Category: news

Magical Moments

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wand

Does anyone remember from earlier this week why this post is so momentous? This is magical post # 200 for Canon Blogger. A few days off here and there, but since inception back on August 21st, 2007, I have made sometimes silly, sometimes serious, and sometimes useful posts to Canon Blogger. It’s been a fun ride thus far, and rather than take the kind reader on a blathering journey through some deep, thoughtful, meaningful, and insightful post laden with pearls of wisdom, trinkets of tips, tricks and techniques, I would rather just take a moment to say: Thank you!

Thank you to all the readers who have let me rant on occasion, wax philosophic on others, and bide their time for something useful, informative, or at the very least… entertaining. It truly has been quite the learning experience thus far. I would like to think I have matured a little, learned a lot, and improved the quality of the content that I’ve been putting out into the blogosphere. That judgement though, will reside with the readership. As of today, Canon Blogger (which I now affectionately call CB), is showing some pretty amazing numbers between Google Analytics and PodPress:

  • 55008 site visits
  • 78175 page views
  • 55775 feeds

Yeah, okay, that’s small potatoes when you look at the more serious bloggers, photographers, and other industry pros, but for a small time amateur blogger/photographer guy like me, I am just shattered that my little page has been picked up and read that much. So…THANK YOU! I’m glad you’ve enjoyed it thus far. Hopefully over the next 200 posts the quality of the content will continue to improve, and we’ll be able to look back on this day with a chuckle. Right now, I can’t imagine it – but, as the old saying goes “You never know…”

Today is also especially magical for me because I contributed an article to a free magazine called PhotographyBB which was published just the other day. This is my first published article, so it’s especially meaningful. I would like to thank Dave Seeram over at the PhotographyBB Magazine, and the folks in their forums who have accepted me into their community so graciously and with such open arms. I look forward to sharing many years to come with all of you. Do stop over to their site and feel free to join the community yourself. It’s a great group of people. The magazine, in it’s 5th issue, has many excellent articles (one by my) and an extra treat was to be able to contribute as the photographer “In the Spotlight”. Thne one that had planned to do it had something come up and could not, so I stepped in to help fill the content out for this issue. Very cool to be able to contribute to this work, and it really is a great read, so either stop over to their site and check out all they have to offer, or at least download the article linked below for a fun read when you have half an hour to spare.

So, it’s definitely some magical moments for me, and I just wanted to take today to say Thank You to everyone who has made this such a special day for me. You all rock!

Week 2: What’s This?

Jason5 Comments

307

For Week 2 of “What’s This?” – the image is another typical household object, so, take a gander at the image above, then take a guess in the comments or via email…This is a _____(fill in the blank)!

After a week of various responses both via email and in the comments, there was one correct guess via email, and the answer is – wait for it – a microphone! That’s right, my Sampson CO2 Condensor Mic that I record the podcast with almost every week. I zoomed in real close and didn’t even crop to produce the photo – so congrats to Thomas for guessing the right answer!

Week 1 WInner - Thomas w/ Microphone

Things are picking up for me for the remainder of the week, so a shorter post today. One thing I will suggest as a Wednesday Web Gem is to stop over at the new CB Flickr Group! I’m posting the full size pics from what’s this (the following week) and sharing photos in there as I get a chance. Stop in, register with the FLickr foolks, and share images of your own, discuss things from the blog, offer ideas, other tips and tricks, or whatever the theme for the day is! The link to the CB Flickr Group is here: CB on Flickr

Until tomorrow, happy shooting and watch those apertures!

Maintenance Monday (and a book review…kind of)

Jason3 Comments

Wrench and Book

Hey all, it’s been a busy couple of days for the blog. I’ve been doing some research and maintenance on the blog to try and keep things interesting and to hopefully let more people know about the articles, essays, tips, tricks, techniques, and such that I’ve been sharing now for the past 9 months. I realized that I was in dire need of this when I saw my post count was up near 200 (hint: Thursday will be significant…) and I had not really taken any measures to get the blog registered in any directories.

So, after some research and study, I took some time Friday and Saturday to look at a number of directories and the types of blogs that are typical of those various venues. A couple that caught my eye include:

Of these, Alltop is definitely one of the coolest ones as they have a Photography category. On looking at the category, pretty much every blog that I’ve ever been to was on there along with a few that I’d not heard of. So, I sent them an email to inquire, and as you can probably tell from the new Directory listings on the side panel, they seemed willing to at least give me a try. So, thanks and shout outs to Alltop for the quick addition. Fair warning though – for those of you that may stop in there, you will likely find new must reads to add to your daily surf list. The one that caught my eye is a blog called Hyperphocal, with Chris Bergman. While still fairly new, the approach he seems to be taking with the blog is very similar to the one here at CB – sharing information, helping other photographers, Plus, his own blogroll reminded me of Digital Camera Resource, which I’d known about but forgotten for some time. So, thanks to Chris for putting that back on my radar.

Back on the directory subject though, the listings have been moved in the side panel to the bottom, as has the Google search box and the Feedburner subscription box. I think putting all that material in the same area gives a cleaner and smoother look to the blog. An iTunes one should be up shortly, I’ve just not had a chance to get the graphic I am looking for. If anyone has other subscription services they use, or that they can recommend, I am open to suggestions here as well. Feel free to stop in to any of these directories and share your thoughts of the blog, I’ve provided direct links to those directories where CB is already live.

The last bit about podcast directories though – even though I’ve been blogging and podcasting for a little over 9 months now, the idea of promoting the blog/podcast is somewhat foreign to me. Adding CB to a few directories seems like a good idea, but I would like to hear what others might suggest for venues or approaches to take. Should I promote the blog? If so, where? How? Are the ones I picked popular? I am in uncharted waters here, so would appreciate any suggestions or comments from the readership. if you’re reading directly, feel free to post in the comments. If you are reading from a feed, or would prefer to to comment publicly, please feel free to drop me an email. The address (as always) is jason <AT> canonblogger <DOT> com.

Other maintenance I did on the blog:

I removed the Dig button that was on each post. With a grand total of perhaps 20 digs over the last nine months, it was just another graphic that was taking up space and slowing down the blog more than it needed to. So, unless I start hearing screams for it back (which I doubt), the Dig button is toast!

A few pictures were added to the header rotation. I manually rotate that periodically to change out the look and feel, depending on the post of the day, so you may start seeing a little more variety there. If I can get to it on my “To Do” list, I’ll try to add full-size versions of the header images to the Flickr photo stream.

In photo news today, I got my copies of two reprints I ordered through reading The Online Photographer. The titles are “The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range” by Robert Adams, and “The Photographer’s Eye“, by John Szarkowski. Being a Coloradan at heart, I tore the shrink wrap off Mr. Adams book first. I’m about a third of the way through it, and the black-and-white approach he takes to address both the man-made and natural landscapes (especially along the corridor of I-25) are pretty interesting. I would definitely recommend at least seeing if your local library has a copy of this book. I know spending $20 on a book of pictures can be off-putting to some, especially when we are trying to create our own works and possibly our own books. Nevertheless, I am quite happy with the purchase as viewing the works of others helps me to refine and hone my own vision that much more. Thanks to Mike J. from TOP for the heads up on these reprints – hopefully the few pennies he got from the referral purchase will pay for at least a few minutes worth of hosting!

Last, but not least, you may have noticed from the casual reference above, CB has joined the Flickr frenzy. That’s right, there is now a Flickr group for the blog. As I mentioned, I will start uploading full-size versions of pics that are rotated through the blog header, as well as some other shots that may be fun to view that weren’t really “croppable” to header size (is croppable a word?). Anyway, on the Flickr group, anyone is welcome to share images, tips, tricks, ideas, suggestions, feedback, or just share photos with one another. Here’s the link for anyone who’s interested: Canon Blogger on Flickr Fair warning though – if I see pics in the photo stream there I will likely be giving shout outs and links to your stream on the site. (Just keep the images PG-rated is all I ask…)

Well, that should be enough news for Monday. Until tomorrow, keep on shooting and watch those apertures!

Smell the Roses

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Rose

Yes, we love this craft of photography, and we could spend every waking hour studying nuances of esoteric subjects related to the field, and peeping at the pixels of countless photos, analyzing techniques, and all that stuff. That wouldn’t be a very balanced existence though, and through having some balance, we can actually probably better focus on our craft when we do delve into it.

So, for this Friday, I’d like to suggest taking a break from photos every once and a while. Consider taking time to “step back and smell the roses”, and stop just taking pictures of them! Rather than thinking about your depth of field, whether to use a ring flash or a fill flash, what ISO to set, and what lens to use – take some time to just step back and enjoy the moment. The same holds true for any photography field. If you’re a landscape photographer, take some time to just enjoy that sunset, or that mountain range. If you’re a portrait photographer, let go of the camera and interact with your models and subjects.

It’s the interaction between the photographer and their subject that actually forms the connection. If you sped all your time taking the pictures, and never interacting with the subjects, your reason for taking the pictures can lose meaning beyond the dollars and cents. Remember, photography is a means of sharing your vision with the world. Losing sight of the vision, and the reason why it’s your vision can diminish both the message and its impact on your viewers. Through connecting with your surroundings, you can actually inspire creativity, and take your own visions to the next level.

I was reading through John Paul Caponigro’s new blog he rolled out recently, and found some audio clips on there – one of these spoke specifically to expanding your creativity, and he suggests closing your eyes to heighten the awareness of your other senses. This same philosophy can be applied to the concept above. By setting the camera down every once and a while (and stepping away from Photoshop and the computer), you can become more aware of the rest of the world around you. Heightened awareness is ultimately what will expand your vision, and in turn, expand your creativity. Enough esoteric mumbo jumbo though, just some food for thought as we move into the weekend. Here’s the weekly installment from What the Duck. Happy shooting everyone and watch your apertures!

What the Duck

What is this?

Jason4 Comments

What is this?

Welcome to the Wednesday walk around the web. Before throwing the web gems for this week at you, I figured it might be fun to bring in a new feature for Wednesdays: “What is this?” I’ll take a shot of something at an unusual angle, perhaps zoomed in super close, or intentionally blurred. See if you can guess what it is (use the comments). If you’re right, guess what you win? That’s right! Fame, fortune, and glory! Well, not really – but you do win the “What is this?” for the week so you can brag to all your photo peers that you won the CB “What is this” photo game. I’ll make the first one easy and give a hint – this was taken in my home office. Now, with that in mind, look at the picture above, and see if you can guess what it is! Good luck to all – and now for the Wednesday web gems.

  • This Week in Photography (TWIP) – Scott does regular photo-related posts, just like the rest of us, but he does bring a unique approach to the table. Another cool thing: he has contests, with actual prizes! Cool blog and ltos of useful info.
  • Frederick Johnson – Learned about this guy in the NAPP forums. He’s the Senior Marketing Manager for Professional Photography at Adobe – and while the title and company are impressive enough – check out his Flickr stream, and he has a blog too! Very cool stuff.
  • Jason D. Moore – His weekly P&P listing is up – everything there is of at least a first and second glance!
  • John Nack – Well known Adobe guy, and on my daily hit list. Always good info there. Actually thanks to John, I should qualify the statements that I made a few days ago about Adobe using the GPU for the next version of PS – his clarification on the subject was that it might be coming…but not sure when and as he said he “can neither confirm nor deny” it – he was just sharing possible developments.
  • Okay, it’s a bit of self-promotion, but I’ve not heard much feedback on the Advanced Online Photography Test (a.k.a. TOP Test) since migrating it. So, stop over to the TOP TEST to take your photography skills to the next level!

That should be enough for your morning surf time, now either get back to work or get out and shoot some pictures! Don’t forget to guess on the picture above, and throw a vote in on the poll. Happy shooting, watch those apertures, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!

Custom Brushes

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Custom Brush

For this weeks tutorial, I thought to take a look at custom brushes and brush sets. It can be a pretty handy thing to have some custom brushes of things you do often, or looks and styles that you apply often to your photos (such as a signature, copyright, or some other such logo). The idea came from someone in one of the photo forums (NAPP forums if I recall correctly), asking if there was a brush set out there that had a set of hash marks (like for the days of the week). We talked back and forth on a few alternatives when it dawned on me – we could make a brush to do that! You really can make brushes to do whatever you want, it’s just a matter of doing it once and then saving it, much like an action.

So, here’s a tutorial that examines how to create, save, and load custom brushes inside of Photoshop. We’ll see you back here tomorrow! Until then, Happy Shooting and watch those apertures!

Creating Custom Brushes

More coffee Monday

Jason2 Comments

Judging from my soreness even today after a weekend of home improvement projects, I would imagine that tomorrow morning will be even more of the same – I will definitely be partaking of more than a few cups of joe to get me on my feet and functional.

I did take some time to do some cleanup work of the weekend on the photo gallery side of things for my website and the project side of things for the blog too though. The lucky readers (lucky possibly being a subjective term in this case) will get a sneak preview of my latest gallery addition as I ran out of time and do not have a link on the site to this yet (or the thumbnail for that matter).

On the blog maintenance, I’ve changed the notice for comments – apparently the spam flag was set a little too severely as people were making comments and it was taking up to a month in some cases before those got discovered and re-tagged. So, your comments should become visible much more quickly now. With that in mind, I thought I’d also share the latest photo gallery that I am putting up on my website with those of you who are tuning in, so now you can comment more easily! Last but not least, I had mentioned an article that was forthcoming both in the video tutorial last week, and in another one of the posts. Well, after going through several re-writes and different takes on it, I’ve decided not to publish that, as it’s just to dense of a topic for a short listen or read. If anyone is interested in it though, the subject is creative development.

I looked at an essay that came out in the most recent issue of Shutterbug Magazine, where Jack Hollingsworth looks at how photographers develop their in the essay The Ladder: In Defense of Imitation . He defines 3 stages or phases of development: imaginative, adaptive, and innovative. While both interesting and logical, it raises more questions than it answers. I found myself in similar shoes when trying to address just a few of those questions ir raised in my mind – more questions, practically all of which were subjective in nature. So, the article will likely not see the light of day here at CB. If anyone is interested in a heavy read, let me know via email and I’ll be happy to forward a copy of that article to whomever requests it directly.

That said, the blog was not a good place for it, so I discarded the idea for CB and went with the photo montage. A sneak peak was done a few weeks ago, and it’s now complete. Visit my photo site for the full gallery here

Hope everyone’s weekends were good ones. Here’s to a new week – happy shooting, and watch that ISO!

In the News – Doo Wah!

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Bop bop doo bop doo bop do wow!  Okay, sorry, that’s a bad skit for the great jazz tune from the ’50’s, but nevertheless, whenever I hear the phrase “in the news” I feel compelled to sing that line.  Now, for your real news from CB today:  I’ve got two stories for you, some news from Adobe on the next iteration of Photoshop and some Canon news on the Canon Hacking Development Kit (aka CHDK) that is now maing waves.  Read on for all the details!

Adobe Photoshop News

Well, the big news I read today during lunch was that the folks at Adobe will be incorporating some sort of GPU support for its next iteration of Photoshop.  Tapping into the GPU (graphics processing unit) means that larger images can be rendered on your display faster.   Another added benefit will be an increase in processing speeds for filters and other intensive activities. Nothing too earth-shattering, except they did report that at the Nvidia show, they watched the presenter zoom and rotate the canvas on a 2 GB image as though it were a 5 MB image.

 

Canon CHDK News

In more Canon-specific news, I have now read at least 10 articles from a number of resources talking about the Canon Hacking Development Kit (CHDK), which is a free firmware hack that can be applied to P&S grade cameras to allow them to do a number of things that SLR’s do, and even a few that your average SLR can’t do!

 

  1. The CHDK allows Point-n-Shooters to shoot in raw mode.  The caveat is that since it’s not a standard raw format, you can’t open this in Photoshop or Lightroom directly.  Instead, there is a third party software kit out there (also for free) called dng4ps2 that can convert the image to the more common DNG, which is Adobe’s Digital Negative format.  The DNG file can then be opened in Photoshop or Lightroom.
  2. The CHDK kit enhances the P&S feature set by adding a battery status indicator so you can see how much of a charge you have left on your battery.  I know this feature is already there in SLR cameras, so I guess the P&S’er didn’t have this feature regularly – news to me.
  3. The CHDK kit also adds what they’re calling a zebra mode which will show you whether a picture is under- or over-exposed.  Basically, it sounds like it’s adding a histogram feature.  Again, this feature is standard on most SLR’s, but not on most P&S cameras.  I just think that even a lot of SLR shooters don’t use the histogram (although I would personally encourage more use of it), so adding the feature on P&S cameras may be a little overkill.
  4. Finally, the CHDK kit allows P&S’ers to extend their range of shutter speeds.  The most reliable info I saw for the CHDK claimed the range went from a standard of 1/3200-15 seconds all the way up to a range of 1/33,333 to 65 seconds!  You read that right, that’s one-thirty-three-thousandsth of a second (and change).  Kind of makes the 1/8000ths shutter speed on the 40D look pathetic, eh?  Granted, this was specific to the S5 IS, but the standard change is to 1/64000ths of a second, which is still earth-shatteringly fast! 

Now, the caveats:

 

  1. Write time slows down considerably when shooting in raw (to about 2-4 seconds – yikes!).
  2. The raw file format is not recognized by mainstream applications like Photoshop and Lightroom.  In other words, file accessibility is likely not reliable.
  3. The software that you have to use to access the raw image data is freeware.  While some software from the open-sourced community is excellent (case in point GIMP, OpenOffice, and many others) and perfectly safe, the fact that this software comes from Russia and is (to my knowledge) untested, sets off red flags all over the place for me.  Of course I work in IT, so it’s in my nature to be suspicious of third party software from third world countries…
  4. As with any firmware hack, this is likely going to void any manufacturer warranty or vendor support for the camera if you install the software.

So, having shown the pros and cons, I’ll leave it to the community – install at your own discretion.  For those that do decide to install, feel free to share your thoughts here in the comments, or with me via email – I’d like to hear feedback on the reliability of the kit.  The CHDK can be downloaded direct from the link here:  http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/S5IS, and the raw converter from here:  http://dng4ps2.chat.ru/index_en.html  Until next time, happy shooting and watch those apertures (or should I say shutters?)!

 

Back to Basics – Rule of Thirds Grid

Jason3 Comments

After I recorded and started production on this tutorial my mind began to remember that perhaps I had covered this subject before. I reviewed the subjects I have posted over at the Tutorial Resource Center and did not see it covered there, so figure I am not repeating some tutorial I have already done. Having said that, this is kind of a return to the basics. Continue reading “Back to Basics – Rule of Thirds Grid” →

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Monday “McNallyisms”

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Thanks to David Hobby over at Strobist for posting this on Saturday – apparently I have been missing the boat on videos lately as Google has a pretty extensive video archive of well-known people that they get to come out to the campus in CA and speak for a short while. David posted the YouTube video of Joe McNally (which was posted last Wednesday on YouTube). Normally I guess people speak for about ten minutes or so. Joe McNally’s talk – 1 hour! He naturally talks about The Moment it Clicks, but I walk away amazed every time I hear or read a little more about it. I have to get this book! Some key snippets came out of his conversation there that I took the time to write down and thought I would share these with the blogosphere. Call these “McNallyisms”:

On the big picture:

  1. “My philosophy about photography is that it’s a very open-ended profession.”
  2. “Human gesture trumps everything”
  3. “You have to have fun. If you’re not having fun, your pictures will reflect that.”

On motivation

  1. “At the end of the day, you’ve created something that didn’t exist that morning.”
  2. “I’m not driven by a particular type of photography…[but] by the love [of photography]”
  3. “I have to make a picture that conveys the emotional and visual experience I am having, and if the photograph doesn’t do that, then I’ve failed.”

On technique:

  1. “There are no secrets, no mysteries, no dark kind of ‘Keys to the Castle’ or anything…”
  2. “It only takes one ‘Awww, shit!” moment to wipe out three ‘atta boys’…”
  3. “The migration period [apertures, f-stops, shutter speeds, ISO’s, etc.]…taking all the sundry stuff and migrating it from the front of your head to the back of your head…you need to learn that stuff”
  4. “Technique is important – mechanical inputs have enormous aesthetic implications. You need to learn them and be fluid with them and it enables you to be able to speak with a louder voice.”

Yeah, it’s over an hour long, but it’s worth the listen…it can remind you of what’s really important about photography, and what doesn’t matter as much as you think it does:

And speaking of remembering what’s important, and what really matters versus what doesn’t matter so much, today you simply must stop over at Scott Eccleston’s blog for Weekly Photography Tips. That, my friends, is what really matters! Anyway, hope everyone enjoyed the weekend. Hope the coming week is just as good and keep those cameras clicking – happy shooting!