Like many in this industry, I started as an assistant to other photographers. One cold and wet afternoon while cleaning the cases of one of my clients I came across a curious set of plastic laminated cards with the word “Sundicator” printed on them. Being the complete geek that I was (am,) I recognized the [...]
Last week I wrote a bit about the reasons tilt-shift lenses were becoming more popular in the DSLR world. This week I’d like to provide a simple example of using tilt in an image to increase effective depth-of-field, and offer a basic overview of how that’s done. To demonstrate what a difference this can make, [...]
When you shoot in the studio as much as I do you learn to hate cords. Power cords, sync cords, extension cords, data cables, all get in the way regularly. It’s not unusual for me to have a sync cord, AC adapter, cable release, USB cable and camera strap all attached to my camera at [...]
Before switching to digital capture, the majority of long-time photo enthusiasts used analog SLR cameras with a 24x36mm film frame. This format was the most common in conventional photography but it was virtually abandoned when affordable digital SLRs were being developed. While a few of the early pro cameras employed a 24x36mm sensor, they were [...]
One of the accessories I needed to get before leading my Theyyams of Kerala photo expedition earlier this year was the ::amazon(“B000Z8CUX2″,”Marantz PMD620)::. It is a small hand-held audio recorder, which I needed badly at the time because my aging M-Audio MicroTrack I was beginning to act erratically. The PMD620 is attractively designed, with a [...]
In my post a few days back, I walked through my own process of setting some specifications for a new desktop machine to run Lightroom, but having gotten my intentions in order it was time to actually go out and buy something, somewhere. But what did I buy, and why?
In the past month or two I became aware of how I was losing a lot of time and personal sanity editing images on my primary work desktop, the performance of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3 on my old system was both poor and erratic, so I’m replacing it. In this article I’ll share with you [...]
In my last installment, I discussed some of the joys and challenges of photographing lightning. One of the tools I use to capture images of lightning is Stepping Stone Products’ Lightning Trigger which is particularly valuable for daylight lightning captures.
Recently I had a disk drive failure, but I didn’t lose any data at all. In part that’s because that disk was “mirrored” to another disk using “RAID 1″ or “mirroring”. In mirroring, software or hardware keeps two identical copies of a disk up-to-date as you go about your work, if one goes, you can [...]
Having the opportunity to work with a great photographer like Joe McNally taught me a valuable lesson about photography, why do I own so much useless crap? There are many things on my photography wish list that I hope to purchase this year. The Canon 5D MKII, with the 580EX II Speedlite and ST-E2 Transmitter [...]
