Reviews

I wasn’t a fan of the original 24-120 VR. Build quality was OK but nothing amazing and the optics left a lot to be desired with a sharp centre that rapidly softened up. So when this new 24-120mm f4 version was announced I was curious to see if they had brought the lens up to scratch. After all, it’s a fantastic focal length for those that need or want a little more reach than the 24-70.

The G series has always made a great case for keeping your serious shooting compact and since Canon have decided to stay clear of competing in the micro system market, this is their middle sized enthusiast offering.

Since its introduction some years ago, the Lastolite HiLite background has been increasingly popular with portrait photographers. Sadly, I still get a lot of correspondence about the HiLite background from photographers who struggle to achieve the look that they expected. That’s why I’m putting pen to paper, not in the form of a review as such, but just to reassure you that using the HiLite need not be a struggle.

Image Stabilized binoculars have been around for a while and continue to be very popular, so clearly this technology is more than just a gimmick. To see just what a difference Image Stabilising makes I was loaned a pair of Canon’s 8×25 IS binoculars for a weekend in the Lake District. This would be the first time I had spent any quality time with a pair of image stabilised binoculars, so I was interested to find out what I would make of them.

Canon’s release of the S95 has excited comment from many bloggers and review sites as to whether it is a worthy update on its predecessor, the S90, which was very well received but had a couple of niggling problems. With these in mind I took the S95 on holiday with me to Ibiza for a thorough trial run.

Over the next few days and weeks I am to be given a new Canon EOS 60D digital SLR to test, review, and form an opinion on. Let me know what it is you want to know about the camera, what you’d like to see pictures of, and tests you’d like to see performed. View it as a kind of remote-control review, or a test-by-proxy, if you like.

In order to review a bag like the Lowepro Fastpack 350, you have to spend some quality time with it. I’m not talking about making restaurant reservations or taking it to the pictures, but simply pointing out that a straight-forward dissection of the bag could be completed in less time that it takes to read this review, so would hardly make it worth writing. No, in order to determine if this is the kind of photo bag you could happily live with, I need to do just that – live with it.

I think of the NEX-5 as my photographic Swiss Army knife: a small package with lots of tools, which will tackle 90% of the tasks you throw at it. Here are some aspects of the NEX which I’ve found the most useful or interesting over the past few weeks…

There’s a gulf between basic third party flashes and the manufacturers’ all singing, all dancing models. It’s this market space that a few pocket lighting specialists fill. The German brand Metz is one of the best known and produce a range which aims to match the big boys in every respect while still remaining slightly more ‘cost effective’.

This is the first self-produced, tailor made demonstration video that WEX have created specifically for the purpose of demonstrating a product to our customers. Now, being our “first-born” as it were, Warehouse Express are incredibly proud of our video baby. It may not be perfect, it may not be the best looking, but we made it, it’s ours and we love it.