A Tale of Two Plates - Sirui L-Brackets vs. The Competition

Several years ago I was introduced to the value of an L-plate on my camera. Since then my cameras have rarely gone a day without an L-plate attached firmly to their base. To the uninitiated the plate seems a little silly, so let me briefly outline their usefulness: 



The Power of the Polaroid

Here’s a very quick tip for travel photographers. Get a polaroid camera. Well, nowadays it’s more likely to be an Instax camera to be honest. Either way get an instant camera for your travels. It’s the passport you never knew you had.

Years ago, when I was still pretending to be an academic, an ethnographer in particular, I used to carry a Fujifilm Instax 200 Wide camera with me whenever I went on a fieldwork trip. The ‘film’ was expensive for me as a student, but I always found that it was an incredible ice-breaker on meeting people that I wanted to interview. If it wasn’t an ice-breaker it was a fantastic memento of our meeting. As I did return trips to the fieldwork site in the Caprivi, I would often be met by past interviewees with wide smiles and the mention that they still had the photograph that I had given them the previous year. 

Laowa 12mm Ultra wide lens review

The Laowa 'Zero-D' 12mm f2.8 lens has become something more than just a Kickstarter project. It is now available at several brick and mortar stores around the world, and not just online and on eBay. After backing the original project I received my lens in the first quarter of 2017. Since then it has become a mainstay of my bag for commercial and industrial work. I love the lens, but isn't everyone's taste. I recently put together a review for Landscapegear.co.za as they are now the official distributors for Laowa in South Africa. 

As an added bonus, if you pick up this lens in the next two weeks, you can get the Nisi 100mm filter older as a bundle with a R1000 discount. This is phenomenal value, and the filter holder outperforms the original Venus Optics holder in every measurable way. Plus, it includes a circular polarizer that doesn't vignette! 

Click through to read the full review on Landscapegear's blog.

Filters, Photoshop, and Reality - Is it Real and Does it Really Matter?

An image from a series of limestone outcrops on the western shore of Madagascar. Purists would look at the relative paucity of post-production and claim that the image is somehow more real (although detractors of neutral density filters might claim otherwise), yet the black and white, almost infra-red view of the image is quite far from the lived visual reality.

Depending on where, or who, you are reading, perceived reality seems to matter a lot. Looking through some image forums on the internet I came across a fairly large trove of vitriol towards images that were perceived as ‘unreal’ by the viewers. An image by a fairly well known American landscape photographer seemed to arouse a surprisingly amount of ire amongst armchair photographers the world over. These screen grabs were taken from the image in question: