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Phantom 4 Pro Review – Unscientific impressions by stills photographer Emil von Maltitz

Phantom 4 Pro Review – Unscientific impressions by stills photographer Emil von Maltitz

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).

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Solid and Dependable – A Review of the SIRUI N-3004x Tripod by Emil von Maltitz

Solid and Dependable – A Review of the SIRUI N-3004x Tripod by Emil von Maltitz

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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Levelling The Playing Field – A Review of the SIRUI LE-60 Levelling Base by Emil von Maltitz

Levelling The Playing Field – A Review of the SIRUI LE-60 Levelling Base by Emil von Maltitz

In the past panoramic images could be quite tricky to get right. The software that was available tended to be rudimentary at best, and the hardware expensive and difficult to use. For the past few years though professional quality panoramic images have been very easy to create. Adobe’s Lightroom even has a fairly robust ‘merge to panorama’ feature included (although this is just a simplified version of Photoshop CC’s ‘merge to panorama). It really does mean that creating large format stitched panoramics is as simple pressing a button.
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New Gitzo Ball Heads

New Gitzo Ball Heads

It is amazing how some manufacturers can get one product so right, yet another product so wrong; until late 2016, Gitzo was one of those manufacturers. Their tripod legs are loved by countless photographers worldwide for long lasting quality, easy operation and excellent performance. Despite the success of their legs, they somehow failed to make a decent tripod head, because they refused to conform to the global design standard. If you look at their older range of tripod heads, you’ll see that most of it is just plain weird. While it did work, it was unnecessarily bulky. It is with very good reason that until now, we only sold Kirk and SIRUI tripod heads.
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The L-Bracket: Simplistic Genius by Hougaard Malan

The L-Bracket: Simplistic Genius by Hougaard Malan

If you pay it some thought, would you say that there are more portrait orientation or landscape orientation images used in all the media forms across the world? All film media (movies & television) is shot and viewed in landscape orientation and the cameras are thus designed to be used that way, which makes sense. Stills cameras are also designed for use in landscape orientation even though most photographers very often shoot in portrait mode, which doesn’t make quite as much sense. The only exception to this is pro-body cameras that have an ergonomically designed bottom virtually identical to the right-hand-side of the camera, featuring a second exposure dial and set of shutter, focus and custom-function buttons. This allows the photographer to conveniently shoot in portrait mode – simply rotate the camera 90 degrees and (almost) everything still feels and functions the same.

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