Don't Be Shortsighted -Try A MIOPS Pic...

I have waited a decade for a straight line like that...you may also have been waiting a similar length of time for an easy way to make special effect shots with your digital camera. Well, the time has come - the MIOPS is here.

Over the last few years there has been increased interest in doing spectacular shots - capture of lightning as it strikes - lightbulbs and balloons shattering - time lapse sequences  - sound and motion activated photography - etc. Some of these images have always been possible - even in the film era -  but the amount of equipment and specialised knowledge to arrange them has been staggering.

As an example, most photographers have seen Dr. Harold Edgerton's stoboscopic pictures and experiments with flash in history books. Or they have seen Muybridge's studies of animal motion. The results are pedestrian now but were revolutionary at the time, and the amount of grear and mechanical setup that was needed to get them was far beyond what you could carry or afford.

Lightning shots have been done for over 100 years, but not reliably and not easily. You generally had to stand out in an open field while Ben Franklin got his kite in the air...Climbing to the top of the church steeple with a metal umbrella in the middle of a thunderstorm was also a possibility but generally it was the sort of thing you only did once...

And chasing pictures of elusive wild animals in the woods? Baits and blinds and trip wires and telephoto lenses and crawling around in a ghillie suit to change the glass plates...The only simple way to get wild animal shots was to sit in a tree during bear season and make a noise like a bucket of blueberries.

Okay. Now it is the 21st century and you have a digital camera with an electronic trigger port. Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus, Fujifilm....whatever. If it has a socket for a cable release you are in business. You also need a mobile phone - iOS or Android - and a teenager* to show you how to get an app to work on it.

You also need the MIOPS controller. This little box contains the ability to do sound and light triggered exposures  ( There's your lightning and pistol shots taken care of. ) and it will sit there and do the multiple shots over a very long period of time that the time-lapse photography requires. You don't need to sit there and fire the camera every 5 seconds or so - you can go about your business while it does the monotonous task.

You can get it to respond to laser beams of light or to the sudden interuption of a light beam - here's your chance to leave it in the woods for those wildlife shots without sitting up the tree. You can set up a light trigger beam to capture images of intruders. You're only limited by your imagination and several inconvenient statutes...

The MIOPS is powered by a good - sized lithium rechargable battery so that it can be on duty and responding for a long time. It is equipped with a shoe mount as well as a 1/4" tripod screw socket so you can securely couple it to the camera. There are dedicated connection cords for a number of popular camera makes - the one you see in the illustration is for Canon. Bless them, they have made the cord as well as the controls and port covers in bright orange so that you can see them when you are out the back of Doodlakine at midnight on a astro-shoot and it is as black as the inside of a cat. Would that ALL manufacturers of cords, wires, and connectors for studio use followed the same lead.

As far as controlling the controller, that is where your mobile phone comes in. The days of complex codes and strange computer words are gone - Bluetooth couples the MIOPS to your phone and as soon as the teenager gets the app into the phone, you can use it.

Expensive? No. About 60% of what this sort of thing used to cost and about 600% easier to use. And in-store right now - no need to try to find something on the internet. Save your internet time for reading this column...

* Or you could get the Camera Electronic staff to show you how to do it. They are like teenagers but without the sarcasm and eye-rolling.

The Urge To Share Just Got A Little Stronger - Nikon KeyMission 170

Weblog columnists are a bit of a menace - I know - I write three of these things every day and I would shy away from myself at cocktail parties. I'd be afraid that I would either start riding a hobby horse to dominate conversation or that I would be secretly watching me to see if I could get some copy for the column...

It's not bad character - it's the desire to share that does it. And this desire to share is the basis of the action-camera photographer's work. They want you to see what they are doing. And to be fair, sometimes it is worth looking at.

If you are an action person you now have the new option of the Nikon system action cameras. Today's blog is for the Nikon Key Mission 170. Make what you will of the name, the actual camera is a remarkable thing. And that said at a point where we have seen action cameras for years by other makers.

The Key Mission 170 is basically box-shaped, but does not need an additional bulky housing to waterproof it down to 10 metres. It is good to go out of the box. The makers do provide an protection lens for underwater hazards, though, so they may know more about the dangers you are going to get into than you do...

The camera is remarkably easy to use in the field. Two buttons on top - one for stills and one for video. three buttons at the back to navigate the menu system. And a separate hand controller to let you separate yourself from the device if you are at another point of the surfboard, yacht, or sailplane.

The necessary waterproof door with big yellow seal has twin locks clearly defined by orange warning panels - you should not be able to mistake what is happening and open the back at the wrong time.

There is a dedicated ball head mount and a snap-off release that glues to flat surfaces. I should not wonder if there were not other mounts in the offing - these sort of cameras generate ideas.

There is an integral LCD screen on the back you can see your results while you are still out there and make sure that you are bringing back the footage you need.

You'll be able to do real-time seamless sharing of your experiences too, with the Nikon SnapBridge 360/170 app that will be available for iOS and Android. The camera does a variety of video types, including 4K.

Note that the case construction of these little cameras is superb, as is the quality of the optics.

Now there are more new Nikon action devices in our stores. We'll be featuring the next one soon. In the meantime come on down and see what they look like - summer is coming fast and the water calls...

Nikon KeyMission 170 is at both Camera Electronic stores. 230 Stirling St and 2/324 Murray St, Perth. See our extended December trading hours here

See the Nikon KeyMission 170 on our online store 

A Fleet With Two Flagships

For some time the photographers who use Nikon cameras have been wondering when the smaller of the DSLR fomats - the DX, APS-C, or 18mm x 24mm sensor, call it what you will - would have a new flagship camera body added to the lineup. They fondly remember the line of development of the D100, D200, D300 and D300s and have been patiently waiting for the next in the series. The wait is over.

Last night an expert photographer and our state representative for Nikon Australia presented a show at Camera Electronic focused around the new Nikon D500 camera. Michael Phillips was able to tell us a great deal of the technical detail of the device while Kingsley Klau let us see what it is capable of on a photo-shooting road trip down south.

The camera is definitely the child of the Nikon D300-D800-D810 styling stable. The shape is unmistakeable if occasionally a detail or line changes slightly. But remember this is a DX camera. Long-time enthusiasts will note that the pop-up flash that has been seen in other models has been left off this camera in favour of more weather sealing. Note also that while the camera bears the note of DX, it can take all of the long FX lenses as well - and therein will lie one of its special charms or selling points.

The really big news is invisible - the performance of the sensor and processor and focusing mechanism is so similar to the bigger flagship - the D5 - that you might think that you are using it with a smaller capture area. The ISO performance is up to the 51200 point and it captures 20.9 megapixels. It also captures 4K video and 10 frames per second. A sports camera indeed.
Kingsley put it through its paces utilising a fast car on a deserted road and showed the extraordinary speed and accuracy of focus on the vehicle. He was even able to emulate this with another 4WD at the first glimmer of dawn through mud puddles.

The people who will be looking at this camera seriously - there were over 35 of them on the night - will be interested in that high-speed capture and the precise line of focus that the camera can take with telephoto lenses. It would be an ideal wildlife or birder's camera. I can also imagine the dedicated night-time shooters of stars and beaches applauding the fact that Nikon have incorporated illuminated control buttons in this body. Folks, when you need to see and can't see it spoils some of the best opportunities in outdoor photography. The theatre shooter will also applaud, during the louder passages of the overture.

Have you noticed that you get a tilting LCD screen at last on a century-series Nikon DSLR? Hooray, it makes quite a difference for studio and field shooting and is even better in being a touch control screen as well.

Finally, I can sort of explain what Michael told us regarding social media sharing with the new feature side the camera - SnapBridge - but only sort of. If you think of it as a wireless sharing feature that will shuffle your pictures over very rapidly to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and whatever other social connection you use, you will not be far wrong. But the delightful thing is that you only have to set up the commands to do this once and the camera will remember that connection and re-establish it ever after.

Other wireless sharing connections require you to start them up, pair them up, press a dozen buttons and enter numerous passwords every blessed time. You eventually get sick of it or forget the special sequences needed. SnapBridge does it for you easily and means that the extremely high quality pictures that issue from this camera will start to measurably improve your images and image in the social scene. Think of it as WiFi for grownups.

Note as well that at sometime in the future the sequence of firmware updates that we all should attempt will be come far easier as the Nikon SnapBridge system allows the Nikon company to automatically update the appropriate equipment as improvements come along.

In short, Nikon is now sailing the DX seas with a very high quality new flagship.

Time Travelling With Camera Electronic

The same incautious staff member who speculated about Johnny Cash and the ducks also raised a thought about time travel. He was specifically thinking of time lapse movies, which are becoming increasingly popular these days, but there is no reason stop temporal speculation there - our shop can speed time up, slow time down, repeat it, or excise it. We can go forward, backward, and possibly up, down, and sideways.

In fact, if the general premise of Dr. Who's Tardis is that of an unimposing structure crammed with more space and more equipment inside, I think that could be said to exactly describe 230 Stirling Street.

I shall gloss over who the Weeping Angels, Daleks, and other entertaining staff members and concentrate on the time itself.

Speeding it up: This is the province of the time lapse. The camera sits there and shoots a series of pictures at designated intervals - generally over a pretty long period of time. If something that the cameras has been watching over this time has experienced a set of gradual changes, projecting the subsequent series of pictures back like a video will show that action unfolding in fast action. We've all seen the Disney pics of flowers unfolding or deserts blooming. The technique can be applied to looking at starry skies, scudding clouds, or rush hour crowds.

It works in nearly every case - the only known failure of this sort of filming was the series of pictures they took at 100-year intervals of Keith Richards. When they projected them later they could see mountain ranges heaving up and down in geological eras and continents alternately appearing and disappearing under sheets of ice but Mr. Richards' face never changed...

Slowing it down: Well, if you take a picture at 16 frames per second and project it at 16 frames per second it looks like normal speed. If you take it at 60 frames per second and project it at 16 frames per second everything looks like it has slowed down. This is used to study golf swings, nuclear explosions, and some scientific phenomena  - indeed, a short sequence taken with a Hulcher camera on 16mm film in the 1950's shows Zsa Zsa Gabor while she was married. It is held in the Library of Congress under argon gas.

Modern video cameras and a lot of the zippier mirror-less models can do this to perfection. Action cams are the champs in this at present and as they are likely to be put in harm's way their footage is always entertaining.

Repeating Time. Take a picture that was shot on Kodachrome A movie film in 8mm in 1948. Project it in 2016. Same colours, same scene, same people. And 33 years after your father died he is alive again for 3 1/2 minutes. Beat that Hollywood.

Cutting out time. Get a picture of yourself that was taken 40 years ago. See what clothes you were wearing in the picture. Go to your clothes closet and take those clothes out and put 'em on - or go to the Good Sammy's and get another set. Take a selfie. Put them side by side and the bit in the middle between the two images is what 40 years looks like. Thin, isn't it?

Note For Fujifilm Users - Hahnel Captur Is the Go.

Those of us who have Rico Pfirstinger's book on the X-Pro1 and the X-E1 ( and by extension the X-E2 ) have read the section on remote control of the camera with confusion - he speaks about a device that can do everything but is never seen here in WA. Presumably somewhere in Europe...

That's all very well, but scientific enquiry this morning revealed that the new Captur equipment from Hahnel will do just as well and we have the stuff right here in the shop.

I hooked up the Canon-compatible version of the basic wireless flash/shutter command system and used the microphone port of the X-E2 as the socket for the cable. The Hahnels now operate on AA cells rather than buttons or AAA types so powering them is easy.

Yes, it works perfectly. Press the transmitter button and the camera focuses and fires properly. This also argues that the sophisticated accessory controllers that Hahnel also make for their Captur system would also work - that's delayed action, time lapse, motion capture, etc.

It's good to have a systemic approach to this sort of thing - watch Hahnel closely in the future.