Archive for the ‘Gadgets and Gear’ Category
WiFi SD Card, Filter Systems, and a New Print Medium
Directions for WiFi on My New Camera (Photo credit: Old Shoe Woman)
Today, let’s take a quick look-see at what’s going on right now in the photography marketplace.
WiFi Camera without a WiFi Camera
Don’t have one of those new WiFi cameras and just achin’ to buy one? Guess what – you’ve got one if you can spend $70 on a new type of SD Card! – say ‘thank you’ to Transcend. Using on
e of their SD cards will allow you to establish a wireless P2P connection between your camera and mobile device and also hop on any reachable hotspot. You’ve got WiFi!
Filters are a ‘Snap!’
Cokin has brought out a new Snap! Kit of filters for mirrorless cameras. The kit contains an adaptor ring (five diameters available), filter holder, an ND4, a Graduated Sunset filter, and . . . that’s all! Cokin, that ain’t much of a ‘kit’. If you want to treat mirrorless users right, you could have thrown in a Polarizer and Star 6, and perhaps a Diffuser (with a suitable increase in price). How about a Snap! Kit Deluxe?
Filters can also be Retro
If you want to use filters but want to exhibit some retro style (and I mean really retro), look no further than Kenko’s Filter Stick. PetaPixel says that it “is like a Lorgnette for Your Camera Lens” and that’s not a bad analogy. While you hold your camera in one hand, you hold this thingumabob, filter screwed in, with the other hand in front of the lens. Lorgnettes may have been High Society style but thanks – I’ll take the Cokin solution!
Printing Medium: Wood!
To close, let’s step back several days and take in an unusual exhibition. Myles McGuinness has tried to print photographs on wood for years and recently he perfected the technique (it’s a secret).
McGuinness is a surf and waterside photographer. For his wood prints, he chooses both, a specific image as well as a particular block of wood for that image. Check out this example and this one.
The fruits of his skill and labour were exhibited from 3rd November at a venue in Oceanside, California.
Barter, the Old Way, and Kodak, the Old Soldier
English: (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Barter, the Old Way
“The old way of trading skills can still work,” a photographer has stated emphatically. Barter? For a photographer?
Yes – that is exactly what Shantanu Starrick seems bent on proving as an itinerant photographer who does not pay for his room and board – not in money, that is, for Starrick pays in kind: photographs and videos.
In Pixel Trade: Photography for Trade, Chris Gampat interviews Starrick, who concentrates on photographing-documenting persons as purveyors of different “trades,” i.e. persons functioning as professionals. In exchange for his photographs, he gets food, shelter, transport, . . . .
Starrick says, “The initial conversations with these people often bring up concerns of cost. It always ends with them realizing how much time I have spent thinking this through, and they quickly agree that this project will be worth the trade.” At the same time, he too is given the royal treatment – usually his hosts are “extremely generous” and he is “well fed.”(!)
Perchance one or two of our Australian readers have bumped into Starrick? After all, he has had a pronounced swing through the country having started off in Melbourne.
I bet the barter idea behind Pixel Trade is giving a lot of photographers some good ideas. I also bet it’s causing one fellow a lot of frustration: the taxman!
Kodak, the Old Soldier
Two months back, one of our posts was titled Kodak’s Suicide Run. The questions about Kodak’s viability have not subsided. “Can Kodak survive just with a successful restructuring/bankruptcy and without any major innovation/new products?” asks PhotoRumors but does not provide an optimistic prognosis.
Kodak has seen a two percent increase in its profitability but when you slash expenses like crazy, that’s not too hard. Kodak’s portfolio of products and services lacks coherence, the company does not have “any major innovation/new products,” and it appears to be a rudderless ship.
Kodak is a gradually-disappearing once-global brand.
Perhaps PhotoRumors could have offered the following prognosis:– Kodak is not going to commit suicide nor is it going to die, yet the writing is on the wall. Take it away General MacArthur: “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”
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