Memory Cards

July 9, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Let’s talk mem­ory cards. More specif­i­cally mem­ory cards with higher writ­ing speeds, qual­ity, and size. Higher writ­ing speeds are a def­i­nite asset when shoot­ing things like wed­dings, lit­tle league games and dance recitals — any­thing that requires you to shoot long bursts of shots. Higher writ­ing speeds are also use­ful when the card is full and you need to trans­fer the images to a com­puter as quickly as pos­si­ble via a card reader.

Qual­ity is cer­tainly not com­pro­mised whether or not you pur­chase a ‘brand name’ ver­sus a ‘no name’ mem­ory card — if the card works, chances are you have pur­chased a fine card which will hold those price­less moments for you.

And what about size… does it really mat­ter? 2GB, 4GB, 8GB… it’s all a mat­ter of pref­er­ence. But a great tip for those who shoot events would be to buy a few smaller mem­ory cards (4 GB) in case some­thing ‘should’ hap­pen to one card, you know you have a few other cards that your shots are on. Now that’s safe think­ing! FORUM LINK:‚ http://www.photography.ca/Forums/showthread.php?t=2522

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How Important are External Flashes?

July 3, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Exter­nal Flashes have many advan­tages over on-camera flashes; not only is an exter­nal flash much more pow­er­ful than a small‚on-camera flash, but it also has a tilt-able head so that you can bounce it. Bounc­ing a flash is a great way to soften the light since direct flash is quite harsh.

An exter­nal flash gives you far more con­trol over how you want the scene lit — the built in flash on your cam­era is usu­ally only good enough to light a sub­ject from a short dis­tance and the light from the flash can only be used from one plane. This is another area where an exter­nal flash shines :)

Exter­nal flashes can be taken off cam­era. This allows the pho­tog­ra­pher to cre­atively light a sub­ject from dif­fer­ent angles. You’ll need a way to trig­ger the flash and there are sev­eral good meth­ods depend­ing on your bud­get. The cheap­est way (20 bucks or less) is with a sync cord but a bet­ter way is a wire­less trig­ger­ing sys­tem like the Pocket Wiz­ard.

So if your bud­get can cope, an exter­nal flash is a prime invest­ment and a step­ping stone to get­ting you closer to the ‘advanced pho­tog­ra­pher’ sta­tus. For addi­tional info check this link from our pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

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Lenses not making your image sharp? Think again.

July 1, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Lenses are one of the most impor­tant com­po­nents of your cam­era in terms of get­ting crisp and clear images. The lens does all the focus­ing, so the bet­ter the lens, the bet­ter the pho­to­graph (espe­cially when mak­ing enlarge­ments). How­ever, there are other ele­ments respon­si­ble for the sharp­ness of your images. Before you blame an unsharp pho­to­graph on the lens, there a few other cru­cial things to con­sider. In fact I hate to say this but the vast major­ity of unsharp shots are the result of pho­tog­ra­pher error not a lemon lens.

Shut­ter speeds that are too slow for some shots such as mov­ing tar­gets, will not pro­duce the sharp­ness you are look­ing for if you are look­ing to ‘freeze’ the action. Mov­ing tar­gets require faster shut­ter speeds. Gen­er­ally though, for objects that are not mov­ing, the rule of thumb is 1/focal length of the lens as the slow­est shut­ter speed to use while hand hold­ing a cam­era. This means that if you have a 200mm lens the SLOWEST hand­held‚ shut­ter speed you need on any sub­ject is 1/200. Choos­ing a speed slower than that intro­duces the photographer’s own move­ment into the image and sharp­ness is sac­ri­ficed. Gen­er­ally fol­low­ing this rule will give you favor­able results. Prac­tic­ing at dif­fer­ent shut­ter speeds will give you a good grasp on things; so prac­tice, prac­tice, prac­tice. While you’re prac­tic­ing, slap the lens on a tri­pod and shoot some text on a news­pa­per pasted to your wall at dif­fer­ent aper­tures. Use a cable release. Now you can gauge the sharp­ness of that lens you were questioning!

For more info on this topic click the link to our Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

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A Week With A View — a day anyway :)

June 29, 2009 By Leave a Comment

A friend of mine, Chris Penn, sent me an email ask­ing me to par­tic­i­pate in A Week With a View whereby we choose one image a day on Flickr and blog about why we think it’s beau­ti­ful. I’ve got a nutty week ahead so I can only play today, but it ‘s a great idea and I encour­age peo­ple to participate.

The photo I choose is called 0253 By Cia de Foto. Click the image to see it on flickr.

0253

For me, part of what makes an image beau­ti­ful is some type of story or the sug­ges­tion of a story. In this image the light is on but the woman looks star­tled. Did the light go on by itself?‚ Did the dog turn it on? What IS going on here? It’s left up to us but we are def­i­nitely engaged.

Another thing that I find beau­ti­ful (Ok it’s a bit tech­ni­cal but it’s my post :) ) is how our eye is beau­ti­fully guided. We go from light to girl to dog and go back and forth between the lit ele­ments. Our eye does not wan­der because the pho­tog­ra­pher is skill­fully guid­ing us.….and for me, it’s a thing of beauty.

and if you don’t accept that, then the star­tled girl is beautiful.

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68 — Creating a photography portfolio

June 26, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #68 dis­cusses how to to pre­pare a port­fo­lio for clients, agen­cies gal­leries etc. Even though we are in the dig­i­tal age, when it comes to pre­sen­ta­tion, noth­ing beats a beau­ti­fully printed pho­to­graph. This pod­cast shares some tips and tricks on putting together a great portfolio.

Links /resources men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Pre­sent­ing pho­tog­ra­phy to gal­leries — Pod­cast #53
June’s low shoot­ing angle assign­ment on the Photography.ca forum

If you are still lurk­ing on our forum,
feel free to join our friendly :) Pho­tog­ra­phy forum

Thanks as always to every­one that sent com­ments by email about our last pod­cast. Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Thanks as well to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

If you are look­ing at this mate­r­ial on any other site except Photography.ca — Please hop on over to the Photography.ca blog and pod­cast and get this and other pho­tog­ra­phy info directly from the source. I Sub­scribe with iTunes I Sub­scribe via RSS feed I Sub­scribe with Google Reader I Sub­scribe for free to the Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast — Photography.ca and get all the posts/podcasts by Email
You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

Filed Under: Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: ,

‘Signing’ your prints

June 23, 2009 By 2 Comments

When Picasso signed his paint­ings, he did so using his paint­brush and oils and gen­er­ally placed his sig­na­ture at the bot­tom right or left of his art pieces. So when ‘sign­ing’ a photo that you are selling/giving away, what can be done as an artist to label your work?


A nice idea is to place a sim­ple bor­der around the photo, and have your sig­na­ture and the photo’s title 1/8 of an inch below the photo. If not opt­ing for a bor­der, another idea would be to keep it ‘clean’ by plac­ing a sig­na­ture in the bot­tom right cor­ner of the photo itself. Keep in mind though that you want to keep the photo clear and not have your sig­na­ture or bor­der dis­rupt ele­ments in the photo.

Some pho­tog­ra­phers choose to sell their pho­tos with mats already attached, and some­times they sign the mat­ting and not the image. This seems silly IMO; after all the pho­tog­ra­pher cre­ated the image not the mat­ting so why sign the mat­ting? Also, the mat­ting can be sep­a­rated from the print and so the sig­na­ture or logo can get ‘lost’.

Some clients how­ever pre­fer not to have a border/signature/title ‘dis­rupt­ing’ their photo. In cases as such, you may want to con­firm with your client first prior to print­ing. As an alter­nate way to sign your prints, a stamp with your logo/signature on the back of the print may be a nice final touch.

For more info, feel free to check out the link on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: ,

‘Signing’ your prints

June 23, 2009 By 2 Comments

When Picasso signed his paint­ings, he did so using his paint­brush and oils and gen­er­ally placed his sig­na­ture at the bot­tom right or left of his art pieces. So when ‘sign­ing’ a photo that you are selling/giving away, what can be done as an artist to label your work?


A nice idea is to place a sim­ple bor­der around the photo, and have your sig­na­ture and the photo’s title 1/8 of an inch below the photo. If not opt­ing for a bor­der, another idea would be to keep it ‘clean’ by plac­ing a sig­na­ture in the bot­tom right cor­ner of the photo itself. Keep in mind though that‚you want to keep the photo clear and not have your sig­na­ture or bor­der dis­rupt ele­ments in the photo.

Some pho­tog­ra­phers choose to sell their pho­tos with mats already attached, and some­times they sign the mat­ting and not the image. This seems silly IMO; after all the pho­tog­ra­pher cre­ated the image not the mat­ting so why sign the mat­ting? Also, the mat­ting can be sep­a­rated from the print and so the sig­na­ture or logo can get ‘lost’.

Some clients how­ever pre­fer not to have a border/signature/title ‘dis­rupt­ing’ their photo. In cases as such, you may want to con­firm with your client first prior to print­ing. As an alter­nate way to sign your prints, a stamp with your logo/signature on the back of the print may be a nice final touch.

For more info, feel free to check out the link on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: ,

Photography.ca winning member images from May 2009

June 16, 2009 By 2 Comments

For the past few months we have added a new fea­ture on our pho­tog­ra­phy bul­letin board where the Admin on Photography.ca (Me, Marko), chooses 1 photo that he thinks is great and talks about the photo. This month I teetered hard between 2 images and in the end decided that they were both win­ners. Wood Duck by Michaelaw and Navy ‘LST 325′ by z-06-jim were my choices for this month. (check the pre­vi­ous link for the explanation).

We have lots of pho­tographs being sub­mit­ted each month on our forum for cri­tiques, assign­ments or just to show the photo. Choos­ing Michaelaw’s and z-06-jim’s photo as the ‹“win­nersž took many hours of care­ful sift­ing. Given that it took so long to choose, I came across many close con­tenders. Seems like a waste of time just to include 1 photo so Ižd like to include 4 hon­ourable men­tions right here.

If you havenžt joined our forum I would encour­age you to do so. We are an extremely friendly bunch that share and learn daily.

Herežs the win­ning photo by Michaelaw:

Wood Duck by Michaelaw

Herežs the win­ning photo by z-06-jim:

Navy ‘LST 325′ by z-06-jim


Here are the 2 hon­ourable men­tions in no par­tic­u­lar order:

Frog/Toad by Michaelaw

First Action Pics by casil403

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries Tagged With: ,

Filters for lens protection

June 12, 2009 By 2 Comments

There is a great debate among pho­tog­ra­phers as to whether or not lens fil­ters need to be used for lens pro­tec­tion. Pho­tog­ra­phers are divided when it comes to fil­ters and image qual­ity. Many believe that adding a fil­ter to the lens reduces the image qual­ity while other pho­tog­ra­phers feel there are lit­tle to no effects to the photograph.



A fil­ter is not only used to‚protect against every day use. UV fil­ters offer pro­tec­tion against UV rays that may dam­age our lenses, and Sky­light fil­ters reduce the haze and clar­ify the photo. But really, are these truly nec­es­sary? Many pho­tog­ra­phers sug­gest that they have no notice­able effect in most cir­cum­stances. Lenses are made so strong today, that the ques­tion remains…“To use a fil­ter, or not to use a filter?”

Feel free to add your com­ments here or join our pho­tog­ra­phy forum and add to the con­ver­sa­tion. Here’s a link to the topic in the pho­tog­ra­phy forum.

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Quality of Lenses

June 8, 2009 By 1 Comment

What real advan­tages are there when spend­ing extra money on an expen­sive lens over its cheaper counterpart?


When com­par­ing pro lenses to the ‘cheaper’ lenses, the higher priced lenses deliver bet­ter qual­ity for the most part. Depend­ing on the lens you might also get expe­dited auto-focus, sharper images and less chro­matic aber­ra­tion.‚ Per­haps the biggest advan­tage though is with regard to aper­ture. More expen­sive lenses are often faster. This means that their largest F-stop (small­est num­ber eg. F1.8, F2.0, F2.8 etc) is usu­ally larger than cheaper lenses. Remem­ber, the larger the aper­ture, the more room you have to use a faster shut­ter speed. In addi­tion, the larger the lens’s aper­ture, the eas­ier it is to shoot in lower light because when you look through the viewfinder you are look­ing at a scene through the lens’s largest aper­ture. If a lens has a max aper­ture of F2.8, any scene you look at through your viewfinder will look BRIGHTER than if the lens’s widest aper­ture was F4.0. It makes no dif­fer­ence what F-stop you use dur­ing the actual expo­sure. This doesn’t make a dif­fer­ence in bright sun­light, but in makes a huge dif­fer­ence in low light where it is eas­ier to focus if the viewfinder is brighter. On the neg­a­tive side, higher priced lenses with larger aper­tures will often‚ buy you sig­nif­i­cantly more ‘weight’ as well.

When com­par­ing the results of pro lenses to the ‘mid-range’ priced lenses (pro-consumer level), there doesn’t seem to be a notice­able dif­fer­ence to many advanced pho­tog­ra­phers so long as the images are kept small. This is espe­cially true if the images are for Inter­net use only.

If you’re still skep­ti­cal and want to test the waters your­self, you can always take the same pic­ture using two dif­fer­ent lenses to prove a point. Or, an eas­ier route is to search the web for some­one who’s already taken the time to do it — much easier!

As a final point, when peo­ple (pho­tog­ra­phy newbies/hobbyists) ask me what cam­era to buy, they never ask about lenses which is a mon­ster mis­take. I ALWAYS coun­cil newbies/hobbyists to spend MORE on the lenses than the cam­era, espe­cially the first ‘expen­sive’ cam­era. This is because the cam­era is just a box with a flap to let light in. The LENS does all the focus­ing so a poor lens on an expen­sive cam­era will give you a poor result. A great lens on an aver­age cam­era will give you a great result (in the right hands of course ;) )
When you’re just learn­ing though you can eas­ily learn on a used or lower end DSLR that you’ll surely replace as tech­nol­ogy changes. The lenses though, you can keep those for decades. Trust me, spend the dough on the lenses.

Check out the link in our pho­tog­ra­phy forum for more info.

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