DIY Photography

Techart announced its initial Leica M to Sony E mount adapter way back at the beginning of 2016. Now, almost seven years later, they’ve announced the new Techart LM-EA9, the second generation of their Leica M to Sony E autofocus adapter. It comes with a sleeker design and features four built-in small, lightweight servo motors that offer more power and faster autofocus operation than its predecessor.

This motor-driven adapter means that you can use all those old Leica M manual focus lenses on your Sony E mount cameras with full autofocus capability. And because it’s a Leica M mount, you can adapt it to pretty much any other kind of old lens mount format, such as Nikon F, M42 or Pentax K, opening up a whole world of lens options.

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Sigma has officially announced the two newest lenses in their Global Vision Lenses lineup for Sony E Mount and Leica L mount. As expected, they’re the Sigma 20mm f/1.4 DG DN Art and the Sigma 24mm f/1.4 DG DN Art series lenses. Both lenses are primarily aimed at astrophotographers, although the 24mm is also targeted towards general photography use.

Both lenses come with some features advantageous to astrophotographers, with the introduction of a manual focus lock and a rear filter holder as well as front filter threads. The 20mm f/1.4 DG DN also comes with a “Lens Heater Retailer” to “keep this useful astrophotography weather accessory firmly in place while in use”. The lenses were announced during today’s Sigma Stage event.

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McKinney Fire that’s been raging in California since late July has become the largest wildfire of 2022 so far. Sadly, lives have been lost of both humans and animals, and lots of damage and destruction has been done.

But kind-hearted and empathetic people make everything more bearable. One of them is photographer Jonathan Rivas of AIO Filmz, who saved a puppy and helped reconnect it with its owner. He captured the encounter on camera and returned our faith in humanity.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware of the fact that plastic is one of the main marine pollutants. Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) writes that Every day approximately 8 million pieces of plastic end up in our oceans. According to data from 2020, plastics consistently make up 80% of all marine debris.

Because of alarming facts like these, more and more individuals and companies are switching to sustainable and eco-friendly solutions. One of them is NYA-EVO, a Belgium-based company that has just launched a unique camera backpack. What’s so special about it, I hear you ask. Well, it was made entirely from recycled nylon and it combines sustainability, durability, practicality, and great design.

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It seems that Panasonic is dumping development of their lower-end camera systems in favour of higher-end kit for enthusiast and professional photographers and filmmakers, according to a report from Nikkei Asia. Exactly how low-end Panasonic will go is unclear, but it seems that they’ve finally admitted defeat in certain sectors of the market against the onslaught of ever-improving smartphones.

It’s not much of a surprise. Many companies have been killing off compacts for several years already, putting their efforts where things pay a little better. Only a handful still produce even high-end compacts now. And, well, it looks like Panasonic’s following suit and killing off their lower-end stuff.

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Earlier this year, Instagram started testing non-fungible tokens or NFTs for a limited number of US users. But if you live elsewhere and want to jump on the bandwagon, rejoice! From now on, you can buy and sell NFTs on Instagram in 100 countries in  Africa, Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and the Americas.

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Images of new Sigma lenses leaking ahead of an official announcement are as inevitable as Thanos. Sigma has a new products presentation live stream planned for later today (in about 3 hours from now) where it’s expected that they’ll announce the new Sigma 20mm f/1.4 DG DN Art and 24mm f/1.4 DG DN Art series lenses. The basic specs leaked last week and now we’re getting to have a look at them.

As well as the images, there are also a few new bits of information, including expected shipping dates and a Japan price for the 24mm. There’s no word yet on what they’ll cost in the rest of the world, but I’m sure that information will be coming later today during the official announcement. I’ve embedded the upcoming stream here in case you missed it.

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Three British women have made complaints so far when they spotted images of themselves used without their permission in a Spanish government campaign. The advertisement was commissioned by the Spanish Women’s Institute as part of their Equality Ministry.

The poster translates roughly as “Summer is our’s too”, and shows five women of different body shapes and sizes enjoying a day at the beach. The image was put together by artist Arte Machape, however, it appears that neither Machape nor the Spanish Government bothered to request permission to use the images of the women. And in an even stranger twist, the Spanish ministry has said that it didn’t know that they were “real people”.

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One of the big problems you encounter when moving a camera from dry land to under the water is the difference in the index of refraction (IOR). That’s the thing that often makes rivers and lakes appear much shallower than they actually are when you’re looking at them from the water’s edge. For 360° cameras, this difference in IOR can be a big problem when it comes to shifting from the air to underwater.

A team of researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), the Seoul National University and The University of Texas at Austin, though, have developed a system based on one of nature’s designs. They’ve taken inspiration from the fiddler crab to develop a 360° camera system that works both in and out of the water.

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The whole Instagram debacle over recent weeks with its focus on video content and the whole full-screen redesign – which now appears to have been halted – has caused it a lot of grief. The backlash from users has been quite vocal. After all, Instagram’s success grew off the back of the fact that it was a photo-sharing app and despite competition from apps like TikTok, that’s what Instagram users still seem to want.

It looks, though, that Instagram might have actually taken the response into account and is currently testing taller aspect ratio photos so that the photos in your streams can take up as much of the screen as Instagram Reels currently do. Whether or not that’ll be enough to appease users remains to be seen, but we’ve only been asking Instagram for the ability to post portrait orientation images for about a decade, so maybe.

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