How to care for your rechargeable batteries is one of those questions I get asked all the time. And it’s a great question, as new technology has made rechargeables last a lot longer and much easier to use. (more…)
Recently there has been a long thread on one of the mailing lists I belong to, regarding the proper way of deleting photos from, and how to format your compact flash cards. There is much confusion and many different opinions about this topic and trying to figure out the correct one is almost impossible. What I have been doing for the last seven years, and I take a lot of photos, appears to work well as I have never had a compact flash card fail (touch wood). People can debate if it is the correct way or not, but it has worked for me. These tips should be good for any type of flash storage media used in cameras. (more…)
Ever been on vacation and tried to take a photo in a church, but it is so dark the photo blurs when you push the shutter button? Many people just live with the blurry shots or give up trying to take them. Well have no fear, there is an easy way around it. (more…)
I was at a Canon /Adobe / Apple trade show this week and it was funny to watch everyone flock and drool over the latest and greatest. Yes and I was sucked in a bit as well as I was looking for some new cameras with live preview to use for our school /team photography business. I ended up with a couple of Canon 40D’s, but that is for another post.
As I listened to the photographers talk about what they could do with this or that piece of equipment, I remembered something that is mostly forgotten these days; You need to have an ‘eye’ to make great photos. (more…)
In case you haven’t noticed, the LCD screen on the back of your digital camera is not a very good tool for judging the exposure of your shots. It’s great for looking at composition, but you need something more accurate to tell if you have exposed your shots correctly. The tool you are looking for is a histogram and more and more digital cameras are including it in their feature set. Scary at first, but if you understand how to use the histogram, it will become your best friend.
The histogram is just a graphical representation of the pixels in your photo. The left side of the graph is the darkest black your camera can reproduce, and the right hand shows the brightest white. Up and down shows how many pixels there are of that brightness. (more…)
Digital photography has made easy work of panoramas. It used to require a special camera or hours in the darkroom to produce what can now be done with a few clicks of the mouse.
Most digital cameras these days come with a panorama mode and software thats merges (stitches) all the photos together for you. (more…)
As the price of digital SLR cameras fall and the technology gets better, taking photos at sporting events is becoming more common. I often have a parent shooting ‘over my shoulder’ at the events we attend.
Keeping the focus on the main action is sometimes harder than you think. With all the other players moving through your shot, sometimes the camera thinks they are the action and changes focus to them. Singling out the play, and keeping the focus on it is the secret to great shots. (more…)
