Nikon's first "affordable" full frame DSLR, the D600 was plagued by reports of "dirty" sensor problems that could not easily be cleaned. While Nikon never "fessed up" about the problem with a product recall, they quickly launched a follow-up camera, the D610. There is little difference between the D600 and D610 other than a new shutter mechanism - the "faulty" component many suspected was the cause behind oily sensor spots in the D600. Others have commented that the D610 is the camera the D600 should have been in the first place. Nobody has known for sure whether the D610 has solved the dirty...

My friend Sean over at Shoots Imaging is raving about a new Profoto flash system, the B1. I've been following his recent Facebook posts about high speed flash photography and that Profoto was about to release something big. That "something" turns out to be the B1 - a 500w professional wireless flash system offering full TTL. This is great news, because in the past the only way to take professional studio heads into the field has been to take some kind of power system with you - a generator or heavy and expensive inverter-type battery system. The B1 apparently has an integrated battery system...

As it's wisely and frequently been pointed out, the best camera is the one that is with you. My Nikon DSLR is not huge by pro camera standards - but it's still too big to go with me all the time. The camera in question lives in a big green backpack alongside other photographic “essentials” - a 70-200 f2.8, wide zoom, filters, flash triggers and a SB flash. That's just the stuff that fits in the bag. There are mono pods, tripods, studio flashes, background sets, large reflectors, small reflectors, soft boxes and beauty dishes. For me, and it seems many others, it's all gone too far. Worldwide...

A few months back I was approached by the London Financial Times to photograph Claire Reid at her Blairgowrie, Johannesburg business. I've just found the article and one of the photos online of Claire, founder of Reel Gardending. What a privilege it has been to shoot for one of the world's premier news titles. Here is another image from the same shoot:

Back in 2011 I felt moved to write about a growing trend I thought was developing in the photographic world. The piece was written for the Johannesburg Photographer sister website and was entitled "Antistock". It was really a reaction to seeing Terry Richardson's work for the first time. His new website seems quite a lot more polished than his old site which in a way is quite sad. His old site, and the images that were displayed on it had a way of describing visually what I think has been the defining image trend over the past few years. Here is an excerpt from that first post: "Brands...

Rolf Sjogren has written an excellent "personal history" of the stock photography business and posted on his site here: http://dismagazine.com/discussion/41100/from-beauty-to-bland-and-back-again/ It's well-written and on the whole makes a lot of sense. He does a good job of explaining the history of stock in the 90s and early 2000s. However, I'm not sure he does a good a job at describing the causes and history of the microstock industry.

Getty Images has sacked one of iStock's most successful contributors, Sean Locke - the same contributor who blew the whistle on the company's bizarre Google deal. Sean Locke discusses what went wrong with a blog post on his site entitled "A Change in Things". Getty's latest move has sparked even  more criticism from contributors - so don't miss the colourful comments at the bottom of Sean's blog.        

Getty Images and internet search giant Google could be colluding to destroy the affordable stock photography market - firstly by Getty dumping iStock's images on Google's free Drive service and secondly by Google launching a new image search “feature” which makes it much easier for internet users to find high resolution images, including copyright protected material, for download. To gain some insight into how and why the two companies would even want to collude, it's best to know something about the history of stock photography in general and Getty Images in particular. Prior to 2000,...

Over the past few weeks I've been attending Vega School of Brand Leadership's Wedding Photography course in Durban. It's likely that wedding photography is the most demanding of all photographic assignments. So it stands to reason that if one can learn to deliver excellent creative photographic work in the pressure cooker of a wedding environment, one can probably cope with any assignment outside a war zone.

Copywriting expert and blogger, Ryan Healy has posted about what he feels are extortionary tactics used by Getty Images to claim damages from images used on websites unlawfully. As a copywriting professional, Healy paints a compelling picture of how he used a Getty image unlawfully by mistake, why he feels he has been treated unfairly by the company and why he further feels Getty is charging too much to settle the matter. In the comments section of his blog, I tried to play the role of Getty's “advocate” – pointing out why they would and could not share his views on the unlawful use of one of their...