Category: Content

Blur, Baby… blur!

Jason5 Comments

Hey all, this week’s show is done and boy are you in for a treat!  Not only is there some pretty ground-breaking news from the computing world, but the theme for this podcast is blur!  I take a (hopefully) clear look at different types of blur you can get in your images, what can work, what will not work, and how to correct for different types.  Got some great listener questions and answers that tie in very nicely to the theme, and as, always the photo tip of the week.  Here’s the show notes:

News Links – HP Z800 Specs (listen to the show to find out why this is so amazing it’s the only news story!)

Focal Length/Crop Factor/Shutter Speed settings –

  • 50mm converts to 85 crop factor, which means a shutter speed of 1/100th
  • 100mm converts to a 160 crop factor, which means a shutter speed of 1/160th
  • 150mm converts to a 240 crop factor, which means a shutter speed of 1/240th
  • 200mm converts to a 320 crop factor, which means a shutter speed of 1/320th
  • 300mm converts to a 480 crop factor, which means a shutter speed of 1/480th
  • 400mm converts to a 640 crop factor, which means a shutter speed of 1/640th
  • 500mm converts to a 800 crop factor, which means a shutter speed of 1/800th
  • 600mm converts to a 960 crop factor, which means a shutter speed of 1/1000th

Listener Questions:

  • DOF Preview button
  • Battery Length
  • Portrait Lenses

Be sure to stop over to the good folks at PLM to get the podcast, and check out the Lensbaby Composer – a great resource for managing blur in your photos!  Happy shooting all and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

How do you like to sound?

Jason1 Comment

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 at Personal Life Media to get all the news, info, and latest from Learning Digital Photography!

Here’s the rest of the show notes:

Here’s the links from news items I talked about:

Listener Questions

  • How do you fix the Canon 99 Error?
  • What does the term “sync speed” mean?
  • What does kerning refer to in typography?

Listen in to the podcast over at Personal Life Media for the answers and full details on all the show segments.  In the meantime, what does your shutter sound like?   It doesn’t even have to be a Canon camera, listen to your camera whether it’s Canon Nikon, Olympus, Sony, Pentax, Panasonic, Leica, Hasselblad, etc! Find out why in the podcast up now over at Personal Life Media!  Thanks for stopping by the blog, and for all your kind words during the flu bug bout.  Enjoy the podcast, then go out and do y’all some shootin’!  See you back here tomorrow!

Too much time in Photoshop?

Jason2 Comments

(Courtesy of the NAPP forums) You know you are spending too much time in Photoshop when:

  1. You go into a sandwich shop and order a Gallery Wrap
  2. You wonder whether “Reduce Noise” will work on the kids
  3. You look for the healing brush to fix your drywall
  4. Your idea of hitting the snooze button involves cloning the digits because it’s quicker
  5. When accused of gaining weight, you say it’s layers you choose not to discard
  6. When “Vanishing Point” becomes something you hope can be applied to your in-laws
  7. When “Sharpen More” is something you wish you could beat your students with
  8. You hear about a stimulus plan on the news and wish it had a “Auto-Enhance” or “More Accurate” option attached to it
  9. Your write-in candidate for the last presidential election was “A Configurator Panel”
  10. You try to move something by just putting your hand in front of it and dragging…

I know this is just a tip of the iceberg – let your creativity and originality shine through in the comments!  Until tomorrow – Happy Shooting!

News, Artists, and Inspiration

Jason2 Comments

Welcome to the show notes for week #17 of Learning Digital Photography.  Here’s the show notes for this week’s podcast…

First off, I’ve done some further tweaking to give a little more consistency and structure to the show for your listening pleasure.  The three segments that I am going to try to regularly stick to will be:

  1. News, Events, and Information from around the community and industry – here I’ll share nuggets, information, and other useful snippets from the most recent days and weeks of activity within the photography community.  Sometimes I’ll share information that’s available elsewhere, and other times I’ll offer my own perspectives on the news and events that shape the industry.
  2. Authors and Artists from within and related to the industry of photography are also an area I would like to devote some time to since the Thursday Thoughts series has not seen much attention lately (not that I am planning to either – I think it’s just on sabbatical!), and I had the good fortune of actually sitting down with an area professional recently which provided a source of inspiration for this weeks show.
  3. Sources of Inspiration – As artists I think we are always searching for and discovering new sources of inspiration.  Often these can come from well known venues such as photography magazines, galleries, and the like, but I am not adverse to featuring unusual or new sources either.  This week, I will be featuring an unusual source of inspiration, so make sure you stop in for this segment too!

To find out why these links are all up and on the blog, make sure to stop over to Personal Life Media and grab this weeks show! For the link grabbers, here you are:

That’s it for today all! Enjoy the show, and we’ll see you back here bright and early tomorrow (well, maybe not so early, as I still have an on-going problem with the sandman! LOL) Happy shooting!

P.S. I am still including a copy of the show locally, so you can grab it from here if you like too. Don’t forget, we still have a poll going on re: Twitter and Blogging, so if you’ve not voted yet, vote here!

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Is 12 enough?

Jason7 Comments

An interesting news story came my way today over on CNet where Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging’s SLR planning department said that most needs of most people can be met with a 12MP camera.  The full story is here, but does bring what has been an ongoing discussion into a more defined state.  As we’ve seen megapixel counts increase from counts lower than 3 MP less than a decade ago to counts that now are at 12 MP or higher, discussions have arisen throughout the industry on “How much is enough?”

From my perspective, I would agree that 12 is probably close.  Yes, processing capabilities are increasing and hard drive storage space costs continue to decrease at almost ridiculous rates (you can get a 1TB hard drive for around $100 these days!), but these are mitigated by need.  When you look at the true and honest need for most folks (myself included), we do not regularly print much larger than 8×10, or 12×16.  I would venture to guess that even artist gallery prints and portfolios do not exceed 16×20″ dimensions that often.

Yes, more megapixels means you can crop smaller and retain print quality, but at what price?  More grain or noise?  Yep.  Reduced dynamic range?  Yep.  More processing demands?  Yep.  More storage needed?  Yep.  While all of these can be addressed by buying software to handle noise, bracketing exposures to increase dynamic range, and buying more storage to meet the increased demand, there does come a point of diminishing returns on the investment, and Olympus seems to have set that mark at 12 MP.

But, will the market agree?  I think so.  It’s no secret that the economy is not doing so well.  People are likely going to be more frugal in their purchases, and getting that full-sized wall print may not be as high a priority as, perhaps, bread on the table is anymore.  Do we need to re-assess our priorities?  Some say yes, that it’s not all about the megapixels.  Some say we should be asking for things like low light responsiveness, better auto-focusing, faster auto-focusing, better in camera noise handling.  I don’t think any of us would complain either if we saw a decrease in the costs of fast glass.

But who knows – maybe the masses will continue to push for more megapixels.  Now that Olympus has drawn a proverbial line in the sane, will other vendors see the logic and start to taper things off?  Or will the megapixels wars continue indefinitely?  Sure, we can’t predict the future, but guessing and talking about it can be a good source of discussion too because it can get us thinking about what is important in our pictures.  So, what do you think?  Where will things go from here?  Sound off in the comments, and watch for the podcast coming up on Monday where you’ll get an extended version of my thoughts on where things may go from here.

In the meantime, have a great weekend, and go out and getcha some (pictures)!  We’ll see you back here on Monday!

Setting bracketing exposures – shutter priority

Jason14 Comments

As promised yesterday, today I will be talking about bracketing your exposures based on shutter priority.  After a couple comments yesterday that it seemed unusual to bracket on aperture rather than shutter speed, I felt that in this companion post I should acknowledge that, it is.  The reason for the post?  One of the downsides I mentioned is that your depth of field will change considerably from a wide open setting to that of, say, f22.  That can also be an upside though because as you merge bracketed exposures into an HDR image, you can also add depth of field if you make the adjustments in aperture priority over shutter priority.

Additionally, I led off with aperture priority because it’s not the norm, and as most readers will know – I try to approach things from a new perspective when possible.  Finally, as I followed up with in the comments section, the simple fact of the matter was that I could not remember whether 250 or 200 was the absolute middle point for shutter speeds (this is the risk of adding gray above the brain, rather than to the brain! *grin*).  So, I led off with the post where I knew the numbers rote! 🙂

So, in the interests of full disclosure, shutter speed is a more common way to go when making bracketed exposures.  After verifying my numbers in camera, here’s how it breaks down using shutter speed to bracket multiple times:

fstopshutter

I also realized that I did not give the step-by-step yesterday, so here’s the process I would follow:

  1. First, meter the scene, set your camera to ISO 100 and exposure priority and adjust to 1/250th of a second.  Check where your f-stop is.
  2. Second, switch to manual, and adjust all settings to match that metering.
  3. Third, adjust the shutter speed down to 1/30th of a second, and fire off 3 exposures and the camera will bracket over and under one stop.
  4. Fourth, adjust the shutter speed up to 1/250th of a second, and fire off a second set of three exposures (the camera will bracket over and under one stop).
  5. Finally, adjust the shutter speed up to 1/2000th of a second and fire off your last set of three exposures.

Voila!  You now have 9 exposures to merge together for a bracketed workup to take advantage of a high dynamic range, or for exposure blending, as desired.  Of course the same rules from yesterday also apply:

  • Be shooting on a tripod
  • Be using a remote release (or timer)
  • Be using mirror lockup
  • All other settings remain constant
  • and that lighting conditions aren’t changing appreciably
  • You are set to manual focus
  • Your lens is set to its hyperfocal distance

Any final thoughts to share on how to bracket exposures?  Anything I missed or additional tips to share?  Feel free to sound off in the comments section!  In the meantime, Happy Shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!

Monthly Poll – Twitter and Blogging

Jason5 Comments

I was talking with a friend on Twitter last night, and despite the etiquette against chatting back and forth repeatedly, we had quite a lively discussion on the subject of using Twitter to promote/market/advertise your blog. Rather than regale the readership with the discussion, I’ll simply leave the voting unhindered by personal bias, save for one link – a post one of us read on Twitter etiquette a while back: http://tinyurl.com/5lcrqr

With that pretext set, we’d all be interested in hearing the blogosphere thoughts on this subject. So, vote in the poll, then chime in with the comments – the fate of the universe rests in your hands (not really, but join in anyway, it’s fun! 🙂 )

I promise tomorrow I will return to photography topics.  In the meantime, Happy Shooting!

Facelift Friday

Jason7 Comments

With February now in the archives, I figured this may be as good a time as any to get a head start on some Spring Cleaning with the blog.  The theme I had been using for the last year or two had been getting a little dated, and the designer has not issued any updates since 2007.  Additionally, some portions of the blog just were taking more muscling to conform to the evolving standards of CSS, XHTML, plugins, and even WordPress itself.  So, consider this a Facelift Friday!

Those of you on the blog, you can see what I am talking about – this new theme is much more photo friendly – the header image is more standardized, so I can start putting more of my images into the rotation for everyone to enjoy.  Plugins also enjoy more support, as does the RSS, calendar, and other sidebar features.  For those of you picking this up via the feeds, please take some time to stop over and enjoy the new layout.  This is, of course, the “first look”, and I will likely be making some adjustments as things settle in, including widening the body width for the main posting area, and dressing up the edges a little.  Any ideas for what to consider?  More pics?  Perhaps some page links?  (I noticed the pages area is now not visible from the main one…)  Feel free to chime in now while I am still in “clean-up” mode!

Okay, so the Spring Cleaning is a little premature, but felt it was needed due not only to update some features, but also due to some coding deficiencies were brought to my attention (thanks, and shout outs to Kerry of Camera Dojo!).  Anyway, on a happy note, I’ll leave you with a little WTD humor since it’s been a while for a comic post:

What the Duck
What the Duck

Have a great weekend, and don’t forget to share your thoughts on the new theme/layout in the comments – it’s now or never to see your feedback implemented!  Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here Monday morning!

Look out behind you!

Jason4 Comments

We’re always looking forward, upward and downward to find a unique perspective or angle on things – to create something unique and interesting.  Well, today, I’ve got an example of how sometimes the interesting shots are behind you!  In this particular case, it’s doubly true.

This is also from the photo walk out in El Dorado from last weekend, and what makes it doubly true is because we were out looking to capture the beuaty of the mountains, the trees, and the amazing Colorado skies.  At one waypoint between hiking trails, we took a rest stop and used some of the provided *ahem* facilities.  On returning to the vehicle, I saw this reflection in the rear window of the Expedition:

Rear View

So, the view was created from the back window reflection, and I only caught it by turning my eyes away from the mountains, landscapes, and opportunities in front of me!  When’s the last time you turned 180 degrees to get a shot?  Got any fun stories of when it did?  Share them in the comments!

Don’t forget to stop over and pick up the new feed in iTunes for the podcast and share your thoughts about the new show format!  Here’s the link:  iTunes feed Happy shooting all and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

The Crop Factor…

Jason5 Comments

First off, my apologies for the absenteeism yesterday.  After a really fun photo shoot with some friends in downtown Denver (more on that next week), I got home super late (by working standards – my shift is 7-4 and I need to take a bus an hour to get there…so I leave at 6, which means I am up at 5!), and went almost straight to bed!  Hopefully the content today will make up for this, because it’s time to talk about (cue fanfare music)…the crop factor!

Now, before anyone gets all uppity because sensor crop factors have been discussed ad infinitum, just relax, because this isn’t about sensors (well, a little, but indirectly).  I am talking about cropping your pictures in camera.  We all do it, often to improve composition, or to focus in on one area of an image – but what about those undesired crops?  What am I talking about?  I am talking about images where it looks really great “in camera” but when you go to print it, the native aspect ratio won’t work for the size you want to print to.  See, most SLR cameras (non-full frame anyway) have roughly an aspect ratio of 2:3.  This means that you can print at this ratio without losing anything in your image.  But, if you want to print at a different aspect ratio, then something has to be cropped out.

So, what aspect ratio will work with the 2:3 proportions? Who all remembers their grade school math?  All you have to do is multiply each side of the ratio by the same number.  So, prints that work are …

  • 2×3″ prints (2:3 x 1:1 = 2×3)
  • 4×6″ prints (2:3 x 2:2 = 4:6)
  • 6×9″ prints (2:3 x 3:3 = 6:9)
  • 8×12″ prints (2:3 x 4:4 = 8:12)

You get the gist…but here’s the thing – the only “standard” print size that really fits our native camera aspect ratio is the 4×6″ print.  What if we want an 8×10″ print?  Well, cropping is required then.  This means losing some of your image.  So, this also means that you need to think about this during image composition in camera – if you like it – and want to print it – remember to frame things so that the crop won’t lose key elements of the picture.  Here’s a perfect example:

isla_original

I took the above shot on a trip down in Isla Mujeres.  I absolutely love this shot.  The problem is that my proportions are lost when I crop to print an 8×10.  Take a look at the 8×10 crop:

isla_crop

It still looks pretty good, and I love the colors still, but some of the impact has been lost by cropping out the frame on both the left and the right.  See how the brown “framing element” has been lost?  I could have cropped less on that side and more on the orange side (even though the orange side is still cropped to a degree), but hopefully you’ll see the difference easily enough because it’s really the orange, yellow and blue that I think are the fundamental colors that hold my eye for this shot.  Suffice to say, I still loved it enough to print and frame an 8×10…but that’s not the point here.

The point is to try and remember to frame your composition in camera with “the crop factor” in mind.   By taking these measures into consideration, you can really have many more printable memories.  So, when you go out shooting this weekend, keep the crop factor in mind.  Happy shooting, enjoy the weekend, and we’ll see you back here on Monday!