The Sigma dp1 Quattro is a strange albeit nicely redesigned fixed-lens compact. It looks like a camera that we should expect to see in the 21st century. If streetscapes and travel photography are your thing, this is a good camera to have in your bag (because it isn't one you can carry in a pocket).
Read MoreI just thought I'd quickly publish a post about my two-week escape to Kota, where I'll be hunting for more bees for the Pollinator Project and of course, holding a solo exhibition on bees and other pollinating insects.
The exhibition will be titled "Bee Aware", and will be held at the Kota Art Gallery, Sarovar Rd, Chatra Vilas Garden, Nayapura, Kota, Rajasthan, from the 3rd-5th October.
I'll also be holding a talk about bees and their importance to the ecosystem on the evening of the 3rd of October, so if anybody's interested, do drop in!
I'll be leaving from Mumbai on the 22nd, and hopefully I'll be able to capture a few local pollinators.
Sigma claims that this lens is a "pro level performer for shooting everything including portrait photography, landscape photography, studio photography and street photography", so I put it through its paces to see if that was true.
If you'd like the short version right here, the lens mostly holds up to those claims.
This review is more about how the lens performs in the field, and I haven't comparedit to any other lenses even though I have a couple of Nikkor 50mm lenses.
I didn't want the review to be about this-50mm vs. that-50mm. There are several other blogs and photography or tech-related sites that have made those comparisons. Skip to the Image quality section for links.
I was very pleased to finally encounter Apis dorsata, or the Rock Bee, on the park grounds. They're all over this park, making me regret that I haven't visited earlier.
(In my defense, the monsoon season over the last couple of months has really prevented me from going anywhere in search of bees)
In an interesting new approach to high dynamic range photography, a group of researchers at MIT Media Lab have developed a method of increasing a camera's dynamic range to infinity, potentially ending the problem of overexposure.
Read MoreThe European Imaging and Sound Association, or EISA for short, just announced its winners, and Canon picked up awards in several "Professional" categories, viz. Professional DSLR Lens, Professional DSLR, and Prosumer DSLR, for the 11-24/f4 L, 5DS/R, and 7D, respectively.
What is notable is that Sigma, Olympus and Sony have also picked up multiple awards.
Read MoreSome of these applications are paid, some of these are free (or fremium), but all of them are programs that photographer's couldn't do without.
I'm sure that some folks would disagree or have a different list, but these are the top 5 apps that photographer's would need in order to run their businesses.
These are all PC or Mac applications, and I'll be making another post on mobile apps soon.
I spent the last weekend at Lonavala with my close friend Abhijeet Jayavant at his family home in Lonavala. The house is some 600 feet farther up than the main town, on the road to Aamby valley. Thankfully, this also means that it's in a near-pristine location, far-removed from the madness at, say, Bushi dam, where people seem to almost take pleasure in littering and driving on the wrong side of the road.
The monsoon hasn't exactly been intense this year, with sporadic showers between long spells of sunshine. June had a few good downpours, but July has been almost entirely bone-dry.
I was thus hoping to find and photograph bees there for my pollinator project, but as luck would have it, the weather literally put a dampener on my plans. Had we made the trip a week prior, I might've had a little more luck.
The Lumix GX-8 replaces the well-received GX-7, and the upgrades are noteworthy. They've crammed a few more megapixels into the camera: 20.3, up from 16.
Other upgrades include a slightly higher frames-per-second burst mode, an electronic shutter that can capture at speeds of up to 1/16,000th of a second, and a lower base ISO (100 vs 125 on the GX7). You can find a good comparison chart here if you want all the spec changes.
The biggest upgrades? 4k video, and dual stabilisation!
Read MoreIf you're a professional photographer and haven't seen an experienced hand work in the darkroom, this is a must-see!
Read MoreWhat makes editorial photography more challenging is the tighter budget that magazines tend to have compared to commercial productions. It entails travelling light, shooting quickly, and being cognisant about where and how the photos are going to end up, way before you hit the shutter release.
Read MorePalette is a device that's designed for folks that prefer the tactility of dials and sliders. It's "tightly integrated with Adobe Photoshop CC", or so they claim. Based on the photos and Youtube videos of the device being used in action, I'm inclined to believe them. And pick one up.
Read MoreI've been using Adobe's CC-based subscription model for a little over a year now.
For the most part, I couldn't be happier with their Photography Plan, which for the very reasonable price of Rs. 499 (or $9.99 USD), offers Photoshop and Lightroom. Updates are quick, and if you happen to use two computers, your settings and workspaces sync. They even sync with their mobile products -admittedly I've never seriously used those, but the feature is nice to have.
However, one lingering annoyance that a lot of users had been forced to endure thus far was that it's Creative Cloud application would often pop up and steal focus from whatever application you happened to be using. Not very productive when you're drawing a path with the pen tool, or if you're editing in full-screen mode in Photoshop. Or, y'know, other equally important stuff. Like watching cat videos on Youtube.
Don't scoff at the cat videos. They provide health benefits. No, seriously.
Thankfully, with the latest update on 7th July, this has been fixed. As per Adobe's release notes (I italicized the text):
Version 2.1.3.121 released on 7/7/2015
- Creative Cloud desktop app no longer pops up in the middle of your workflow.
- The Exchange plugin will now correctly install Adobe Add-ons.
- Additional bug fixes have improved overall experience.
Thank you, Adobe. High time. Won't be gnashing my teeth and closing the CC app in frustration any longer!
Obligatory first post. 'nuff said.
