Category: learning

The Exposure Triangle – A Primer

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When we look at the elements of composition, the three that everyone constantly considers are shutter speed, aperture settings and ISO (or ASA in the old days of film). These three factors make up something called the Exposure Triangle.

Exposure Triangle

Readers of the blog have seen this before, in my post about The Future of Photography. The rules of the exposure triangle (such that there are rules in photography…) state that if you want to keep the lighting the same in your shot, as you increase one factor, another must decrease proportionally, while the third is kept the same. What does that mean? Simple – let’s take scenario I encountered when on a photo shoot with some friends touring the waterfalls of South Carolina. While shooting, I saw a perfect scene to demonstrate how this would be manifested.

For our first example, let’s set set up our camera and take a picture of a waterfall. In order to hand hold, and easily compose things, we have the following settings.

  • A shutter speed of f 1/250
  • An aperture of f 4.5
  • And an ISO of 100

Fabulous – but in looking at the photo, we’re not crazy with how the photo looks. Something is off, and we want to change one of our settings to make for a better composition. I’d like to see the same photo but with some blurred water. Now in your own photography it could be something else, like a flower to be sharper throughout the entire depth of the frame, or the background of a portrait to be completely blurred. So, how do we accomplish that? This is where understanding what each factor does to the composition:

Shutter speed

Shutter speed controls how quickly the shutter opens and closes. The higher the setting, the faster the “action” is – so you can freeze something like a speeding bullet, a blade of a moving helicopter, or the wing of a hummingbird.

Aperture

The aperture is the size of the opening on your lens. Think of it like a hose that controls flow rate. You could use a really skinny hose that only lets a teensy bit of water through, or a fire hose that just gushes gallons and gallons. Now, as you open the aperture wider, and let more light in, you also do something called creating a shallow depth of field. And the more shallow your aperture is, the less focused things will be in the foreground and behind your subject.

ISO

The ISO is the noise or sensitivity setting for your camera sensor. This changes how sensitive the sensor is to light hitting it. Lower ISO settings make it more sensitive to light, higher settings make it less sensitive. Back in the days of film, this was done by using films of a certain ASA value (which ironically was referred to as film speed, but I digress…) But the fun thing to consider is that once you inserted film in a camera, you were stuck with that film setting until you finished every frame, so ISO adjustability in digital cameras was a HUGE advancement.

Okay, so now, back to our example photo. Now in our example, we want to make the water more blurred, so we have to slow the shutter down, not speed it up. Okay, so let’s do that:

New shutter speed = 0.5″ (one half second)

So, what’s going to happen? Well, because we are now letting the shutter stay open a LOT longer (0.5 seconds is HUGE, but we need that to really blur water)! As a result, more light is going to hit the sensor, and make it way too over-exposed, so we need to compensate for that by adjusting the other two controlling elements – aperture and ISO. Now in this example, our ISO is already as low as it can go, so our only option is to make our aperture opening much smaller:

  • A shutter speed of f 0.5″
  • An aperture of f 29.0
  • And an ISO of 100

See how we did that? Now, this shot is going to have much more blurred water, and our exposure stays consistent. But, we’ve effectively made the same shot with a different composition!

See how the shutter speed and aperture will change the entire composition? Yes, I blurred the water, which was my primary goal, but look at the log in the foreground. Now it’s a little out of focus due to the shorter depth of field. Pretty fun stuff, eh? I should also mention now that since I slowed the shutter speed to half a second, there was no way I could hand hold that, so I mounted it to a tripod in order to prevent camera shake.

As a reminder, for a strict metadata comparison, that’s what happens when you account for the exposure triangle:

Shot 1

  • Shutter speed = 1/125th
  • Aperture = f 4.5
  • ISO = 100

Shot 2

  • Shutter speed = .5 seconds
  • Aperture = 29
  • ISO = 100

Happy shooting!

Author note: I was going to post this article in response to a question that came to me from Quora. Imagine my surprise when I realized I had never written a post in 10 years on something as fundamental as the Exposure Triangle!  It may have been written and lost in the server crash from a few years ago, but thanks to Quora for giving me the reason to re-create it now!

The Smart Phone Versus the SLR?

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Lately the internet has been teeming with people fixating on the latest iPhone release, and questions are coming through the woodwork asking the same question over and over. Everyone thinks they are coming up with an original question, just because they changed one word here or there, but essentially all these questions come down to smart phone cameras versus traditional cameras. I’ve answered the question so much via email, in forums, on Reddit, and in Quora that I finally said “enough is enough”. For all who want to ask the question, I am going to direct you to this post!

Smart Phone Cameras in a nutshell

Let’s break down this phrase a bit – smart phone cameras What does this mean? It means the phone vendors like Apple, Samsung, LG, Huawei and the rest are adding cameras as software applications to sit on top of these cell phones. I’ll say that one more time for clarity. At their core, these devices are cell phones. So, on that basis alone, why would anyone want to draw a comparison between an add-on feature to a device designed with photography in mind?

The answer lies in dollar bills. That’s it – money! Vendors want to sell more devices, and if the phones can’t really be improved (let’s face it, cell phones are merely a function of the network they are on), then sales plummet! Think about it – iPhones, Androids, and the rest all must be on a cellular network for their original designed purpose of making phone calls, right? So, off the top of your head, how many cellular providers can you name? Not regional ones. I mean Tier 1 providers! I came up with 4/5:

Verizon

AT&T

T-Mobile

Sprint

US Cellular (don’t really wanna count these guys, but ok…)

I think the phone makers agree:

iPhone Carriers offered

From the Apple iPhone 11 Splash page

Samsung carriers offered

The others, like metroPCS, Cricket, Go Phone, etc. are really just smaller ones that piggyback on the major providers networks (and many are actually owned by them!)

So, don’t fall for the hype. iPhones, Samsungs, and every device out there as far as their phone service goes, is only as good as the network it lives on. They can’t sell products that way, because the experience will be different for everyone, based on the network and where the customer lives relative to the towers. So, cell phone vendors try to stand apart by their add-ons. That is the only reason why every vendor tries to hype their accessory apps like cameras, computer speeds, and media storage aspects of these ridiculous tiny devices (of course tongue in cheek when you consider that these devices have more processing capacity than what we had when sending a rocket to the moon!).

But, everyone likes cameras, and photographs are a part of our lives. We are a visual society, so everyone wants a camera they can always have with them. Naturally, since we always have our cell phones with us, it’s sheer brilliance to make the camera feature the selling point.

But the cameras are crap.

There, I said it. Cell phone cameras are crap compared to dedicated cameras. Don’t believe me? Check this out:

Here is a photographic representation of various camera sensor sizes ranging from a medium format camera, all the way down to the sensor sizes of point-and-shoot cameras, with their actual dimensions (courtesy of Wikipedia):

I don’t even see a cell phone camera listed, so off to Google I went in search of the actual dimensions of a cell phone CCD sensor for capturing images. Here’s what I found…

From https://improvephotography.com/55460/what-is-the-focal-length-of-an-iphone-camera-and-why-should-i-care/ )

So, the sensor in a smart phone is about 7mm x 6mm in physical size. The author claims that’s “about the same as a 1/2.5″ sensor”. I actually think it’s closer to the 1/1.7″ range, but that’s miniscule…

A meaningless measurement from the outside looking in, but it looks to me based on the lens that the sensor is about 1/3 of an inch. Interesting that this sort of information is not readily available from Apple, Samsung, or other phone vendors. I wonder why?

The answer is because at the end of the day, the sensor on these cameras are teensy tiny miniscule little things that are crammed into the innards of a phone, trying to get you to buy into the fact that the CCD sensor of the phone (thus making it a “smart” phone) is better than the sensor of an SLR, or even a point and shoot.

I’ll go to my grave saying that it’s not better, and never will be. Simple physics prevents it.

Lenses

If you ask any photographer the question of what camera to buy (excluding talk of the smart phone cameras), invariably, they will tell you that it’s not the camera you buy into – it’s the camera system. More specifically, it’s the glass that matters. The reason for this is because the camera is just a box that houses the sensor, and it’s the lens that defines the clarity of the shot, your aperture range, and even the sharpness of the glass comes into play. I know photographers that refuse to by Tamron or Sigma glass because they claim it’s “not as sharp as Canon” lenses. I’ll leave that argument aside for now, because the point here is to highlight that even if we were to exclude the sensor as not being as much of a factor based on this concept, we need to now look at the lenses in these phone cameras.

So, let’s do that for the iPhone 11:

That’s actually better than I would have thought, because most predecessor phone cameras had fixed or nearly fixed aperture sizes on their lenses. But a range from 1.8 – 2.4 aperture opening is impressive, as it’s nearly a full stop (read more about apertures and F-stops here) so I’ll grant that. Now let’s compare that to the absolute cheapest lens for a Canon lens at B&H Photo (I looked at the EF and EF-S lens mounts). I also could have picked Nikon, Pentax, or another maker, but I am CanonBlogger for a reason: 🙂

So, for $125, I can get a lens that goes from an f1.8 all the way up to f22? (That’s about a 6 full F-stop range by the way, for those of you keeping score..) A smart phone camera will never compete with that. Now, for the average Joe (or Josephina) consumer, what does that matter or mean? It means from a smart phone, you’ll always get images that look like this:

And never get images that look like this:

Now, with my rant over on the differences between the camera apps and sensors in phones versus the dedicated SLR and even point and shoot cameras, I need to clarify something.

Software

The way that phone cameras are able to get some apparently stunning imagery is not because of the camera – it’s because of the software. So, if you really want to compare apples to apples, the comparison should be between phone camera software and standalone software. And I will grant you that the software the developers at Apple and Samsung have done some amazing work as to what’s baked into the computational algorithms. The problem lies in the fact that it’s baked into the phone. We have no control over it.

Now, devil’s advocates will say “There’s an app for that” and sure, there are tons, but that’s not a fair comparison, now is it? Comparing a software app from a phone camera to a dumb SLR that has the sole purpose of capturing images makes no sense. So, if you want to get into a discussion of software comparisons, we can do that, but we need to make it an apples to apples comparison. Which one would you like to start with? We could start with a comparison to Lightroom, Photoshop, and others…

But if anyone tries to tell me that the hard baked software for photo editing in a phone can compare with Photoshop, Lightroom, or any of the above, I’ll… well, just don’t! 🙂

Printing

Does anyone print images anymore? I am not sure about that to be honest. With social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn (and probably a whole host of others that I am not hip to), we often are looking at images through this medium rather than by prints. So, my argument here could be meaningless, but…

Take a photo with a smart phone camera. Take the same photo with a point and shoot camera. Try to print them at your local print store. My guess is you’ll be able to print up to perhaps an 8×10 photograph from the cell phone. From the SLR camera – you can go billboard and poster sized effortlessly. Why? Because of the sensor and the pixels.

You see, cramming pixels more tightly together in a small teensy sensor is going to produce something called artifacting, which ultimately translates to bad pictures when you try to print to a larger medium. So, there’s that too…but again, perhaps I am long in the tooth because I don’t know anyone who prints photographs anymore. 🙁

Conclusion

So, there you have it – the full explanation as to why a smart phone camera will never truly compare with a dedicated camera. The SLR will always win. In any category.

What say ye all, interweb citizens of the world? Agree with my assessment? Hate it? Sound off as to why you like what I have to say, or where I am just flat out wrong in my preconceived notions. Otherwise, I’m ready – what’s the next question…?

Copyright, Licensing and Model Releases

Jason1 Comment

One of the questions I’ve gotten since releasing the DIY Legal Kit surrounds the sometimes confusing matter of photographer copyright protection versus licensing, and model releases. As the Legal Kit is designed to be the forms needed to cover each of these bases, the delivery was intended for those with a solid understanding of each principle.

However, soon after launch, I realized that the “solid understanding” was not necessarily present, so figured a bit more background would be helpful.  For those of you who already purchased the kit, an upcoming supplemental will be released to you free of charge.  For those of you who would like to get the primer separately though, that will also be made available to give you the primer you need to understand all these nuances.  For now though, I thought it might be helpful to give a bit of an introduction to the concepts here on the blog.  It’s a confusing issue for sure, and one that does warrant a bit of discussion.

Copyright Protection

Copyright protection refers to the rights of an artist to control the distribution of works they create.  Whether you are a painter, a writer, a sculptor, or a photographer, you have the right to control distribution of your own work.  Registering your work with the federal copyright office entitles you not only to the protection of copyright, but also to legal remedies for damages in the event someone tries to use your work without your permission.  The supplemental will cover the process for registering your work with the Federal Copyright Office and answer some of the more common questions there.

Model Release

A model release means a person is signing over the right to produce the image they have been captured in to the photographer.  A photographer may own the copyright to a photograph, but a person also has the right to control their own likeness.  If you do not want a photographer to produce your image in any commercial setting, simply do not sign the model release.  If you are a model, you probably want your image to be used to gain notariety.  So, to do that, you need to release the right to produce images of you to the photographer.

There are always circumstances that can raise questions though.  For instance, does an attendee at a wedding inherently give the photographer the right to use their image?  It was only the bride and groom that hired the photographer, not the attendees!  What about someone who is out on the street taking portraits for $5 a pop?  If you buy the photo, does that grant the photographer the right to use your image?  Not necessarily!  The supplemental answers these types of questions too.

Licensing Your Photos

Probably one of the biggest misconceptions I see around the field of photography, is that clients (and some photographers) see the product as what they are selling, not the service.  The truth of the matter is that as a photographer, it’s more common to get compensation for the service than the photos themselves.  Obtaining a photo, or using a photo afterwards is what’s referred to as licensing.

So, the question naturally comes up from wedding and event photographers – does this mean a couple needs to also pay for the photo album?  The answer is – (as always) “It depends!”  If your pricing structure includes a CD to re-print then no.  If your pricing includes a photo album, then yes!  What about Facebook and Twitter, along with a host of other social media sharing sites?  Are those included?  How does this differ from corporate or studio sessions for head shots or architectural and fine art prints?  These are all great questions and the answers to these and many others will all be included  in the forthcoming supplemental.

Hopefully this has helped answer some of the basic ones that people have had regarding the Legal Kit forms.  The last question you may have at this point is what is included in the DIY Legal Kit itself.  Here’s what you get in the Basic Legal Kit:

  1. Both an adult and minor model release forms (and is accepted at most stock agencies, including iStock, Getty, and Alamy)
  2. A standard event contract
  3. A standard licensing agreement
  4. Schedule A (which itemizes the list of photos included in the agreement)
  5. Schedule B (which covers the terms of usage).

The thing that’s super cool about these forms in the basic kit is that they are designed so you can add your own logo, company graphic and other design styles to the forms to suit your personal preferences.  They are in standard Word format so you can easily modify them as needed for your locality if desired, rather than the more difficult PDF format that is more common with other Legal Kits of forms.

These all were created by a licensed and practicing attorney here in Colorado, with the intent to make them as applicable as possible in most municipalities.  If you do have concerns though, feel free to consult with an attorney in your own area.  As an aside, it’s always cheaper to review existing forms and documents than to have them create ones from scratch for you!

*****

So, if you haven’t gotten the Legal Kit yet, feel free to pick up a copy now: https://canonblogger.com/education/ebooks/

Software Subscription Models Revisited

Jason1 Comment

Adobe Logo
Adobe Logo

As some die hard friends and colleagues are aware, Canon Blogger, suffered a catastrophic failure about a year or so ago now, and I’ve slowly been crawling along as I try to resurrect the archives, and get everything back online. The process has been a tedious one as with nearly ten years of content, some was lost for good when the server crashed, other content survived in the last backup that was performed. Be that as it may, I recently was reading an article on Medium about The Rise of the Rent Seeker and thought to myself, “Oh my GOSH, this nails on the head exactly what I was trying to say way back in 2011 when Adobe made the switch to the subscription model for their software licensing model.  This was such a good read that I wanted to share it (thus realizing another two or three articles that were lost, but now recovered courtesy of The Wayback Machine) in the context of my original thoughts. You can read my original articles here and here.

In a nutshell, this most recent article from Medium explains that:

…the economy has two kinds of entrepreneurs: profit seekers and rent seekers, and those who participate in the latter are redistributing the wealth from the subscribers pocket to their own.  Adobe has made the shift to this model, and as such, they are extracting value, but not giving any real value back….”

It goes on to elaborate about how the technical space is inherently badly suited for innovation and development when they convert to this model.   But the statement made is pretty powerful:

Increasingly, mature software vendors who have run out of innovation runway turn to rent seeking, increasingly we are are told that the subscriptions will soon be everywhere and there is a real problem with that.

Toward that end, it raised the question in my mind:  Does that mean Adobe has stopped innovating? What else can be added Photoshop or Photoshop Lightroom to improve our workflow? I honestly don’t know as I’ve stopped upgrading as of CS5 and LR 4. I’d love to hear others thoughts on whether or not Adobe has really been all that innovative over the past 3-4 years. It was telling though, that the author actually used Adobe in his illustration of the dangers of entering into a subscription model:

Adobe Reference in Medium Article
Adobe Reference in Medium Article

The article does give a little bit of validation to me though, in seeing someone else so much more eloquently than I as to why renting is almost always (in the long run) not in the best fiscal interest of the consumer.

Triptych Photography 101

Jason1 Comment

If I were to say the word triptych to you, many folks wouldn’t know for sure what I am talking about. Let’s be honest…in photography, there are lots of crazy semantics to understand! Everything from ISO’s and apertures, to shutters, diopters and f-stops, ASA’s and guide numbers are all part of the craft. Heck, there’s even one called the “circle of confusion” – and you can quickly get lost in the sea of words and acronyms in photography. One that I can’t believe I’ve not talked about here before is a TRIPTYCH! It’s pretty simple actually when you break it down really though, so fear not. Here’s your beginner’s guide to triptych photography!

In a triptych, all you are doing is taking three photographs and putting them together in sequence. The sequence can be three photographs all composited into one montage (say in Photoshop), they can be individual prints that are assembled in a wide frame, or even three framed photos that are hung horizontally or in close proximity to each other on a wall. Traditionally, triptychs follow a theme, whether it be a series of photos over time (a house in the Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter), a person with different poses, or a landscape cut up into a left, center and right framed photograph.

Triptych photographs can be a lot of fun, especially if you have the digital capacity to preview how things might look in sequence like this. Here’s a few examples I’ve done digitally to give you an idea. First, a posed series:

Triptych Portrait - Maggie
Triptych Portrait – Maggie

And now a landscaped series:

Triptych Landscape - Weeds
Triptych Landscape – Weeds

See how a landscape can have various elements in each, to visually tie things together? This is similar to, but quite different from the effect of a series of portraits. I’ve seen some wonderful triptychs where people have assembled longitudinal poses (say a dog as a puppy, at 4 years and in their senior years), triptychs of seasonal changes in a landscape, and even triptychs that juxtapose color, black and white, and sepia filters on photos.

Triptych Boneyard Beach
Triptych Boneyard Beach

Add to it the ability to angle photographs from the top left to the bottom right, or from the bottom left to top right, and even up and down to create an entirely different effect. Matting and framing choices also factor into how successful a triptych display would be. You literally are bound by nothing more than your imagination. As the folks at Canon are keen for saying then, where does your imagination want to take you today? Follow that path unique to you! To that end, I’d like to hear from the reading audience, here’s my questions back to you:

1. Do you find triptych styles of presentation appealing?

2. Have you done any triptych work in the past that you’ve posted either online or in your own house or gallery?

Can You Shoot Thirteen Views

Jason1 Comment

I was reading a book recently called “Beyond the Obvious” by Phil McKinney (great book by the way) that challenges people to think about concepts and questions, and then encourages people to look beyond the knee-jerk reactions and responses.  This same mentality exists in the world of photography.  We see a scene, a portrait, or something that catches our eye and our instinct is to capture that “something”.

McKinney illustrates his point in asking the reader to answer the question:

“What is half of 13?”

He then goes on to show that there are many responses to this. The canned answer is always 6.5, and that’s what came to my mind too.  But in going “beyond the obvious”, he shows that if you think about it from the perspective of say, a deck of cards, and 13 cards in a suit.  Since the ten, jack, queen and king all are values of 10, then really, half of thirteen in that scenario is 5.5, not 6.5.  You could also say that half of thirteen is really “thir” with “teen” being the second half!  By illustrating that you can divide either numerically or semantically, entirely different perspectives, thoughts, and answers can be right at the same time!  Once I got on the mental plane of looking at things differently, my own result was that half of 13 could also be 1 or 3 – applying the semantic concept to the number…

That is such a great concept, and one I’ve always tried to help people understand here in many different ways.  The “half of thirteen” way is probably one one the most succinct I’ve ever seen though.  Let’s take that concept now and apply it to photography.  Go get your camera!  Right now…seriously!  Go get your camera, and pick some random object in your room, office, or where ever you happen do be.  I don’t care if it’s your SLR, P&S, or camera phone.

Now what?  Take 13 pictures of that object.  Make each one different!  Change the angle, change the light, change the object itself.  It doesn’t matter what you do, just do 13 different things.  I can guarantee you that at least one of those photos will be something new, unique, and even compelling.  Now, take the most compelling one, and post it here.  To get you started on the right mentality, if you’re not already, here’s my own set of thirteen:

The shots above come from the “Wreck of the Peter Iredale” – on the coast of Astoria, Oregon.  Now, granted, the setting sun, and the unique nature of the composition made my 13 shots a little easier, but there’s now reason you can’t do the same.  Take a speaker and shoot it from as many angles as you can.  Run out of angles?  Try a different tack and change the lighting!  What happens if you pop an on-camera flash?  Try throwing your hand up to act as a barn door of sorts.  There’s no end to potential…it just takes thinking outside the box!

Take Time to Play

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Ever feel like your creativity is  at a standstill?  Something got it on hold?  The common belief is that creative or mental blocks come from trying too hard to actually be creative.  So, how can we stop trying to hard?  It’s not that we should stop trying per se. It’s more that we need to stop trying to make every image a powerful image.  Being playful often starts with just laughing at yourself.  Seriously…laugh at yourself.  Do something stupid or silly.  That becomes infectious and can move you forward to play.

In being playful with your work, it’s often even more helpful to put down the tripods, and SLR’s.  Put down the lenses and filters. Put down the soft boxes and fill flashes.  Being playful means letting go of the “rules” of photography.  I’m reading David DuChemin’s book, The Inspired Eye (available now on his website – use EYE3Free for 20% off through Sat.), and in it, he speaks to this idea that that inspiration can come from play.

Some ideas from David include taking a day and try taking pictures whenever the mood hits.  Even if you are shooting through wet glass, or in a moving car.  Take a picture with your focus ring taped down.  The softness from the out of focus shot can force you to look at something more generic like the lines and energy of a scene.  It really is inspired capture that David is going for here, and that can definitely come from play.

One of my favorite images from my own library is a niece – I was literally playing.  I wasn’t expecting anything great, or show-stopper quality.  Just goofing around.  I was laughing and being silly, and so was she.  I took the camera to ridiculous angles, knowing it wouldn’t work (or so I thought).  Just goes to show you the power of play in photography:

Laughing Girl
Laughing Girl

The upshot?  Take time to play – only good things can come from it!

A Pro Level Point and Shoot?

JasonLeave a comment

I need some help!  Recently I had the idea of creating a Pro level Point and Shoot camera review corner as an interesting addition to the blog.  To that end, I am compiling a short list of P&S cameras that would be useful material here for the reading audience to have.  However, since most of my experience thus far has been with SLR gear, I could use some help in ensuring my final selections are both useful and of interest to the audience here.  So – I need your help!

You see, it’s a given that there are limitations to the “point and shoot” grade of cameras.  You simply don’t have the same degree of flexibility – no changing out lenses, a smaller sensor, more inherent noise, etc., etc. etc.  Yet, when you take an SLR, there’s a lot more gear involved, even if you “go light”.  At a minimum, you’re likely to have a camera body, a lens, a flash, and a tripod.  So, which do you do?  Thankfully, with the advancement of the “P&S” grade cameras, the differences between SLR’s and the “P&S” category has narrowed substantially.

Pro Level Point and Shoot
Pro Level Point and Shoot

So, the question becomes:  which P&S is a good alternative for the SLR when you just want to take something and go, yet still have the malleability to capture the kind of images you want?  Now, if you ask ten different photographers this same question, you will likely get ten different sets of cameras in varying degrees of priorities.  That being said, a short list of high-end P&S cameras is always helpful to consider.  Here’s the short list I picked:

Canon:  Powershot S95, Powershot G12
Nikon:  Coolpix P7000
Sigma: DP1x

There were some others I considered including a few from Panasonic, Sony, and Olympus, but in looking at the specs of those, all had an interchangeable lens feature, which makes them more SLR-like than most P&S counterparts, so I removed them from consideration.  Here’s the criteria I am using to consider cameras for inclusion in a P&S review section:

1.  True point and shoot design (no interchangeable lenses)

2.  Cost should be less than the entry level SLR for that vendor

3.  Raw or sRaw capacity is probably going to be a requirement…most high end P&S cameras I’ve seen have this feature.

These are of course, just subjective takes on which P&S cameras stand head and shoulders above the rest, and the criteria to classify ones for inclusion as “true P&S cameras”.  As they come through the doors, I’ll share thoughts and feedback with you, but for the time being, I’d also like to hear what others think of these selections.

Can a P&S really stand toe to toe with an SLR?  Is it even worth looking at?  What about the cameras themselves?  Are there others that you wish were included?  Do you own any of these?  What have your own thoughts and experiences been?  Sound off in the comments, and I’ll see what I can to do add others to this roster for upcoming review!  In the meantime, happy shooting, and we’ll be back tomorrow!

What? You’re Not Going to PSW?

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Photoshop World – aka PSW – has become a week-long hug-fest, and is a bi-annual tradition,especially among the NAPP faithful.  As an active and sometimes promotional arm of NAPP, I can promise you that if ever given an opportunity to attend PSW, I will jump at said opportunity.  Having said that, I’ve been a member fr nearly four years now and still have not found the financial wherewithal to pony up the necessary funds needed to:

Photoshop World

1.  Pay for the cost of entry

2.  Pay for the cost of travel

3.  Pay for hotel accommodations

4.  Pay for the cost of food

It’s an expensive proposition, which I conservatively estimate at nearly $1000.  This does not mean it isn’t worth the money, because it most likely is, even if for networking purposes only (and I am sure there are educational opportunities galore)!  Let’s face it – if you want to be a “player” in the photography world, there is usually justification to attend PSw either in Orlando (Spring) or Las Vegas (Fall).

My problem is that I am something of a one-man-show.  And photography is very much a secondary stream of income, when it even does present opportunities.  My primary job has always been in IT.  I suspect it always will be.  So, to find the time off for a traditional working stiff is tough – I am often needed, and earn precious little vacation time every year.  So, unless a company that values both my IT and photography skills hires me (Adobe, are you listening? ), I will likely not be in a position to attend this event.

As is often the case, I know I am not alone.  So, here’s your chance to let your non-PSW light shine!  What are you doing this week?  For me, I am taking a little time off between jobs actually.  After accepting an offer at a new company (I am not holding my breath for Adobe), I have a week or so to spare from my calendar (but not my budget) to travel a little, and am visiting family in both AZ and NY.  Let’s face it, family should always come first, and here is no exception.  This last weekend I spent in AZ, and coming up later this week is a trip to NY.  Maybe I’ll get in a little fall foliage out east, but not sure as the fall seems to be late arriving all over this year.

So, there’s my plans, and why I won’t be there!  What’s your excuse?  Why are you not at PSW?  Sound off in the comments!  See ya back here tomorrow, and keep on shootin’!  I’ll be back again with the August contest winner and a new contest for September that will knock your socks off!

Shooting Shadows

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Most of the time the subject of the a photo is easy to see – whether it’s a portrait, landscape, travel, or architecture. While these subjects are easy to identify, the use of shadows in these topics is not discussed as often as it should be.  We spend so much time trying to get the lit portion of our images in focus, composed to our satisfaction, making sure things are sharp, and all the rest, we sometimes miss the value of shadows in our imagery.

Boat Mast in Shadows

The shadows of an image can be just as important to the composition as the lit parts are.  When talking about how to light images with strobes and studio lights, the use of shadows to give definition is often discussed, but the same discussions can be germane to naturally lit photos too.  Remember, the word photography means to paint with light (photo and graphos), so even the absence of light can be significant in defining our images.

Subtle Portrait Shadows

Whether you shoot portraiture, architecture, landscapes, or even abstracts, shadows can and do play a role in how you compose your images.  Do you look at the shadows in your images?  What story do shadows tell in your work?

Abstract Shadows

Shadowed Helicopter

Share your own thoughts on how to accomplish a story by shooting with shadows below in the comments – would love to hear others feedback. In the meantime, keep on shooting.