Do you have dreams of shooting a Canon 1Ds Mk III? The new Canon 5D Mk II? The Nikon flagship D3X? Or how about shooting with a $1,600 70-200 IS L 2.8? If you are like me, that’s pretty much all we can do is dream about the day we can afford high end gear like that. Rentals are always a good option either since most places require a deposit equal to the purchase price of the equipment.

Oh Canon 5D Mk II, how doest I love thee, let me count the ways. That could pretty much sum up my impressions of the newest camera from the folks at Canon but it probably doesn’t tell you what you really need to know. I certainly don’t have the testing lab that DPReview or Popular Photography has to tell you all the little specs and test results, but as someone who is shooting all the time, I figured I would get my hands on one and see if it really is all that it is hyped up to be.

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.

It seems like we just got into our groove with Photoshop CS3 and now CS4 is out and everyone is wondering if its really a signifigant upgrade or not. I just spent the day with the folks from Adobe to get a deep dive into the entire CS4 family and let me just say, one day was not nearly enough time to learn about everything. There are very cool changes in virtually every product in the entire suite. Today we are going to go deep into Photoshop CS4 and find out what some of the new features are and try to explain in layman’s terms what each of the new features can do for you.

The 5th major iteration of the Camera Raw plug-in is now shipping as part of Photoshop CS4. Camera Raw 5 has a number of new features:

* Local adjustment brush
* Graduated Filter
* “Post Crop” Vignetting
* Opacity for the cloning/healing tool
* Improved Auto Adjustment
* Support for the new Camera Profiles that are still in beta form

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.