How To Format Your Compact Flash Cards September 21st, 2007

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Cure For Those Blury Shots Inside Dark Buildings. September 18th, 2007

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. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s All In Your Eye September 15th, 2007

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Making Sense of Histograms September 13th, 2007

The pixels are evenly distributed in a properly exposed photograph.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. Read the rest of this entry »

Making Panoramas Easy September 10th, 2007

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.Six vertical photos stitched together of the frozen Hilton Falls in Ontario, Canada

Most digital cameras these days come with a panorama mode and software thats merges (stitches) all the photos together for you. Read the rest of this entry »

Focus On Sports September 6th, 2007

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.Soccer player celebrates a goal at the Boys U-16 National Soccer Championships.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Say Boogers – Made You Smile! September 5th, 2007

How many times have you wanted to photograph your wife or child and they give you this really cheesey (pun intended) smile? Well a quick tip to throw them off guard and give you a more natural smile is to ask them to say something. Not just anything, but something that makes them smile or think of a happy time. Maybe something that makes then laugh.

Maybe it is the shock of you asking them to say boogers that creates the smile, and lets face it, not many people can say boogers without smiling. How about wieners, ferarri, whiskey, smelly socks, payday, hawaii, the list can go on and on.

Next time you need that little extra to get someone to smile in your photos… Say Cheese!

Happy Shooting