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Macro photography is addictive! Once you try your first diopter, which is basically a cheap and nasty magnifying lens, you dive down the rabbit hole of macro photography. Walking into the back garden suddenly becomes a safari, and everything from...
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Emil von Maltitz was one of the first people to take the dive on Laowa’s 12mm Wide Angle lens when they first launched on Kickstarter. We only started distributing Laowa in South Africa recently – his review is thus entirely objective. For the past year and a half he has used the lens all over Africa for a variety of genres including industrial, agricultural and landscape work and has put it through it’s paces. What makes this lens unique is that it is the widest rectilinear f/2.8 lens and also the only full-frame lens wider than 16mm that accepts a 100mm filter system. Not only that, but it’s priced at a fraction of the Nikon and Canon counterparts, yet beats them in almost every image quality criteria.
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Every adventure photographer living in South Africa dreams of going to remote locations where few people have ever been, in the search for something special, something to tick off the personal bucket list that you will forever remember. In November 2017 I was asked to join a group of veteran landscape photographers on a trip of a lifetime, a trip that might just be one of those legendary trips I dreamed of. We set out to plan a week long hiking and camping expedition to arguably the most impressive mountain range in Africa, the Drakensberg.
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A few months ago, Durban based photographer Emil von Maltitz acquired a drone from us. Most people buying up DJI’s hi-tech toys are using them exactly for that purpose and not much more – to play around and check out life from above. For photographers, however, it’s a bit more complicated than that and we all ask the same set of questions about image quality, ease of use and legality. In this review, Emil answers a lot of those questions and explains the complications of drone use as it applies to our species (photographers).
Choosing a tripod can be quite a difficult decision. We want stability, light weight, low price and large size pretty much as an ultimate goal when selecting a set of tripod legs. The problem is that we rarely get more than two of those options ticked off. So we have to make a compromise. Good tripods essentially manage to tick off three of those four. Great tripods tick all four boxes with the large caveat that one of those criteria are in relation to its peers (for example ‘well priced’ in relation to its competition does not mean cheap). Aluminium tripods are an attempt to get the most bang for buck out of a tripod, but they come with the hefty (excuse the pun) drawback of increased weight.
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