Innholdsfortegnelse for June - August 2024 i Photo Review

Why visit? If you live outside of the Riverland area of South Australia you may not have heard of the Wilabalangaloo Reserve, which is located along the western bank of the Murray River just north of the Berri township. Dedicated in 1959 and surrendered as a gift to National Trust of South Australia in 1972 by owner of the original perpetual lease, Janet Reiners, it contains a significant remnant of native Mallee vegetation and wildlife habitat, including representative specimens of the rare Blue-leaved Mallee (Eucalyptus cyanophylla), Native Jasmine (Jasminum didymum ssp lineare) and nine species of rare birds. The reserve includes a one-kilometre stretch of ochre-coloured sandstone cliffs about 30 metres high along the edge of the river, which can provide interesting photographic subjects. A viewing platform above these cliffs…

Expect to hear a lot more about generative AI this year, not only in association with computer-generated texts and translations, but also for images, voice recordings and even video clips. AI-based tools are increasingly relevant for photo-imaging. Since 2020, leading software developer, OpenAI, has released the following applications: GPT-3, a large language model for text generation and translation, introduced in 2020; DALL-E, for generating complex digital images from descriptive text prompts, introduced in 2021; ChatGPT, an AI-based ‘chat bot’, based on GPT-3.5, introduced in December 2022 and leading to GPT-4, introduced in March 2023; Sora (www.openai.com/sora), a text-to-video application announced in February 2024 in beta format. It’s not the first text-to-video model, although it was the most powerful when announced. Earlier models include Emu by Meta, Gen-2 by Runway, Stable…

The natural world has a public relations problem. With nature being almost everywhere – even in big cities – it’s easily taken for granted. Which is where Nadia Culph’s art photography of mainly Australian flora comes into play. Conceptually simple and done superbly well, it has a startling immediacy that reawakens awareness of her subjects’ uniqueness, diversity and beauty. Whether you see her photos on social media, on online print marketing sites or hanging in homes and other places, they have a wow factor that exceeds what might be expected from seemingly straightforward images of flowers, foliage, seedpods and the like. With its low-key natural lighting and trademark black backgrounds, her work is distinctly contemporary while echoing outstanding botanical painters dating back to Sydney Parkinson (who sailed on the Endeavour…

Star trails and astronomical objects like the Sun, Moon, planets and stellar clusters aren’t the only interesting things to photograph in the night sky. Transitory objects like comets, meteors and artificial satellites are just as exciting and many comets and similar objects are named for their amateur astronomer discoverers. A comet forms when a small object – which can be up to 20 kilometres in diameter and is usually made up of ice, dust, rock and frozen gases – heats up and begins to ‘outgas’ as it passes close to the Sun. This leaves a trail (‘tail’) of gas and dust behind. Comets have been observed and recorded since ancient times, although few can actually be seen by the naked eye, making them rare and exciting events. Most have highly…

Wallaby By Leigh Williams The Nobbies, Phillip Island, Victoria Over time the style that I have developed is to try and take animal portraits, capturing their gaze and looking into their eyes. Don’s response I like Leigh Williams' intentional approach to animal photography and, to an extent, I think she’s succeeded in capturing the direct gaze of her subjects. The problem with this effort is not compositional but instead is something much simpler, and familiar to all wildlife photographers: she needs more millimetres. The 300mm focal length is a mainstay of most wildlife shooters' kits, but in this instance a 2x tele-extender would have been handy. To achieve her objectives, Leigh needs perhaps to be thinking like a human portrait photographer, for whom the finest details of the face, and…

Photographer Robynne Hayward grew up in New Zealand’s Northland region, first as a child in Whangārei and then later in picturesque Doubtless Bay near the very tip of the North Island. While her interest in photography started in adulthood, she was, she says, a very visual person from early in life. ‘I loved art class when I was at school. We were in a small town high school, but the New Zealand government had a Country Services program where they paid teachers to work for two-year placements where normally they wouldn’t have wanted to go. We ended up getting really brilliant, high quality teachers.’ At 15, when the school system compelled her to choose between arts or languages, her parents made the decision for her, insisting that she drop out…

Photo Review was launched in October/November 2001 as an integrated magazine and website at a time when digital imaging was beginning to take off. We’ve come a long way since then and seen many changes, but the camera market has steadied over the past few years and settled into a ‘mature’ state – at least for the time being. New technologies and changing consumer preferences always influence the equipment we buy. To illustrate the effects of some of these changes, we’ve compiled some graphs covering the last 20 years from statistical data published by the Japanese Camera & Imaging Products Association (CIPA), which began collecting records in 1999. Market changes After a period of strong and steady growth, camera shipments fell for the first time in 2009 due to the…