Sony Week - Part Five - The Repair Department Secret

Be prepared to be frustrated - I am going to tease you unmercifully in this column.

Normally I don't do this - the idea, after all, is to entertain you and win your loyalty to Camera Electronic. To entice you to come on down and leave your money on the counter. So I don't berate you and I don't make false promises - and I don't dance around telling you that I know something that you don't. Until now.

Oh, it's not just me. It's the staff in the Camera Electronic Repair Department too. They know something that you don't.

Okay - the Sony connection first. Great cameras that they are, Sony mirror-less digital camera bodies have the same basic problem that all other cameras with removable lenses - dust and particles will eventually get into them and onto the sensor. Be you ever so careful or ever so obsessed, the dust will eventually beat you. And as all digital camera owners will discover, you need a sensor clean.

Up till now, there have been any number of sensor cleaning tips, kits, bits of equipment, and rituals devised for cleaning sensors - some of them have worked, most of them have not. Some have ruined sensors. This is particularly noticeable for people who have tried to do it as a home-job.

Sony mirror-less sensors have been a particular problem. I was alerted to this by one of the scientists in the CE Repair Department who was able to show me any number of anguished posts on the internet forums about it - and equally anguished emails passing back and forth amongst professional repair firms in other parts of the world. Many professional people seem to have spent a lot of time trying to clean Sony sensors and ended up with them just as dirty as before.

Well the two scientists in the CE Repair Department conducted a series of practical experiments to solve this and have devised a procedure that DOES clean the Sony mirror-less sensor completely - and can do it easily in the future. I was not initiated fully in the arcane ritual of it...being frightened of the bubbling vats and whirring flywheels - but that does not stop me from reporting their success. They are not going to release the secret - they are going to keep it as a working procedure for the Repair Department at the normal commercial price. It will be known as The Secret. It is a multi-stage process.

Note: The Secret does not involve those little rubber pads on the end of sticks that some people think are marvellous. They look like an invitation to disaster. About like poking your sensor with a wet Gummy Bear...

I can also confidently rule out steel wool pads or a wood chisel.

SO....take a look at the images that your Sony mirror-less camera has been pumping out recently. If there are little grey balloons in the sky, you need The Secret. Bring the camera in to Camera Electronic Repair Department next week and they will make those balloons go away. If the grey balloons have replaced the faces of your brides, grooms, newborns, or family members, bring it in NOW!

The New Bike On The Block - the X-T2

The new Fujifilm X-T2 is dazzling the mirrorless crowd right now, but the last two weblog columns showing the results of a studio shoot may have given the impression that it is no better than previous models. Here's where I reveal the truth - I was only looking at a small part of the picture before. There was some wiggle room there in the writing.

You remember I showed little 1200 x 960 pixel images and they all looked about the same. Well have a look what happens when I go back to the main image and zero in on the motorcycle headlights.

Yep. The extra division of the X-T2 sensor makes more pixels available for enlargement and the image is much, much smoother. So the advice here is to get the newer camera if you intend to blow your images up past A4 or if you need to extract small portions of them.

You will also get the option of an additional film simulation setting over and above what the X-E2 or X-T1 can provide and even more compared to the X-Pro1 or the X-100. If one of them is your preferred look, you need look no further.

The computer experts will argue that there are any number of film simulations available as extra plug-ins for image editing programs - and so there are. But how much neater to have them applied as the image rolls out of the camera - in many, many cases the JPEGs that come out of the Fujifilm X-Trans sensors can be used for reproduction straight away without further managing...as a number of weblog columns and newspaper advertisements will attest. No, I won't tell you how easy it is to do, in case it affects my pay...

The lens in use on the X-T2 today was a Tokina macro 35mm f:3.5 and was totally manual in operation. Had it been an AF lens I would have steered the AF single point marker to the exact centre of the headlights using the little rubber joystick under the right thumb. It is a vast improvement on the menu wheel as a selector. You are less inclined to twist the camera about trying to get the green square on the subject...or worse, to just blaze away hoping that whatever is in focus when it beeps and fires is really what you wanted. Far better to actually command your vision rather than be commanded.

What a didn't turn on in the studio was the wide field of focus points that this camera is capable of using - the field shooter may well opt for this as the best way of operating the AF. I also did not need to instruct the camera about predictive tracking and the persistence that I might want with the AF in case something intervenes between me and the subject. It's all there in the menu.

Perhaps it is time to take a couple of the cameras out to see some real automotive action and give these features a test as well...Stay tuned.

See the full Fujifilm range at Camera Electronic here

Four Facets Of Fujifilm

One of the advantages of owning your own studio is the fact that you can use it to do photographic experiments without interference from other people. You might be able to do this in a commercial rented space, but every minute you occupy the place costs money - and you might be tempted to skimp on the science to economise.

You can also do photo experiments out in the open air on any number of subjects - if you are a landscape shooter, outside is where they keep landscape. But there are no end of atmospheric and optical variations that might be introduced and skew your results. And outside is dirty - if you're going to change lenses some of that dirt may get in the camera. Err...not may...will...that's why Camera Electronic Repairs Department does so many sensor cleans.

Well the question that arose today was what practical changes can we find in the Fujifilm X-series of mirrorless cameras between the first X-100 and the newest X-T2? I mean practical changes in the final image that comes from the camera. I assembled four bodies and tested them under my own conditions. The conclusion is not quite as predictable as I thought it was going to be.

The basic bodies were an X-T2, and X-E2, And X-Pro1, and an X-100. I know there are more in the Fujifilm X-series but these are four good mileposts along the way. And I own three of them, so I can use them freely.

The scene I used is the Tomahawk Cafe in Wet Dog, Alberta, August 1966. It is noon, and nothing is moving...probably all the way from Medicine Hat to Edmonton, but that is beside the point...The lighting is a constant and all the cameras have been set to a standard Kelvin temperature for it. Shutter speed is 1/250 for the X-T2 and X-100, 1/180 for the X-E2, and 1/125 for the X-Pro1. Aperture is f:16 in all cases, and as three of the bodies have interchangeable lens, a 35mm Macro lens was used in turn. The X-100 has a 23mm that is fixed but it can be switched to macro as well.

The X-100 has the least division of the sensor - 12 megapixels. The X-Pro1 has 16 megapixels, as does the X-E2. The new X-T2 has 24 megapixels...a considerable advance on the first in line. As well, of course, as the series has advanced, the processor inside has been improved. So perhaps there will be a doubling of goodness...?

Well, as with all these propositions, there were some small hiccups. None of them share the exact same range of film simulation modes. The RAW encoding is different enough to need different generations of ACR to deal with. So I opted for the simple large fine JPEG for the tests. I grant that more detail would be available in the boxes if they were all running on RAW, but my software won't cook the X-T2 RAW files and I'm too cheap to buy fresh stuff.

Okay. You can look at the results on this blog post and the next one - too may shots to run on one page. I've identified them with lettering in the image so they can't get confused. First, the overall shot:

Now the medium view:

At this point I started to become suspicious, but I'll let you wait until you see the results of the last two tests tomorrow before I tell you what I think and let draw your own conclusions.

See the Fujifilm range on the Camera Electronic website here. 

                                                                                                                                          

                           

Spotty Herbert

Shooting an impromptu product coverage in the shop one morning meant making an improvised scoop out of a roll of Ilford printing paper. It's good paper, and gives a spotless finish.

To get a neutral white balance in the mixed shop lighting I used the Custom White Balance provision on my Fujifilm X-T10 camera  to reset it in one go. Lots of cameras have this same feature - you point the lens at a plain white surface that is illuminated like your subject and the camera measures the colour temperature with one shot. If you say OK to the result you have a steady basis to shoot from, colour-wise.

Only trouble is when I shot I had a real spot - obviously my sensor had picked up a lugie the size of a Volkswagen  and when I stopped down to f:14 it showed up something terrible. Well, I opened the lens a little, put on flash, and resigned myself to cloning it out in the finished products - I didn't have time to wait for a sensor clean.

That's the three choices you have; clean, clone or claggy pictures.

After I got home I decided to see if I could clean the sensor myself with a puff of air - I wouldn't touch the filter in front of a sensor with anything else - I leave that to the staff at Camera Electronic when it gets really bad - but figured a puff from a blower would be fairly safe. As the spot was in the upper left of the picture the offending dirt must have been in the lower right area - I puffed carefully all round the place and then took another diagnostic picture of a clear blue sky and small aperture.

No good. Still spotty. Puff again. Still spotty. Then I happened to glance at the rear element of the lens.

The spot. Sitting there. One puff and it was gone, and with the last photo....voila:

This is the wide angle/short focal length trap that has got me before. When you use this sort of gear and then stop down to f:11-22 you run a risk of picking up dark spots from gunk on the rear elements of your lenses or light spots from the front elements of filters in front of the lenses. It can be deadly if you are firing a flash at a subject against a dark backdrop.

The answer, as Ernest our technician says, is to take as much care with the element surfaces as you are urged to do with the sensor - and to make sure that you are not re-contaminating everything

each time you heave a lens on and off. Clean out the camera bag, make sure your clothing is not shedding itself into the camera.

And when you are next in the shop, whack out some cash for a Camera Electronic lens cloth or some packets of Hoodman Lens Cleanse wet wipes. The money is little enough and the time you take clearing the optical pathway will be repaid 100 x over in not having to clone stamp every darn file you make.

Motorcycle Mike On His Souped Up Bike

Well, not really - but that was the title of a track by Dave "Diddle" Day in 1957 and the chance to use it may never come again...

Wednesday night at Camera Electronic and we saw what happens when a hot rod guy gets a hot rod camera - in this case Stefan Gosatti and the new Nikon D5. It was a perfect combination.
Stefan was given a chance to try out this brand-new top-of-the-line sports and action camera by Nikon - their high-speed flagship - on the road and on the football field. It was a quick trial but he was just the man who could give an accurate report.

Stefan has used Nikon professional cameras for years with fashion, sports, automotive and product illustration. The bran-new Nikon D5 is the latest evocation of their big full frame DSLR and he got a chance to wring a lot of it out. Not all - by his own admission, there were a lot of new features he did not have time to fully explore...but with the items that pertain to his professional specialties, he was able to go to town.

The prints you see in the small snapshots are from that camera - they are mere reportage representations of what are large, excellent images. Sharp, fast, and with very good colour and dynamic range. And at ISO points that are normally accessed only with oxygen and a nose bleed. While he shot his fast lady on the bike at ISO 6400, the device will go to over 3 million ISO! It's nearly impossible to think of a situation that would not be possible with that sort of camera sensor.

Of course it is never only the sensor - it is the new processor as well.

This also accounts for the rapidity with which the AF system works and the sophisticated nature of the tracking that allows the user to select what he wants to follow and then delivers sharp focus on that in spite of movement and visual interruptions.

It is also the reason that the screen on the new camera can be made to be so convenient for the photographer when it comes time to examine a sequence of shots. The high-speed nature of the shutter and associated buffer and writing circuits mean that a lot of images are going to be stored rapidly - and the photographer needs to be able to access these equally rapidly. Stefan demonstrated a scrolling bar on the LCD screen that runs rapidly through the files, allows you to stop as soon as you see a good one and then zooms, widens and searches throughout the image with the same sort of finger gestures that control smart phones.

The cameras are equipped with twin card slots - and these can be ordered with either two CF card slots or two XQD slots. Readers will be aware that the XQD cards are faster than the CF cards by a fair margin, but are more costly. Of course, a lot of people will have lots of CF cards already, so these can be utilised straight away. Camera Electronic can supply CF-ready D5 cameras right now - either in sales or rental form. XQD can be ordered but may take a little while to arrive. People who get one type and change their mind about it can have the camera converted here in Australia to the other sort for a fee.

Speaking of two different items - apparently the D5 will also produce 2 different forms of JPEG files as well as the NEF file type.

Well, they are not cheap. You can see the price on our on-line store or ring up the staff and discuss it. Think in terms of about $ 8900. If you are in the business of doing the sort of photography that these cameras do, that money is a business investment. If you are dabbling but have that sort of figure available to play with you can be assured that you will have an instrument that cannot be bettered for high-speed action photography. You'll need to put good Nikon lenses out the front and they will also cost money.

PS; No motorcyclists were injured and no laws were broken in the making of the pictures, but apparently half the dress blew off. Makes your afternoon photographing Canal Rocks sorta slow, doesn't it?

For all orders on the Nikon D5 please call in or follow the links on-line.

A Picnic In The Country

After sampling the delights of early morning tourism in Rossmoyne ( Land Of the Two-storey Mansions Trying To Be More Massive Than Each Other ) I headed over the historic Old Shelley Bridge toward the Artistic Quarter. As this is where the Little Studio is located, perhaps that should be amended to Artistic 1/64th. No matter - I was determined to try the Olympus Pen F as studio camera.

Don't screw up your noses - it might have been meant for a street camera or a tourist camera, but inside that chrome lurks a very special studio camera - one well-adapted to the Little Studio.

The sensor in a Micro 4/3 camera is smaller than the sensors of other mirror-less cameras - they might have the 24mm x 36mm of a full-frame camera or the 18mm x 24mm of the APS-C camera. The Olympus company has pioneered the micro 4/3 sensor which is which is 13.5mm x 18mm. The lenses that are made for micro 4/3 cameras have their focal lengths selected to match this smaller area.

As the lenses have shorter focal lengths while still maintaining the angular coverage of their larger cousins, they benefit from an increased depth of field. The photographers who always want shallow depth of field to throw backdrops out of focus might growl at this and have to take special care to use wide apertures - but those of us that shoot close-ups of various types think that more DOF is wonderful.

To give you a concrete example - if I want to have a digital view of the world that is the same as that was seen in an old 35mm film camera when it had a 35mm wide-angle lens mounted here are my choices:

1. A full frame camera with a 35mm focal-length lens. No mathematics involved. If I focus on a subject at 10 centimetres and use an aperture of f:22 I get a depth of field of 4.6 mm. That's very little when a subject might be 25cm long - It means the subject can only present a very shallow side to the camera.

2. an APS-C camera uses a 23mm lens for that same angle of view. It is better when the same criteria are applied - you'll get a depth of field of 12.6mm. Still shallow but the subject has more space to move and can start to be seen more in 3/4 view.

3. The micro 4/3 camera uses a 17mm focal length lens for that same view - and this time the DOF expands out to 25.1 mm.

Now, obviously if you can move away from the subject a little then the DOF gets wider too, but in the tabletop studio you are clawing for every millimetre of focus that you can get - it can literally be a no-debate question if you are faced with a 40mm macro lens or a 35mm macro - you choose the latter.

Now the good part about the Olympus firm is that they have incorporated massively good sensors and processing engines in their cameras to take advantage of those smaller sensors. Studio work on a tripod does not using their extensive anti-shake mechanisms as such but there is certainly provision in the camera to use the shifting sensor to capture more detail from an immobile subject.

Note that in the examples made today, this extra resolution mechanism was not put in place - I was working on the premise that the camera was being used as a tourist camera so I left it off. Another time might show far more detailed results.

As it is the results from the front bumper of the Chrysler 300 to the back are more than adequate. This is a good test model as it is one of the longer cars of the 60's and it tests DOF to the limit.

One fun thing - there are provisions in the 'art" section of the colour control dial for "retro", "pinhole" and other effects. They are surprisingly good, and if you did not want to add plug-ins or complex actions to Photoshop to achieve old-looking images, this would be a good choice. There is also a very adjustable monochrome control to explore.

For those who have never ridden in a Chrysler 300 from the late 50's and early 60's - they are interesting cars. The front seats swivelled to the side to allow easier entry and exit and in some cases they had adjustable steering wheel rake and the wheels themselves were shaped like television screens. The ones with the press-button automatic transmission did away with column or floor shifts.

They were big and fairly fast on a highway, but the suspension on them had a fore and aft roll to it that could set up a rocking motion that was a killer for people with travel sickness.
You can find the Pen-F available for order on our website.

The Midnight Laboratory Of Dr. Ernest...

Approach the the old castle, open the creaking door, and avoid the large Tesla coil machine making lightning in the corner. Welcome to the laboratory of Dr. Ernest. It is as near to Transylvania as most of us ever get...

Disregard the shrieking. It is just the staff looking at the latest work roster. Pay them no mind. Look on the bench...

Notice the Canon camera sitting with the lens off, and strange wires leading from the inside...leading to the dismantled Voigtlander lens nose-down on the workbench. Now listen and watch as Dr. Ernest triggers the continuous exposure drive of the camera and captures the result in slow motion...

Notice how the actuator lever in the lens bounces back and forth as the diaphragm of the lens is stopped down - and how it comes to the end of its travel and meets as simple a device as a brass wire to arrest it...

See the shutter open in perfect synchronisation with the diaphragm, even though the camera is banging away like a maxim gun. And look into the mysterious depths of the camera at the living, breathing sensor...sensing things...

Notice how every paragraph ends with three dots...

Behold! Dr. Ernest breathes life into the separate parts! Behold! He knows how to make them operate in unison! Behold! He knows how to put them back together again and not end up with extra screws and springs! The science of the Repair Department! Life!

And one last thing...

Some Ernest Advice From The Workshop

I have been let into a few secrets by our senior technician regarding sensor cleaning for digital cameras. Here is a précis of the conversation held in the workshop. I have not included the bit about not scrubbing over the sensor with a steel wool Brillo pad as I figure nearly everyone will know that already. But here's some other thoughts:

Where do flies go in winter? If you have done pondering that, try this - where does sensor dust come from?

Okay, if you have removed the lens of your DSLR or mirror-less camera in the middle of a paddock at ploughing time or in the discharge path of a council mulcher, you may be forgiven for thinking that is the source of your troubles. Possibly, possibly. If you have not had such misfortune consider the other sources of contamination.

1. Lenses with open clearances and a considerable 'pumping 'action that operates upon zooming or focusing, dirt gets near moving section of lens, dirt gets drawn in, dirt gets distributed.

2. Your clean home is...full of cooking oil vapour as well as other sticky components. Also full of cloth lint and carpet fibres as well as dirt brought in from outside on you clothing. Run yourfinger over the top of a picture frame anywhere in the house. Pass inspection? If you think so, lick that finger. No? Thought so.

3. You get ready to change a lens and take the rear lens cap off the new one. You put it in your pocket, then change the lens, then recap the removed lens. With the cap that is now full of pocket lint. Guess where this goes and where it ends up next time you change. And ALL your rear lens caps are probably just as bad...

4. Way hay, let's go to the drag races. Or Barbagallo. Or the speedway. What is that drifting cloud of blue smoke composed of? Tyres. Guess which part of your camera it ends up on.

5. Spots in the viewfinder of your DSLR.? If they are not seen on Live View - and most times they are not - they are not affecting your sensor view or images.

6. On-board sensor cleaning mechanism not working? See No.2 above - you have glued the gunk to your sensor with just ordinary living. Time for a professional wet-solution clean to get off what a tiny piezo-shake will not shift. Not a home-swab-it-with-something-from-the-internet clean which is closer to the Brillo pad that you might think.

7. When I used to rip bones out of people's head for a living, I was required to do it with clean hands. The hospitals were surprisingly insistent upon this, and went to the extent of demanding that I wash not just to the wrist, but all the way up to the elbow for several minutes with strong soaps. Even though I rarely plunged my arm into the patients up to the elbow. The principle was to get cleanliness in a wide radius around where it was needed.

So also with cameras. No good just cleaning the sensor if the rest of the device looks like an ash-pit. And certainly no point in doing it if the back of the lens is a source of continued contamination. Clients - wise clients - would do well to bring their lenses in for cleaning and pay the extra impost to have the entire camera cleaned - it will extend the period of usability no end if the contamination loading is reduced all around.

And a final thought - but not from Ernest this time. I had been plagued with white spots on my images taken of dancers on a dark stage - particularly when flash illumination was used. Wide angle shots were the worst. I blamed the sensor and the curtains and the dancers and cruel fate...until I looked at the bits of dust that had accumulated on the inside of the UV filter that was screwed onto the 18-200mm lens. No wonder I had white spots - an 18mm lens firing at f:11 can see quite a lot close up to itself and if the dust has bright illumination against dark ground... so I removed the filter for inside shots and the spots disappeared.
Heading Image: Either sensor dust or flak..

http://cameraelectronic.com.au/repair.html

Next Size Up. Epson And Fujifilm.

I am going to revise what I say to people here in the shop - particularly in respect of the size of sensor and the size of picture one can make with it.

I base my opinions on what I have done...not on what I have read. Will Rogers would have laughed at me because I am the one who has to test out the electric fence for myself - but in some cases the shock s a pleasant one. So it was today with a trial print done here on our shop Epson Stylus Pro 4900 printer. It has opened my eyes.

The file came as a large jpeg from my Fujifilm X-Pro1 camera and the standard Fujinon 35mm f:1.4 lens. It was taken in bright sunshine at Cusack Road this last Sunday - a little red Model A delivery van done as a mild hot rod. Red? Red as!

Up until now I have advised customers that the most they could expect from APS-C sensors on mirrorless cameras was an A3+-sized print. That indeed was my experience with the last system camera I used, and I accepted it as gospel. If someone wanted bigger prints I advised a bigger sensor.

Not no more. The red Model A picture that came off the Epson this morning is a full A2 size. It's printed on Ilford Smooth Pearl and it is brilliant. Of course part of the secret is that it was taken in RAW on the X-Pro1 and converted through the Silkypix program to a big  jpeg. but there is no reason on another occasion not to use the large/fine jpeg setting on the camera itself and just go from there. This would give X-trans users of some of the unique film simulation modes as well

Brodie Butler Passes Judgement!

It's not as bad as it sounds - he hasn't put on the black cap and the solemn voice...in fact the news he has to impart to the prisoners is all good...

Brodie recently gave a dynamite lecture on the subject of the new Canon EOS 5Ds and 5D Sr cameras at the Oxford Hotel. As part of the festivities, Canon Australia, Fitzgerald Photo laboratory, and Camera Electronic put up a little contest for the photographers who attended.

They were to submit pictures involving Canon products. Brodie was to be judge.

The entries were so good that Brodie finally had to give it as a spilt decision and award two prizes. They go to:

Hyrom Jones
Brad Miskiewicz

They both get a big 'ol print voucher from Fitgerald's, and $ 375 worth of Canon gear rental from us. Good images coming...

And for all who entered the contest , they can come in to see our service team for a free sensor clean - courtesy of Canon CPS and us.

Sleepless In Seattle - Spotless In Subiaco - $ 5 Special...

Anyone with a digital camera knows the annoyance of discovering spots on your images - no-one more so than wildlife photographers who take pictures of leopards or giraffes. Thus you can understand my problem yesterday on the African savannah. The elephants were fine - the lions were fine - even the vulture was attractive and co-operative...but the giraffes had spots.

Not on the giraffes, mind. These were the Italian racing giraffes with the two-tone paint job and racing stripes. The problem was spots in the sky above them.

Normally this sort of thing is the result of dust on the sensor of the camera. Dust, skin flakes, insects, or shark teeth - they all leave distinctive shadows on evenly-lit portions of the scene. I noted them in the sky of the savannah shots. The irksome thing was they were happening with a camera body that had not had a lens change...and I was unwilling to believe that the camera company would have sent it out from the factory pre-dirty.

Well, nothing for it, but to carry on and resign myself to cloning it out in the computer - so I changed the lens to the next focal length and carried on. And the spots disappeared.

Arrrgh!

Working back to the first lens, I noted that it was an extreme wide angle...14mm. and that I was using it at f:22 - and focussed at the closest distance that it was capable of. So I looked round the front end of it and...found that there was a spot of dust on the front surface of the UV filter - right in the position of the mark. I experimented by removing the filter and re-taking the shot.

No spot.

It is indeed possible to see the effect of a dirty filter if you have enough depth of field with your settings. So the moral is either take the filter off - or use one of the $ 5 special cleaning kits we have in our shop dump-bin to keep the blessed thing spotless.

Who'da thought...?

Boom Boom - Two Big New Canons Rolling Into Battery

Today is the launch day for two new Canon cameras - as I write this, senior figures from Camera Electronic ( and others ) are being feted by the Canon company - eating lark's tongue paté and sipping  rare champagne like as not - while we struggle here at the shop counter with a dry crust of bread and a sip of pond water. Cough, cough. It is good to see that priorities are preserved...

Coming away from that, the new cameras are called the Canon EOD 5Ds and the Canon EOS 5Dr. Not surprisingly, the bodies are closely related - but there is a vital difference.

The basic specs are wild:

50.6 Megapixels off the new sensor.

5FPS high-speed shooting.

61-point AF selection.

New Mirror Vibration Control system to make long exposures sharper.

100-6400 ISO with extension to 12800ISO on demand.

The difference in the two bodies revolves around the provision in the EOS 5Ds of a low-pass filter to deal with the tendency of sensors to create moiré patterns when they encounter man-made repeating patterns like fabrics and grids. This filter is deliberately absent from the EOS 5Dr to allow it to have a sharper result - as long as it sees the random patterning of landscape and nature,

Something for everyone, but Boy, are you going to need to work cleanly and with the best lenses to make use of that much resolution. Choose Canon lenses for this.

Don't know when we will get them, but as soon as we find out, we'll let you know.

Shut Dat Shutter

If you have a mirrorless camera - like the Fujifilm X-E2, The Olympus E-P5, or the Panasonic GX-7, you can conduct an interesting experiment.

Set the camera so that it will fire the shutter with the lens off. Put it to manual, and the shutter speed to 1/60 of a second. Take the lens off, and look into the open mount as you press the shutter button.

What the heck was that!? It was the shutter snapping into place, opening for 1/60 of a second, then snapping shut again, then opening up. If you had put a cigar end in there you could have cut it off...No, no, no - that was just a joke. Don't do that. Smoking cigars is bad for you and even worse for shutters.

The point of this exercise is to show you where the shutter is. It used to be tucked away decently a the back of the camera body just in front of the film plane* or hiding coyly behind a swinging mirror - now it is up the front ready to be broken.

Reduce the chances of this - now you've done the experiment, don't repeat it. If you are going to clean your own sensor ( Questionable decision ) don't leave the camera on ( Bad decision) and then press the shutter button ( Terrible decision ). Repairs are profitable but only for the repair shop - not for you.

If you are concerned about dust or smudges on your sensor past what the little cleaning program of your camera can cope with, bring it in to our repairs department. We can do it well, quickly, and without busting the shutter.

* Was a PRU Spitfire considered a film plane...?

Canon CPS News - Spots Be Gone!

" Spots wha hae wi' Canon fled..."

Sorry - the devolution vote and all. I'll be right in a minute...Och Aye, the noo...

Good news for Canon CPS members. Camera Electronic has long been an authorised drop-off point for professional photographers sending their Canon equipment in for the excellent and expert Canon Australia services. Now we get to go one step more:

We are now able to provide the benefit of free sensor cleaning for current CPS members under Canon's authorisation. This will be for 5d and 1D-series bodies and will be governed by current Canon terms and conditions.

Please contact our repairs and rental department to get more details. Now you no longer will need to Hoover your own sensors.

Fuji Introduce An Air Force And A Navy Version Of Their Camera

Well that was a flat-out lie, but you must admit from the look of the things that one looks as though it is land-based and one looks as though it flies off a carrier. The truth is a little more complex.

The silver camera is the Fuji X-M1 fitted with their 16-50 mm f:3.5-5.6 OIS lens - a beautiful all-round piece of glass. The lens delivers the same angles of view that we would expect from a 24-75 lens on a full-frame camera. It is very well built.

The X-M1 is based around the new Fuji X-Trans sensor with a slightly different arrangement of the colour sensors on its surface from the standard Bayer-array that other manufacturers fit. Users can see an increase in colour fidelity and low-noise sensitivity even in jpeg images.

Here I must put a personal note in - I use a Fuji X 10 camera and have never even bothered to shoot RAW with it - though it does do RAW - as the jpegs were so good right from the start. Anyone who gets any of the Fuji cameras would be well advised to test out the jpeg for themselves before switching to RAW. You might find it does all you need without using up extra memory.

Any road, the Fuji X-M1 with that lens is about the $ 1049 mark, give or take an argument
or two.

The blue Navy version is actually the Fuji X-A1. Same body, I think, and same lens, certainly - but the sensor in this one is the more conventional Bayer-array. I'll have to refer you to DP Review to see the complexities of that but it may be that your photo needs would be well met by this level of light handling.

If so, pocket the difference in price - the Fuji X-A1 is about $ 849 - or spend it on a second lens for the camera. I'd pick the 14mm myself, but then I'm a studio and closeup shooter and I'm biased.

Not biased about the Navy or the Air Force, though. Both fine services.

Stereoscopic Low-Light Lenses - Newest Development

News just in from Rochester about the development of new lenses for stereoscopic work.

Apparently they have developed small lenses with a focal length of about 22mm that can be remotely controlled to change their shape to focus on close objects. An electrical signal is fed into the lens and the actual curvature of the lens can be changed. This will eliminate the need for manual focussing helixes or stepping motors in the application.

The lenses are currently limited in their aperture range from about f:2.1 to f:8.3, though one researcher says that the maximum aperture is closer to f:3. The lenses are being paired with dual-element sensors that can be dialled up to a considerable ISO. Unfortunately when the ISO approaches the maximum the colour information is switched off. So far the maximum resolution of the experimental sensor is only 5 megapixels but this may be increased  - it is understood that funding is being sought from private investors to do this.

Up until now the maximum shutter speed of the test rig has been about 1/50 of a second.

Apparently there is a 20-stop dynamic range with the sensor, but the monochrome limit applies at the lowest light levels.

One interesting thing I saw in the photos of the test rig was the automatic tracking mechanism that allows the cameras to go from a straight lock for infinity to a slight inward tilt for closeup objects. This can give a sort of three-D effect.

So far these lenses and sensors are in a developmental stage but already the marketing boys are adding their input - the iris diaphragms come in grey, green, blue, and brown.

Note: apparently they are also thinking of equipping each lens/ sensor assembly with automatic covers that close over them for about 8 hours out of 24.

A Guide For The Perplexed Pixel

I noted recently that my little 3-D stereoscope - I got it as a child - has been repeating itself over and over. I think it is a Déja-View Master... Those of you old enough to appreciate this will also like the next bit.

We get all sorts of service calls here for repairs and maintenance to digital cameras. One of the most frequent worries is material contaminating the sensor and showing up in the image.  Here is a little guide to understanding what you see and what to do about it.

1. Vague grey blobs on an even grey ground are dust particles on the sensor - they shade the surface and thus it is darker, with a fuzzy outline. You may see a crescent-shaped item - likely a hair on the sensor.

You can clean the sensor yourself with a number of commercial brushes and swabs, but in the hands of the ham-fisted, this can carry a real danger of scratching the delicate surface. Ruin the sensor and you might as well buy a new camera...

Better plan is to let the technicians here at CE clean it for you. They do not ruin sensors, and the cost and time required for this service is not excessive. $44 for a small mirrorless camera, $55 for an APSC sensor, and $77 for a full frame DSLR.

2. The well defined grey blob with eight legs is a spider in a bathtub. Don't scoff - in 40 years in the trade I have seen a number of film and digital cameras infested with mites and crawlies of various types. Insecticide fumes and a mechanical cleaning get rid of them. If you discover a Huntsman in your mirror box, don't take off the lens, whatever you do...

3. We were asked how to get rid of this irregular-shaped mark on the image. If it is just one-off I would suggest Photoshopping it out with the clone tool. If you get a have a lot of these recurring, get yourself a Mossberg .410 and a box of No.7 shells.

4. This is harder to get rid of. And you get yourself in real trouble with the DCA if you try. Best idea is to turn away from it and photograph another bit of the sky. These marks rarely intrude themselves into interior shots or family portraits...