We are officially into the holiday frenzy, and with Black Friday sales creeping up quickly, it’s time to start thinking of some gift ideas for the photog in your own family…or to drop subtle hints to others (if you want it for a present)! Over the next few weeks, I’ve got 25 great gift ideas to share with you. I’ve tried to keep true to some principles with these gift selections, so just to let you know, here’s my barometer for inclusion:
A. I either own it or want it! If I don’t own it, how can I say it’d be a great gift? Only if it’s something I want!
B. Let’s be realistic, the current economic trials are hitting us all hard – and throwing $100+ ideas on a gift guide is too rich for the blood of many photog-types in the trenches, so it’s gotta be cost-effective (nothing over $50)
To keep this manageable, it’s been parted out into five posts – each with 5 items. These are in no particular order, with no favoritism or affiliation to the actual products or vendors. So, without further ado:
1. Ditty Bag – My brother had some of these on our canoe trip earlier this year, and they proved invaluable in keeping my gear dry. $27 for a three-pack of dry ditty bags is a steal! From REI:
REI Ditty Bags
2. The Photo Mug – What can I say? I want one of these muchly. With my own expenditures being withheld to ones that are needed versus wanting, and not splurge items, I just have to hope someone in my family sees this:
Photojojo Lens Coffee Mug
3. The Battery Caddy – I know, this was in last years showcase, but that should tell you how much I love this. Mine was won in a photo contest online about three years ago and it has never left my camera bag. Brilliant idea, and worth its weight in gold! More options available than the AA clip shown here.
Battery Caddy
4. Flickr is probably one of the most recognizable photo sharing sites. With a pro account ads are banished and you are not limited in your daily uploads nearly as much. Only $25 gives the gift for a year!
Give the Gift of Flickr
5. Pocket Rocket from Think Tank. A sponsor of the Lightroom workshop, Think Tank gave us a bunch of these to include for each participant. I had to have one myself too, so out went the $17 – totally worth it!
Think Tank Pixel Pocket Rocket
Number 6-10 will be out soon, but I still have room on the list for some late additions, so if you’ve got some ideas, feel free to share (sharing is a good thing) either here in the comments or with me via e-mail. Happy shooting and we’ll see you tomorrow (or possibly Friday)!
A review lens from the folks at Sigma has been getting a good tire kicking here for the last few weeks. I’ve tested it out in a number of environments, including portrait, landscape, and throughout the zoom range. I have been pretty happy with the quality of images that have come out from it. However, a new photo/writing project is in the works that will require me to hang on to the lens for a little while longer, so I asked Sigma if they would be okay with that. Since they did confirm that, I am going to hold off on a review report here on the blog for a little while longer in order to complete project #2 (the first being the lens review). So, instead of delivering a lens review as I had originally anticipated, here’s a teaser alert from the very lens in which a review is forthcoming:
Moon
I am quite happy with the sharpness on this lens. (This was hand held…) Any guesses as to which glass did this? And for the pixel peepers out there, don’t peek at the meta or EXIF data!
At long last! After several weeks hiatus with starting a new job, and lots of other activities distracting me, I finally just dove in and assembled another podcast. No fuss, no muss, no guests, no news – it’s all you! That’s right, another Q&A show – the best of the listener questions answered in this latest episode of The Learning Digital Photography Podcast! It should be up on iTunes in a bit, and of course, is immediately available from right here in the RSS feed and the blog. Continue reading “Episode #52 – Why We Charge!”→
I was on the verge of taking a day off on account of tired – my new shift at work goes from 6:30am to 3:30, and the adjustment on my internal body clock has been a challenging one to accommodate. However, I remembered a quick post I wanted to make to share with everyone a great eBook I had the pleasure of previewing from the crew working with David DuChemin. So, now is as good a time as any! Continue reading “Close to Home – from Craft and Vision”→
For the month of October, the theme of the contest series has been STUDY…and people have been submitting their images to the Flickr thread in hopes of winning a years’ subscription to the well-respected National Association of Photoshop Professionals. I’ve spoken highly of them before and their educational approach to not only Photoshop, but much of the Adobe family of products, as well as to graphic and web design, oh yeah….and photography… is literally unparalleled. With over 70,000 members worldwide, it’s an impressive organization and I have learned a lot from my own participation in NAPP events, seminars, and their community forums. Winning a year membership to NAPP is like giving a fisherman (or woman) the keys to a lake full of fish, and time needed to learn to use the nets. NAPP membership can literally change your life! Continue reading “Welcome to NAPP!”→
A recent birthday launching me firmly into my fourth decade of existence yielded some nice returns…which has afforded me the opportunity to upgrade my monitor. I’ve been in desperate need of an upgrade to my setup as I have been working off a Dell 19″ and a Dell 17″ for my two display setup for a while now. Given the birthday broohaha, I had about $250 to go find something new. So, on a shopping spree I went, and I come back from said spree, with three new nuggets of information to share…or more to beware of when purchasing a new monitor.
#1 – Understand the data
I was out two weeks ago with this money (probably burning a hole in my pocket, and came across an HP monitor in none other than Best Buy. The price was right ($249), as were the dimensions (23″). I was looking at some of the other monitors, and none really filled the bill like this one did. The only downside was that there was no USB port (or so I thought). The salesman also pointed out the contrast ratio of 40,000:1! Without thinking about it to much, I figured it certainly wouldn’t be a bad monitor – so why not give it a whirl! After all, a 30 day return policy to the brick-and-mortar worked in my favor. So, home it came for setup. A few landmines awaited:
Size – While the dimensions of the monitor are always important, another consideration to take into account is the elevation or lift you get. My old faithful Dell had a telescoping arm that elevated it nicely over my Drobo, and kept it right at eye level for me (or very near it to prevent me from hunching over too much and becoming Lurch!. The HP 2310m had no such benefit and I then found myself shopping around for monitor stands. Subtract another $40 for a decent quality stand (Allsop).
USB Ports – I neglected to consider that the HP had no USB ports. I previously had 3 things coming off the old monitor – a printer, my mouse, and a dangler I could connect my card reader to easily. So, some rewiring was in order. But, this helped me clean up some cable management issues, so that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Contrast Ratio – If you take away nothing else from this post, consider this: contrast ratios are meaningless! That’s right, they are meaningless numbers, generated by each vendor to measure their own “belief” of what the expected performance could be of the monitor under the most extreme settings. I got a hard knock here, recalling after some collaboration with the crew over in the NAPP forums (thanks to Andrew Rodney for the reminder). As it turns out, pretty much anything past 1000:1 is meaningless under a calibrated workspace, because monitors just aren’t made to produce a useful contrast past this once calibrated. Some of the really price ones from LaCie and Eizo do, but those are in the thousands of dollars range. So, keeping true to my budget, I had to settle for consumer grade gear. But, I wish I would have known that before buying, because the decision was made in haste and on bad information. So, lesson learned – know the important data! Contrast Ratio = 1000:1 or greater is fine!
#2 – Don’t Be Afraid to Settle
After finding out all these little caveats, I also got an email blast from Newegg, touting their Halloween deals, and of course, a monitor came up in the laundry list. An ASUS 25″ for $230! I was floored. Two more inches of real estate, for $30 less! So, I started digging into the reviews, forums, and consumer reports. I’d purchased a few of their motherboards over the years and was happy with those. A trip back to the NAPP forums did alert me to a few misgivings some had about the brand though, so I decided against returning the HP in exchange for the ASUS. After all, it was only $30 difference in price, and would have possibly got me in a situation where I may not have been able to return the ASUS without getting an ugly restocking fee. And besides, the low profile and lack of USB were also present there, so there wasn’t much to gain. Then I saw the LG.
It was on display at Sam’s Club, and I’d seen these things in use in lots of retail settings, including warehouse environments, retail, and even doctor offices. The seemed to be of decent enough quality, although the contrast was always way over cranked. I could fix that with a calibration though, so checked the price: $189! A savings of $60 (figure in tax). That would negate the $40 spent on the monitor stand and give me a little change back in the wallet. Off to the web I went for more research. Turns out this isn’t that bad a monitor. I decided to go for the savings and returned the HP, bringing the LG home. Now, all that was left was to set it up, and I was off to the races!
#3 – Calibrate it!
Last but not least, I set the LG up to calibrate. After twenty minutes trying to dial in the color, contrast, and brightness, I was beginning to understand the differences between vendor makes and accuracy. I’d heard of monitors that just wouldn’t calibrate and was suspecting that this was the case for the LG. (The luminance was just way to low, and the colors would never fully align to center in my Gretag Macbeth colorimeter. I finally gave up, and went to take the colorimeter off. On doing so, I noticed that the ambient light filter was still on the puck that I had used to measure ambient light. That explained it! Sans filter, I placed the colorimeter back on the monitor, and within 5 minutes, had things dialed in pretty close to perfect. My luminance is 0.5 off, the color is at 6500, and contrast is spot on dead center. It’s got 30 days to satisfy me (and assuming nothing else goes on sale…) So, word to the wise – when calibrating your monitor, remove the ambient light filter – it can save a lot of headache!
I’ve now moved the 19″ into the secondary position, the 23″ has become the primary, and the added benefit of the monitor stand has given me two new rows of surface area to store things like my thumb drives, media cards, businesss cards, and other bric-a-brac. More storage in an increasingly cluttered life is a good thing!
So, watch that contrast, check to calibrate, and exercise caution in spending habits – especially if you can’t return things easily.
Thew New LG Monitor
Now it’s your turn – got any purchasing stories or tales to share where you learned something in the experience? Sound off in the comments, let me know your thoughts on the above, or to share your own “war stories”. Thanks for stopping in and we’ll be back tomorrow with more photo goodness.
P.S. Another heads up reminder, that the November Newsletter will be coming out this Friday, so if you’ve not signed up – make sure you pick up a subscription for it either in the sidebar or here. It’s free, and only available to subscribers!
We all have lists of things we want to do in any given calendar year, and without meaning to be the bearer of bad news, the clock is ticking on 2010! So, if you’ve got that one shoot, project, or other goal still dangling out there, just waiting to be completed – time’s a-wasting! Continue reading “The Clock is Ticking…”→
Another month of fantastic entries in the monthly contest series has ended and as always, the quality of entries just keeps getting better and better. When I saw the folder of images to review and judge, I think Tracy actually heard me utter “How am I supposed to pick a winner from these?” So, after much deliberation (I even enlisted the help of some photographer-friends to help me narrow it down), the winner has been decided. I am pleased to announce that Cameron Gardner is the September winner! Continue reading “September Winner – October Begins”→
It’s come to my attention that the site has been experiencing some severe delays in load times. I am looking into the problem and will correct things shortly – in the meantime, please excuse the dust as I clean things up a little…and enjoy the simplified layout for a while!
It’s one thing to come out every day with good solid advice for how to do anything, whether it’s manage your finances, run a business, or (as is the case here), how to take better pictures. It’s another thing entirely to follow ones’ own advice. There are countless instructors out there that offer great learning resources, and have an online presence that illustrates how to do things correctly, yet many would have to fall back on the axiom of “Do as I do, not as I say.” We’re all guilty of this occasionally, but I try to stay more to the side of practicing what I preach. Continue reading “Practice What You Preach”→
