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.

I have heard the phrase “I don’t need no stinking light meter” more times than I can count, your LCD display and histogram are all you need for a perfect exposure right? Would you be surprised if I told you that your camera was lying to you? We first need to know why our LCD and histogram is wrong before we can believe that using a light meter will be of benefit.

Are you a total Apple Aperture N00b like David and I are? If so, then you may want to listen to this podcast featuring our good friend Sara France. Sara is very well known for her Apple Aperture skills and she walks us through some of the basics of getting started with using Aperture and how to use some of the very cool features like Smart Albums and the Book designer.

In the beginning there was the original Lensbaby lens, a simple bellows system with push-pull focus and left/right and up/down sweet spot selection. Then came the Lensbaby 3G that allowed you to fine tune the sweet spot after locking it down so that you can easily repeat the same shot and settings.

Now, the Lensbaby Composer promises a lens that is easier to use, better control over focusing, and a selection of different optic inserts to give you a variety of different effects.

Las Vegas, NV (PMA Booth #U221) – March 3, 2009 – Nik Software announces today that Viveza, its popular digital photographic plug-in filter is now available for Adobe® Photoshop® Lightroom® 2 and higher. The update is free to current owners of Viveza.

Today Canon dropped two new tilt-shift lenses that update the previous models that were discontinued recently. The new TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II offers enhanced functionality and image quality in its most popular tilt-shift focal length. Designed with UD glass to minimize and compensate for chromatic aberrations and specially coated aspherical elements for the highest possible glare-free image quality, this tilt-shift lens features an angle of view of 74°. New TS revolving lets users freely combine tilting and shifting within the range of +/- 90° in the direction of movement.

If you have ever re-sized an image you know that you always lose a lot of image quality whenever you do that, especially when having to blow things up really large. The solution may just be with OnOne Software’s Genuine Fractals 6. This tool is designed purely to handle your image resizing needs. For myself, I often have to scale things like screenshots for use in the books that I have been writing so that the images look good in the books.

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.

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.

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.