Tonight, the monkeys from Chimp will be down at Canon Australia to see how cameras have changed, but from what we’re hearing, it’ll be really about a new Canon camera that they’ll be facing off against the Nikon D3s.

And our source?

Someone else’s website. (Credit to Gizmodo US)

It’s literally just been announced in America and it looks like the Canon 1DS Mark IV will definitely be a step up from the Mark III.

Squarely aimed at the Nikon D3s market including features like 16 megapixel, 102,400 ISO capability, 45-point autofocus, and a 1080p video recording. If this is indeed what we’re seeing tonight, we’ll have more for you including possible images if Canon let us.

Nikon users have long been claiming their video format has been better as it allowed you to shoot at 24P on Nikon DSLRs, but that bragging right is about to be lost.

If you’ve got a 5DMkII, Canon will soon be releasing a firmware upgrade enabling the use of both 24P and 25P filming options on their already-capable 1080P shooter.

Our press release quote is this…

“We understand that EOS 5D Mark II users desire additional frame rates and we’re preparing a firmware update to allow the camera to shoot at both 24P and 25P,” said Chris Macleod, Brand Manager – EOS, Canon Australia. “The upgrade to 24P and 25P will broaden the usage scope for this popular camera to include cinema and broadcast applications, respectively.”

While not yet available, it is something to look forward to as Canon Australia expects a release in the first half of 2010.

Meanwhile, Canon 7D users get a firmware upgrade today correcting some bugs and improving Auto-Focus accuracy during Live View shooting. Click here to get all the info on that.

I’ve been doing black & white photography long enough to understand some things about it and a lot of people have been telling me what I do is good so I thought I’d share a few pointers here.

If you happen to disagree with any, that’s fine. I don’t expect my opinion to be absorbed and appreciated by all. Just be aware that I’ve been helping people learn photography, cameras, Photoshop, and all manner of fun optics bits for quite a while, and I’m not just any guy with a digital camera.

My name is Leigh D. Stark and I’m 25. I’ve grown up practically in darkrooms and despite the chemicals being toxic as all hell, it feels great when I’m in one.

Bondi Beach in January. Image by the author.

Now, to people who recently bought cameras in the past year or two:

1. You are not a professional.

If you own a digital SLR, that does not make you a professional.

I don’t care whether you spent $2,000 to $7,000 or more on it, or whether it says “What professionals use” on the box. You are not a professional. You have a digital SLR. Get over it.

2. Having a camera does not make you a photographer.

You take pictures. Good for you. So does every person on the planet these days. Cameras are in phones, portable music players, watches, computers, digital address books, and heaven forbid the cameras themselves.

But just because you have a camera DOES NOT make you a photographer. It means you have a camera.

3. You are not a professional, so stop fucking acting like one.

Seriously, did you not read point 1? Stop acting like a professional. Don’t carry your kit around you and think you understand what’s going on. Don’t lie about your skills in order to make some of us think you’re better.

Hell, do you even know what the “SLR” bit in DSLR means, or do you have to whip out your iPhone and read from the Wiki whenever someone asks you? (Heaven forbid someone asks you what a “TLR” is…)

Just be cool with the knowledge that you have a camera and you’re about to take a walk on that very long trip of being better.

James. Image by the author.

Now let’s get into the area that I love. Black and white.

1. A colour image is not a black & white image.

It should be pretty self-evident, but you’d be surprised how many people just don’t get it, so let me say it again incase the whole “number next to the words” didn’t drive it through as a point:

A colour image is not a black & white image.

Okay, okay. So it seems like I’m patronising you. I’m not. I am saying it because the qualities of a colour image are very different from that of a black and white.

A colour image can be anything but what it has against the monochromatic is just that: the colour. Believe it or not, those millions & billions of colours (those numbers are very dependent on your screen) actually change the way a scene looks.

Imagine what you’d see if you suffered from colour blindness or achromatopsia and everything was in grey with sheer overblown whites any time you saw the light.

In colour, everything you see connects something else, but in black & white, you’ve got a limited colour space to work with so you need to think about things like shadow, shape, contrast, and a whole bunch of other bits we’ll get to further down the page.

2. Black & White is not a cop-out and it will not save your ass.

With the advent of Photoshop and other photo-editing applications, every Tom, Dick, Harry, and Claudia thinks they can automatically make anything that doesn’t look good into a black & white and it’ll instantly look good. People with different names think that too. This means you.

But this just isn’t the case because the situation is actually more like this: if you have shot a crappy image in colour, it will continue to look like crap in black & white. In fact, it’ll be just as crappy but with less emphasis on colour and more emphasis on how much of a douche you were for thinking it would look better this way.

Plain and simple (and referencing Point 1 above), a colour image is a colour and a black & white is a black & white. If you shoot for the right things specific to each, you’ll end up with an image that works for those qualities (of which I’m going to sort of explain in the next few points).

Nigel Kennedy. Image by the author.

3. Composition is critical.

An image in black & white is very different to that of a colour one. You’ve probably worked that out: you’re so smart.

One has colour, one doesn’t (well sort of).

But because you’re making an image that lacks colour, vibrancy, and often enough chaos to draw the eye away from everything and only look at specific points, you need to make sure your composition doesn’t suck.

I cannot stress this enough, and I say this because most photographers (yes, you included) will never realise just how bad their composition is until someone points it out. If you can’t compose naturally – and many photographers simply don’t have an “eye” for it, so to speak – then use the techniques we all pass on. Use lines, diagonals, foreground/background, threes, quadrants.

Do something. Anything. Just don’t keep taking the same badly composed shots.

Random Tip #68!

Shoot a bowl of fruit. Sure, you might think you’re too good for a bowl of fruit, the most classic of the compositions used in art for centuries, but trust me… if you think that, you’re absolutely not. So grab a bowl, buy some fruit, and take pictures of it and start to work out & understand the basics of composition. I assure you, the organic models won’t mind and you can devour them afterwards. Like a praying mantis devours its lover… yummy.

4. Detail is nice.

Despite the name, “black & white” isn’t about either the blacks or the whites. It’s about the bits in the middle. The full colour range that starts from a deep black and goes all throughout what shadow & contrast have to offer, before finally hitting the stark white that a vibrant image can smack you in the face with.

So when I see a black & white that someone has made that lacks this sort of understanding, I throw up a little bit in my mouth.

‘This is not a black & white,’ I think to myself. ‘This is an image put together by someone who doesn’t understand light and how it falls, especially in monochrome.’

What you need to do is keep some detail. Bring out some of the areas and make them glow, fall into the shadows, pop from the page and almost have a 3D look to them as if you could reach out and rip them from the picture.

Without detail, your black & white is as dull as everything else.

Mick at night. Image by the author.

5. Do you even understand light?

Photography is all about light. Let’s look at the Greek origins shall we (bet you didn’t think you’d learn anything today, eh?)…

• Photo – light
• Graph – letter or writing

Okay. So we’re writing with light, essentially. That’s not too far off from what we actually do with cameras, except when it comes to film or even digital sensors, we’re letting the light write itself to our frame, so to speak.

Remember, we’re dealing in “light” here and not “pixels”. So because we’re working with light, this means you basically have to understand light to capture the right sort of scene & information.

If you don’t quite get what I mean and think this is all a load of crap, stop for a second and go outside. Find somewhere where the sun is casting shadows. Now look at those shadows and find something brilliant about them.

If you take a photo of a shed where part of the building is obscured by shadows and you shoot for a colour image specifically, all you’re going to get is a colour image of a shed with darker bits thanks to the shadows.

But the moment you start seeing the shadows as shapes that the light is making up, you’ll start to understand light and all its intricacies.

I’m not saying you’ll have a clue about it, but you’ll at least be getting the general idea, and not just shooting a darkened shed.

Oh, and if you don’t understand light, don’t go around claiming you do. If you really need some help, go out with someone who “gets it” and have them explain it to you as you use your camera. Trust me, it’ll begin to make sense from that point on.

6. Technique

Technique is ridiculously important, and it’s not something you’re going to get overnight.

It’s not an issue of RTFM (Read The <Fine or Fucking> Manual) nor is it an issue of having the best piece of equipment money can buy. It’s all about practice and learning. I don’t care what you’ve got. You could shoot on an old Nikon FE2, a Canon PowerShot, or even a Nikon D300 (which is what I use), the skills of the user will determine just how good the shot looks.

But even if you read the manual, buy several books, attend classes, or ask me to help you out (which I’ve been known to do on occasion), you won’t get this knowledge overnight and it is completely foolish for you to expect so.

It happens with time, practice, and a shit load of fuck-ups. And no, your fuck-ups ARE NOT examples of technique; they’re examples of fuck-ups and fluke.

James Morrison. Image by the author.

7. The Film Dilemma

While digital is becoming increasingly popular, a lot of you are switching to film.

You think it’s classic, soft, and probably beautiful, and you’re not wrong. But a lot of the time, people are assuming that just because something has been shot on film, it is automatically art.

It’s not.

Much like digital, it’s likely to be a bad shot that just so happened to take place on film.

In photography, we have a ratio for good images out of every image shot. That ratio is much more noticeable now as photographers can shoot and shoot and shoot (on digital) and still end up with crap shots. That’s fine. We all start with crap ratios.

But on film, the ratio is much harder because with a roll of 36, that’s between 36 (ok, 34 to 38 depending on how you roll it on) images you have to shoot. So naturally, you must think that each shot must be worth more and therefore better!

Which isn’t the case. Much like how we said in the beginning, a crap image is still a crap image no matter the colouring of it or the media it was shot on.

Shooting in film doesn’t make you any more of an artist, even if it can be a lot more fun to shoot on.

Sydney in infrared black & white. Image by the author.

Finally, there are some things you need to know to be a photographer, if this is where you want to actually be. These are little things, but still quite important.

1. Patience

This is quite possible the most important thing you’ll ever need to know if you want to take photos: be patient.

Seriously.

This job, hobby, game, profession, skill, talent, technique, method, love, hate, joy, trade, and passion is all reliant on you being able to shut the fuck up and be patient for a little bit.

Things have certainly gotten a little bit easier from when we worked in darkrooms and we did test strip after test strip hoping to hell it worked, finding the science behind every shot, and then praying that next day the chemical solution wasn’t so different that we would have to do this all again.

These days, it’s all about the digital image and that’s certainly a hell of a lot faster than that of the ones captures on little bits of plastic with emulsion on them. But you still need the patience for the perfect shot in that you want it to come to you, not the other way around.

You still need the patience if you’re planning to do any post-processing on your images through applications like Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom, and even Picasa. Mostly Photoshop because of the whole “blank canvas” approach Photoshop has, but if you’re interested to learn and are blown away by it all, find some tutorials online, ask a friend, or download a trial of Photoshop Elements to get your head in the right working space. And be patient as you work because it’s not easy at first. Hell, it’s not even that easy until you’re a pro.

Mostly though you need patience if you want to understand photography. There’s a lot of terms and equipment and software and printing technology and filters and paper types and cameras and all sorts of bits and pieces that could easily fill every room in your house if you were so inclined.

You need to realise that this is a big area – a huge area, in fact – and because of that, if you lack the patience to let this all seep into that big wrinkly bit in your head, you will lose.

Photographer Wendell Teodoro. Image by the author.

2. Thick-skin

If there’s one thing living has probably taught you by now it’s that everyone has an opinion, and most of us will gladly take the time out of our lives to tell you how much you suck as often as we can.

It’s not a fact, it’s an opinion. Just remember that.

And likewise for your images, if I say they suck, it’s not a fact but rather an opinion.

But if you get all fussy and annoyed, if you’re insulted by even the most tiny quibble that someone has against your work, you won’t be a photographer for very long. The truth of the matter is that most of your images probably aren’t very good, but that’s ok because you like them right?

Really, that’s all that matters.

Regardless, you can’t chuck a shit for people not liking your work. It’s not an insult against you, it’s a view of your work. And perhaps some good will come out of it. Perhaps you weren’t happy with how that printed especially with how it looked on screen. Perhaps the composition wasn’t that brilliant but you went with it anyway. Perhaps, perhaps, a lot of freakin’ perhaps.

The point of all of this is to grow a thick skin if you haven’t yet because if you don’t, you’ll fail here too. 

Patience and being able to take criticism, they’re pretty big factors.

For some of you, this will be a lot to take in. For others, you won’t even bother reading it. You’ll look at some of the points, gloss over them and go “yup, I get it, I’m doing that now” even though you’re doing little of it and generally being a wannabe classic photographer.

If you do that, it’s generally pretty easy to pick up on it in your photos. Just giving you a heads up. The regular person might not notice, but photographers who are worth their weight will.

This is also just a piece that carries a lot of opinion. I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography, a semi-respected opinion, and have fired more shots off in the past five years than most of you will in your life (with the exception of sports photographers and paparazzi, both of which I’ve done). 

Without making this sound too much like an ego piece on “Why you should listen to me,” I’m going to say flat out that I don’t care if you do or don’t. Do what you want. It’s your imagery. 

Just don’t come running to people like me for help when the stuff your churning out looks like crap on a page.

Nikon have just announced their follow-up to their professional D3 camera, the D3s.

New features on the D3s include the ability to use 12,800 as a standard ISO with the possibility of reaching ISO 102,400 for shooting in ridiculously low-light environments (think dark and move on from there), a 720p movie mode that can take advantage of that ISO range, sensor cleaning, in-camera RAW processing (for when you’re sitting there having a coffee and you need something to do), and a whole bunch of other fun things.

It’s probably worth noting that while we’ve yet to get an official RRP for Australia, this is a pro camera and, if you’re looking at it just because you want the best of the best and you’re not a working professional photographer, it will probably cost the arm and a leg extra you’d otherwise use to take the pictures with.

We’ve attached the press release for you to take a look through, and if you’re after images of this new beauty… well, we haven’t been shy in uploading them. Sample images coming up later.

Nikon D3S Press Release

Remember those vacations your parents would come back from where they’d force you to watch a presentation (or these days a DVD) of all the images and video they shot overseas?

Well, you still probably won’t get out of being forced to watch them but the means to watch them might become even easier with Nikon’s S1000PJ, a new digital camera with a projector built right into the body.

It just made its way into the Chimp Cage and we’ll be reviewing it shortly, but until we do, feast your eyes on the unboxing of the first projector camera.

Nikon’s newest entrant in the beginner’s & amateur range of cameras has arrived at the Chimp Cage and we’re unboxing it for you.

The Nikon D3000 looks to be the replacement for the D60 (which itself replaced the D40x) and we’ll be getting a review online for you in a few days. We’ll take a good play with this one as we have a D60 to compare it to which you’ll see in some of the unboxing shots we’ve prepared.

The team of monkeys, gorillas, and damn dirty apes that roam a lobby in Sydney waiting for an elevator are working on a new issue of Chimp.

You see this website – the one you’re currently sitting on – was originally a digital magazine. You can see past issues by hitting up our magazine section.

Now that we’re back in a website form, we’re looking at bringing the magazine back to life. So we’ve got an idea of what we want and  an expected release month of December 2009.

Oh, and we’ve also got this:

This issue of Chimp will be all about “Black & White”. Not only will we be educating ya’ll about black & white, monochrome, silver gelatin, sepia, cyanotype, and infrared, but we’ll also be saving the environment by reducing the power your monitor needs to display the magazine*.

*Theoretically. I mean, it probably wouldn’t. But it sounds cool.

It might seem crazy, but one of the most common mistakes by people with cameras is how they hold a camera.

There are many ways of holding them, sure, but there is one way to hold a camera often cited as “the way to hold a camera” that provides stability, control, and is less likely to result your hands ever dropping that expensive toy.

The hold is simple and works like this:

Hold your left hand out, palm faced up.

Place the camera on top of your palm so that your pinky sits under the grip and your thumb rests againt or under the lens.

You should now be able to curl up your fingers to grip the lens while the rest of your hand supports the weight of the camera. Now you can bring in your right hand to grip the right side and press the shutter.

Congratulations, you are now holding your camera right.

We hold it like this for a few reasons.

One is that it’s a hell of a lot harder to drop the camera when the bottom is being supported by your hand.

Another reason is that it’s far easier and quicker to change focus or zoom with the thumb and forefinger while you’re looking through the viewfinder instead of pulling the camera away, looking at the lens, changing the zoom, and then bringing it back to your eye to recompose.

This way of holding a camera can be applied to pretty much any camera you come across, too. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s a cheap point & shoot that your Mum bought for you last Christmas or your uncle’s expensive digital SLR. With the exception of a medium- or large-format film camera, you’ll find this method of holding a camera will work with almost any camera anywhere.

If you’ve been in the market for a new memory card or two for your digital camera, you might want to know that SanDisk – the people who created the Compact Flash – have been working to create a new line of CF cards designed to hold up to the heaviest of testing that a photographer can put them through.

The SanDisk Extreme Pro takes the SanDisk Extreme line-up and boost it even more than what it was in the first place. It features new error correction codes for better performance, new processing architecture, weather resistance including new silicon and a whole bunch of things that SanDisk’s PR team have loaded into the press release which you can see by clicking this bit right here.

However what you might want to know about before you go and do the whole “press release” thing is some of the features that took our attention when we got to play with it… which we still are.

This card has an RRP of $1299 in Australia. But damn, is it fast.

Rather than just rating the card at 120x or 133x and being done with it, this card now uses UDMA 6 to achieve 90 MB/s, provided your camera can of course support it.

SanDisk showed this to us by testing it on the Canon 5D Mk II. With an older SanDisk 15 MB/s card, it took 37 seconds for 15 shots, while the newer Extreme Pro’s 90 MB/s speed brought that time down to 11 seconds.

Here at Chimp, we’ve currently got the Nikon D300 (recently superseded by the D300s, which we’ll be reviewing soon) which gave us similar timings. For this test, we tried both a 15 frame burst and a 27 shot burst on the SanDisk Exteme Pro 16GB and the SanDisk Extreme III card (which handles 30 MB/s). The 27 shot burst is slightly different as it was a burst of 15 shots fired plus letting the camera handle a 2-3 extra shots on top of it.

Our  timings for the 15 frame continuous burst worked like this:

• SanDisk Extreme III (30 MB/s): 19.7 seconds
• SanDisk Extreme Pro (90 MB/s): 7.7 seconds

Keep in mind that these timings also include the saving of information to the card, something we can monitor by the little green light on the back of our cameras (or orange if you use a Canon).

For the 27 frame burst, we got:

• SanDisk Extreme III (30 MB/s): 34.7 seconds
• SanDisk Extreme Pro (90 MB/s): 14 seconds

If that doesn’t say speed, I don’t know what does.

Now if you’re anything other than a pro, you might want to turn away once you see the price of these new cards.

The SanDisk Extreme Pro cards come in 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB and range in price from $399 for the 16GB to $1299 for the 64GB.

If you can't afford the 90 MB/s brilliance of the SanDisk Extreme Pro, this is less expensive and 60 MB/s, which is more amazing than the card in your camera right now.

There is an upside, however, as the new SanDisk Extreme cards are faster too, and if you’re not a professional their pricing is more than doable. The SanDisk Extreme cards (yes, the naming scheme is as confusing as you think it is) are rated for 60 MB/s and come in 8GB, 16GB, and 32GB varieties. The 32GB version has an RRP of $349.

These days, anyone anywhere can take a picture. You find the ability to take still images inside phones, watches, computers, mp3 players, and funnily enough cameras. None of this is bad, though, as this lets anyone take a photo whenever they need to.

But sometimes a photo isn’t enough. Sometimes an image isn’t worth a thousand words and you really do need to communicate a scene or a moment through the use of video. Sadly, video cameras haven’t really dropped themselves into everything under the sun in the way a still camera has. Oh sure, they’re in phones, but we all know how crappy the video in those things are.

What if there was an easier way to record a movie or a short video that anyone – and I mean anyone – could get the hang of?

Similar in size to an iPod or a small mobile phone, the Flip Mino HD (also known as “The Flip”) is a one-trick pony. I say pony as opposed to horse because of its size: the Mino variant is the pony while the yet-to-be-released-in-Australian model of the Ultra HD is more like the horse.

With this animal, you can record video in 720p (1280×720) HD for up to one hour. It includes a built-in microphone and a fixed lens that while not great for close ups, will actually surprise you in its quality.
Sadly there’s no light you can turn on or use when it gets really dark, nor is there a whole ton of “low light performance” that you may get on other video cameras, but that’s not really needed here. Most video cameras can’t be stuck in your pocket nor do they have a set amount of time for you to record on, allowing you to have a no-fuss device that you can whip out of your pocket to film directly on.

In fact, “no-fuss” is really the name of the game here as the Flip Mino HD is easy to use. A power switch on one side turns it on lighting up the 1.5-inch screen that’s just big enough to use on such a device. From there, you merely need to press the big red button that looks like a record symbol to… well… record. Press it again to stop and voila, instant recording.

You can also zoom in while you’re recording using the plus and minus buttons above the record button, which will also work as volume up & volume down buttons when in playback mode. Play is easy to find too as it’s the triangle we’re all familiar with, while a delete button sits on the other side of the device that is locked (and unlocked) by holding it down so you don’t accidentally get rid of a video.

A tripod socket in the middle makes it usable on any tripod. It also has a flat bottom so stands up on any flat surface, too.

With the exception of the record button, these little buttons are all touch sensitive and serve to make the device look & feel just that much more modern. It even has a tripod socket at the bottom in the middle making it useful on a tripod.

Getting your video off is very easy too, as a switch on another side of the camera (different to the one the power button is on) pushes out a USB key from the top and allows you to transfer the MP4 files directly to your computer via either the included Flip software (available for both Windows and Mac OS systems) or by using whatever file manager you use.

Go on... push the button (to record).

And that’s it. The Flip Mino HD is small and easy to use, missing only a couple of marks.

First up is the USB key mechanism, which while strong enough to be plugged into a laptop sitting on a desk, has me a little worried for the desktop ports that face up. Depending on which way your USB ports are situated, that could leave you with too much pressure on the Flip and possibly a broken device.

Adding to this is a time limit that some people may not like. With only 2GB of storage inside the Flip Mino HD, you’re capped at one hour of recording time. For some, this may not be a good thing, but for most it won’t be a problem. From our testing the battery – which recharges when plugged into USB – seems to last the record time that you get out of the Flip, and seeing as you’ll probably be plugging it in to get your video off before it runs out, that’s not so bad.

We’ve also tested if it’s possible to edit the files as they use an MPEG-4 file format using a 3vix codec. You certainly won’t have much luck going from the file straight to Windows Movie Maker, but the included Flip software certainly does a decent job of editing and our tests with Adobe Premiere CS4 didn’t have a problem with the MP4 files the Flip threw at it.

4GB of space and an internal USB connector. Now why can't all things be so easy?

Quite simply, the Flip Mino HD is a simple and easy video camera that does what it does well. There hasn’t really been a dedicated video recorder before. This is the point & shoot of video cameras and it really is a joy to carry around with you permanently.

Verdict: Love it. It’s portable video for the budding film-maker, the guerrilla in-training, and the person who normally brings a camera where ever they go.

Product: Flip Mino HD
RRP: $299.95