Articles

Canon Auto-Focus Explained, 2025 Update! with Rudy Winston In Februari 2022 Steve Brazill from the Behind the Shot podcast made a show called Canon Auto-Focus Explained, featuring Rudy Winston, technical marketing consultant with Canon USA. In the show Winston talked about Canon's autofocus system, particularly the one in the R3. Steve Brazill writes on his site that this show had roughly "453,000 views on YouTube, in addition to all the views in the video and audio-only podcast feeds." It didn't take long before people started to ask for an update, especially after the R6 Mark II and the R5 Mark II were released "to cover all of the newer Auto Focus features." After the R1 was released last November, Brazill decided it was...

The hidden benefits of birdsong by: Natalia Zielonka and Simon Butler Our natural soundscapes are falling silent as bird populations decline. To improve our lives, we must invest in conservation. A male Chaffinch. Photograph Levina de Ruijter Imagine you’re walking across rolling hills that stretch for miles, with warm sunshine and the chirping of birds all around. This peaceful and serene scene is an increasingly rare one in the modern world. Our natural soundscapes are falling silent as bird populations decline. Humans are interacting less with nature, in what is sometimes referred to as an "extinction of experience." This has been linked to deteriorating public health and wellbeing. Birds are often colourful and their song...

How glamour photography makes suburban stars of us all by P. David Marshall Glamour photography sells both the experience and the product. WEExp/Shutterstock In shopping centres and malls across much of Australia and North America, a peculiar and particular type of photography business makes itself at home. It goes under a number of names and guises, but is generally described as glamour photography. At the core of this particular business is creating images that make the everyday person feel extraordinary; a “star”. One of these businesses, Starshots, with its 16 franchised studios across Australia, is nicely nestled in the suburban landscape. It advertises itself in glossy posters in the malls themselves with provocative photos of...

How Lee Miller’s photos remind us of war’s destructive brutality by Ann-Kathrin McLean Almost 80 years since the end of the Second World War, images of its destruction are being brought back to us through the film LEE. The film charts the journey of renowned war and surrealist photographer, Lee Miller (played by Kate Winslet) during the war. On April 30, 1945, Miller witnessed the liberation of the Dachau Concentration Camp alongside the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the U.S. army. Today, Dachau is a site of memory that embodies the stories of the past — the told and untold. Family heritage and trauma shape these stories and sites. As a German citizen, I am distraught about the past and see it as my duty to learn and...

Shrinking wings, bigger beaks: birds are reshaping themselves in a warming world by: Sara Ryding, Alexandra McQueen and Matthew Symonds The Common Bronzewing is one of the birds that has increased beak size in response to climate change (@ JJ Harrison) For wildlife, climate change is a bit like the “final boss” the protagonist faces in a video game: big, hulking and inescapable. This formidable enemy has forced wildlife to alter where and how they live. Higher temperatures exert so much stress on wildlife that over generations, they are forced to change and adapt. We wanted to better understand how this pattern of change was playing out in Australian birds. Our two pieces of recent research identified that, in response to...

Tourists in our own reality: Susan Sontag’s Photography at 50 by: Andrew Milne This year marks 50 years since Susan Sontag’s essay Photography was published in the New York Review of Books. Slightly edited and renamed In Plato’s Cave, it would become the first essay in her collection On Photography, which has never been out of print. The breadth of Photography is immense. It ranges over artistic, commercial, photojournalistic, and popular uses of photography; and it discusses the photograph’s role in both sensitising and desensitising us to other people’s suffering – a theme Sontag reconsidered 30 years later in her final book, Regarding the Pain of Others. But perhaps nowhere is Sontag’s enduring relevance as a critic clearer than...