Camera Dojo

So you drove across town for a impromptu photo shoot and when you arrive you realize you forgot something as basic as your camera batteries or your tripod. For larger photo shoots, you should use something like our photographers checklists we have used before. Some people have asked for something simpler for those quicker spur-of-the-moment shoots. We have put together a page that you can print out, cut it into multiple pieces, laminate it, and have some quick-use checklists handy. If you laminate them you can use a dry-erase pen to check off the items you want and then wipe it off to use it again. To download the PDF file, just follow this link. [Download Checklist]

Just in time for Christmas we have put out our first set of develop presets for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, the first set, Lightroom Essentials, is FREE and is designed to help make working with large batches of images easier. With basic presets for common white balance issues, to simple exposure compensation, to a few pretty cool artistic presets, to one-click vignettes. Be sure and check them out and let us know what you think. For more information read more about it at http://l7foto.com/lightroom-presets.

Happy Holidays for all of us here at L7Foto!

Note: The download link has been fixed for Firefox users

We are certainly fans of constant lights for beginners with their “what you see is what you get” approach and some of our favorite lights are our Photo Basics kit which we use all the time for different projects. The main problem with constant lights is the heat generated by the bulbs. On a recent product shoot we added up 3000w of lights running which brought up the temperature in the room VERY quickly and I swear I ended up with a mild sunburn by the end. This time I wanted to step it up a notch and get some real studio-quallity lights. I had thought about moving to studio strobes but I have good off-camera flashes that work great when I want to use flash and I didn’t want even bigger and hotter constant lights. This left one obvious choice, the Westcott Spiderlite TD5. The TD5 uses a set of 5 fluorescent bulbs to provide daylight balanced light and plenty of it, but without the heat. But can you really get studio quality light out of a bank of fluorescent bulbs? We ordered a 2 light kit to put them to the test and see if this is the lighting kit we were hoping it to be.

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Gavin over at The Pro Photo Show put up a nice link to our recent article about shooting in manual mode.  If you haven’t heard of Gavin’s site or his podcast, I encourage you to subscribe to it. It is on my list of “must listen to podcasts every week. Please go see what’s going on over there! Thanks for the link Gavin.

Link: http://www.prophotoshow.net

Here is another in our Mythbusting series. Today we answer the question “is using your camera in cold weather bad for your camera?” This origin of this myth is from anecdotal evidence of people having camera failures and other strange things being attributed to being used in the cold. Is this real, imagined, or a coincidence? Let’s take a look inside this myth and find out what’s really going on.

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In the first of our Mythbusting series we are going to look at a common myth that you should always use the lowest ISO number possible to get the best results This is based on the knowledge that the higher the ISO number you use, the more noise (digital artifacts) will be created in your image While this is certainly true, what we are going to examine in this article is wether or not you should always shoot in the lowest ISO number your camera can handle in order to get the best images Will this myth be confirmed or busted? Continue reading to find out

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