Reviews: The annual conflict reporter's meeting in Perpignan offered a great opportunity to compare rugged cameras.This week I'll give a nutshell report on three years of using Canon's top of the range bodies, a nutshell report of the Perpignan photojournalism meet and point you towards an effective Photoshop training video about color.
First, the video. It's called Mastering Color, and it's narrated by Ben Willmore.
I bought it, watched it and found it teaches effective ways to finely tweak the color of your pictures in Photoshop.
I'd call it an intermediate-level tutorial. If you want to learn to use commands such as Replace Color, Match Color or Selective Color effectively, this video is a good place to start.
There are stock images supplied on the disks so you can follow along with what's on the screen. Apart from classes, tutorial videos are the best way to learn the tricks of the Photoshop trade—and there's a lot to learn.
By the way, did you know there is a Color Replacement tool hidden behind the healing brush in the Photoshop CS tool palette?
Now let's move on to Canon camera bodies and photojournalism.
Megapixels don't mean mega-quality. Click here to read more.
Last week at the big Perpignan photojournalist meet, I again had a chance to handle a Canon 5D body.
The 5D promises full-frame at a breakthrough price. However, Canon also released the 1DIIN, which is an updated version of the 1D Mark II. Here my experience with previous Canon bodies seems relevant.
The 5D has full-frame, like the top of the line 1DsII. The 1DIIN does not. So, what advantage can the renovated crop-frame 1DIIN have over the new full-frame 5D which promises better image quality?
Well there's the small matter of being able to deliver eight frames per second, and effective focusing. Out in the field, speed can be an asset. And then there's something most reviewers won't tell you about: physical durability.
Photoshop plug-ins make image retouching easy. Click here to read more.
In the last three years, I've wrung thousands upon thousands of frames through each of Canon's EOS-1 digital bodies.
I've often shot 8 gigabytes of images in a day with the 1Ds, the 1DII and the 1DsII, and I can say one definite thing about all three: These things could be sold as hammers in a hardware store.
In contrast, the 5D magnesium body doesn't appear to have extreme weather proofing.
Next Page: Where to party with war photographers in France.
I may have written an op-ed piece that pushed Canon for greater image quality. But that's to be expected, especially since I like to do fashion work, and fashion shooters are an obsessive lot, always concerned about skin tone and color rendering and highlight detail.
We want the quality of the $30K backs, but we want it from the $7K Canon SLRs.
However, as regards reliability of the body design, I think the EOS-1 series are coming closer to perfection. Some tuning of the controls might make them even easier to use, but the solidity is unbeatable.
The younger photojournalists at Perpignan liked the 5D design, and they were saying they would take this new light full-frame 5D camera to Iraq.
But I would strongly advise them to buy the tougher, faster 1DIIN instead of the hi-res 5D because when they take the 1DII N out of the bag, it'll fire.
Exploring camera shops in Tokyo and Paris. Click here to read more.
As Mr. Kalashnikov might say, don't underestimate the ruggedness, reliability and effectiveness of a time-tested design.
Earlier, I mentioned the Visa pour l'Image conference at Perpignan, a small town in southern France where photojournalists and agency buyers congregate every year.
Every evening for a week, a thousand images of death and destruction are thrown up on a huge open air screen. This meet has been going for 17 years, so I guess it too is a time-tested and successful formula.
This year, Perpignan was screening imagery from Iraq, the Congo, Gaza, and other places where "conflict photographers" earn their keep.
The organizers did throw in a retrospective of Pope John Paul: He was qualified as a statesman with an important effect on the politics of his time, maximizing his own press exposure through carefully organized trips and photo-ops.
Although this seems trite, the set of images I found most painful was a sequence of tourist pictures of a beach in Indonesia. You've doubtless seen them—on picture after picture, a big wave can be seen rolling in towards the shore. You wonder at what point the owner of the camera realized he was documenting his own demise.
Hundreds of young and not-so young photographers, and a lot of famous ones from all over the world, flock to Perpignan.
They spend the week networking, hawking their work, and making the connections that will allow them to survive another year.
The iconographers from the print media are there to buy subjects for illustrated magazines. And the agencies are all there, signing up photographers to send into the field.
Of course, there's a Web site for the Perpignan Visa pour l'Image festival. And some of the past images are here.
I'll give you a tip: all the hotels in Perpignan are booked up solid, months ahead. If you want to be there, you should reserve well before July.
For those who deal in images of death and destruction, Perpignan is the trendy place to be at the end of the summer break.
