PhotographyREVIEW.com member and forum moderator, Jeff Impey, better known as Grandpaw, took it upon himself to create a Nikon D7000 Tips thread on the Nikon Forum. Since he began the thread in August of 2011, Grandpaw has added over 25 separate, numbered tips for Nikon D7000 camera owners and the thread has been viewed well over 5000 times. Some of the tips included are: how to access the virtual horizon; how to adjust the D7000’s built-in flash output; how to create your own personal shooting mode (user settings); how to add copyright information to your photos; and lots more! Even though the thread was created for Nikon D7000 users and some of the suggestions are specific to that camera, everyone should be able to pick up some new techniques by browsing Grandpaw’s D7000 tips.
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Last year’s camera of the year was pretty obvious to me from early on. And it was the same this year. I took my time, let things settle and took a closer look at the other contenders to make sure I wasn’t missing something. There were four cameras in the running for me – the Sony NEX-7, the Sony Alpha SLT-A77, the Olympus E-P3 and the new Nikon 1 mirrorless camera system. But in the end, I had to go with my original gut decision. The 2011 Camera of the Year is the Sony Alpha NEX-7 compact system camera. The NEX-7 is unique in that it offers true professional-level digital SLR features, build and performance in a mirrorless camera body. That’s been said before about other compact system cameras but the NEX-7 raises the bar a few notches with a 24-megapixel APS-C sensor, excellent electronic viewfinder, 3-inch tilting LCD display, high-speed AVCHD video, customizable exposure control dials and 10 frames per second high-speed burst. And then there’s Sony’s new LA-EA2 transparent mirror adapter, which pushes the NEX-7 over the edge by giving it phase detect AF for DSLR continuous auto focus performance. No one has done that before.

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Here are some of the best photos posted in the past week by the PhotographyREVIEW.com community. We’ve got a lot of variety in this week’s Featured Member Photos – both in terms of subject matter and geographical location. There’s a beautiful photo of a fox in the snow from Italy, a couple of black-and-white images from China and Great Britain, and a great surf photo from San Francisco’s Ocean Beach. Thanks a lot to our moderators for choosing these photos and thanks to Photography REVIEW.com members, carlogalliani, jacobovs, baldemort and Aungwin for sharing their photos with us.

To see and comment on this week’s featured photos, scroll down and click on the thumbnails.
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The smallest interchangeable lens Olympus Micro Four Thirds camera yet, the Olympus E-PM1 definitely deserves more attention. So I was really happy to see this fine review show up a few days ago. It’s our first user review for the E-PM1 and the author, Anbesol, has supplied a lot of well-informed detail about the E-PM1’s performance – both positive and negative. This review is a textbook example of how a great user review should be written and it’s very deserving of Featured User Review status.

If you’re an Olympus E-PM1 owner, or any other Micro Four Thirds camera for that matter, please write a review so other photographers can learn from your experience. Your reviews are one of the most valuable parts of this site! It only takes a few minutes to write a review that could help hundreds or even thousands of other photographers.

Write A Review

Featured Review: Olympus E-PM1 Pen

by Anbesol (Expert)

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Kodak, the company that invented the personal camera over 100 years ago and a brand that’s an integral part of our culture, has announced they are filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Although Kodak has kept a brave face and struggled to keep up with the new digital world, photography industry and business analysts have been predicting this for a while. Photographic film and chemicals, the core of Kodak’s business, are almost a thing of the past. Film photography has become a novelty for young photographers or a specialty product for a few fine-art, wedding and commercial photographers.

Update: Kodak posted an official statement about their Chapter 11 reorganization today, in the form of a Web page. I’ve added a link to that page at the end of this article.
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I had to rewrite this article a few times. My final and most significant rewrite occurred after I took a close look at the photos of the Samsung WB850F camera and found it to be wonderfully handsome. There was a time when “handsome” and Samsung did not often occur in the same sentence. Not if we were talking about cameras, anyway. That was a few years ago though, and the new Samsung WB850F with its 21x Schneider Kreuznach lens, mode dial and AMOLED display is very much a looker. Hopefully, it’s also a performer. With that, I return you to my original article…

Wireless connectivity was one of the main themes at the 2012 CES tradeshow this year and Samsung contributed by introducing three new WiFi compact superzoom “Smart Cameras” at the show. The 12-megapixel 10x zoom Samsung ST200F, 16-megapixel 21x Samsung WB850F and 14-megapixel 18x Samsung WB150F are all compact “travel zoom” cameras with built-in WiFi connectivity. The new WiFi-enabled Smart Cameras fit right into Samsung’s larger “all-share-play” cloud-based content sharing system, intended to make sharing between devices in and outside the home easier. The WB850F is the most exciting of the three new cameras. It has a 16.2-megapixel backlit CMOS sensor, a 21x zoom lens with optical image stabilization, full HD video, a 3-inch AMOLED display, GPS, and of course – built-in WiFi connectivity so you can upload directly to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
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The Sony Alpha NEX-7 is Sony’s top-of-the-line interchangeable lens mirrorless camera and this is our first user review for the NEX-7. It was written by community member Greg McCary, one of my favorite photographers on the site and a man who knows his cameras. Greg owns Olympus, Leica and Sony cameras and he’s a very experienced photographer, so his opinions carry a lot of weight. I’ve been anxiously waiting for him to get his NEX-7 so he could write a review and I am pleased to give it some extra attention by making it a Featured User Review.

If you own the NEX-7 or another Sony camera, please write a review so other photographers can benefit from your experience. User reviews are the foundation of PhotographyREVIEW.com and we need your reviews!

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Featured Review: Sony Alpha NEX-7

by Greg McCary (Intermediate)

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This is the second video in our new “What’s In Your Camera Bag” series. People are always asking me what camera and backpack I use when I’m mountain biking. In this episode I show the camera equipment I typically carry when I’m out on my mountain bike and how I carry it. Major issues for riding with a camera are carrying a hydration bladder in your pack and the possibility of breaking your camera – especially if you want to ride with an expensive digital SLR. Weight is also an important consideration. These are big concerns for a lot of people but to me and other working pros they’re really non issues. The bottom line is, you either ride with your camera or you don’t get the photos. I’ve been riding with a digital SLR for well over ten years. Let me show you how I do it.
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With Olympus’s new pocket superzoom camera you can bypass the shower and the mirror in the morning. Well, maybe not the shower. But the new 16-megapixel Olympus VR-340’s new Beauty Mode includes a purse-load of in-camera makeup tricks: “Laid out like a cosmetic toolbox, it lets you apply everything from eyeliner and eye shadow to rouge for skin blemishes. You can even lift cheekbones and morph your subjects to give them a cover-model look.” Unfortunately, it probably doesn’t brush your teeth and make coffee for you. The VR-340 does, however, include a super-versatile 10x 24-240mm (equivalent) optical zoom lens with dual image stabilization, 720p HD video and a 3-inch 460k-resolution LCD display.
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Introduced last week at the annual CES tradeshow, the new 14-megapixel Olympus VG-160 digital camera offers a 5x zoom lens, 720p HD video, creative “Magic Art Filters,” Intelligent Auto (iAuto) mode, a 3-inch LCD display and more in an ultra-compact pocket-sized camera – for less than US $100! You sure get a lot more for your money with digital cameras these days. A few years ago, a camera like the VG-160 would have cost at least twice as much – and it probably would have been a fair bit larger, too.
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