Lensbaby goes mirror-less

Lensbaby Composer Pro

If mirror-less camera owners were a bit peeved that it was dSLR users who were getting all the fun with Lensbaby lenses, they need feel hard done-by no longer. Lensbaby Composer Pro lenses are now available with a heap of mirror-less camera-compatible mounts. From Lumix G-series cameras to Olympus PENs, via Sony NEX and Samsung NX, they can all enjoy some tasty tilt-shift-tasticness.

The Composer Pro ships with the 50mm Double Glass Optic installed; it creates a sweet spot that's in sharp focus, and you get to decide where by playing around with the tilting and swivelling lens body. However, the Composer Pro is compatible with all of the optics in the Lensbaby Optics Swap System, including the Edge 80, the Sweet 35, and the Fisheye, so opportunities abound for getting creative with your images.

If you're wondering about the aperture on a Lensbaby lens, the Double Glass Optic has a maximum aperture of f/2.0. By removing and inserting different sized aperture disks, you can change to f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6, f/8.0. f/11, f/16, and f/22.

Time to go buy one? They're retailing around $300 and are available from authorised Lensbaby retailers and their own online store.

Photographers on Twitter

Say hello to the Twitterati

For the past year or so, I've kept a repository of awesome photographers on Twitter - and today, we hit a really fun milestone: 2,000 photographers!

The list of Twittering Photographers can be found here, on Twittogs.

How can I join in?

Adding yourself to the list is easy: Simply follow @Twittogs on Twitter. As long as you keep following Twittogs, you'll be kept on the list. If you want out, simply unfollow @Twittogs again, and you'll be removed soon after.

If you want your Flickr to be listed separately, that's pretty easy too: Simply do an at-reply to Twittogs with the URL to your Flickr stream, like this:

Hi @Twittogs, please add http://flickr.com/photocritic

Every 24 hours or so, the little Twittogs robot checks its @replies, and adds the new Flickr accounts and Twitter followers to the list.

Check it out, and follow some awesome photographers on Twitter!

Canon C300: now with BBC approval

The Canon Eos C300

When it comes to approving cameras for use, the BBC is notoriously hardcore about the makes and models that it deems acceptable to film its programmes. And that's programmes produced by both its internal and external providers. They've got a reputation to uphold, I suppose.

It's understandable then, that Canon should be cock-a-hoop that the C300 has just been approved to shoot programmes that can be screened across the BBC's HD channels. The C300 is the third of Canon's camcorders to have received the BBC's seal of approval since January last year, the other two being the XF305 and XF300.

But you get the feeling that Canon is especially proud that the C300 passed the test, as it's the first in the EOS Cinema range, that combines Canon's video, broadcast, and dSLR expertise. Now they're excited to see how the BBC puts it to use. And I bet a few other people are interested, too.

Reorganisation at Sony: digital imaging a business priority

Sony's newest addition to the camera world: the SLT-A57

'Was the Roman Empire's collapse a result of over-expansion?' It's the sort of question that university lecturers put at the bottom of an exam paper to allow anyone who hasn't revised to ramble on interminably and at least write something. If Sony's latest corporate reorganisation fails, and the company continues it overall downward spiral, future business analysts might, too, ask if Sony's demise was precipated by being too big.

From 1 April this year, Sony will embrace a new corporate structure that merges consumer and professional branches, streamlines the decision-making process, and places digital imaging, gaming, and mobile devices at the foundations of its business. The initiative is called One Sony (how very unifying) and is the brainchild of the incoming CEO Kazuo Hirai.

Over the past few years, Sony has struggled to convince people that they should be buying Sony TVs, has divorced itself from Ericsson, and can't really compete with the likes of Netflix or Amazon when it comes to content access. But people love Playstations and Sony held second place in the market share of worldwide camera sales in 2010. (17.9%, compared to Canon's leading 19%.) So they know where their bread is buttered.

Another important move is to appoint an executive to unify Sony products and create a better user experience. Will this make it easier for us to get our photos from our Sony cameras onto our Sony tablets and our Sony HDTVs? Maybe.

Even if Sony cameras aren't your bag, they are a key player in the camera market; their video cameras are favoured by many cameramen, their development of SLT technology is exciting, and they're a prime mover-and-shaker in the EVIL camera market. Sony is one of the companies helping to keep things moving along in the digital imaging world, so hopefully this restructure will help it to stay that way.

(And as for the fall of the Roman Empire, size did have something to do with it, but it sure as heck wasn't the only factor.)

William Klein: Outstanding Contribution to Photography

Antonia Simone Barbershop New York 1961 Vogue. William Klein.

He didn't start out as a photographer. He was an artist who'd studied under Fernard Léger in Paris and happened to be exhibiting in Milan when his photographs of some turning panels inspired him to explore photography as a medium. Then he was spotted by Alexander Liberman and brought back to New York (he was a New Yorker by birth) to work for American Vogue. He worked on films with Fellini and made some himself. He's been exhibited all over the world. He won himself a reputation as an 'anti-photogrpaher's photographer', but still picked up award, after award, after award.

He's William Klein. And this year he's being honoured with the Oustanding Contribution to Photography Award at the Sony World Photography Awards.

Klein is famous for his high-grain film and his wide-angle shots. He has captured New York, Rome, Moscow, and Tokyo in their naked realism. His fashion photography favoured street and location shoots, not carefully controlled studios. His films, including Who are you Polly Maggoo? and The Model Couple were satires. Moving between art, photography, and film, he has always been an uncompromising and frequently controversial commentator on modern life.

So at the age of 83, he has been honoured with this award that recognises 'a body of work of incredible diversity, depth and individuality,' says Simon Baker.

Congratulations, Mr Klein.

There will be an exhibition celebrating his work at Somerset House, London, from 27 April to 20 May 2012.

Sony World Photography Awards: Open and Youth category winners announced!

Sossusvlei ©Bernard Pieterse, South Africa, Youth Category Winner, Environment, Sony World Photography Awards 2012

London is gearing up for a month of fantastic photo events organised by the World Photo Organisation. Kicking things off on 26 April will be the Sony World Photography Awards, held at the rather swanky Hilton Hotel on Park Lane. In the run up to these awards, the winners of the Youth and Open competitions have just been announced.

In the Open competition the category winners were:

• Architecture: Filippo Di Rosa (Italy)
• Arts & Culture: Sanket K (India)
• Enhanced: Victor Vargas Villafuerte (Mexico)
• Low Light: Natalia Belentsova (Russian Federation)
• Nature & Wildlife: Giovanni Frescura (Italy)
• Panoramic: Denise Worden (United States)
• People: Ana Gregorič (Slovenia)
• Smile: Piotr Stasiuk (Poland)
• Split Second: Tobias Bräuning (Germany)
• Travel: Krzysztof Browko (Poland)

The Youth competition category winners were:

• Culture: Kolyaskin Sergey (Russian Federation)
• Environment: Bernard Pieterse (South Africa)
• Portraits: Karina Sembe (Ukraine)

The overall winners for these competitions, together with the preofessional competitions, will be announced on the big night in London.

There's a selection of the winners' photos on the carousel up there for you to enjoy!

Using Quora to solve your photography conundrums

Photographers always want to learn more about their craft, so that they can hone their skills and better themselves and their career. Whether you are a professional photographer with your own business, or you are just a hobbyist who likes taking photographs in your spare time, you probably have questions or issues that you want answering. Quora is a relatively new question-and-answers style website, that is rapidly developing into the perfect place to find answers to many different questions - including ones about Photography.

What is Quora?

Quora.com is a website that connects users who are interested in the same field - such as photography. The site connects users with common interests and allows them to share their knowledge about their topic with others, and also, it allows them to get information and answers from other users. It is a great place to find information and advice from users who have real-life experience in their field, and it provides fact-filled pages that answer particular questions in a certain field.

How Quora Can Benefit Photographers

Quora has a whole section devoted to the subject of photography. The topic page is filled with links to useful answers to popular photography questions and you can even click a link on the page to follow the topic, so that you can keep on top of new answers. You can even follow a particular answer, question, or user. The site also allows you to post your own questions, so if you have a question that you haven't seen answered on the site, you can ask it yourself. You can even direct your question at a particular user.

The site also allows members to vote on how useful an answer is, meaning that you can visit the photography site and see the top answers, without having to go through all of the answers on the site. This is a great time-saver, and a quick look at this list could answer some burning photography questions that you may need answering. The site is also ideal if you are a professional photographer, as you can answer other user's questions and establish yourself as an expert.

Get High-Quality Answers to Your Questions

The site is dedicated to providing high-quality answers to user's questions. The voting system means that only the most useful answers are placed in the best answers category. As a photographer it is important to learn as much as you can about your craft.

Quora provides answers to many questions about photography. For example one of the top questions in the best answers category focuses on how to get a subject who is shy, to pose naturally. The answer provides tips on how to get the subject to feel relaxed and comfortable in the photography environment. You can read the full answer here.

The site also provides answers on specific types of photography such as travel photography. For example the questions about the best places to photograph in Maui, Hawaii and the best secluded places to photograph in the French Riviera, both provide an interesting insight into travel photography - and if you don't really have any questions yourself, you can always browse the best questions and answers in the Photography category.

If you are looking for some guidance, Quora can provide it from experts in the field. Signing up to Quora is quick and easy, and using the site is relatively simple.

Team Leica publish book for charity

A gorgeous spread from the book, showing pictures by Gez and Ivan.

So, what do you do if you've got a big heart, an empty wallet (after buying that fancy Leica), and a lot of creative people in the same room? You create a book, of course, celebrating some of the most awesome photography by your users - and raise some money for charity at the same time.

Well, that's what the Leica Users Forum did anyway, aiming to repeat the success from previous effort - their first book was published in 2010 and raised over £12,500 / €15,000 / US$19,500 for their chosen charity, The Association for International Cancer Research.

And now, of course, they're doing it all over again.

This year, they've selected their 100 best photographs submitted to the judging panel.

Interestingly, even though all the photos were taken on Leicas, more than 20 different camera models were used to take photos, and yet, only 13 of the shots in the book were taken on film - the rest were taken with the Leica M8 and M9 digital rangefinder cameras.

So far, the 2012 Book has raised nearly £4,000 already, so if you want to be part of history, ogle a lot of fabulous photos, and help fight off cancer in the process point your browsing device at the Blurb page for the book, and dust off your credit card.

The photos are gorgeous, and the cause is good. What are you waiting for?

Photo Mosaic - a free photography workshop for children

A participant at a previous Geffrye Museum photography event, by Hannah Salisbury (courtesy of the Geffrye Museum).

Photography workshops for kids are good. Free photography workshops for kids are even better. On Sunday 25 March, the Geffrye Museum in Shoreditch, London, will be offering a free afternoon of photography for young people aged between 11 and 19.

Participants will be working with a professional photographer to hone their skills, both with the camera and in the editing suite, and have access to the museum's objects - as well as themselves as portrait subjects - to create a series of 'tiles' that will be compiled to form a giant digital mosaic at the end of the day.

Sounds pretty good to me, especially as it won't cost a penny.

The workshop runs from 13:00 to 16:30. To register for a place, or to get more information, contact Vanessa Weibel at the Geffrye, by either email (vweibel@geffrye-museum.org.uk) or telephone (020 7749 6013).

That's gotta hurt

I can't reproduce the photo of the accident here; so have a photo of a racehorse in training.

When photographers head off to cover conflict and natural disaster, there's an understanding that what they do carries high risks. They know that there's a chance that they might get hurt themselves, or that, terribly, they might not come back at all. Sports photographers don't necessarily set out to shoot a day's football match, swim meet, or in Jean-Charles Briens' case, the Cheltenham Festival, anticipating injury. But sometimes it does happen.

The generally sleepy Gloucestershire town of Cheltenham is currently hosting its annual four day National Hunt Festival. (That's the one when horses jump over monstrous fences.) The cream of British and Irish racing have gathered to watch their superstars compete, and with any luck their heroes take the spoils, as well as drink a moderately-sized lake of Guinness. It's a big deal, and it gets lots of coverage, which is just why Jean-Charles Briens was there, and it's something that he's been doing for years.

He was standing amongst a group of photographers close to the final fence, behind the rail. Wishful Thinking, ridden by Richard Johnson, didn't jump it cleanly, took an almighty tumble, and crashed through the railings. Johnson was catapaulted into the crowd; Briens was hit by the flailing horse and his camera smashed up into his face. There was a lot of blood, screaming, and confusion.

Johnson suffered severe soft tissue damage and was stood down for the remainder of the card. He has to pass a medical to ride again tomorrow. Briens, though, was taken to hospital with severe facial injuries. We wish both of them well. As for Wishful Thinking, the horse, he was entirely fine.

Yes, these photographers are close to the action and racehorses are heavy (about half a ton) and move at speed (40mph when flat out, 25mph at a steady gallop), so there are risks. Of course there are. But this is the sort of freak accident that no one anticipates. It's all part of the game.

---

Headsup to the incomparable Clare Balding and to the Racing Post for further details. (You can also see a photo of what happened on the Racing Post. I can't reproduce here for copyright reasons. The Daily Telegraph also has this one, showing the horse coming down.)

Fun with sound and laser triggers

The last few days, I've spent quite a bit of time playing with my prototype of the Triggertrap (it's scheduled to ship next month! How rather exciting...), and have rediscovered the vast amount of fun it is to play with balloons... Specifically, balloons that go 'pop' just when you take a photo.

Here's a few of the results I came up with;

It's almost like being a kid again! :)

How photo-tastic is the all new iPad?

iPhoto on the new iPad

Whenever I see someone taking a photo with her or his iPad, it makes me cringe. There's something about it that looks so very wrong, especially when you consider that cameras have been growing progressively smaller, making the iPad as a camera seem counter-intuitive. However, the camera is there, which means that it is going to happen.

More than that, in fact, it's meant to happen. Apple has stuffed an f/2.4 aperture, five megapixel lens into its latest version, which might not compare with some of the hottest compacts out there, but it's more than enough for someone wanting to snap a casual shot, as is its 1080p HD video capability. No, there's no optical zoom, but tap the screen and you can adjust exposure whilst the auto-focus capability can cope with up to ten faces in one photo.

This is just what's needed in a portable device that's designed for communication: it's part of the territory of social media. Snap the photo, give it a bit of a tweak, and send it straight to Facebook or Twitter or wherever else you want to share it.

And with iPhoto that gives you the ability to adjust exposure, white balance, and colour saturation, not to mention use multi-touch gestures to change this, that, and the other, as well as add effects and geo-tag, it turns the iPad into a one-stop social media shop. That's probably especially true with the inclusion of Journal, which allows you to make an album of your images, complete with notes and maps.

But even if the thought of taking photos with an iPad gives you the shudders, don't overlook its 2048 × 1536 resolution Retina display with 3.1 million pixels that are so close together the eye can't distinguish them as individuals. That's going to make it fairly awesome when it comes to viewing images. Right now, the iPad might be a rather expensive photoframe, but what some professional photographers were using to show proofs to their clients has just got a whole lot better. And what started with the iPhone has moved to the iPad; where is it heading next?

So yes, I might think that taking a photo on an iPad makes you look a few shades of silly, but it makes some sort of sense. More pertinent to me, though, is that I'm excited to see where these developments are going to lead when it comes to editing, viewing, and sharing my own photos. The iPad still falls well short of my needs right now, but it doesn't mean to say that it won't in future iterations.

A photo competition for March!

Flax against the dawn. Lake Wanaka.

Okay, I've got a bit of a thing for silhouettes at the moment, so I thought it'd make an excellent competition theme this month. There, pretty simple then: silhouettes.

If you submit the winning entry, you'll win yourself a 12" Fracture courtesy of the wonderful guys at Fracture. (And if you've not checked out their work, then you should!)

The competition opens today (Thursday 8 March) and closes on Thursday 29 March. Entries need to go into the Small Aperture Flickr pool, but please remember that it's one submission per person.

I've reproduced The Rules, in case you need to refer to them, but otherwise, good luck! (And don't forget, if you follow @SmallAperture on Twitter, you get up-to-date competition and other photographic news!)

The Rules

• If you decide to enter, you agree to The Rules.
• You can’t be related to either me or Haje to enter.
• One entry per person – so choose your best!
• Entries need to be submitted to the right place, which is the Small Aperture Flickr group.
• There’s a closing date for entries, so make sure you’ve submitted before then.
• You have to own the copyright to your entry and be at liberty to submit it to a competition. Using other people’s photos is most uncool.
• It probably goes without saying, but entries do need to be photographs. It’d be a bit of strange photo competition otherwise.
• Don’t do anything icky – you know, be obscene or defame someone or sell your granny to get the photo.
• We (that being me and Haje) get to choose the winner and we’ll do our best to do so within a week of the competition closing.
• You get to keep all the rights to your images. We just want to be able to show off the winners (and maybe some honourable mentions) here on Pixiq.
• Entry is at your own risk. I can’t see us eating you or anything, but we can’t be responsible for anything that happens to you because you submit a photo to our competition.
• We are allowed to change The Rules, or even suspend or end the competition, if we want or need to. Obviously we’ll try not to, but just so that you know.

If you've any questions, please just ask!

Our photo competition winner takes flight!

Almost Like a Lightbulb, by Giuseppe Maria Galasso

The theme for February was 'flight'. We had some amazing entries, and some of them were very original takes on the theme, so as always, picking a victor was a complete pleasure. But our winner really stood out from the crowd with its gorgeous colours and capture of a moment, so many congratulations are due to Giuseppe Maria Galasso for his Almost Like a Lightbulb.

He's won himself a 12" Fracture.

The theme for March will be going up soon, so keep an eye out for that one. And don't forget that you can keep up to date with our competitions - and other photographic news - if you follow @SmallAperture on Twitter, too!

New issue of Photographer's i out now!

Issue 2 of Photographer’s i Magazine—an interactive, multimedia magazine for photographers—is now available on the iTunes Newsstand.

Yes, it is so chock full of informative and entertaining multimedia content—if wasn’t on an iPad, you would indeed need a wheelbarrow. This exciting issue—available for US $5.99 after downloading the free app—serves up over 150 full “pages” of text, photography, audio and video from internationally acclaimed professional shooters such as: Michael Yamashita, Douglas Dubler, Gregory Heisler, Lucas Gilman, Michael Freeman, Heather Angel and many more!

Try tackling our fully interactive compositional lesson with Michael Freemen and learn about composition. Then explore lighting and other master techniques from pros who are at the top of their game. Watch Jesse Coombs go over a 100-foot waterfall in a kayak and see the backstory about getting the shot in hazardous conditions. Journey to Japan to photograph snow monkeys, and follow Marco Polo’s travels to China. Hear the stories behind the stories, visit photographers in their studio or on the road, and watch and listen as they talk about their most memorable minutes from a lifetime of professional shooting. Discover what inspires them to create, learn how they solve problems on a shoot, and hear their war stories from their many years behind the lens.

There's a preview on the website, and you can download it for iPad or for Android.

There is no photography magazine like this, so fire up your iPad and take a closer look!

Photographer's i Magazine is published bi-monthly. The Pilot issue is still available at the introductory promo ($1.99 / £1.49). Issue 2 is available for $5.99 / £4.49 or on a cheaper subscription offer.

Olympus' new board - in the shadow of the old one?

Finally, the scandal-ridden board of Olympus has resigned. Their situations were pretty much untenable, and they had said that they would go. But only when they were ready and only after they'd appointed the new board. They made their new appointments this week, and have duly stepped down.

Picking up the poisoned chalice of president will be Hiroyuki Sasa, who steps over from the medical equipment marketing arm. The new chairman will be Yasuyuki Kimoto, who was previously an executive for the Olympus-connected Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp.

The appointments, are, however, dependent on shareholder approval at a meeting on 20 April.

Sasa has stated publicly that his primary concern is to win back consumer confidence in Olympus and to implement structural reforms across the compacy to prevent the kind of fairy-tale book-keeping that got into such a dire mess in the first place. But really, what else is he going to say in this situation?

What he says and what he will be able to do are different things, however. Olympus is desperate for reform and everyone knows this. But the old board's insistence on naming its successors somehow casts a pall on the new board, however compentent and determined it is. I can't help but feel it would have been better for them to have stepped away entirely and allowed for the appointment of a caretaker board before a permanent one was named. This would allowed for a completely clean slate, and would have reduced the insinuations that someone, the old guard still retains some form of control, whether it is because of patronage, or because they picked their own men. Neither of these scenarios is necessarily the case, but the circumstances, Caesar's wife really does need to be above suspicion.

Arrests at Olympus

There's not masses to report here, but it would seem as if former Olympus chairman Tsuyoshi Kikukawa, former Vice President Hisashi Mori, and former auditor Hideo Yamada have all been arrested by Japanese authorities for their parts in the scandal that has rocked Olympus. You know, the one where Olympus covered up huge losses with some very dodgy accounting, cost former Chief Exec Michael Woodford his job when he uncovered it, and resulted in Olympus' share price taking a monstrous tumble.

Whilst Kikukawa, Mori, and Yamada all left their jobs last year, the remainder of the old board is still in place and is currently being sued by Olympus. Yes, that does seem like a rather odd situation, doesn't it?

That's about it for the moment, but heaven only knows how the stock market will react to it.

(Headsup to The Online Photographer and the BBC)

Keep track of your camera with CameraTrace

Being the dutiful and conscientious photographers that we are, it's likely that our camera kit is insured to the hilt, and then some more for good measure. (If not, please go sort it now. Right now. This'll be waiting for you when you get back.) That way, if some miserable thief should steal away into the night with your Canon 5D Mk II, your Nikon D3s should meet a watery fate tumbling from your hands into the murky blackness of a canal, or some other grim and grisly fate should befall your Sony A77, you'll be able to - doubtless after much sighing, frustration, and possibly even blood-letting - replace it with something new and shiny. But wouldn't it be awesome if you knew that there was a way to help locate a lost camera, or potentially bring a thieving git to justice? Well, bring on CameraTrace.

It's an online camera registration service that'll set you back the princely fee of $10 per camera. If some dastardly sod does waltz off with your treasured kit, you can fire up CameraTrace's search technology to trawl the EXIF data of photographs on famed photo-sharing sites Flickr and 500px to look for camera serial numbers that match yours. When you've located your camera in the clutches of AN Other, CameraTrace will help you complete the necessary police paperwork to try to reclaim it, too. (As they rightly point out, you shouldn't try to recover it all by your lonesome - you don't know who might have it.)

Of course, this will depend on the new user taking photos with your camera and uploading them with EXIF data intact to Flickr or 500px. Without the serial number, you're scuppered, and if they use Picasa, you're out of luck, too. At least for the moment, anyway. GadgetTrak, the developers, are working on increasing the websites covered.

More than just that, though, they also provide camera identification tags so that should you somehow manage to leave your camera on a train and it's picked up by a Good Samaritan, there's an easy - and anonymous - means of returning it to you, via an identification number and a website. And they'll ship the tags world-wide, too, so even if you live in Outer Mongolia, you can still tag your camera.

Sound like a good idea to you? You can sign up for it here.

Winners of the Macro Challenge announced

Update: A winner has now been found - see the bottom of this post for the answer, and thank you for playing everybody! :)

Can you guess what this is? (If you've read my book on macro photography, you're disqualified from entering, as it contains the answer ;)

To help you along a little bit... The photo is taken with a Canon MP-E 65mm lens. That's a particularly epic lens for macro photography; it starts at 1x magnification, and goes all the way to 5x. On a crop-sensor camera, you get even better effective magnifications, obviously... It's really good fun to play with, actually; if you get a chance, try to rent one from a camera rental store for a few days.

For this particular photos, I used the twin-flash kit on the lens as well. The exposure was 1/90th of a second at f/2.8 and ISO 100. I believe it is taken at around 4x magnification. The only editing is a slight crop, some sharpening, about 20% desaturation, and about 30% extra contrast.

The result!

So, in a week, there were exactly 200 people who guessed; and of those, only the 20th and 73rd guesses were correct.

The guesses were overwhelming; more than three quarters of you guessed it was paper... Which was correct, in a way, but you failed to specify what kind of specific paper it was, so I'm afraid I can't accept that as the right answer...

The photo above is of a cigarette (Specifically, a Marlboro Light, I believe). The faint lines on the side are from the cigarette factory, and the brightness at the top of the image (and the darkness at the bottom of it) are due to the curvature of the cigarette itself.

However, only Harald Halvorsen and Jon Garrett guessed correctly. Since there were only two people who got it right, I've decided to give both of them the first prize; Harald or Jon, if you're reading this: You'll have an e-mail with instructions how to claim your prize waiting for you in your in-box!

To everyone else: Well done, and thanks for playing! :)

Bonus

Here's a photo of the tobacco from inside the cigarette:

Design-led? Actually, I think the Pentax K-01 means business

The Pentax K-01

Pentax launched a new mirror-less interchangeable lens camera today: the K-01. It's bigger than we're accustomed to in this breed of camera - in size it's definitely no match for the cute and quirky Pentax Q, a camera that certainly had its stumbling points, but isn't being replaced by the K-01 - and the line is that it's a design-led camera aimed fashionable-types, and possibly a younger market. Given its looks, I'd certainly vouch for it being design-led, but I think that Pentax has a lot more going on with this camera than just a niche market of fashionistas and trendy-types.

First, there's the CMOS sensor, which measures 23.7×15.7mm. That's the standard measurements for an APS-C sensor, one with a 1.5 crop factor, as you'd find in a Pentax K-r, for example. This isn't some piddling thing that's about the size of a newborn baby's toenail. Sure, this makes the camera a whole lot bigger than the pocketable Pentax Q or the Nikon 1 series, but it's still 30% smaller than a K-r, and the larger sensor has its advantages. It also happens to have 16.28 megapixels of resolution and a sensitivity range of ISO 100 to 25,600 (when it's expanded).

Second, the K-01 is compatible with all Pentax K-mount lenses, including those produced for film cameras. (If you want to use your 645 lens on a K-01, you'll need an adaptor, though.) That's just made the K-01 a whole lot more attractive to anyone who's ever owned a Pentax interchangeable lens camera - provided that they still have their lenses, of course - and to people considering a mirror-less camera as stepping stone between a compact and an SLR, so that they won't be shelling out for even more lenses.

If we want to be really forward-thinking about things, let's consider the potential day when Pentax decides that SLR cameras really aren't where it's at anymore. With the K-01 technology in place, they might lose some photograhers who do still want their optical viewfinders, but they'll keep those who are happy with an electronic viewfinder, because they won't have to invest in new glass.

And it does all things that you expect of a high-end camera now: there's 1080p HD video (with a choice of frame rates: 30, 25, or 24 frames per second); there's an HDR function; a burst mode of upto five images per second; and let's not forget the toys.

With all the toys and gizmos that Pentax has put in the K-01, they're making it quite an attractive camera for anyone considering the leap from a compact, too. It does the auto-mode thing; it has 19 different scene modes, ranging from nighttime to backlit silhouette; its in-camera editing allows you to give images a cross-processed or bleach-bypassed look; and there are 19 different filters, for example miniaturisation, which can be applied multiply to an image.

But there's one final place where the K-01 is also holding its own: price. Body-only, it costs around £630. With the 40mm lens (which is the thinnest interchangeable lens on the market), it's £680; with the 18-55mm and the 50-200mm lenses, you're looking at £800. That's in the same ballpark as the Nikon V1 and significantly less than the Fujifilm X-Pro1. The chances are, this will come down after launch, too.

No, the K-01 isn't as pocktable as other mirror-less interchangeable lens cameras, but it is smaller than your average dSLR, and that 40mm pancake lens is tiny. In the K-01 you have the beginnings of a compromise between camera size and sensor size; between pocketableness and image quality. This incarnation might be design-led, but who knows where any more K-0 series cameras might lead.