Tag Archives: tips
Five Ways to Deal with Harsh/Low Lighting
A common question I get here is how to deal with harsh or low light situations. This is a great question, and for event photographers, it’s simply part of the job to recognize various lighting conditions and address them accordingly. Today, I’d like to share Five Ways to Deal with Harsh/Low Lighting: 1. Cranking the ISO and hoping to fix in post With advancements in technology, noise handling both in camera and in post production has resulted in some astonishing results that in previous years would have been literally unrecoverable. While we should always endeavor to make our images shine … Continue reading
Five Tips to Better Photos
With the sudden surge and swell in the blogosphere, Twittersphere and Photosphere over Lightroom 3 hitting the streets (and a nice combo discount is available in the sidebar by the way), let’s not forget that this software is all meant to be doing one thing – letting us get back to the business of taking photos instead of spending our time in our computer. With that in mind, I’m bringing back a popular concept of “Top Tips”. Today, I give you…(drum roll please): “Five Tips to Better Photos” Be Ware of Exposure Values – No matter how good your camera … Continue reading
Creating a Monthly Desktop Calendar
I alluded to it yesterday, and have already had several people inquire about the procedure to create this desktop calendar. It’s really quite clever, and kudos go out to Jeffrey Friedl over on his site for the script: http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/calendar He does a decent job at the basic explanation, but since we are a visual world, here are some step-by-step instructions on how to run things from beginning to end! Fair warning – this does require Photoshop as the script (I don’t believe anyway) will run in Lightroom because it uses layers… 1. Download the script from the link above (I … Continue reading
Traveling and Photography – Episode #40
So, the weekend was spent on lots of photography stuff – we had the February edition of our Creativty Workshop Series here with the Denver Photo Meetup group and that was a lot of fun. The theme for this outing was contrast, and the group came up with a lot of great examples. For a peek at some of the member shots, be sure to stop over there and look at the photo gallery: Denver Photowalk Creativity Workshop Series In other news, Erik Bernskiold and I got together again to do another episode of the Learning Digital Photography podcast. Episode … Continue reading
5 Tips to Better Landscapes
The most common questions I get here on the blog center around the idea of how to take better pictures. Whether those “better pictures” are better landscapes, or portraits, wildlife or events, everyone wants suggestions on how to approach the practice of taking pictures better. Esoteric and creative considerations aside, there are some fundamental “tricks of the trade” that, by and large, will almost always improve your craft in pretty much any genre. So, today, I thought I would take a moment to share 5 “tricks” I’ve learned that always lead to better landscapes:
How Low Can You Go?
In episode #34 of Learning Digital Photography, we look at the subject of low light photography. In these shooting circumstances, you often need to drop your shutter speed pretty low, while shooting with apertures that are relatively open, and high ISO’s in order to get the scene with enough light. Whether you are shooting night photography, concert photography, or foggy weather, these are all things to look at and think about. To help shed some light on the subject (get it? ), we talked to Becky Thomas (aka BecThomasPhoto on Twitter) on the show. A great conversation, and lots was … Continue reading
Tuesday Top Five Nuggets
In lieu of a software review, today instead just a couple news nuggets for you. First up, the finalists of the $500 giveaway have been determined. These six finalists are being considered to win a pretty impressive package of stuff including a Thinktank Photo Multimedia Bag System and a complete set of the Topaz Labs Photoshop Bundle. View the finalists gallery here. Next up, a recommendation: Even if you aren’t a subscriber to the Rangefinder Magazine (although you should be), you can read the current issue online here, (it’s a PDF download) which includes in the most recent issue an … Continue reading
For the Love of Gravy Focus on the Eyes …. Please
I hear a lot of chatter out there about how many photographers are in the market, and how soccer moms with a camera are taking your clients. Are you sure they are taking your clients, or are you losing them because you are not trying to be the best photographer you can be? (sounds like the army!) Just because Digital SLR cameras are affordable doesn’t mean everyone can be an amazing photographer. Your job is to be the best photographer you can be, and stand out among the others. How, you ask? Well, start with the basics as it builds … Continue reading
Seven Super Summer Tips
Since the podcast went live yesterday, the compositional theme was kind of put on the back burner, so I’d like to bring that back to the forefront today with something everybody likes…a list! For some reason lists of bullet points seem to generate a lot of feedback, and garner the most interest, so here we go with a set of what I am calling “Seven Summer Super Photo Tips” Shoot early, shoot late – it’s the “Golden Rule” – and I think we all know about it, so this is just a reminder. Shoot often – seriously, the eye does … Continue reading
The Un-review Software
This week I am going to talk about the lack of software in the weekly software review. That’s right – the lack of it! You may be sitting there wondering which software item I am going to talk about, promote, or diss in some way shape or form, but instead of that, I actually want to talk about the general trending of software, hardware, and system resources. Why? Because we demand a lot from our computers these days. Think about it – we want our computers to do many things from surfing the internet, to designing graphics, office functions, building … Continue reading
Sigma Lightstand – Hardware Review
This week’s hardware review is the Sigma Lightstand. Specifically, the Impact 8 foot Air Cushion Lightstand. While you may think that this is something that wouldn’t garner much discussion – I actually have found this to be a very handy tool. “Tool?”, you ask. Yes, a tool. Sure, it’s primary function is to hold lights, but look at the variety even there – I’ve used it for small flashes (like my 550 EX II), studio strobes from Smith Victor, and water bags. Lest you do a double take, that’s right, I used it along with a makeshift boom (arm that … Continue reading
A video short on HDR and bracketing
One of the more popular posts here on the blog has been two that consisted of explanations on how to bracket multiple exposures in camera in order to capture a wider range of exposure values than is typically permitted in a single frame. Typically, these various exposures are then seamed together in some editor like Photoshop, Photomatix or other that is available to produce an effect called HDR – high dynamic range. You can get some impressive results with various techniques that appeal to different subjective perspectives. Here at the blog though, rather than take sides on such post processing … Continue reading
And from the Bag of Tricks…
Wow – it’s been a crazy couple of weeks: Interview of Tom Hogarty over at Adobe, to the generous donation of a copy of Photoshop Lightroom for a contest (only two days left!) A 3 minute clip on The Tech Guy Radio Talk show with Leo Laporte Invitation to go on a photo shoot with Scott Kelby, followed up by dinner with the crew Front row seat at Lightroom Seminar A very kind and thoughtful mention on Scott’s blog only yesterday And now… Well, I don’t want to jinx it, so I am going to have to leave one of … Continue reading
Photography Secret #1249871
There are so many tricks and little tips to taking better photos – it often seems like millions, doesn’t it? Well, it does to me. I thought of one last night that thought the listening audience might enjoy. This one is a toughie though (because it’s not that easy to do)…are you ready? here goes: Shoot for fun Yep, that’s it. I say it’s tough because we can often forget about the fun factor. We get caught up in the gear, the software, rules of composition, ISO’s shutters, apertures, marketing, advertising, booking gigs, constantly on the go, and all that … Continue reading
How do you like to sound?
In preparation for the next podcast, due in no small part to a technical difficulty with Garage Band, I’ve set up a dedicated computer and recording space (call it my dedicated recording studio) and the audio quality is off the charts better than anything I’ve done before. Ironically, the new topic for this weeks podcast is also about sound – the sound of shutters and how they can impact the feel of the camera, and how they can effect a moment is significant enough to warrant consideration. Make sure you tune in for this one from the good folks over … Continue reading
The creative versus the communicative process
The latest podcast episode has been published and in this week’s episode I talk about a new podcast to hit the airwaves – Digital Photography Life, hosted by none other than Scott Sherman and Michael Stein. If these names sound familiar it’s because I have talked about them and their podcast before when they used to host The Digital Photography Life. Tune in to the podcast here to listen to the details Their show notes are posted on Scott’s blog, which can be found here, and of course, their press release announcing the show, can be read here. The podcast … Continue reading
What do Photo walks and software cycles have in common?
Tune in to this week’s episode of the Canon Blogger Podcast Series, Episode #58, from either the blog or your feed readers today! I also tackle a few listener questions, and offer up a photo road tip for the listening audience. So, pick up the feed today, or stop in to the blog to not only download the show, but also to see the other content that isn’t in the daily feeds (things like the Online Photography Test, Colors and Textures Galleries, polls and more! As I tinker a little with the audio quality of the show and try to … Continue reading
Making Money off your Photos
In the tightening economy, many of us are considering additional ways of supplementing our income, and as hobbyist photographers, we all have wondered at times whether we could parlay our hobbies into sources of revenue. For a short time I even considered this blog as a possible method for generating revenue. By and large though, I found that the blog was not well-positioned to be a significant source of revenue, for a number of reasons. So, I decided to turn the idea arond, and think about whether my photography could be considered as a source of revenue. Thus far I … Continue reading
Tuesday Tricks
Orange Jason Moore has his bi-monthly Photographic Compostion posted today, so be sure to stop over there and see the others (I am sure they were more creative than the one I came up with at the last minute yesterday…) Rather than record a tip or trick for this Tuesday, I thought I’d share a few ideas and suggestions I’ve picked up from various magazines, forums, and photo communities for managing and handling your gear in the field. These things have become almost second nature to me now and I can’t tell you how helpful these tips and tricks have … Continue reading
Eureka! Tutorial Tuesdays Triumphant Return!
For those that have been visiting the blog, you know that Podpress, my plugin of choice for putting out podcasts has been broken for some time as the developer has not released an update that makes it compatible with WordPress 2.6 Well, since it has been several months now, I am officially parting ways with it as my method for publishing. Thanks to the folks over at Blubrry, I have been successfully able to implement a new alternative to embed podcasts into the native feed that already exists for CanonBlogger. So, in the interests of getting the content posted to … Continue reading
Monday Minutia: Memory Management
A post over on This Week in Photography got me thinking about my memory cards and the rituals or practices I take to conserve my image data. As they suggested over at TWIP, I do format my cards in camera prior to using. This in-camera formatting optimizes the data sectors and creates folders to organize image data. However, I also occasionally format my cards on the computer for that exact reason. Since the XT only has an image counter that goes to 100, whenever I pass that 100 mark, it creates a new folder. If I were to never format … Continue reading
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