Adam Mason asked us how aperture can affect your shot. To answer the question Kerry explains what aperture is and then demonstrates how it can be used to alter the look of the image you are trying to create. By learning how to use your aperture to control light and depth of field you can dramatically change the look of your photographs.

With the recent articles we have done on portrait lighting and the use of light meters we have had a bunch of requests to do an actual demonstration of how to use a meter in an actual real-world environment.

In this video Kerry demonstrates using a simple light meter in a product shoot.

Along with our regular podcast, we are thinking about trying out our hand with some videocasts. In this show, Kerry and David discuss paying attention to details. This covers your material, to your work, to working with other vendors, and more.

We have seen every imaginable type of light diffuser product you can imagine and have even built different ones yourself for specific purposes all in the name of finding just the right combination of bounce and diffusion. Every device we have seen will work great in some specific situations but will not be ideal in every situation. When we saw the VerteX for the first time, while it may have looked more like a gimmick at first glance, I soon realized the potential and just had to try one out.

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.

Focal Point is OneOne Software’s newest Photoshop plug-in that allows you to create images with selective focus and edge vignette effects. Using these techniques you can guide the viewer’s eye to the spot in the image that you want them to look at. Using an easy to use “focus bug” you can control the sweet spot, the amount and kind of blur. These types of effects have only been possible with expensive specialty lenses before. Does Focal Point deliver on the goods? We decided to try it out for ourselves and see what we thought about it.

Let’s face it, Adobe seriously dropped the ball on watermarking within Lightroom. Many of us got hints about potential new watermarking features for Lightroom 2.0 but were disappointed when there was nothing added. For many of us, Lightroom is the tool that we use for 90%+ of our workflow including prepping images for use on the web so the last thing we want to do is run some action in Photoshop or have to run an additional application to apply watermarks which reduces the image quality because the jpeg image has to be saved a second time.

In this video Kerry shows you a demo of the new Pixel Bender Gallery plugin. This is used to add special Pixel Bender effects to your images from Adobe Photoshop CS4. You will need to download the Pixel Bender plugin and any filters you want to add.

I have had the hardest time dealing with camera bags over the years, from my first backback that got so heavy I couldn’t lug it around anymore to my uber cool Airport International 2.0 which is great for big jobs but what about when I want to go a little lighter? My old backback is too large, and my Airport International is too big, and my Modulous Speed Belt can’t hold enough nor is appropriate when traveling. So what does that leave?

Another new feature in Photoshop CS4 is the Live Preview when using the Cloning and Stamping tool. What this does for you is show you exactly what the effect of the tool is going to be while you are using it. Where you will probably find this to be the most useful is lining things up with the clone tool or making sure color tones and brightness levels match well.

Today we are going to take a look at a new feature in Photoshop CS4, the Fluid Zoom and View Rotation tools. The Fluid Zoom allows for smooth zooming in and out of an image with much finer control than every before. The View Rotation tool allows you to rotate the view of the image around to make working on an image easier.

One of the coolest new tools in Adobe Photoshop CS4 is the Content Aware Scaling. With this new tool you can scale images and yet protect certain areas from being distorted, this is very useful for a variety of different applications. This short video clip will show you just how powerful, and how easy it is to use this new feature.