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.

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.

Based on comments and emails I have received there are still some people that are confused about how the three elements of exposure play together to determine how dark or bright an image is. Today I want you to think of the three elements of exposure as the three points of a triangle each having an equal effect on the final exposure of the image.

Heather wrote in with the following question and we thought it deserved more than just a quick email response.

“Hey Guys,

I got a question for ya. Sorry the answer to this might already be on your site somewhere but I’d just thought I would msg you instead. I was wondering if you had any suggestions for photography books either having to do w/ business or the technical side of things.

Yes, RAW vs. JPEG, the seemingly endless debate, almost as bad as Mac vs. PC or Film vs. Digital and people have been asking me to write up an article on this based on my opinion and experience and I have really put this article off for a long time as I wanted to be as unbiased in how I write this given that this is a very biased topic.

With the release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.2, camera profiles are now built in by default. What are camera profiles? Well, let’s look start at the beginning and explain what happens to your images within Lightroom so we have a basis of reference when we get back to figuring out how to use these profiles.

HDR Photography is a method of combining multiple exposures into a single image in order to achieve a greater dynamic range in an image. If that sounded a bit complex, let’s break that down a bit more. If I take a photo, the sensor only can capture a given range from light to dark, in a normally exposed image, you may lose some detail in the darkest areas and you may lose some detail in the brightest areas. But if we can take an normal exposure, an underexposed image (to get the detail in the highlights) and an overexposed image (to get the details in the shadows) and combine them into a single image, then we can get a new image that can be the best of all three.

As part of our Photography Basics series we talked about Exposure already and this time we are going to cover the mystery of aperture. Aperture is probably the least understood setting of everything on your camera. While shutter settings are very easy to understand, to long of a shutter speed and you will get blurring, pretty simple stuff. Same with ISO, too high of ISO and you introduce digital noise. But learning how to use aperture properly can kill brain cells faster than a frat house kegger party.

We are beginning a series we are going to call photography basics to help explore the basics of digital photography. While the focus is on digital photography, all of the concepts will apply whether you are shooting film or digital. In this first installment we are going to look at how to control exposure by manipulating the different settings on the camera such as ISO, Shutter, and Aperture. Upcoming installments will focus on other areas such as depth of field, motion control, and specific shooting scenarios.

I have been wanting to write this article for some time now… ever since I received a really bad fake SandDisk Ultra II Compact Flash card a few years back. After doing some research online, I found a few others that were getting the same crap cards from their online purchases.