Stories

The quiet, unobtrusive nature of change struck me recently when, on returning from an extended overseas trip, I realised that for the first time ever I had not packed an analogue camera of any description. On further reflection, it occurred to me that more than a year had passed since last I dropped a roll of film into my trusty vintage Nikon FM.

The online photographic collection Museum Victoria calls ‘The Biggest Family Album in Australia’ is about to get even bigger with a major drive to boost its Melbourne content. The museum is asking people to come forward with photos depicting life in Melbourne from the earliest days of the medium up until 1980.

“We were already digitising photographs, paintings, sketches, prints and posters before Picture Australia began, and it has revitalised life for us,” says Tony Marshall, the senior librarian of heritage collections. “It has taken our images to the world and we get a lot of requests through it.”

In May 2007 mobile phone photographer Henry Reichhold visited Sydney as part of his ‘Connected Worlds’ project. As Reichhold describes it, ‘The “Connected Worlds” project aims to create two exhibitions; one “realworld”, and one virtual. The dual nature of this approach will reflect the way in which images are being shared across the world. The two exhibitions will open simultaneously at the Royal Albert Hall and on Nokia’s Secondlife Island on October 24, 2007.’

Writing to the Australian photographic historian and writer Jack Cato in 1952, just a year before he died, Harold Cazneaux, recalled how the 1898 international exhibition of pictorialist photography forever changed him. ‘I stood spellbound and inspired,’ he told Cato, ‘here was a new beauty beyond anything I had dreamed of in terms of the camera.’

Photo Review was represented in a group of approximately 40 journalists from the Asia-Pacific region who visited Sony’s Kohda TEC factory, where Cyber-shot digicams, camcorders, camera modules, printers and Memory Sticks are assembled. The factory is located in the Aichi prefecture, a little over an hour by bus from Nagoya city, which has the fourth largest urban population in Japan. The area, which is one of the three largest industrial centres in Honshu (Japan’s largest island), is home to well-known brand names like Toyota, Toshiba, Hitachi, Suzuki and Brother (see map).

Photo Review was one of two Australian magazines whose technical journalists were invited to join a party of representatives from leading Australian and New Zealand retail chains on a visit to the Oita Canon factory on 7 February, 2011.

Photographers who are confused about – or have yet to come to grips with – workflow management for digital printing should probably consider attending some kind of course that shows them the basics of a colour workflow. The type of course they attend will depend on their level of expertise, practical needs and, naturally, budget. While a lot can be learned about colour workflows through books and online, there’s nothing quite like hands-on experience to teach you how to control colour reproduction at all stages of the process from image capture to output as a print.

Fountain pens have long appealed to me. In fact, this editorial started out as a series of disconnected thoughts and notes jotted down on the back of an envelope with a cheap, but functional, midnight blue plastic model.