News entries for June, 2012

2012 is the year of the lens, with more drool-worthy optics hitting the street every month. Some of the most exciting lenses are coming out for Micro Four Thirds cameras, effectively packing lots of imaging power into a small package. With the E-M5 still fresh in my mind, when the new Olympus 75mm M.Zuiko lens landed in our office, I claimed post-test dibs on the gorgeous...

Canon released the EF 40mm f/2.8 STM alongside its EOS 650D / T4i Rebel body; the lens is tiny, less than an inch in depth, and only four and a half ounces in weight. It employs a new focusing system - "Stepping Motor Technology" - which allows the lens to focus very quietly and is very useful in movie capture. We have put the lens through its paces in our test lab: click...

If you're shooting with Olympus' handsome OM-D E-M5 compact system camera, likely one of the features which attracted your attention was its weather-sealed body. There's definitely something to be said for shooting safe in the knowledge that even if your camera gets wet, all should be well.

Like all weather-sealed, interchangeable-lens digital cameras, the Olympus E-M5...

If you visit any of the photo sharing sites such as Instagram or Flickr, you may find that eager photographers seem obsessed with one thing. No, not THAT thing; another more highly caffinated thing. Coffee, that is: blogging and tweeting about it and, above all, sharing photos of it.

Honestly, if we have to see one more close-up photo of the foam on top of a freshly...

The trouble with most of those books you'd take to a deserted island is that they don't say much about islands. This one is different.

"Several years ago when I was in the aircraft business (distributing Challenger ultralight aircraft across Canada), I went on a random flight with a couple of friends that changed my life. I happened to trip across a relatively unknown...

Since its launch back in September 2011, the pocket-friendly Canon PowerShot S100 has proven to be quite a popular camera with photographers seeking better-than-average image quality by compact camera standards. It certainly doesn't hurt that the S100 also offers Full HD video capture, plus a built-in GPS receiver that's used both to geotag images with their capture...

How often have you heard someone say that one of the pleasures of photography is it lets you stop and smell the roses? But what if you could actually smell those roses in your photos? Or how about a shot of your new baby that smells just like a new baby?

Think that photographs that smell like their subjects sounds too good to be true? Or like something out of a science...

Sigma Corp. has today revealed pricing and availability for its Sigma DP2 Merrill digital camera, a pretty major update to the previous DP2 model. Announced last February, the Sigma DP2 M has a new APS-C image sensor and processors, all inherited from the impressive Sigma SD1 Merrill digital SLR.

Output resolution from the full-color Foveon image sensor soars from 4.64...

Rich Harrington and I discussed this the other day and I thought it would make a good post. There are many things that I learned about black & white photography back in the day when we used film: black-and-white film, that is. Some of them translate to digital and some don’t.

For those of you who want to work in black & white, here are a few tips.

1. Capture as much...

A week ago, we told readers about the first test we've seen of Canon’s new 40mm pancake prime lens, courtesy of Roger Cicala, founder of LensRentals.com. Today, Roger's rolled his sleeves up and gotten to work with Norman Koren's Imatest suite once more, to test two more Canon primes announced this year: the EF 24mm f/2.8 IS USM and EF 28mm f/2.8 IS USM.

As with the EF...

At the IR news desk, we report on a lot of firmware updates, but most have one thing in common: they only attempt to squash operational bugs, and occasionally to make very minor feature changes. A small minority are more interesting to us--and likely, to the cameras' owners--as they add one or two entirely new features.

A rare few indeed make comprehensive feature...

Olympus announced its 75mm f/1.8 M.Zuiko telephoto prime lens in May, and we managed to get our hands on a copy to review on SLRgear.com. Offering a 150mm equivalent field of view, the lens does not disappoint, offering tack-sharp results: click here to read our full review of the Olympus 75mm f/1.8 M.Zuiko!

With summer upon us, it's time to head out and photograph the world. With blue skies and plenty of sunshine, millions of us will go out and start taking scenic, travel photographs while on vacation.

Yet, despite the immobility of the subject, taking really good landscape shots can be a challenge. In part, the difficulty is that we are overwhelmed by the scene’s beauty and...

Faced with the onslaught of camera phones, the market for compact, fixed-lens cameras might have become a tough one in which to make a profit, but there are certainly some manufacturers that have identified convenient niches for their products. One such is Woodman Labs, creator of the popular GoPro action camera series.

Consumer electronics giant Sony looks set to...

It's a shame that the Flip Video camera is no longer being manufactured. It's the perfect, basic imaging device for projects like this series of videos capturing what it's like to be homeless.

The videos (including the one embedded below) are being created by Henry Moses Thirkield, a homeless man known as Mo, who has been documenting his day-to-day life on the streets of...

Polaroid's a name that still comes up now and then in our gear coverage but if the stylish new Z2300 instant digital camera catches on, we might be hearing more from this venerable brand in "instant" photography.

Available in black or white with a rainbow sash across the front that a few blogs have likened to the Instagram logo (which several IR readers have correctly...

New firmware for Ricoh's unusual GXR camera system today brings a variety of fixes for problems identified by the company.

Ricoh GXR firmware version 1.51 improves image quality when shooting with Multi-P AUTO white balance and negative exposure compensation, regardless of the lens module in use. The remaining changes are all specific to one lens module. For the GXR...

There's an old saw that says "Every cloud has a silver lining." Software giant Adobe Systems Inc. just added some extra silver to a cloud of its own today: the Creative Cloud, to be specific.

Earlier this year, Adobe launched the Creative Cloud alongside the debut of its new Creative Suite 6 product line. At the time, the company suggested that one of the main advantages...

Last week, we shared a classic (and rare) TV interview with photography legend Henri Cartier-Bresson from the Charlie Rose Show on PBS. While that interview had some choice moments, we were somewhat put-off by Rose's interview techniques.

There's actually a much better film (embedded below) about Cartier-Bresson on YouTube which, thanks to its subtitles, makes it much...