Tag: 350D

Saturday’s scenery

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Normally I take the weekends off from posting while I go out shooting and recording podcasts and such, but the fun of todays outing was such a high that I wanted to put a few shots out after processing just because I thought they were something anyone could enjoy.

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Not sure the low-res will work, but I thought these were good examples of how an entry level SLR is still quite capable of taking some great shots! Feel free to critique and share your thoughts in the comments section of the blog! 🙂

Podcast update

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I know I had said that I woud be putting out a tutorial today showing the benefits of god quality gear (i.e. my new Samson condensor Mic), but since my typical date for release is Thursday, I dediced to hold off until tomorrow to finish the production on it, and cross all my T’s and dot all my eyes. In the meantime, for your viewing pleasure, since I’ve not done a POTD for a while, here’s one I worked up recently from last Wed. (Haloween). Kind of works for the month of November to as the color scheme also is leading into fall/autumn and Thanksgiving. So…another day delay on the podcast, but will definitely be out tomorrow. Until then…happy shooting!

Life Lessons (and a tutorial)

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The last week has been an interesting one… I got a call at work saying that my wife was at the doctor’s office and they were transferring her to the hospital as a precautionary measure for some elevated blood pressure levels. Needless to say, the next few days I was not thinking much about getting a new podcast tutorial out. After getting every test known to mankind done, the good news is that she is fine and will be sticking around for a while. The bad news is that she needs to go on some blood pressure medication and she has now joined the ranks of Vytorin membership (although her dosage is lower than mine).

That was Wednesday and Thursday.

Friday was pretty much a “recovery day” and I attended to the typical daily minutia that was not taken care of on Wednesday and Thursday.

Saturday, I had a photo assignment for a real estate agency, so I headed out to Daniel Island and shot the property from every angle you could think of. On the way back, I stopped off to get some pumpkins for carving today at one of the local farmer’s market vendors. The pumpkins and flowers made for such vibrant colors I couldn’t help but take some pictures there too.

So, now it’s Sunday and I’ve settled down in to do the post processing from my shoot yesterday, look at my fantasy football setup for the day, and record a tutorial for the blog!

It’s a quickie today, but something that has a lot of uses, and is so easy once you know how to do it, you’ll find yourself playing with Photoshop more and more as a result. The subject is creating backgrounds, and it’s pretty cool. Check it out: Creating Backgrounds in Photoshop

In the meantime, here’s one of the better shots that came from the pumpkin outing:

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Sharpening in LAB Mode

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That’s right, the podcast is done…this is part deaux of what will likely be a three part series that speaks to my work flow in LAB mode. The first tutorial dealt with curves and luminance adjustments in the LAB color space, and here, I illustrate how to sharpen in the LAB color space. Great stuff here, and I also briefly touch on producing an action that will create various layered sharpness levels so you can pick and choose which suits your needs best.

Also helpful are some formulas I’ve learned on what works best for various scenarios. I intended to include these in the podcast, but I am trying to cut down on podcast length and keep extraneous info to a minimum. Nevertheless, the various sharpness levels are relevant, so I am including them here:

For people, portraits, etc.: An amount of anywhere from 120-150%, a Radius of 1.o, and a Threshold of 10 works well.

For cities, architecture, etc: An amount ranging from 50-65%, a Radius of 3 and a thresh hold of 2 does great.

For general everyday use: For all others, I try an Amount in the range of 80-85%, a Radius of 1, and a Threshold of 4.

As always, these numbers are not set in stone, and will vary depending on the types of photos you are working with and your particular tastes. Nothing is ever set in stone in a subjective field like photography, so take this information with a grain of salt, and pepper to your own tastes.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the Sharpening in LAB tutorial! Enjoy! (And feel free to leave a comment or idea – if you do, you’ll be the first!)

Camera Raw Tutorial is up!

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I gave up again trying to figure out how to embed the flash file into the blog page, and keep the layout somewhat decent looking, so I am going to continue linking to a dedicated video podcast page, where I will likely end up building an html front end to reference down the road. It’s an admittedly rudimentary look at ACR (Adobe Camera Raw), and while there are some really great extensive resources out there (I highly recommend Jon Canfield’s book on the subject), this should be a nice intro for those that have shot jpg and are thinking about making the move to raw.

In any case, here it is…enjoy! Thanks for stopping in and don’t forget to vote in the Content poll! 🙂

Fair warning though – it’s a long video, and the audio is kinda on the loud side…

Camera Raw Video Tutorial

No news for Monday

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Well, that may not be entirely true, as Tips from The Top Floor has a few updates both in audio and video format, so stop over there for some weekyl news and info about Chris’ trip to the great ole U.S. of A. He’s going from CO on to California, and then some other place before finishing up in St. Lucie FL, so if you get a chance between now and Oct. 18th to listen/view – you may wanna do so as now I am even thinking of making my way down there for a few days.

Please also say a prayer for Scott Sherman and Michael Stein from The Digital Photography Show. Before this week I did not know that their affiliation began because both their children are affected by Cerebral Palsy.   Scott’s had to have a surgical procedure this last week, and yet he still managed to find some time to produce the show. Suffice to saw, I would have been long gone and Canon Blogger would not have even been on my radar – so thanks to Scott and Michael and my prayers go out to both of you as you walk this noble path – esp. to Scott given the recency of its impact on his life personally.

Finally, Strobist had a couple cool posts recently, first one about Flickr where you can see your “ranking” on there – serious submitters only though as if it’s less than that, you probably won’t show up many times. Another cool post is about using small off-camera lights to help illuminate landscapes. A neat example is there too, so go check that out.

Finally, another podcast is ready for viewing! I did run out of time for production tonight though, so will have to wait until tomorrow to finish it, but promise a rather lengthy one (about 30 minutes) is forthcoming and discusses quite a few details about working in Camera Raw for your post processing. Stay tuned and it should be online in less than 24 hours! Until tomorrow then…Happy Shooting!

Closing out the week with a new tutorial!

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That’s right, I’ve finally got enough of an act together to record a new tutorial. It’s another Photoshop tip, and this week is kind of a tangential feature of Photoshop, in that it’s not one you would typically use Photoshop to produce as Adobe has other products that perform this function better. There are also other applications on the market that do this equally well, and probably with equal if not better results, but if you don’t have them, PS is a neat alternative, especially for preserving things like drop-shadows and text style treatments like gradients and other stuff commonly associated with Photoshop. In any case, the tutorial is linked at the end of this post. You can download for iTunes from the link as well.

In other news, I also was able to successfully arise early enough to catch a sunrise shoot at Isle of Palms today. I had my trusty Canon XT with me, and I found myself enjoying swapping between the 18-55 kit lens, a Sigma macro lens, and my Canon 70-200 4.0 L The colors were okay, but nothing really spectacular to write home about thus far in my review of the shots. I’ll hopefully have a few to share tomorrow, but in the meantime, enjoy the video podcast. Until next time, Happy Shooting and enjoy the weekend!

Creating PDF files in Photoshop

Quiet News Day

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As photogs both amateur and pro await the start of the Photoshop Conference out in Las Vegas, (the “pre-conference” starts tomorrow, the rest of the photo world plugs along. Not much really “news-worthy” or personally revealing today, so here’s just a recap of some of the top stories I happened to catch in my blog feeder.

Olympus announced it’s latest Pro series camera, the successor to the E-1, to be unveiled Oct. 17th. While the announcement may seem kind of a yawner (reviewed at dpreview here: Olympus Review), the fact that it only took them 4 years, 4 months to announce a new body was of comical note to Michael over at TOP.

Scott Kelby does his daily post on the Photoshop World conference, and gives a few props to other photogs and their sites around the net. Always worth at least a glance. You know it’s quiet though when Scott doesn’t have much to post other than a few helpful link referrals pimping sites of his friends (just kidding Scott)….

The Strobist is always a great place to stop in for a detailed read if you’re in the need of knowledge (remember, I like alliteration).

Adobe finished the rollout of its own software in house.

Not much else other than the usual spate of forum posts that struck a chord for me. I’d share them here, but in most cases you need to register to view, so not worth the time since most won’t click thru.

I did notice a significant drop-off in readership, and still not many participating in polls. I’d really like to get at least 20 people to participate, so if you’ve read the blog at all and not voted on the content you like, please do so at your leisure (over here on the right—–>) .

In the meantime, with photos being the dominant choice, I will leave today with a random shot from my own library, a recent effort at a stock shot (sorry if the IQ is a little low-res, but always gotta be taking efforts to reduce piracy)…

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Top Five Reasons I am getting the Canon 40D

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It wouldn’t be a year in photography without at least one of the Big Boys of photography world (those boys being Canon, Nikon, Olympus and Pentax) announcing some new piece of equipment that sets everyone off, racing to give their money away so they can have the “latest and greatest” that money can buy. As a technology buff, I am particularly susceptible to this tendency, so I always have to take a step back and look at my current setup, as well as the rest of the options available before I can pull the trigger (or trip the shutter, since we’re using “photo speak” right now).

So…I set out to look at the major features in the EOS line since that’s where my lenses are. Within my price range (under $1500) are the XTi, 30D, and 40D. I also included the 20D in my comparison because even though it’s been discontinued, it still is available through online auctions and various community forums for sale, and the spec sheet is readily available online (I used the specs from B&H). Given the number of options, even within the Canon line, I had to set some minimum. So, I told myself that in order to make it worth the expense, I would need to see at least 5 major features/reasons in order to justify the purchase. I defined a “major” feature/reason as something that either represented more than a 15% increase in numerical value, or a feature that was completely lacking in my current setup.

With my benchmarks set, and my expectations in place, I put together the following chart for the consumer/entry pro level EOS bodies that Canon offers:

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The benchmarks indicated the following results:
• XTi – 2 features/reasons: Discarded
• 20D – 3 features/reasons: Discarded
• 30D – 5 features/reasons: Candidate
• 40D – 8 features/reasons: Candidate

With two pretty clear favorites, I looked at the differences between the two, and the 40D does seem to have enough of a distinction (3 features) from the 30D to justify the increased expense (Mega Pixels, screen size, and Frames/sec). What also tipped the scales for me in my decision was that since I don’t buy new bodies as regularly as some, as there have been 3 new releases since my last purchase. That being the case, I will probably be better served by getting the newest one so that it can last as long as my XT has (3 years).

For those with other Canon bodies, a similar system could be used to determine whether an upgrade is justified, depending on what you are looking for. For those with Nikon bodies looking to upgrade, the decision-making process should likely be weighed within your own DSLR system, but the principles used above could be applied equally there as well. As for Olympus, Pentax, and Sony – what are you guys smiling at? (Something tells me they will be following the lead of Canon and Nikon but at lower price points down the road…)

Size doesn’t always matter…

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As I bide my time for the Canon EOS 40D to come to a B&H store near me (online), I have been slowly find flaws with my current body – the Canon EOS 350D (a.k.a. the XT).  When invited to a high school football game last night, one of my Canon camera buddies lent me a second body so I could have a wide angle and a zoom at the ready for changing situations without having to swap out lenses on a single body.  As it turned out, I pretty much stayed on the zoom the entire night, but that’s not the interesting part.

What was interesting was the performance results.  The body I was lent was the EOS 10D, which has much more of a heft to it.  Since it was incompatible with the EF-S lenses, I had to put the kit 18-55 on my XT, and my 70-200 (f4.0) went on the 10D.  After adding a 550EX flash, the setup was quite heavy.

For the first half I noticed that the buffer in the 10D took about the same time to fill up as the XT, which seemed odd, as I knew that the 10D had a smaller pixel count (6.3 versus 8.1)  and both are rated at about 3.0 fps.  What amazed me though, was the write speed once the buffer was filled.  The 10D took as many as 30 seconds to write all images to the card, where if I was on the XT, I would have been shooting again in 10 seconds.  By the second half I had switched back to the baby XT (size wise)  for its superior Megapixel count and write speeds.  Turns out, the size doesn’t always matter…