Only a few short years ago most photographers had not been persuaded to adopt the Raw file format in any great number and of those who had, it tended to be pulled out just for special occasions. The hefty overheads that came with Raw files, together with the less than ideal post production software of the era, made it a very time consuming proposition. High quality JPGs were so much easier to deal with that they tended to win the argument on most occasions.

In the years since we have acquired much better computers, far cheaper storage media and hugely improved software. Together, all of this has reduced those overheads to the point that working with Raw files has become akin to handling JPGs. Now that they can enjoy all the benefits and few of the constraints, it has come to be that for most of the photographers that I know at least, shooting in Raw is now standard.

But while Raw certainly helps them make better pictures, a seldom realised danger has arisen as an unintended consequence of this mass-migration.

Put simply, have you tried opening a digital image from 1992 lately? It shouldn’t be too much of a bother if that image is in the JPG file format as Adobe Photoshop handles those painlessly of course. How about a Microsoft Word 2.0 document from the same era, though? Worse still, a MacWrite or Nisus Writer document of that vintage? Of course you don’t have those programs anymore, or probably anything sufficiently backwards compatible, either. If push came to shove you’re unlikely to even have a computer that will support the Operating System needed to run them.

With photography the problem is infinitely more pronounced because of the myriad of camera manufacturers, models and resulting formats, and increasing all the time. The end state is finding yourself with a shelf full of old back-up hard drives that you can no longer access.

The danger is standardisation — or the lack thereof. ‘Raw’ itself does not in fact refer to a single standard or even a loose convention. It represents a variety of proprietary file types that differ from manufacturer to manufacturer, even from model to model, all of which need to be interpreted by their own specific software. Wikipedia says there are thirty-seven individual Raw file formats, but I notice their list omits one I recall using ten years ago, so it’s safe to say there are more.

In terms of solutions, Adobe has been the only company so far to offer a meaningful response with its Digital Negative Format (DNG). It’s open-source, licensed to any manufacturer that wants it at no cost, and has so far won favour with the US Library of Congress and is endorsed by the American Society of Media Photographers as a standardisation of the Raw file concept. So far thirty-eight camera models have been equipped with the capacity to shoot in DNG natively, and Raw files from around two-hundred others can be converted with Adobe’s software.

But the OpenRaw working group reports a less than flattering view of DNG. They say it amounts to little more than just another third party file format. It doesn’t transcribe all of the data currently recorded in many Raw files (keeping the full gamut of image data of course being the corner-stone function of Raw in the first place), it is not future proof, and nor is it a truly open-standard are their claims.

I won’t pretend to know enough (or anything in fact) about software and hardware engineering to decide how much of this is true, but what I do know is that I’ve never had a pro-camera with the ability to shoot DNG files natively and I think that’s telling in itself.

If we consider the broad variations in camera sensor hardware across the brands, it’s not necessarily unreasonable to think that creating a universal software format that encompasses them all would involve compromises that result in poorly optimised, one-size-fits-all, bloated files, and that it might not compare all that well to the Raw formats of the present. Because of this, and the fact that none of the hardware majors show any great interest in addressing the problem anyway, I think a less than perfect DNG file will be our best option for a long time to come.

wade@wadelaube.com

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However the Prime Minister Julia Gillard has acknowledged in recent days that Labor’s campaign strategy has not served her well, and to that end she has announced that for its remaining weeks she will take personal control and that from now on Australians will get to see ‘the real Julia’.

But if it’s authenticity the PM wants, there’s a pretty simple way to go about achieving it. She wouldn’t even be pioneering new ground, because the White House and Downing Street have been doing it for years.

United States governments have for decades indulged fly-on-the-wall, documentary-style political photography. White House photographers have been permitted to record even the most critical meetings in the Oval Office in a candid manner, Situation Room briefings on the eve of war, or a President’s more casual moments mid-flight aboard Air Force One. Entire US election campaigns have been photographed in this manner with books published to prove it.

No posing here: meeting foreign heads of state. Photo Pete Souza

Fly-on-the-wall: on board Air Force One. Photo Pete Souza

Real moments: the Situation Room. Photo Pete Souza

Recording reality: Presidential downtime. Photo Pete Souza

Britain’s former Brown Government allowed a photographer from The Guardian to witness the final moments of its tenure. Martin Argles was in the room as Mr Brown paced the floor waiting for the telephone call from Nick Clegg that was to inform him he was no longer Prime Minister of Great Britain.

While moments of such doubtless historical value are recorded as a matter of course elsewhere, Australian political parties of all persuasions have with only the briefest of exception conducted their business behind closed doors. In Australia, political photographers are feared by politicians more than the potential cultural and historical weight of their work is appreciated.

So if it’s an expression of authenticity she has decided she needs, the Prime Minister ought to simply pluck one photographer at a time from the campaign media bus to spend the day travelling alongside her team. Allow them to record the business of electioneering by facilitating that fly-on-the-wall approach. Let them photograph real, unscripted moments honestly.

Sure, offering access like this means taking risks, but against the present backdrop of stage-managed and contrived political imagery, one ounce of reality will make a stark difference and perhaps a positive impression on voters.

wade@wadelaube.com

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OmniGroup, if you don’t know of them, are a class act. Half a dozen of what I consider the better computer applications that I use are of their making. One that has been particularly useful, a “Getting-Things-Done” tool named OmniFocus, was just last night migrated to the iPad to compliment its existing desktop and iPhone versions.

Now you’re either the sort of ultra-organised person who is predisposed to keeping to-do lists to manage their time or you are not, and no computer program is likely to change this. But the very polished to-do list manager that is OmniFocus does offer an especially pertinent function for photographers, whether they feel the need to subscribe to the “Getting Things Done” time-management religion or not.

Ever had a number of long-term, concurrent assignments, each perhaps with shot-lists as long as your arm detailing of all of the pictures that you need to tick off during a period lasting weeks or months? If you’ve ever been commissioned to photograph construction projects or government programmes spanning several offices and requiring you visit each, you’ll relate to this and OmniFocus for iPad will probably be quite handy.

I say that because of it’s mapping feature. As well as sorting lists of pending tasks by Projects, Due Date or any of a wide array of other fields I won’t confuse you with by explaining here, OmniFocus can present these lists by geographic location, superimposed on a map. That means when you arrive at your road tunnel construction site for visit five of that particular project, the location awareness of this software will present you with an up to date version of the shot-list you have been maintaining on your desktop computer or iPhone, filtering and displaying only those to-do items that are geographically pertinent – in other words, your shot-list for that location.

While I like OmniFocus a lot, at $AU48 it isn’t cheap for an iPad app and that will make the decision a far less straight forward one for some users. For those people, it’s possible to achieve a slightly watered-down version of the same effect with the iPhone app that sells for $AU24.

OmniFocus for iPad in map view: See your shoot locations plotted on the map and drill down to your shot-list for each.

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With Photos 1440 and the Word Press Photo exhibitions occurring simultaneously in opposite wings of the State Library of New South Wales, the contrast between their respective works is all the more clear and it begs the question: why must World Press Photo be so bloody upsetting all of the time? It’s generally very worthy subject-matter I concede, but surely there’s more of that to be found than is for the most part confined to conflicts and generic misfortune, year after year after year?

Why shouldn’t photojournalism be experienced without having to so commonly take the viewer down a path of misery and despair? It hasn’t always been this way — in fact photojournalism’s formative years were so very much the opposite. If you trace the movements of the early master practitioners in the Golden Age of our craft, it was daily life and street photography that defined their early work over many years during the 1930s. Of course when it arrived, The Second World War was an event delivered to the public in pictures like none before it by the work of those same photographers. But for at least the preceding decade, photojournalism was able to thrive in the pages of the world’s mainstream magazines without war.

If you know World Press Photo then you know it’s always confronting and never spares you the full-frontal realities of the impact on human beings caught in the middle of those events that it chronicles. It’s always been this way — so much so that World Press has become synonymous with war, poverty, disaster and peril and in the eyes of some that formula has now come to define photojournalism itself.

But the craft is so much more than that, and as such Photos 1440 is purposefully different. Its intent is not only to confront but also to extract from its audience a broader range of responses – things like amusement and joyousness. But that’s not for one moment to denigrate World Press Photo as an institution or its contributors and all of their great work — for they quite simply are the cream of our crop. But many of you might nonetheless concede my point that for a competition showcasing the highest achievements in our field, World Press Photo has become terribly insular — its audience is now not the mainstream, rather it’s mostly made up of the photographic and the arts communities, which is ironic for a trade that is driven by getting the story out.

Having said all of that, for the most part Photos 1440 (named that way to mark the total number of minutes in each day) does not itself comprise of photojournalism as such. Rather it’s an exhibition of the work of press photographers whose general intention is creating pictures that draw you in, not make you want to look away. Compared with traditional photojournalism, press photography is the short-form of the same article if you like. The work of the World Press Photo winners is in most cases months or years in the making, whereas the average newspaper assignment lasts for an hour or so. And while World Press Photo is global in scale, Photos 1440 is local and personal – you’ll know many the places and perhaps even recognise some of the faces.

These are two neatly contrasting exhibitions for you to take in, both opening this Saturday and both are free.

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For instance Adobe Photoshop CS5 is thirty per cent more expensive if you buy it from adobe.com.au than it is through adobe.com, the US site.

And a Canon 1D Mark IV is well over $1,000 cheaper in the United States right now than it is here.

These are just two examples but if you’re a photographer in Australia you’ll know of plenty more.

Multi-national companies like these will tell you that they are in fact individual businesses in each of the countries they operate in, and that they set their prices in response to “local market conditions” and “individual circumstances”.

Well I for one do not think the corporate structure of a particular vendor should be something I need to account for in my purchasing decisions. Couldn’t Adobe set a global pricing standard where the only variation would be as minor as that caused by the currency exchange? The Apple App Store can manage it, and so can small to medium sized software developers the world over. Look at OmniGroup or Panic Software for instance.

The madness of this disparity is such that at various points in recent history a photographer setting themselves up for business in this country could, for argument’s sake, fly to New York, buy a couple of cameras and half a dozen lenses, spend a few days sight-seeing, then fly home and still have change when compared to the Australian RRP for the very same equipment. The United States is infact a perfect place to shop because there are so many high volume camera resalers that put huge pressure on prices to our collective benefit.

A Canon executive once tried to pacify me with that same old line about “business structures” and “market forces”, topping if off with the threat that a US-bought camera wouldn’t entitle you to local warranty or membership of the Canon Professional Services programme.

Well given that it’s often been the case that the price of one pro-camera body in Australia could buy you two of the same in New York, I’d be happy to console myself in the knowledge that if the worst did befall me, I could buy a brand new one to replace it and still be no worse off.

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In the media we deal with those who peddle visual propaganda every day of the week. Marketing dressed up as news is just another mode to get your message across. And while that’s a marketer’s job, it’s our job to distill the legitimate news-matter and to ditch the rest.

I have to say that most of the calls we get offering us an “exclusive opportunity” to shoot so-and-so’s new underwear range, and the “tip-offs” we receive informing us that if we’re at a certain place at a certain time we’ll be able to witness an impromptu “protest” over some fringe-interest, are all generally very clumsy efforts and it’s easy to see them for what they are. I think what we saw in Perth yesterday was but another form of marketing and it was just as disingenuous.

Anti-mining tax protesters in Perth yesterday. The signs are suspiciously uniform, no? Photo: Sharon Smith

Disingenuous because it was so clearly orchestrated by interest groups. Examine the uniformity of the signage being waved around by all of those “disgruntled constituents” and you won’t be surprised to learn they were centrally produced and distributed to the crowd by over efficient organisers.

Disingenous because so many of the faces just happen to be recognisable mining industry hangers-on, former Liberal Party figures and other conservatives of varying degrees of note. They of course all have a right to protest but spare us the pretence that they somehow represent the mainstream view.

Disingenuous because Andrew Forrest saw fit to don a yellow worker’s uniform for theatrical effect and wear it not only while perched on the back of a truck, shouting down his megaphone at two thousand-odd protesters, but also to the PM’s Press Club address and later during his Lateline interview. A gratuitous stunt – pure and simple.

Twiggy in worker-mode at the miners’ rally. Photo: Sharon Smith

Twiggy in costume at lunch with the PM. Photo: John Mokrzycki

Twiggy still in costume on ABC’s Lateline.

But if making yourself the lead story on the TV news last night and getting splashed across the front of the nation’s newspapers today was the objective, then the plan worked. But it’s still little more than political propaganda of the visual kind.

There was, however, one picture shot yesterday that I think gives a meaningful insight into what this campaign is actually all about. It shows Deputy Opposition Leader Julie Bishop embraced by  – and herself embracing  – one of the country’s richest “workers”. I think it illustrates a marriage of convenience between the mining fraternity and the Federal Opposition – one side fearful of what it has to lose, the other with an eye on what it could possibly win.

Mining theatrics on the front of today’s Sydney Morning Herald. I think this picture captures the marriage of convenience between the mining industry and the Federal Opposition.

wade@wadelaube.com

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There’s a lot to be gained from such a venture. It’s an opportunity to build software and hardware environments free from the obsolete hangovers that continue to weigh down manufacturers on other platforms today. In creating a new platform and doing so entirely in-house, Apple has also positioned itself as gate-keeper, declining third party software contributions with totalitarian aplomb. The upside is quality control but there are worrying downsides too.

Putting quality control into Apple’s hands should mean a higher standard of software product than is available on many other mobile platforms. Apple software has always been of the highest standard after all, and its hardware design is what brought the company back from the brink in the 1990s. But that pipe dream is already proven so: if you shop at the App Store, you know that while some of its content is top-notch, most is trash and the challenge is to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Third party developers have complained loudly about Apple’s approval process and aspersions have even been cast calling it an anti-competitive process and a method by which to constrain key-competitors like Google. To this Apple says users aren’t compelled to buy, and developers aren’t compelled to build. Nice.

The iPad brings to the table another dimension to the software approval politics. Magazines and newspaper publishers are flocking to release their titles in a digital form that closely reflects their printed products. This new model brings with it a whole lot of hope for companies that have to this point been feeling a whole lot of pain from the decline of advertising revenues and circulation numbers. But editorial content and censorship of any kind are dangerous notions for publishers and for Apple. For this we need to see a clear policy outlining how digital publications will be treated differently to software.

Photography became a trade firmly linked with computer technology by the late 1990s and soon after it was commercially senseless not to be mindful of how technology might help your business. I’ve always had an eye on the horizon with a view to how new technology might benefit photography and the conclusion of this review is that the iPad does very much do that.

You can find any number of technical reports on the iPad across the internet which will tell you how the battery lasts all day (which it does), and how the oil resistant touch-dsiplay isn’t very smudge-resistant at all (it’s a mess). They’ll give you all the technical analysis you could ever want, so I am not taking that approach here. Rather, I am going to point out five reasons that I have concluded the iPad to be a worthy tool for photographers.

1 Wireless image preview

Its most intriguing function for us, I think, is in its role as a wireless tethered display for big shoots on location. Photographers have been lugging laptops or even carting entire desktop systems with them for their large displays so that art directors, stylists and others can collaborate directly during a shoot.

What I wanted to see from the iPad from day one was a way of previewing pictures on its display in as close as possible to real time, definitely wirelessly and preferably without the need for a host computer to be on the network. ShutterSnitch ticks all of those boxes.

Real-time wireless preview on your iPad as you shoot

The essential ingredients are a digital SLR, an Eye-Fi card (or a proprietary wireless adapter for your camera model), a wireless network, and an iPad with the ShutterSnitch app itself.

2 Portfolio viewings

One of the most obvious applications for the iPad in the hands of photographers is portfolio display and for that role it receives high marks for polish and presentation. But the iPad’s touch-screen display is very susceptible to smudges, even in the cleanest of hands. That’s not a good look, so running your cleaning-cloth over the display before a client meeting is essential preparation.

Highly customisable photo presentations

From the App Store’s current offerings Keynote is my tip for photo slideshow software. The iPad implementation of the desktop original by Apple is a very smooth product and offers the flexibility to cater for whatever bells and whistles you might like. It demands more preparation than the much more simple, in-built functionality but Keynote offers you an overall level of polish that makes it well worth $12.99.

3 Pre-production meetings

If you have pre-production meetings with your clients or crew, use the iPad for brainstorming and the laying-out of ideas and lighting concepts. With the right software, you can very easily sketch a lighting diagram and send it to your desktop computer for tidying-up or distribute it to all parties as needed then and there. If you like the sound of this, you’ll want OmniGraffle for iPad.

Complex drawings and diagrams – useful for lighting diagrams and set designs

I’ve been using OmniGraffle for Mac for a while and it’s a very fine product indeed. It’s a diagram, mock-up and drawing application that is simultaneously sophisticated and simple such that you’ll pick it up in minutes. OmniGraffle maintains a library of stencils that are essentially icons and other useful templates that save you having to create them yourself. Download the lighting and photography themed stencil (called Strobist Stencil) and you’ll be creating lighting diagrams in minutes with point-and-click ease. Or pinch-and-zoom ease on the iPad version.

A lighting diagram sketched out using templates in OmniGraffle for iPad

At $59.99 OmniGraffle for iPad is an expensive piece of software by App Store standards but it’s probably worth twice that price. You’ll find its depth of features, simplicity of design, and compatibility with the desktop version very impressive. It’s simply the best piece of software I’ve seen for the iPad yet.

Also for the pre-production planning process, take a look at Lightrac. It illustrates the angle of the sun for any location at your chosen date and time by plotting it on a map for you. Very handy when planning timings.

Plot the angle of the sun for your desired location, at your desired time

4 Digital wallet

At up to 64GB, the iPad is a reasonably sized mobile storage device if you don’t fill it all with music and movies. If you use it for wireless preview with ShutterSnitch as detailed above, and if you configure it to transfer your full-sized originals, you also have an instant back-up of your shoot as you work. The downside is that the wireless transfer of modern raw image files can take a while.

5 Property and model releases

I am beta-testing an iPhone and iPad app at present which presents a very useful function for photographers on location by managing property and model releases for them. It displays legally binding (and customisable) contracts that signatories acknowledge and agree to via the touch-screen display, following which it despatches PDF copies of the digitally signed contract to both parties and to a back-up server also. That’s it in a nutshell. Very useful for photographers, and very adaptable to a variety of other industries I would imagine. More on that app later.

And beyond…

There are iPad apps for processing credit card payments on the spot. Use a spreadsheet to keep track of shot-lists on a complicated day of shooting. Get detailed weather forecasts and update your blog during a rain delay with the WordPress app. Complete fully fledged finance functions with the Numbers spreadsheet. Access your desktop machine (Mac or Windows) from wherever you are with LogMeIn Ignition. Be immediately informed of flight delays as they are announced by the carrier with FlightTrack Pro. Or seek inspiration from the Guardian newspaper’s Eyewitness photo-feed app. The list of secondary-functions is huge, growing daily and only limited by the imaginations of developers.

As a first generation product the iPad performs surprisingly well. That’s probably because it’s not truly first generation, given that it comprises largely of technologies Apple has been bedding-in for years.

It’s by no means a replacement for a laptop computer and therefore it’s not a means by which press photographers or photojournalists could realistically transmit their pictures from the field. It’s therefore probably of limited use to them. But for the average commercial or portrait photographer, the iPad is a tool you will not regret buying.

wade@wadelaube.com

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In the final week of her voyage, as she neared the heads of Sydney Harbour which would mark a full lap of the globe and the end of seven months of solitude at sea, media and public interest started to build at a rapid rate. But if you were not a party to that commercial arrangement, you would have to locate the sixteen year old and her 34-foot yacht somewhere in the Tasman Sea without any assistance from her land based management team (or should I say “media management” team?).

Never mind. Where there’s a will there’s a way, and it proved quite straight forward for all but one media organisation to find Jessica about sixty nautical miles off the New South Wales south coast.

But flying across sixty miles of open sea (and back again) is no minor aviation feat apparently, and it requires a twin-engine aircraft with certain safety-equipment on board. That distance, likely intended to make it harder for the freeloaders, forced upon us a change of aircraft and a bit of a delay in getting airborne. So the fading light, the weather and Watson’s media plan were all conspiring to make life interesting for photographer Quentin Jones who set off to bring back a page one picture for Saturday’s Herald.

Earlier in the day it had been our plan to launch a helicopter and a photographer from Wollongong but when it became obvious Jessica was sailing so far out to sea, it became necessary to use a larger aircraft based in Sydney. Quentin Jones answered his mobile at about 2pm and we briefed him on his task. Quentin and reporter Kate Benson drove out to the Executive Jet Base at Mascot where the helicopters live, and awaited their 3.15pm pickup.

However by 3.15pm the aircraft hadn’t turned up. Nor had it by 3.30pm, 3.45pm, or 4.00pm. The clock was ticking, the helicopter was late and we were getting nervous. It turned out the pilot, Mark, was ferrying a 60 Minutes crew out to the yacht and they had struggled for quite a period of time to locate Jessica. So not until after 4.45pm were Quentin and Kate in the air. With 20 to 30 minutes’ flying ahead of them, and with last light around 5.20pm, any delay at all in finding Jessica this time would cost us the picture.

Once they were upon her, the last rays of daylight were hitting the water but barely were they bright enough to illuminate her yatch. Cue the world’s biggest fill-flash – the helicopter’s spotlight.

On his Canon EOS 1D Mark IV cameras (one with a 400mm f2.8, the other with a 135mm f2.0), Quentin shot 82 frames in the course of 7 minutes in driving rain while Mark dealt with the five metre swell below. When daylight had faded completely, and the ocean was rendered jet-black, Quentin and Kate left Jessica alone for one last night at sea.

Back in the office, having not heard from them for almost an hour by now, we were looking at the black of night outside our window and working on contingency plans for what was feeling more and more likely. But then my mobile rang: definitely the sound of a helicopter cockpit, but no voice. Then it dropped out. OK, they’re back in mobile range but did he get the picture? Texting. Fingers crossed. Waiting. The phone rings again.

“Got it,” he said. And that was that.

Success that Friday night was about cutting edge technology, a super experienced news photographer, and having one of the best pilots in town. Saturday’s page one picture was shot at a 30th of a second (handheld) at f2.0 and at 12,000 ISO. So without our new 1D Mark IVs it wouldn’t have happened.

Of the 82 pictures shot by Quentin on this assignment, a sum total of two worked. But you only need one.

Sydney Morning Herald May 15 2010 edition with sailor Jessica Watson on her last night at sea, photographed by Quentin Jones.

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There’s a designer you might know of whose work has recently caught my eye. Sir Paul Smith started in fashion in the 1970s but he’s since done everything from teapots to tie-pins too.

The Paul Smith label is a clever mix of the classical and a subtle modern twist; like a respectable, gentlemanly suit that appeals as much to a twenty year old and could be carried by either; or a range of fine china not out of place at home or at high-tea; or an umbrella that’s a conservative black on the top side but an eclectic, eye-catching array of patterns underneath that you could carry in any setting. He finds a balance between bold and subtle; loud yet conservative.

For Paul Smith, commercial success must also come from his obvious diversity as he is clearly intent on pushing beyond his comfort-zone.

There’s a common thread running through Paul Smith’s designs that I think can often play out in successful commercial photography too. It employs tried and tested concepts that satisfy a client — the classical, let’s say — but it features a signature element that makes it distinct and unmistakably you.

So it’s about being the same but different. It follows a path well worn by others which tends to make it commercially safe, but it’s made simultaneously unique by your own touch and style which renders it hard to mimic and probably more creatively rewarding too.

This has got to be the killer combination for success as a business while enjoying your craft as a photographer: creating pictures that are proven and tested, yet fresh and unique.

It turns out that it’s ironic to hold up this particular designer as inspiration for photography because it appears Paul Smith shoots a bit himself — so much so he does his advertising pictures in-house.

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Drop a prosumer camera off your shoulder and you’ll probably need a new one. Drop a pro body and as long as the lens survives you’ll likely not miss a beat. The latest and greatest Canon has 76 gaskets and seals making it rain proof. The top Nikon is built like a tank. But for this you pay.

For newspaper types the cost of such pro-specs pays off. It allows press photographers to get about four years out of a typical body, each of which is in the field five days per week, in rain, heat and cold, all year round while getting plenty of undeclared hard knocks along the way.

But par for the course can be the kind of incident no camera will endure.

An old friend, while on his first assignment with a new employer, dropped a $100,000 Betacam into Dilli Harbour after an excited kid knocked it off the wharf there. He had unfortunately committed the cardinal sin of walking away from a TV camera on a tripod. He kept his job.

A colleague who will remain nameless fell into a concealed puddle — cameras on either shoulder — with one getting momentarily but completely submerged. He had the presence of mind to immediately remove the battery and then leave it for a couple of days to dry out. It continued to work normally for a couple of weeks but then needed Canon’s special attention.

One dropped his near new 1D Mark II into the olympic pool at Homebush (Canon couldn’t help), while another sent a brand new Canon 1Ds to its grave by not sealing an underwater housing properly before entering the water.

In Canberra’s bushfires of 2003 one of our team lost what was then a $20,000 Canon D2000 while running for dear life, after its strap got caught on a tree branch. Unlike the camera, the photographer was lucky enough to get away unscathed.

But perhaps harder to watch than any of these scenarios is Canon staff pulverising half a million dollars worth of stock because it didn’t pass their strict quality-control.

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