Margaret’s Antarctica Post 4: El Chalten

February 12, 2006: Two days ago we travelled by bus from El Calafate to El Chalten, which sits at the foot of the mountain of the same name. The mountain has been renamed “Mount Fitzroy” after the captain of Charles Darwin’s ship, The Beagle, but its original name, which means “the smoking mountain” is more appropriate today. There’s been cloud hanging off the peak since we left our accommodation this morning.

Margaret’s Antarctica Post 10: Wrap-up

March 3, 2006: At the end of a trip like this you inevitably ask yourself: would I do the same things again or are there some things I would change? This is particularly important when you’ve spent a substantial amount of time and money and visited environments as challenging as Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego and the Antarctic Peninsula. In fact, I can confidently say that the majority of our choices were good ones – and, where things were less than totally satisfactory, the fault lay more with the fact that better alternatives were simply not available.

Margaret’s Antarctica Post 2: Buenos Aires

February 5, 2006: It’s hot in Buenos Aires; as hot as Sydney in February – and just as sticky and humid. This isn’t surprising as the latitude of both cities is similar, around 35 degrees south. Since we arrived yesterday, the sky has been cloudy and we had rain for virtually all this morning. This is neither the place nor the weather for a digital SLR so I’ve only used the Ixus 750 since I arrived. Being small and inconspicuous, this camera is ideal if you don’t want the label “tourist” to float invisibly over your head. Other tourists also carry compact digicams, so you can fit into the normal scene.

California Light

Unlike its hard edged, high contrast counterpart in Australia, the Golden State’s sunshine often has a kind of warm, enveloping quality that seems ever so subtly to open up the shadows and soften the highlights. Perhaps it’s something to do with the cold Pacific Ocean which every summer creates dense fogs along the coast for weeks at a time. Or maybe it’s the ever present photochemical haze created by car exhaust and, in some cases, the vegetation on California’s chapparal clad hills. Whatever the particulars of its origins, it is an ideal light for landscape photography.

Book Review: Contact

Contact, Photographs from the Australian War Memorial Collection is a powerful collection of some 200 images drawn from The Australian War Memorial’s collection of 900,000 photographs of Australians at war. Written and assembled by the AWM’s Curator of Photographs, Dr Shaune Lakin, Contact is not just another collection of stodgy official war photographs. Instead it sets out to illustrate how photography was used both to record and portray Australians at war.

An Interview with Masaya Maeda, Managing Director and Chief Executive of the Image Communication Products Operation at Canon Inc.

Photo Review was privileged to be able to interview Mr Masaya Maeda during our visit to Canon’s headquarters in the Shimomaruko area of Tokyo on 8 February. At the time of the interview, Canon had just announced total consolidated net sales for 2010 reached almost 3707 billion Yen and represented growth of 15.5% over the previous year.

A Matter of Timing

One of the questions I get asked most frequently is ø¢â‚¬Ëœshould I buy a digital camera now, or wait until the prices drop some more?’. There is no short or easy answer to such a question. Instead, one has first to find out in some detail what sort of photography the potential digital camera buyer thinks they want to do. Then you need to know the state of their computer hardware and finally, what sort of budget they have to work with. At every stage you have to be asking yourself if analogue photography could deliver a better cost benefit ratio. Taking someone through this process gives one a real appreciation for the challenges facing the sales staff in Australia’s camera stores.