7 with 18-55mm lens

Meanwhile, Trey Ratcliff has posted an interesting article on his blog announcing the death of the DSLR. Instead, Trey imagines a future of 3rd generation digital cameras, most without mirrors, and many without even any kind of viewfinder except for the big screen on the back. Indeed, new mirrorless cameras like Sony‘s new NEX-7 offer all of the image quality of today’s APS-C DSLRs in an amazingly compact package. With adapters available allowing a wide ranges of lenses to fit on the NEX cameras, they’re sure to be a hit. The NEX-7 is poised to be a very capable, professional quality camera once some serious lenses are available.

Full circle?

Years ago, professionals relied heavily on superb-quality 35mm rangefinder cameras with interchangeable lenses from Lieca, Nikon, Canon, and others. They loved them for their small size and weight and excellent image quality. A glance at the pages of any new photography magazine shows some of those same players are back at it today, introducing high-end “digital rangefinders” aimed squarely at professional or semi-pro markets.

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Un-Blur: More Amazing Technology from Adobe

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Could tripods and image stabilized lenses become a thing of the past? Many photographers have already ditched their tripods in favor of image stabilization, and now Adobe have given sneak preview of a new automatic “un-blur” technology that is nothing short of amazing.

I personally believe that it’s always best to get it right in camera, but for those times when things just didn’t work out as well as one would hope, this could be the tool that saves the day!

Who Needs a Video Camera?

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As manufacturers improve the control and quality of video recording in digital cameras — including D-SLRs, advanced or transitional digicams and even the smallest of point-and-shoots — will consumer camcorders become a thing of the past? Many cameras are now capable of producing video at resolutions and frame rates, and with compression quality, that rivals that of broadcast television. Continue reading →

Sony: Back Into my System…

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Sony Cyber Shot DSC-WX9

Sony Cyber Shot DSC-WX9

Back in January, I wrote that I thought I had finally gotten that whole Sony thing out of my system. Boy, was I wrong.

I recently purchased a new little point-and-shoot digital camera, the Sony Cyber Shot DSC-WX9. I bought it primarily for one purpose — the sweep panorama mode, which automagically takes 15 image and stitches them together, producing an amazingly high-quality image. The idea was to be able to record panos to use as backgrounds for my model railroading efforts. Continue reading →

Photo Editing with Flare

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This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Photo Software Bargains

As many of you know, I’m always interested in ways of obtaining great results, without spending a fortune. It’s driven my choice of camera bodies, lenses, computers and software — on my Macs, the most expensive piece of imaging software I own is Lightroom, which costs $79 from Apple’s App Store. So, when I stumbled across Flare, a $19.99 imaging program from The Iconfactory (available for $9.99 for a limited time via the App Store), I was certainly intrigued. Could a $20 piece of software actually be any good?

Actually, it can be.

The program is really quite good at quickly applying a variety of effects to images, with a decent level of control. And, it works with pretty much any kind of image you can throw at it. For the images here, I started with JPEG images from our last trip to Maine.

For the bicycle image, I wanted to fix the color and exposure a little bit, and apply an interesting boarder. I spent more time looking at the available borders than in applying the actual effects. Total processing time was about 5 minutes.

The Flare interface is quite simple, and very easy to learn. Every thing you want to do can be previewed, including blending modes, with simple flyouts.

Image editing can be accomplished using presets, which can be modified. You can also create your own presets, which can be saved and shared via the company’s web site. Every aspect of a preset is also editable, and the whole thing cab be saved as a snapshot, which includes an image and all the effects used to make it. The final output can be saved as a file to disk, sent to your iPhoto library or shared via Flickr or E-mail.

Another interesting feature is that, if you have an image open, and you open a second file, that file will be opened “into” the current working space, so any effects or settings applied to the first image will be immediately applied to the second image. The program remembers up to 24 snapshots for immediate recall, and once applied to an image, they can be saved as a preset.

I’m particularly impressed with the single-click black-and-white conversion. It’s about the nicest I’ve seen anywhere.

HDR Image Preprocessing

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Over on The Aperture Blog, I just read a post about Moose Peterson pre-processing his RAW files with Photomatix before processing them in any other image editing software — in effect, using an HDR imaging application in place of Adobe Camera RAW, or some other RAW processor. Interesting…

I thought I might try it with an image, just for kicks. But, instead of going all high-end like Moose, I thought I’d try it on the cheap. Instead of a RAW file, I’d use a pretty vanilla JPEG. Instead of Photomatix, I’d use LightCompressor ($0.99 from the App Store). Instead of Aperture, I’d use iPhoto (free!).


The results are … interesting and fun. Now, Moose was using pretty landscapes, and I used a gritty cityscape. But, the result is interesting and fun. I’ll probably try it on some other images down the road.