Shop Party - It's Not Just About Cameras

We wish to apologise for the noise. We have been celebrating the the refit of our showroom here at 230 Stirling Street. This is the sort of event that happens somewhat seldom, and we have been making the most of the opportunity.

I have enclosed a number of unofficial photos found in an old camera in a footlocker...there will be better pictures from our official photographer "Mr. Ernest" as soon as he returns. In the meantime you can get a feeling for the evening from this selection.

The venue.

The red carpet.

And I'd like to introduce...

The stars of the evening...

B1 and B2

One of them belongs to Leica and one of them belongs to us...

Sam And Frodo

Oh Myyyyy...

" See? I told you...

Yes, actually. They really are...

See? There's a C in the middle of the keyboard...

Now is actually a good time to come down and see us. The walls have been freshly painted and all the electrically-operated doors still open. We are stocked to the gunwales with cameras and lenses and there is space to move round the floor. Easter is upon us so get in today before it all sells out!

Cabinet Electronics

The shop is currently refitting. Unlike a warship, this is not being done in a dry dock - it is being done in a kamikaze attack. Thus you may experience a little delay in getting a response to a phone call or an email enquiry. At least until we throw the burning aircraft off the flight deck...

Please bear with us. It will get better. From the looks of the new cabinets that have already arrived ( and more coming ) it will get very much better. But just this week there will be a bit of confusion and language. The repair and rental departments are largely unaffected.

On the bright side, at least we have got rid of the rats.

A Christmas Carol And We all Go To The Dickens...

Whet the knife and boil the oil
Someone here has screwed up royal.
Grab a throat and twist it tight
The advertisement is not right.

If you read the newspaper today you may be astonished to see that 24-70 mm lenses from Canon and Sigma are at an all-time low price. An eye-poppingly low price. An unsustainable send-us-to-the poorhouse price. It is not just a clever marketing ploy by devious minds. It is a monumental proof-reading mistake by tired minds. The first casualty of Christmas 2013.

This is in the true Australian tradition of something coming seriously adrift around the 25th - you'll remember the ILLAWARA and the Tasmanian bridge and Darwin and the cyclone and all the bushfires. Well, this is the Camera Electronic Christmas disaster.

Don't contribute money to the Red Cross for us - no-one is homeless yet. We are about to have a couple of days of irate phone calls but we are trained in how to handle these; we burst into tears and howl like husky dogs. It seems to work.

The REAL PRICE of the lenses:

1. Sigma 24-70 lens    RRP $ 1049    Christmas Special $ 744

2. Canon 24-70 lens   RRP $ 1699     Christmas Special $ 1222

Apart from the advertisement passing 4 proof readers...(!)...we do apologise for the inconvenience to our customers. It is just a mistake, not a deliberate piece of meanness.

We reserve that for our relatives at the end of Christmas Day...Ho Ho Ho.

Kindly Old Uncle Dick

Santa Was Never Like This - Until He Started Drinking Floor Polish

Every now and then you get out past where the buses run, as Kinky Friedman says...and Camera Electronic is no excepton. We hire a lot of people and occasionally we get more than we bargain for. We hired a sales floor manager thinking that all we would get was a guy who could talk cameras...and ended up getting a world champion.

And not just any old world champion. Never mind your bicycle racers or boxers or cricket teams. We got the World Champion Santa. We really did.

David Downey is his name and it apparently took him three years to work his way up to the Arctic circle and put on the red coat and the hat with the bobble for Australia. But he blasted all the other Santas off the ice and took the championship.

You can see him in action on the ABC television station on Monday the 23rd at 10:30 AM in a program called " World Champion Santa". It is kid-safe to watch...as opposed to " Bad Santa" with Billy Bob Thornton, which is not.

Remember that you must all behave yourselves when you come into the shop - Santa knows when you have been naughty and when you have been nice and these days he works in close collaboration with the USAF out of Omaha. There is a vast difference between a reindeer and an armed drone.

Coming Soon To A Computer Near You

I opened the emails at home this morning and found an advertisement for an antique sales company. I do not buy antiques but I opened it anyway - it turned out to be from some firm that is trying to sell antique photographic gear at auction - or what may purport to be an auction.

I like antique photographic gear - I could look at it all day. Sigh... I DO look at it all day...Either at home in the studio or here at the shop - there it is. I have no desire to augment the collection but still I looked at the list.

One item on offer was a Spirograph. The blurb said that it was similar to one in the Smithsonian Institution and that it was expected to fetch $ 10,000. I am glad that I was not eating at the time I read this as I would probably still be cleaning cornflakes off the the computer screen right now....Reading further I saw a long address in Chinese at the bottom, leading me to the cynical speculation that there must be someone who thinks that the Chinese people are either seriously rich or seriously stupid.

Then I remembered Nürnberg and a visit I made to that city in 1995. I wandered through the business district, pretzel in hand, and passed a camera shop. In it were a vast collection of ex-Soviet cameras and 50's film cameras at eye-watering prices. It was a nice set of premises until you considered the premise that the owner - Boris  - was trying to sell the unworkable to the unwitting. I think he must have succeeded because he pops up in eBay all the time doing the same thing from Germany, and has lately established an outpost in Hong Kong. I can only presume business is brisk, but I cannot say whether this makes me happy or sad, nor for whom...

As it is, I shall pass on the $ 10,000 Spirograph. If there is one in K-Mart for $ 9.95 I might be tempted as the swirly patterns that they make can be quite lovely. I wonder what would happen if you put it on a Wacom Intuous computer tablet and traced up a storm. It would probably look like some of the computer-generated patterns you get as screen savers. I wonder if you could use it to draw a picture of Boris?

Dinner Of the Camera Party

With profound apologies to M. Renoir...

What do camera people do when they are not standing behind the counter at Camera Electronic? They dine at the Duckstein Brewery in the Swan Valley, of course. This is the holiday season and with Christmas coming up we all repaired to the Duck to recruit the tissues and revive the mind.

Aside from testing the malted waters...and I can particularly recommend the Dunkel...and the sauerkraut, we indulged in that most sporting of pastimes: shooting people. I hasten to add, for the benefit of whatever spy agency monitors this blog ( Hey! to Langley...)that we used Fuji cameras and flashes for the task.

I used the X-10 and Dom used the X-Pro 1 with the EF-X20 flash. His pictures came out better than mine but that is because he did not get served his Dunkel as quickly as I. I'm satisfied, though, as I have good souvenirs of the night, quite apart from the deadly hangover and the lump behind the ear where the barmaid hit me with the litre stein.

The trick was - Dom was using the flash and I was relying upon an extreme ISO and a steady hand. I did mention the Dunkel, didn't I? The flash and the circuitry in the Fuji were able to sort out a perfect front exposure while leaving some of the back light to imprint behind thee main subject. Make no mistake - that is the real secret of party and event photography.

Never mind light from three separate directions and diffusers and assistants and artspeak - you need a clean clear front flash or at least a clean bounced flash with a little front card light to get the best out of faces. If you can get some background light and colour, so much the better. You are looking for good grip-and-grin with couples and foursomes - after that you can plan out epic shots with your three assistants and a Klieg light.

Fuji does this - I can get good selfies if I pop up the flash at 200 ISO and set the thing on P. Dom can get great G&G with the EF-X20. If you are using one of the X100 or X100s it is even better - the whole thing is self-contained and you can instruct the camera to fire whenever it thinks it knows what you want to do better than you do.

The perfect Dunkel camera...

NIKON - A New Landscape

 The shop is in a turmoil. This is not new - we import turmoils and sell them at good prices. We can service turmoils. We trade in secondhand turmoils and give three month's warranty on them.

Major changes to the cabinetry - and Nikon is the first off the blocks with a new display. Please look at the images - these cabinets are super sophisticated and wonderful to play with. You can open them without a crowbar. Or drawing pentangles on the floor...one day they are going to get stuck and we won't be able to get them open - I'm just hoping none that none of the staff are in there at the time. It will be like watching a dove in a Bell jar...

No - there are good things in there - look at the new binocular selection from Nikon - and look at the new Nikon 1 system camera on display. And there will be more to come as time passes.

No Need To Rend Your Garments Over Rental

I was delighted this morning to be introduced to Thomas - our new staff member who will be working in the rental and repair department. He has been seeing what we do and has been in conference with out IT man. I think Jason will also be delighted as the pressure of the rental department has been intense these last few weeks.

Rental is a good idea for a number of reasons for a number of people. Photographers who don't have enough money to afford to buy decent equipment can stump up enough for a rental...and if they get paid for their work they might be able to become buyers rather than renters.

Other people are flush enough for normal gear but have no reasonable excuse that they can make to their bank or their spouse for a lens that costs $ 7000. They can justify a weekend with the rental.

Yet others really do contemplate one of those once-in-a-lifetime take your breath away and leave you eating cabbage for a year purchases but do not want to leap into the volcano without being absolutely certain - so they rent their heart's desire several times before buying it. I have a feeling that there are a number of marriages that have been contracted on the same basis...

Finally, there are the photographers who are travelling on someone else's dollar. Pro's. They don't want to schlepp a giant lens through the airports of Australia so they rent one when they get here and save the backache. They bill the client.

Doing a rental is pretty straight forward, though your wouldn't believe the computer flow that we need to do before it spits out a receipt. You'll need ID, and a deposit and, of course, a booking for the gear. Phone Jason or Thomas on 08 9328 4405.

The Orange Cones On The Information Highway

Our clients who are of an observant nature may notice a small change in operational procedures next week here at Camera Electronic. Over the weekend we plan to make changes to the electronic system. Big ones. Provided the main frame of the computer does not detonate and you see fire engines blocking Stirling Street on Saturday afternoon, we should be starting the experiment on Monday.

Please be patient with us - the new system is good but a little complex - we have been training in the operation of it but remember that sometimes training involves tying someone up and laying them on he railway tracks until the train goes by...

Any change of systems involves discovery - we will have to do a stocktake and expect to discover any number of things - those of you with a retail or business background will know that simple number sequences can go awry and then start a whole chain of searches and readjustments. Rest assured that we won't actually come out to your studio and repossess the equipment you have bought, but we may want to carve new numbers on it with a Dremel tool to make the records match...we promise not to do this on the lens elements.

What I am saying is - please be patient with us in the next little while. If you see the staff red-eyed and desperate and looking like they have been peering down the hatch of hell, you will earn their gratitude by being patient.

Uncle Dick

Gone Bush With Camera Electronic

Last weekend we lost the bosses. Yes, we looked behind the wardrobe and no, they weren't there. They had escaped to the bush near Dwellingup at the Nanga Bush Camp.

The Western Australian Photographic Federation held a weekend retreat/seminar/camp there on the 24th, 25th and 26th of May. We packed the 4WD full of shop goodies and Saul and Howard took a pretty good trade presentation down for the WAPF members.

These things are always a bit of a puzzle to know what exactly to send. I bet this year on rain and packed a dozen of the Op/Tec rain sleeves and three of the Promaster rain jackets in the mix. In the end, it looks as if it was fine weather. Ah, well, a lot of other things caught the eye of the attendees so all is well.

Note from the attached photos that Nathan Archer conducted a class on portraiture and Sasha the model was there to help the photographers put some of Nathan's ideas into effect. If you're going to learn something it is good to learn from experts.

The WAPF always puts on fine shows - Ric McDonald sees to that, and Perth photographers would do well to look to the WAPF site to see what is coming up in the future - I know the big exhibition at the cinema last year was a major event and I suspect they will build on that to have even a better one this year.

"I want three volunteers for a hazardous mission. You, you, and you..."

Click On Us - And Get A Surprise

A friend who follows these blogs contacted me via the Facebook system yesterday to tell me that he was getting a surprise when he tried to read the blog - it shuffled him off to a sex site.

Most annoying. And a bit of a professional challenge. After all, how can I compete with the various things displayed on a sex site - busty, dusty, dusky, or damaged - if my resources are limited to the contents of our photography shop. I realise that our staff have their charms but I am hesitant to uncover them...

Please rest assured that the management here have no interest in sex. The sales staff have no interest in sex. The repair technicians have no interest in sex. The writer of this blog has no interest in sex. We are moral and straight-laced and buttoned up to our chins in sensible woolen garments.

The answer will lie somewhere in the complex computer system that runs the web - someone somewhere has thrown the thing in and until the IT chap comes back and exorcises it you might get sex or gambling or cheap medications. And Nigerians. " Hello Dear, This is Precious Imbubu..." All you can do is keep the firewalls up and hope for the best.

Meanwhile, if you are running a bit low on hysteria, fraud, and Grumpy Cat, may I recommend an hour on Facebook? You'll never get that hour back in your life but you will get to see what a lot of your friends have had for lunch.

Uncle Dick