Photo Accessory Reviews

I received similar advice from my own father on my 17th birthday that ultimately put me on the path to a career—not a job—in photography. The photograph here was made by my friend Danny when we climbed the 897 stairs inside the Washington Monument. Inside the classy vinyl camera bag slung over my shoulder is a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye that my parents gave me for a birthday present. I modified the camera to accept close-up and yellow filters that an uncle gave me as a gift. Even then I was interested in enhancing images, and I had no idea what that might hold, but I was fascinated by computers (and robots) back then as well.

The Kodak Scanza is a basic film/slide scanner that is well made, very easy to use, and capable of producing entry-level scans of your photos. It comes complete with a generous array of accessories and can save digitized images on an SD card or output them to a PC (or Mac) for storage or a TV for viewing.

If you are a serious digital photographer you probably have a good D-SLR camera. And you expect it will capture sharp, finely focused, high-quality photographic images. It follows that the display you choose should be capable of reproducing all the attributes and qualities your camera has recorded. Most of the displays sold with computers in box stores, however, are not much better at reproducing photographs than the old-type big and heavy CRTs we had back in the mid-1990s.

We’ve all covered the front of a lens with sandwich wrap or a nylon stocking and created a DIY special effects filter at one time or another. Maybe you’ve even smeared an old UV or Skylight with Vaseline or crayon wax to produce creative distortion. Cool, no? Well, those are NOTHING compared to the incredible optical tricks you can do with the new Omni Creative Filter System from Lensbaby.

LG Electronics is the first to offer a new pro-graphics LCD display with LED backlighting. It also has the wide Adobe RGB color width, and will adjust to the lower 80.0 CD/m2 white luminance to provide color-managed printing brightness. The new display is optimized for Microsoft Windows with WQHD 2560x1440 resolution and multitasking windows, “dependent on content, device, interface and/or graphics card,” according to LG. The 27” diagonal size has a base physical resolution of 1920x1080 pixel resolution that may be doubled by the software driver with some PC systems running Windows.

This January issue’s theme was outdoor photography and other than architectural interiors and studio photography, more images are probably captured out of doors than indoors. This column’s focus is on camera bags for landscape, nature, and wildlife shooters, whose needs are different from their urban counterparts. Kelly Moore, for example, manufactures fashion bags (see the December 2016 Geared Up column) and offers the beautifully crafted Woodstock Backpack ($229) that’s probably better suited for Rodeo Drive than Jellystone Park.