Camera Dojo » Featured

Podcast #100 – Talking About Lenses

KerryG — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:37:05 +0000

Welcome back to the Camera Dojo podcast. I know some people really liked the GoCast series and some people didn’t. Overwhelmingly people asked for more of a standard audio podcast with a co-host like the earlier shows. The new co-host for the show is Chris Diset, a wedding photographer from southern California. In this episode, we talk about lenses. During the show we covers our favorite lenses, how to choose a lens for different tasks, zoom versus prime lenses, and then we wrap up by each picking one lens we would choose if we could only take one.

Chris Diset on Choosing a Lens
http://blog.chrisdiset.com/2010/10/choosing-a-lens/

Show Hosts

Kerry Garrison
Website | Facebook | Twitter

Chris Diset
Website | Blog | Facebook | Twitter

Subscribe to the Camera Dojo Podcast on iTunes

To leave a voicemail for the Camera Dojo podcast, please call (888) 436-8647
To send an email, send a message to podcast@cameradojo.com

Review: SpiderPro Camera Holster

KerryG — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:00:54 +0000

Most new products come in and you just know right away if it is something that you will like or not. The SpiderPro Holster was not one of these products. I have tried numerous camera straps over the years and no matter what I have tried I have always gone back to my original R-Strap from the summer of 2008. It’s comfortable, has some storage on it, distributes my camera weight well, and suites my shooting style. So to say that I went into the testing process with a small amount of bias would be an understatement. This SpiderPro review was not something I whipped out one evening, I have really been putting it through its paces and using it exclusively for two and a half months to really see if it was something I would continue to use after knocking out a review. After that intro, your probably wondering what the result was…well…continue reading to find out.

Overview

The SpiderPro Holster is a unique device that allows you to place your camera on your waist and then be hands-free…and strap free until you are ready to use your camera again. For me, when I am not shooting, I am usually doing something with my hands like working with a product, helping someone to pose, or arranging items for a shot. Having a strap means that my camera is often in the way, sometimes swinging into something or getting in my way. The SpiderPro Holster securely holds your camera via a special plate on the bottom of your camera keeping is close, secure, and still easily accessible.

Features

The main parts of the Spider Holster system include the holster itself that straps to a belt that will hold your camera, the SpiderPro Plate which attaches to the bottom of your camera, and the SpiderPro Pin which attaches to the Plate and allows it to sit inside the holster.

The SpiderPro 1-Camera kit consists of the following components:

1 SpiderPro Camera Holster
1 SpiderPro Plate
1 SpiderPro Pin
1 SpiderPro Belt

Setup

There is only a small amount of prep work to get ready to use the SpiderPro. First you have to determine if you are going to wear it on your right or left side so you can put the holding stud into the correct position on the camera bracket. Next, you need to attach the bracket to the tripod mount on the bottom of your camera. The mount tightens with an Allen wrench that is stored in the camera mount bracket. Finally, you need to adjust the belt for your waist. Once you have the belt on, you are ready to start using it.

Usage

Using the SpiderPro holster is a very different experience than using a strap. Once you slide your camera into the holster, you are completely free of anything bogging you down and you are free to use your hands. I have to say, while any strap allows your hands to be free, with the SpiderPro Holster this takes that concept to a new level because there is nothing around your neck or on your shoulders, this is a very liberating feeling. The only issue I have is that I don’t feel overly secure not having any kind of strap on the camera in case the camera slips out of my hands. A simple solution to this is a wrist strap for your camera if you need that little extra piece of mind.

Keeping the camera on your waist instead of your neck and shoulders is actually more comfortable than I had expected. I position mine a little more towards my back than directly on my side so that a lens on the camera tends to ride behind me a little which helps protect my gear as I am maneuvering in tight areas.

My camera feels extremely secure in the holster even when the safety latch isn’t closed.

Results

While the SpiderHolster looked interesting when it first came out I was pretty happy with the existing strap I was using. While I was at WPPI this year I stopped by the SpiderHolster booth and really got some hands-on time with it. I was actually so impressed with it that I felt I really needed to give it a long term try. It only took a few outings with it to be convinced that it was going to be my primary way to carry my camera.

Using the SpiderHolster is comfortable and easy to use and I certainly recommend it to anyone looking for a better system.

Score Card

The SpiderHolster was pretty easy to grade since the only setup is to put the mount on the bottom of your camera and adjust it to your size. As for features, while it has a single purpose, it does it extremely well. The very nice clasp and the lock mechanism add to an already great package. The system is very easy to use and works great to help you from getting sore after carrying your gear all day. At $135 (Amazon) it isn’t cheap but is well worth it for the ease of use.

Website: http://spiderholster.com

Strap used in video: http://www.cottoncarrier.com/

The Problem With Many Awards Programs

KerryG — Sat, 12 May 2012 19:21:56 +0000

If you have been involved in any major industry that has its own trade shows and trade publications, you may already understand how some of the “Best of The Year” and other types of awards are handed out. For those of you not privy to the behind-the-scenes action, let’s lift the lid and see how some of these awards systems work and why you need to careful about taking a major publication’s recommendation for a product.

Have you ever pulled out a copy of a major magazine’s issue of their “Best of” products and wondered why some products made it and other products didn’t? One of the main reasons is often that a major company, that has a great and innovative product, simply won’t pay the submission fee to the publication or don’t know that a submission is required. Some companies consider this to be a form of extortion and just won’t pay to have their products “considered” for an award. This also means that copycat companies can come out with a competing product and use these submission fees as a form of paid advertising. Let’s face it, if you have even a mediocre product but it gets named as one of the most innovative products of the year in what appears to be an unbiased article, this can really kick start a company.

What do these awards cost a company? Depending on the publication, they can range from several hundred dollars to several thousand dollars. An industry insider says that some publications base awards on yearly advertising and not on any reader votes while others require you to pay to have your products considered with some unknown panel making the final decision.

So how are you to know if an award is given out based on any merit at all? The reality is that you don’t. Can a small panel of judges be completely unbiased? It’s rather hard to say for sure. With many of the big name photographers being sponsored by multiple companies, conflicts of interest are quite easy to come by. Large advertising contracts are worth tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars so there is always motivation to give big advertisers favorable reviews and awards.

Our insider goes on to tell us that the danger to a company is that if they don’t give into these types of extortion-based awards, that it leaves that category wide open for an lessor known company, or one with a poorer quality product to get this type of industry recognition.

How can you recognize these types of awards programs? It’s actually not that difficult. Looks for the same company to be mentioned in multiple categories, products that have no new innovation or unique feature winning awards, products with poor user reviews getting rewards, or an older product with no perceptible change from the previous year getting awards.

I asked our insider what the reader should consider when reading these awards articles. She says that so long as people don’t think of these as merit-based awards and instead as the thinly disguised paid advertising that most of them are, then they are less apt to base a purchase decision on an undeserved award.

Basically, the message here is reader beware. Whether its a paid award, contests claiming to give away product with no winners ever announced, or other veiled forms of marketing. Read through the disclaimers, rules, and criteria to determine exactly how these awards are being handed out before taking them at face value.

Using Gels To Fix An Ugly Sky

KerryG — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 03:51:55 +0000

Yesterday I went out with the LA Shoot This! group to help lead a group shoot event but unfortunately Mother Nature was not on our side. The sky was gray and boring and it was raining on and off. While I like nice blue skies, there was no hope of getting anything beyond dark storm clouds. My friend Chris Diset was in this same situation a few months ago and used a little white balance trick to change the color of the sky. Taking a cue from his playbook, I used that same trick to help make something out of nothing.

As I said, the sky was just downright ugly with no color in it at all, and worse, it only looked like it was going to get worse. My goal of teaching how to balance flash and bright sunlight was certainly not working out so I decided to show how to make a blue sky of of the drab sky we were looking at.

To start off, I switched the camera’s white balance from Auto to Tungsten. What this will do is to add a blue color cast to the clouds. Here is how the sky looked in both Auto and Tungsten White Balance.

Auto White Balance

Tungsten White Balance

Now that we have some color in the sky, its now time to shoot our model. If we just used a flash, the Tungsten white balance setting would make our subject look more like a Smurf than a human. In order to compensate for the much cooler color temperature we have to reverse that by making the light from the flash much warmer. To accomplish this, I used the ExpoImaging Rogue Gel Kit with the 1/2 CTO (Color Temperature Orange) gel.

Using the gelled flash to light our subject, we get the natural looking lighting on the subject while retaining the blue in the sky.

You can use this same technique with different gels to create more dramatic skies by using the opposite of this effect with a nice sunset. Using a cool (blue) gel and setting the color temperature to a higher temperature will create extremely vivid colors. No lighting kit is complete without at least a few color correction gels.

Review: Midland XTC300VP4 Wearable Action Camera

KerryG — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 22:15:27 +0000

Wearable point of view camera are all the rage right now with everyone that is doing any kind of action sport strapping cameras on to give the viewer a sense of what he/she was seeing. a newcomer to this field is Midland Radio….yes…I said Midland Radio…the same company many of us older folk knew and loved back in the CB radio craze. (yesssum, that was before all these crazy internets). Those of us who chose Midland gear did so because the stuff just worked so when I saw that Midland had an action camera, I just had to get my hands on it and give it a test drive.

Did Midland score a win with the XTC300VP4? There is only one way to find out….put it to the test!

Features

There are not a whole ton of features, settings, dials, inputs, outputs or really much of anything to the XTC300VP4. The camera is what it is, and what it is, is a video camera. There are only three settings shooting modes:

1920×1080 High Definition @ 30 FPS (16:9 Aspect Ratio)
1280×720 High Definition @ 60FPS (16:9 Aspect Ratio)
848 x 480 Standard Definition @ 60FPS (16:9 Aspect Ratio)

There are only two controls on the entire camera, the on/off slide switch and the video resolution switch. There are no menus to dig through, cryptic codes to remember, just set the video resolution you want and turn it on to start filming.

Highlights:

1080p True HD Wearable Action Camera
First Person Point Of View Video & Audio
Records with the flip of a switch
Includes Submersible Case and 4 Different Mounts
Multi-Coated tempered glass lens
Focus: 5 inches to infinity
Aspect Ratio: 16 x 9
Video Format: MPEG4 / H.264
Audio: AAC
Light Sensitivity: 1.4 V/Lux second
Transfer: USB 2.0
Power: 1100 mAH (up to 5 hours recording time)

Key Features:

Records to a Micro SD Card
127˚ Wide Angle Lens (1080p)
Records 30 frames/sec (60 frames/sec at 720p setting)
Includes a LI-Ion 1100 mAH battery pack
Weather Resistant

Setup

With a camera this simple, there isn’t much to the setup process. Plug the USB cable into the camera and then into the AC adapter, car adapter, or into a computer to start charging the battery. You will need to supply a Micro SD card as one is not included.

With the battery charged, a Micro SD card in place, simple select the video resolution you want as follows:

Position	Resolution	Frame Rate	Viewing Angle
Top Position	1080p (1920×1280)	30fps	127°
Middle Position	720p (1280×720)	60fps	170°
Bottom Position	480p (840×480)	60fps	170°

To start filming just slide the large switch on top towards the front of the camera.

Usage

These days I am not much of an action sports kind of guy but I do fly radio control helicopters and multi-rotor copters (see http://droneflyers.com). With these aircraft I do some aerial photography and video for fun. The “go to camera” has been the GoPro HD Hero camera with it’s lightweight and good image quality. The downside to the GoPro is that to really mount it to anything you need to use the heavy waterproof case that comes with it.

The Midland XTC300VP4 however, has a standard 1/4″ thread on the bottom for attaching to a regular tripod or quick connect plate. This can really cut down on the overall platform weight.

The only time you need the waterproof enclosure is if you are taking the camera into the water.

My biggest gripe about these types of cameras is the ultra wide-angle of the lens. While not a true fisheye lens, its pretty darned close. While this may work for some things, it’s often a bit much for my taste and what I would like to shoot. With a 127 degree field of view, the image will have a bit of distortion.

The following video clip demonstrates how the video looks and how the camera deals with going from bright to dim conditions and how it handles backlit images.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2izaw9p5O4

In order to make cameras at these price points, they use essentially the same sensors found in camera phones. Since there is no mechanical shutter, they take an image by scanning one line at a time from the top to the bottom of the sensor. The problem with this rolling shutter is that a fast-moving object may move from when the scanning started and when it finishes. When this happens you get what is referred to as “the Jell-O effect”.

The XTC300VP4 suffers from this rolling shutter issue which didn’t really come as a surprise considering the price point. This is only a problem under certain conditions and is less noticeable when shooting in 720p mode because the shutter is working faster.

The following video demonstrates this rolling shutter issue. Keep in mind that this is NOT unique to the XTX300VP4, all the small action cameras in this class have the same issue.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJ80VmH0FOA

This next video puts the XTC300VP4 on a tripod to shoot a fast-moving QuadCopter.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZG5ABbLG2e4

In this last video, a white streak is visible in the top and a lens flare is visible in the lower middle of the frame. Without a lens hood and with such a wide-angle lens, getting a piece of the Sun in the shot is bound to happen.

As I explain in the video, the tripod mount on the bottom of the camera is not deep enough for most tripods and mounts. With most tripods you can’t tighten the camera down onto the mount tightly. With the tripod I used the camera would have a tendency to just spin around making it hard to set up a good shot.

Results

The XTC300VP4 will set you back $249 which is in the same ballpark as the GoPro and Coutour cameras so making a decision isn’t really a price issue. The XTC’s streamlined design may fit certain situations better than the much wider GoPro. While I really wish the field of view was adjustable I can’t knock the XTC for it considering other action cameras are the same or even worse.

The simplicity of the XTC300VP4 is what really sets it apart from the crowd. While some of the competitors in this field also shoot stills, their ultra wide-angle is better suited to video than stills. By sticking just to shooting video, the XTC300VP4 has taking simplicity to new levels that anyone can use even if they are wearing thick skiing gloves. The lower resolution mode doesn’t change the frame rate although the smaller image size would mean you can fit more video onto one card. The XTC300VP4 comes with a nice choice of mounting options and a very nice touch is both an AC charger and a car accessory port charger.

Score Card

The XTC300VP4 gets high marks for its dead simple setup and one-touch control. Since it can be operated even with thick gloves on, the usage score gets high marks as well. The features category takes a small hit due to not having the ability to take stills and the super wide-angle field of view. The final results category took a minimal hit due to the rolling shutter issue which, although it is problematic when the camera is being flown, not everyone will have a major issue with. The overall value gets full marks for the nice accessory package that comes standard and the price point is in the middle ground of the competition.

Midland Website: http://midlandradio.com

Photoshop CS6 Public Beta

KerryG — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 05:40:43 +0000

Photoshop CS6 Beta Now Available on Adobe Labs

First Major Release since April 2010 Packed with New Features and Huge Performance Enhancements

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced Adobe Photoshop CS6 beta, a preview of what’s to come in the next release of the industry standard in digital imaging, is available as a free download from Adobe Labs. Customers can download the beta, try out the experience and provide feedback to the product team. Packed with groundbreaking new innovations, features and incredible performance enhancements, Photoshop CS6 beta is available for the Mac OS and Microsoft Windows platforms. The final release is expected in the first half of 2012.

“Photoshop CS6 will be a milestone release that pushes the boundaries of imaging innovation with incredible speed and performance,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president products, Creative Media Solutions, Adobe. “We couldn’t wait to share this beta of Photoshop CS6 with our customers and are looking forward to hearing from them and seeing the ways they are incorporating the beta into their daily creative workflows.”

New Features in Photoshop CS6 Beta

Photoshop CS6 beta demonstrates Adobe’s focus on huge performance enhancements, imaging magic and creativity tools that offer customers a new experience in digital imaging. Key features include new additions to the Content-Aware tools: Content-Aware Patch allows greater control by letting users select and duplicate an area of an image to fill in or “patch” another. Content-Aware Move lets users select and magically move an object to a new place in the image.

Customers will experience incredible performance, powered by the new Adobe Mercury Graphics Engine, enabling near-instant results from popular editing tools including Liquify, Puppet Warp, Transform and Lighting Effects; and a refined, modern interface featuring dark UI options to make images pop. New and re-engineered design tools make creating designs faster and more efficient. Vector layers allow users to apply dashed lines and gradient strokes, searchable layers help quickly zero in on any layer you need, and new type styles let designers quickly apply type treatments to their designs.

In addition, the Photoshop CS6 beta offers all the features of Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended, such as new 3D editing features and quantitative imaging analysis capabilities. These features will be included in the shipping version of Photoshop CS6 Extended when it becomes available.

Pricing and Availability

The Photoshop CS6 beta is available immediately as a free download in English and Japanese. At installation, users will be required to provide an Adobe ID to complete a one-time login and online product activation. For information on how to install Photoshop CS6 beta visit http://www.adobe.com/go/photoshopcs6. Customers can submit feedback via the Photoshop CS6 beta forum: http://www.adobe.com/go/pscs6_forum. Users can also connect with the Photoshop team via the community-powered site: http://feedback.photoshop.com; on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/Photoshop; YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/photoshop; Photoshop.com blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/photoshopdotcom/; or via Twitter: http://twitter.com/photoshop.

Adobe Photoshop Family

Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Extended are at the heart of the Photoshop family, joined by solutions for users at every level who want to bring out the best in their digital images either at home, in the office or on the go. Coupled with Adobe Photoshop, the recently released Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 addresses the workflow needs of amateur and professional photographers, helping them create, manage and showcase images in impactful ways. Adobe Photoshop Elements provides consumers with powerful yet easy-to-use tools that organize, edit, create and share photos memories. For mobile devices, the Adobe Photoshop Touch app transforms images with core Photoshop features custom-built for tablets; and Photoshop Express is a free app for simple photo fixes and enhancements, and sharing to social networks.

About Adobe Systems Incorporated

Adobe is changing the world through digital experiences. For more information, visit www.adobe.com.

GoCast #20 – Readers Questions

KerryG — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 23:24:54 +0000

In this episode, I tackle some readers questions that have been sent in.During this episode we talking about fixing exposure issues, bouncing light, using reflectors, shooting groups of people, rechargeable batteries, and a handful of other topics.

This one was recorded in our cargo van so the noise reduction makes it sound pretty tiney. I apologize for the poor audio quality.

Host: Kerry Garrison

GoCast #19 – How to choose the right equipment

KerryG — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 14:39:40 +0000

With different camera bodies, lenses, and countless accessories available, deciding what to buy that will really make a difference is often very difficult. In this episode Kerry Garrison discusses how to go about picking out the right gear.

Host: Kerry Garrison

Sponsors: GoPro, Blackbelt Lighting