We’ve got space for one more booking on the upcoming April workshop here in Queenstown (where it’s turning from summer to awesome Autumn)… it’ll likely be my last NZ workshop for some time (years) so now’s the time if you’ve been thinking about it over my time here. You can see more about the event and grab that slot via the store. (If you want to bring a partner, etc, no probs. We can sort that out after you book.)
Been enjoying traveling the South Island of New Zealand with my new Sony a7CR – it’s a great camera! I think I went at least 5 years without getting a new camera, so I decided to treat myself and there are some other more practical reasons too, which I’ll explain in future posts. There are a lot of options on this thing and I’m still figuring it out. Maybe in another life I was a Japanese savant that knows how to use these menus, but not in this one. Here’s one of my early test shots…
Another day, another hike! I’ve been out enjoying this weather on looooong walks about 3-4 hours a day, listening to all sorts of audiobooks. I usually carry a few pieces of fruit that I eat like a primate while my monkey brain tries to figure out these books.
Just before the start of Lockdown here in NZ I had some time to play around with the a7R IV. Ultimately, I didn’t move over from my a7R III but it was a pretty awesome camera. Just not the leap I needed but it was a good excuse to head out for a hot air balloon ride to find some interesting test shots. 🙂
The one area of photography which still continues to evolve at speed is mobile. One of the handsets which really made me start to think about when I wouldn’t need to carry a main camera most of the time was the Google Pixel. It couldn’t compete with my a7R but you could see where the market was going, especially with the computational work that was going on with the images and by the time we hit the Pixel 3 range I was able to drop an image into my a7R series review and have it not stand out amongst a range of full frame images. Here’s an image from my original Pixel…
A cool, calm morning near Queenstown.
ChatGPT can now accept images as inputs, so I thought I’d test it out with a random shot I took on a hike the other day near to my home in Queenstown. In the screenshot below you’ll see what it had to say… pretty impressive!
The calmness of this scene from near here in Queenstown does not reflect the recent weather AT ALL. Landslides, floods… and a cryptosporidium outbreak to top it off (fortunately, I’ve not experienced that!). Hopefully normal awesome NZ life will resume soon. 🙂
