Photokina

We just returned from Photokina, the huge photography show held in Cologne, Germany every two years. The show can be overwhelming - 1,600 vendors and over 150,000 attendees.

We didn't see any real breakthrough products for product photography, although the trend to daylight balanced fluorescent lights is picking up momentum.

The most impressive technology was Fujifilm's new "Face Detection" system. The system, is supposed to allow future versions of Fuji digital cameras to automatically recognize any faces in a scene and then set the camera exposure and focus based on the position of the faces. If it works as billed, it should prevent a lot of snapshots with underexposed and out of focus people in the photo. We don't see any immediate application to product photography, but hope that it is an indication of camera maker's desire to move beyond simply adding more megapixels or more "scene" modes and instead adding truly useful features. Fuji expects to have cameras with the new technology shipping by November.

Another potentially positive development was Samsung's introduction of digital SLR cameras with built-in image stabilization. Samsung calls it OPS (optical picture stabilization) and describes it as "Shake reduction with image-sensor shift mechanism". What that means in plain English is smply that the camera's image sensor can move in order to compensate for camera movement. That should lead to sharper images. The significance of this announcement is that by building the image stabilization into the camera image stabilization will always be available. In other systems like the Canon and Nikon systems, the stabilization is built into costly lenses. So in order to get image stabilization with thoses systems special lenses are required.

We are hoping that other camera makers also build cameras with image stabilization features. Motion blur is always a potential problem with product photography, especially for close up images common in jewelry photography. So anything to help reduce motion blur, will be welcomed.

Of course, there were the usual dog and pony shows taking place in the various booths. But one that really stood out from the others was the Swarovski binocular and spotting scope distributor that had a large number of very impressive birds of prey on hand. Even though we weren't there to look for binoculars or scopes, I couldn't help but be attracted to the big birds.

This will probably be the only picture of Stephen you will ever see on this site.