Steve McCurry – London exhibition 07/09/2011 – 24/09/2011

The Chris Beetles Gallery in London is holding an exhibition of Steve McCurry‘s work. There can be little doubt that McCurry is one of the finest travel and humanitarian photographers working today. Some of his images are so famous you would know them even if you have never heard of his name. We regularly feature posts about Steve because he is just the best. If you have a chance get along to see his pictures.

Chris Beetles Fine Photographs

3-5 Swallow Street, London, W1B 4DE

gallery@chrisbeetles.com 020 7434 4319

If you can’t get to the exhibition then have a look at Steve’s website, beautiful and simple, here is the link

150 unmissable photography sites

so as we know the great thing about the web is that all the information you need is out there, the problem is finding it. I spend a lot of time looking at photography related sites and apart from a problem with categorising them in my bookmarks there are also so many. When a site like Pixiq creates a blog post titled “150 unmissable photography sites” it is worth checking out.

“A few years ago, I wrote a post highlighting some of my favourite photography sites, and it quickly became one of my most-commented posts. It turns out that despite the fact that I included lots of sites, it was never enough. Now, I’m not much of the bookmarking type, and so as time went on, I never really kept a record of my favourite sites.

Until recently, that is. About six months ago, I started a new blog post, tentatively titled “100 great photography sites”, but I quickly discovered that there are many more than 100 fantastic sites out there. Then, the post completely ballooned out of control, as I tried to write descriptions and a bit of information about each of the sites I had collected.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… 150 photography sites that will waste most of your month, if you’ll let them.”  if you want to see this list of unmissables go here

Here is the top 5

1 – Flickr

A fantastic community-based site that enables user to create profiles and upload, tag, and organize their photos to share with friends and family. It also has groups so users can share photos about similar topics, themes, or concepts.

2 – Digital Photography Review

Probably the most viewed website for getting reviews about the latest classic cameras and accessories. Enables users to compare various cameras, and find images and specifications. Members can also comment, ask questions and post topics in the forums. Easily the best place to research your next camera!

3 – Small Aperture

Small Aperture writes about photography ‘stuff’. Anything goes, really, from new cameras to their own monthly photo competition, via the odd rant and tutorial. But they’re as irreverent, unstuffy, informal, quirky, and opinionated as they can get away with, which is a breath of fresh air. It’s pictures, cameras, websites, and exhibitions on too much caffeine and sugar.

4 – Photo Competitions

If you are interested in amateur or professional photography competitions, visit this website to take part in almost all aspects of photography contests like landscape, nature, travel, wildlife, cities, culture, underwater adventure and many more.

5 – The Luminous Landscape

Those who love nature and landscape photography will find vital information, latest news, tips, and tricks on this website. People will also find out some relevant and valuable articles on various topics related to landscape photography.

from William Eggleston’s Guide

 

 

Video on DSLR – does it work

Like many people I was excited by the prospect of having HD video capability on my DSLR, when I first got my hands on my 5D Mk2 I was trying out all it’s lovely video options. As expected the quality was really great but then I started to notice the drawbacks. The first thing that jumped out was that the sound recording was poor, noise from the body of the camera, noise from wind, in fact any noise was a problem, too loud, too harsh, not directional enough etc. So I bought a very nice twin mic set up with hot shoe mounting from Rode. In my testing I realised this made significant improvements over the built in mic. Then I realised that with the addition of mics on the top of the camera I needed to put the thing on a tripod and this limited what I could do with the camera in video mode. I also realised that focusing the image using the lens manually, focus pulling in fact, on moving subjects was almost impossible, either with the camera on a tripod or hand held, my arms just were not long enough even considering my simian nature. I have barely used the video capture options on my camera a few product vids where subject movement to describe the product’s function and a few talking heads have been the total of meaningful use.

I did have another go but soon relaised that I needed more kit and started to investigate the options and there are many. The obvious was to buy one of the rigs that gives shoulder support, geared focus and zoom controls and maybe a clip on viewfinder. The cost was more than the cost of the camera, so really a non starter. The whole thing made me realise that when a piece of equipment is made for a job it is so much better than something that is adapted.

This article from Pixq perfectly sums up my experience and considerations on the matter. The advantages of dslr video are far out-weighed by the advantage. I have no doubt people will disagree with me, but then maybe they have arms much longer and the ability to focus on things much closer than I do. More gibbon like in fact.

Here is that article

Here is an example of the rigs you can buy to make your video dslr work

“There is a SLR camera in there, somewhere, but if you have to add several lengths worth of metal tubing to your camera to adapt it to be useful as a video camera, it is probably not a good sign.”  Pixq

gibbon, very long arms!