29 Jun, 2008
For photographers that shoot in RAW one of the biggest problems is not being able to see thumbnails of the images in Windows Explorer or do quick checks of RAW images without having to open them in Lightroom or Photoshop. I have been using dpMagic for over three years now and had thought that the project had completely stalled out. To my surprise they were just getting ready to launch a new version and it’s finally been released. Since dpMagic has been an indispensable part of my RAW workflow, I couldn’t wait for the new 2.0 version to come out and share it with you.
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19 Jun, 2008
All of us here at The Dojo are HUGE fans of products from Think Tank Photo. David and I both wear Modulus Speed Belts with different accessories. My old eBay-special backpack was really beginning to fall apart and has become quite heavy with gear. When you use a backpack and get to a point that you don’t trust the straps to stay on, it’s well past time for a new bag. After looking around at different options I had decided that I definitely wanted a roller-style and it had to be able to always be used as carry-on no matter where I go as I never check my camera gear as luggage. On the off-chance that I absolutely had to check the bag in, I wanted to make sure the contents are secure and safe as possible. With these requirements in hand, there was really only one option in my mind, the Think Tank Photo Airport International 2.0.
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17 Jun, 2008
We have talked white balance in the past and have reviewed different products that help you get a good white balance setting. A new product has hit the streets that does the same thing, and since the Dojo is all about helping you to improve your images and doing so at a decent price, we needed to take a look at the new Colorright disc. So let’s take a quick look at why we need white balance and if the Colorright disc is worth the cost.
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7 Jun, 2008
For almost everything in photography there is usually a simple way to figure out what it is you are trying to accomplish, whether it is figuring out how to light something, what shutter speed to use to stop motion or to create a sense of movement. The hardest thing to do is to figure out how much depth of field will be in your images. While you can sometimes get a preview or you can always do the shoot-chimp-repeat dance until you get what you want. The trick is to actually know how to calculate the amount of depth of field you will get based on your aperture and focal length. This is where the Expoaperture discs come into play. If you want a specific effect without the trial-and-error, then the Expoaperture discs will save you tons of time and once you get a solid feel for how the system works you will eventually be able to setup your shots without it.
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19 Apr, 2008
I am a big fan of doing interesting lighting techniques and have been playing around with using gels to create colored background effects. While using small gels can work pretty good, I have been looking for something that works better, isn’t as fragile, and basically was designed for the purpose. What I found was the Lumiquest FX kit. The FX is a complete colored filter system designed specifically to create colored lighting effects.
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12 Apr, 2008
For the most part I come home from a shoot and dump the images from the CF cards onto the computer and then do my backups. Once in a while I am gone for a weekend without the benefit of a laptop and I want to make sure I have my CF cards backed up every night. For this reason I picked up a Wolverine Flashpac several years ago and have been using it ever since. Since you should always make backups as soon as possible, I can’t recommend some type of device like this enough.
Continue reading to learn more about remote backup devices…
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11 Mar, 2008
For a lot of people, getting into photography is all about creativity and imagination while trying to find unique ways to express yourself. However, take a look through Flickr and most pictures are boring and bland. One of digital’s greatest strengths is that it’s simple, fast, easy, automatic, and doesn’t require much thought or effort to take a picture with a modern DSLR. While those are digital’s greatest strengths, it is also its biggest weakness. When something is too easy to do, the quality of the end result can often suffer. In this article we are going to take a look at the Lensbaby 3G. Not only does it add a very unique effect to your images, it also makes you slow down and really think about the image you are making. Because of its design, it also makes using your camera a much more interactive process. So let’s get into it and see what the Lensbaby 3G is all about.
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2 Mar, 2008
As you develop a good digital workflow and learn the power of tools like Adobe’s Lightroom, one of the tendencies is to take less time to perfect your exposure and white balance in the camera because it is so easy to correct these things during post production. However, when you think about it, if you spend 15 seconds per image and you do a wedding with 2,000 images, that’s 8 hours of fixing white balance and exposure. On the other hand, if you spend 15 seconds at each shot location during a wedding to get the exposure and white balance right, that will add up to about 3-4 minutes of time to get the settings right in-camera. If this sounds more like the time you want to spend getting you images right, then you should probably look into a digital calibration target.
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22 Dec, 2007
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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23 Nov, 2007
Not everyone will ever have the need to shoot tethered to a computer but if you do, it can really come in handy. Whether it is for quickly getting your shots to your computer, using the computer to control the camera’s settings remotely, or to easily send the image to a monitor for other people to review live, shooting tethered is sometimes the only way to do what you want. Most of the higher-end cameras like Canons come with software to allow for tethered shooting, so why would you need to pay for a product to do the same thing? Continue reading to see what we have to say about it.
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