f you haven’t visited the L7Foto Flickr Group, we post regular assignments to help people have inspiration for taking different types of pictures. This new assignment is for you to go out and take a picture where you live that shows something unique or special about your city and shows what winter in your city is like.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?