Last week Graham and I had a chance to spend the day looking at all the latest and greatest equipment of our trade. Diamonds camera, video and digital in the city were holding their annual Big Lens Day. Always a fun informative day.
We listened to reps from Olympus, Sony, Fuji, and Canon. We caught up with some old faces and met some new ones.
Coffee On Olympus at Cafe Brunelli – look at that Crema!
Our catch up with the Olympus rep, Brett, was a nice informal chat over coffee at Cafe Brunelli. We also had a chance to chat with Denis Smith of Ball of Light fame. We can’t believe it has been 12 months since this amazing guy crossed our path. You can check out his work here. So much has happened since then. We attended one of his workshops last year, (check it out here) and began to understand his love affair with the Olympus Live Composite Mode – his enthusiasm and passion for photography is quite addictive. A bunch of very brave photographers joined him at Sunrise this year – needless to say – if you know us – we were not there! But, here are some of our light painting images we prepared earlier!
Cafe Brunelli kept us going with coffee and cake – this Tiramisu was delicious – the staff were friendly and very helpful when it came to trying to choose which cake for afternoon tea!!!
We then listened to the Sony rep, Sean, tell us about the Sony A9 – very nice – 20 frames a second – wow!
Aaron from Olympus spoke to us about the developments with lens technology.
For Graham this is like being a kid in a candy shop – he enjoyed trying some of these lenses on his camera!!
Next up was the rep from Fuji, He had the great task of showing us the Fuji GFX – well – what can I say – this camera is amazing. I could tell you all the technical jargon but at the end of the day you just want to know if it is a good camera or not – it is a great camera.
A behind the scenes image of Graham getting a chance to be hands on with the Fuji GFX in a studio setting – great idea by the rep!
TJ – taken with the Fuji GFX – this is SOOC – quite impressive if you ask me!
This session was hands on. TJ the model patiently sat through the technical talk and then we were given a chance to pop our own memory cards in to this little beauty and give it a whirl in a studio setting – hey presto – here is the result!
TJ in the studio with the Fuji GFX – the first time Graham has even seen the camera!
To finish the day we went with Steve from the Canon collective on an Architectural walk with tilt and shift lenses. Now that sounded pretty specky. It is quite a cool technique and we again had fun with a hands on experience out in Rundle Mall. Steve lent us a camera, lens and tripod! We even had the poor security man standing there watching!
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- Sample shot with a Tilt-Shift lens – Tilt-Shift normalised.
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- Sample shot with Tilt-Shift lens, neutralising the perspective change.
So to sum up the day – once again Diamonds put on a great show, it must be a logistical nightmare and they carried it off beautifully.
Did we love the equipment we saw – yes! Will we be jumping ship and changing brands – not yet! However, the Fuji has left a very nice image in my memory – maybe one day when I have some spare cash!
