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

Kerry and David discuss the new features of Adobe Photoshop CS4 and give their impressions of Lightroom 2.1.

Kerry talks about OnOne Software’s Photoframe 4.0 and FocalPoint 1.0.

Although you may think that no two situations are alike, the fact is that there are quite a few constants that you can rely on to give you a good starting point. The sun is one of these things you can count on to be consistent. Of course there are things that affect the sun’s output like the time of day, haze, fog, and clouds, but on a bright sunny day the light output is very consistent and knowing the camera settings for this condition will give you a guideline to make adjustments. This is where the “sunny 16″ rule comes into play.

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.

A big stumbling block for many new camera users is how to figure out how much depth of field a particular image will have it in given the focal length of the lens, the aperture used and the distance to the subject. Trust me on this, trying to do the algebra to figure it out is not something most people want to try to do in their heads. In this article we will cover all of the math involved and then make it real easy with an Excel spreadsheet and some links to some free applications to help you out.

I have been a fan of Wolverine products for almost four years now and my trusty Wolverine FlashPac was in need of an upgrade. Not that the FlashPac didn’t do it’s job, its just that it was pretty slow and didn’t have a display that could be used to view the images. Without hesitation I turned back to Wolverine to see what they had available and I found the new ESP Digital Photo Album and Multimedia Player.

As expected, the replacement for the EOS 40D has been announced just prior to Photokina. The new EOS 50D is the top end of the “prosumer” market and has a number on improvements over the 40D which is just about a year old. Let’s get right into it and see what this new camera is all about.

What’s better than a Photo Basics StrobeLite? A StrobeLite Plus of course! With more and more companies trying to attract the beginner to semi-pro market Westcott is pushing hard with the Photo Basics line to get good quality components into the marketplace. The difference with the Photo Basics line is that they are complete educational packages complete with floor mats to help with placement and instructional DVD’s.

One thing that seems to baffle a lot of new photographers is understanding the term “stop” as it pertains to a measurement of light. We see this word used over and over with regards to shutter speed, aperture, film speed, filters, lighting, and other ways that light is used. You may hear a phrase like “you should expose one side of face 1-2 stops under the lit side of the face and expose the background 1 stop under the main subject”. For many people that’s about like asking them to solve a complex calculus problem.