Articles in Product Reviews
We have done a number of tutorials lately so we thought it was time for another inexpensive product review. This time we go back to our friends at Gadget Infinity to review an unbelievably affordable wide angle lens. We ordered the one to fit the Olympus E-500 to see how it would fair in some real world tests.
While you can’t really mess up too bad by buying inexpensive tungsten lights like the Dynaphos lights we have reviewed in the past, buying a flash system can cause you all kinds of grief if you buy a weak unit. The lack of decent specs makes buying an inexpensive unit purely a guessing game.
White balance is an age old problem that is becoming all too modern with so many people moving to digital SLRs. Today’s cameras all have a pretty decent auto white balance settings, from the basic point/shot cameras to the pro SLRs. There are also several “fixed” settings on many of the simple cameras and most of the SLRs like Sunlight, Shade, Cloudy, Fluorescent, Incandescent, etc. But as many of you may know, these settings are not always perfect, and sometimes far from it.
Learning all of the technical aspects of digital photography can be quite mind numbing for newcomers. Trying to learn about aperture, f-stops, shutter speed, depth of field, and other technical terms can be a bit overwhelming. So what do you do when you know what you want to accomplish but you just don’t know how to go about it?
For the casual user, the ability to get your flash on-camera in a very inexpensive way can make a dramatic difference in your photographs and for this price, how can you afford not to pick up a set?
Muslin is an excellent background material because it can be stored easily, hung on almost anything, and takes light well. However, muslins are quite expensive, often heading into the $250+ range. As always, we try to save money where we can and finding muslins on eBay from Amvona for under $30 was just too good to pass up.
The whole color management process is getting pretty solid as printers are more accurate than ever and if you are using a known paper, you will get great prints. However, the weak link is the monitor, if you monitor isn’t displaying accurate color, if you tweak and adjust your image to match what you saw, when you print it, the colors will be off.
If you have been reading along lately, you know my battle with cheap lights and my discovery of the Lowel Omni light which totally changed my mind about trying to do things on the cheap. But did it? Yeah, I knew I should have just kept bidding away on eBay until I won another Lowel light, but hey, I have been trying to save you all some money along the way as well so I decided to try some of the cheapest of the high wattage lights available. The DynaPhos products from Amvona are some of the most affordable around, but…..are they any good?
As you get more into photography and Photoshop, eventually you being to think you would like some extra control over what you are doing in Photoshop even if you cant quite put your finger on what that means. This is usually the time to plunk down a couple hundred bucks on a Wacom tablet and gain a whole new level of functionaly from the brush-based tools (brush, eraser, healing tools, etc) than you had with just a mouse.









