Article Archive for March 2009
Just a quick note to everyone letting you know we are running late getting this week’s podcast up. We had a few scheduling issues with potential guests and then I had to go out of town for a few days. We will have a new podcast up in a few days announcing the winners of recent contests. Stay tuned!
I have seen grown men shiver and quake in the shoes at the thought of cleaning the sensor on their DSLR by themselves. The sheer anxiety of sticking something into your expensive camera body has left many people with the only option for dust removal being a stop at a camera shop or repair center for a cleaning. In this article we will look at how to clean your camera’s sensor the safe and easy way and dispel some myths around the black art of sensor cleaning.
Canon’s new EOS Rebel T1i is packed with features, both refined and new. In addition to its admirable performance with an all-new 15.1 Megapixel Canon CMOS sensor, DIGIC 4 Image Processor, a 3.0-inch Clear View LCD with anti-reflective and scratch-resistant coating, and compatibility with the EOS System of lenses and Speedlites, the EOS Rebel T1i adds remarkable Full HD video capture at resolutions up to 1920 x 1080.
Kerry talks to Jim Divitale about using speciality lenses like the Lensbaby Composer in commercial shoots. Jim talks about how to tell clients about the effects, how to prepare for a shoot, and the comparision between the effect of of a Lensbaby versus a Tlt-Shift and 4×5 View camera.
Studio strobes are expensive and when you need lots of light but when you want to use them on location somewhere you have to find electrical outlets and possibly use long unwieldy extensions cords. But what happens when there is no power available at all? Using a generator is not recommended unless you can find one with a true sine wave inverter and even then, the peak times of the strobes when recycling can put an excessive strain on the generator. Innovatronix has a solution with their Explorer XT portable power source.
Kerry and David discuss the latest tools and gadgets they have been using or have seen at the recent shows including products from Lensbaby, Vanguard, California Sunbounce, Datacolor, Lenspen, Sandisk, Flip video, Apple, and Photovision.
During a wedding shoot one day I noticed that my flash was only firing occasionally. After the initial panic, I quickly figured out that if I held the flash with a little counter-clockwise tension, then the flash worked fine. At the first break, I tried my backup camera and it was doing the same thing. When I got home, I checked it against my daughter’s 20D and it worked fine, and it also seemed that the hot shoe on my cameras was loose compared to hers.Another symptom of this is that the flash will switch from E-TTL mode into TTL mode and the exposure will usually be very overexposed.
On this third (and final) part of my intervew on Aaron Dieppa’s The Big Picture, we discuss the different Dojo Lightroom presets that I developed for photographers and were I see Camera Dojo going over the next year. We also discuss issues that people have with lighting and making lighting look more natural.
In this episode, Kerry and Aaron discuss the current trend of “transparency” and putting yourself “out there” and how this is changing how we communicate with our clients and our peers. This is a very interesting discussion. For more of Aaron’s The Big Picture video blog, go visit http://aarondieppa.com.
For those of you who haven’t heard about Aaron Dieppa, he is an Orange County photographer who came up with an insane idea to try to do a daily video blog for an entire year. To say that he has taken on quite a challenge is an understatement but he has been doing a great job so far. Be sure and check out The Big Picture at http://www.aarondieppa.com for all the back espisodes. This week however, I am thrilled that Aaron asked me to be a guest on the show and we talked for quite a while about Camera Dojo and the industry, so much so that he needed to break it up into three shows.
I have always been a proponent of keeping my cameras looking brand new. A big piece of keeping your camera new is protecting the screens. This has been an age-old issue that affects all modern, digital cameras from point and shoots to professional SLRs. With typical protectors seeming overprices at $10 to $15 for a piece of plastic film smaller than the palm of your hand, why would you spend quite a bit more than that for the Giottos Camera Screen Protectors? We needed to try these out and see if they were worth the extra cost.
In the beginning there was the original Lensbaby lens, a simple bellows system with push-pull focus and left/right and up/down sweet spot selection. Then came the Lensbaby 3G that allowed you to fine tune the sweet spot after locking it down so that you can easily repeat the same shot and settings.
Now, the Lensbaby Composer promises a lens that is easier to use, better control over focusing, and a selection of different optic inserts to give you a variety of different effects.
