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.

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.

Kerry and David talk about how to add some spice to your shots, some of the ideas covered include:

* shooting from different angles
* changing your depth of field
* dissect other people’s work
* Look at EXIF data on people’s images

Standard Podcast [ 44:45 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (2814)

On September 23, 2008, Lensbaby, LLC (formerly known as Lensbabies, LLC) is launching an entire new system of selective focus lenses at the Photokina tradeshow in Cologne, Germany (Hall 5.2 C021).

Move over Nikon with your piddly 780p D-Movie, Canon attacks back with a consumer grade camera that can do 1080p! The new SX10 IS features a 10 megapixel CMOS sensor, face detection, motion detection, and a plethora of outstanding features.

Canon’s update to the wildly popular full frame EOS 5D is here, and it’s better than ever. The EOS 5D Mark II has a stunning 21.1-megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor with DIGIC 4 Image Processor, a vast ISO Range of 100-6400 (expandable to ISO L: 50, H1: 12800 and H2: 25600), plus EOS technologies like Auto Lighting Optimizer and Peripheral Illumination Correction.

We have done a number of articles with different flash heads but we have never gone into the detail of how to set them up and make them work, this results in emails that we sit and explain all the details to people. So today I am going to go through how to setup these studio flashes and connect them to your camera to get the results you want.

Las Vegas, NV — September 4, 2008 (Photoshop World, Booth #321) — Nik Software today announced the latest version of its popular Sharpener Pro photographic plug-in for use with Adobe® Photoshop® and Apple® Aperture™. Designed for professionals and photo enthusiasts, Sharpener Pro 3.0 is the most advanced and powerful sharpening solution for photographers, eliminating the guesswork typically required for achieving superior and consistent results.

If you have ever shopped for a flash or read a review, you may have noticed a section of the spec called the guide number or GN. While this value is a measurement of power that the flash has and allows you to compare flash models, is this number useful to you at all? In this article we dig into the guide number and see how we can use this number help us dial in our flash and camera settings using some math instead of just guessing and retrying until you get what you want.