Yo! Here's Your Glanz DSLR SHoulder Rig!

For those of you who wish to use your DSLR or mirrorless cameras as vital parts of a video system, we have a range of excellent support platforms.

Manfrotto make delightful tripods - light and sturdy and fast to deploy. Cullmann makes a heavy tripod with a very good value-for-money fluid head. Cambo make an extremely competent and complex shoulder mount rig.

And dear old Glanz make the RL shoulder rig - as seen in the three awkward views in this blog. Forgive the photography - the product is a good one despite the pictures!

Okay, this is marginally smaller than the competitors, a little less complex, and a lot less costly. It supports standard-sized DSLR and mirrorless cameras and reasonably long lenses. If you wish to mount a Carl Gustav tube and go hunting tanks you'll need a bigger rig, but that can be covered in a later blog.

This one has all the articulation that you need for basic support and apparently there are follow focus units that can be attached. The build is sturdy, the slide of the components is slick, and the knobs are blue. You cannot ask for more than blue knobs...

For under $ 200 this is a good addition to the videographer's kit.

Visionary Camera - Visionary Minds

It's a dull day outside and the rain is drifting by - perfect weather for a pair of Camera Electronic salesmen to venture onto Stirling Street and start new careers as award-winning video makers.

They've got the new Cambo shoulder rig for stability - the one with the smooth focus wheel on the left.

The camera mounted is the NEW Canon 1Dc with the NEW Canon 50mm T: 1.3 video lens. The camera has all the capability of the renowned 1Dx with the added capability of 4K video recording.

The Canon presentation for this last week was so detailed that I cannot remember half of it but looks as if this camera has better video capability than many cinemas can even show - it really is the cutting edge of he art right now. Looks as though you can film ( err....) like mad now and pull out single frames from it at will - good enough single frames to make finished still prints to a professional wedding standard.

The lens is T-stopped rather than f-stopped for a consistent line of exposure - the output from this camera can integrate with other cameras like the classic 35mm cinema ones. They have made this even easier by providing special cropping in the 35mm frame as well.

It is not cheap. Not even if you know Saul. It is not for everyone - but it is for the videographer and wedding pro who knows that they will need to be ready for the best image on the market.

Paper Pictorialism - a Modest proposal

Sometimes customers look at our collection of old large format monorail cameras on the top shelf and ask us what we are ever going to do with them. This is really a question that is turned 90 degrees from itself - the real question they should be asking is what are they going to do with them. Here is one modest proposal.


First - go to the library and get out a book on pictorialism. Steiglitz, Steichen, Strand, Kasebier, Baron De Meyer...the list of pictorialists goes on and on. Search the net diligently for a picture called "The Onion Field". Look for the portrait of J.P.Morgan. Flatiron Building at twilight. Linked Ring. Henry Peach Robinson.

Second - come down here and buy a monorail and a lens. Don't matter what kind of monorail and lens. Buy three double dark slide film holders. Buy a pack of Ilford Multigrade RC gloss paper.

Third -  go home and into your darkroom and cut the Ilford paper into 4" x 5" sheets. Load them into the double darks under a suitable safelight.

Fourth - out you go looking for beauty. Find it on a sunny day for preference and find beauty that will stay still for a while. You can define to yourself what it may be, but as your exposure is likely to be anything from one second to 5 seconds, you'll need to put the monorail on a tripod and work like the old-timers did. Deliberately and methodically. Expose those double darks progressively in the camera at whatever takes your fancy. Experiment with a yellow filter over the lens.

Fifth - back to the darkroom. Develop the Ilford paper in Multigrade developer, fix and wash it and let it dry flat. You now have a wonderfully detailed paper negative. It has darks and lights and texture. It cannot be deleted with a mouse click but mice may attack it - store it carefully.

Sixth - clap it onto the bed of an EPSON V700 scanner set to Domestic Scan and grey scale at 300 dpi. Scan it as a jpeg into your computer system and then start to work on it. Use whatever program you fancy - I favour Photoshop Elements 10 with Aliens skin plug-ins. Tone it to your taste, but do look at some of the tones that the original pictorialists used and try to do a similar thing.

Seventh - print and display. You may wish to lease small commercial premises and name them " An Australian Place" and exhibit these and other works of pictorialism. Try to grow a moustache.