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| © Russell Hart |
| Photo magazine editors shoot the Kenai Fjords from a tour boat with the new Sony Alpha 100 digital SLR. |
Camera companies have been known to hustle photo magazine editors off to picturesque places when they want them to shoot with a new SLR. That may sound like the sort of thing politicians go to jail for, given that those editors are wined and dined and their expenses mostly paid. Yet in 20-odd years of experience with the practice, I've found that it's actually beneficial not just for the camera companies -- though I never make any promises of editorial coverage -- but also for photo magazines and their readers. Such occasions give a writer the opportunity to focus at length on a new camera without the distractions of an office environment or the other stories he or she is working on. And during that time, the expert help of the camera's product managers and engineers is freely available to participants. The environment is sociable and low-pressure, with writers given the opportunity to step away from scheduled photo ops to record their impressions and, if on deadline, send stories back to the office.
Just as valuable for someone testing a new camera, these trips give editors with limited budgets access to a challenging variety of subject matter that they otherwise couldn't afford. One of the earliest I can remember is when, in the late 1980s, Canon flew editors to Bar Harbor, Maine so that they could shoot with the soon-to-be-introduced EOS-1 in and around Acadia National Park. And in June of 1992 Minolta invited the same generation of editors to Durango, Colorado to shoot with the brand new Maxxum 9xi -- a trip ranging in excursions and elevations from a hike through the rocky canyons of the nearby Ute tribal park to a caravan of four-wheel-drive jeeps (most driven by a member of the photo press) snaking up single-lane dirt roads into the still-snowy Rockies, where at 14,000 feet we all got sunburns and altitude headaches. No one goes golfing or gets massaged; we just shoot, edit, print, talk, eat, and drink on these trips. So please don't call them junkets.
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Though Sony is a newcomer to the digital SLR world, it saw the wisdom of creating such an experience to introduce photo magazine editors to the Sony Alpha 100. Its whirlwind two-day adventure in Alaska allowed me to take a long, hard look at the first Sony D-SLR -- and get beyond the strangeness of using a single-lens reflex with a nameplate I'm more accustomed to seeing on my TV. I've only just recovered from the effects of 24 hours of travel time, which made Alaska seem more surreal than it probably is. Carting our motley crew around in a big bus, Sony kept us going for as long as there was light, which in Alaska this time of year means about 20 hours a day. We took pictures at wildlife preserves, mountain-ringed lakes, and from a boat cruising the waters off the Kenai Peninsula, where we saw humpback and killer whales, otter and sea lions, and flotillas of puffins. We flew bush planes into Denali and sailed over glaciers surrounding a socked-in Mt. McKinley, flying low enough to see grazing moose and pairs of swans along the way. Alaska's beauty is, for lack of a better term, raw. (I now have to fight not to capitalize that word.) It's not the sort of subject matter I'm accustomed to photographing, but I came away impressed with Sony's first effort at the type of camera, albeit a digital version, that I grew up with.
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