01.14
10
by jachamp ·
You knew it would happen. You got the camera you wanted and it’s a beginner and maybe the lens(es) that come with it are not exactly what you were hoping for but believe me, they will work well while you learn.
The first thing you need to do now is find a challenge for yourself on that camera. Go out and use it and shoot images of something. Kids playing in the park, deer eating your neighbors’ flowers, maybe even hit the local sporting facilities and shoot photos of athletes doing their thing.
Just use the camera.
The next thing you should do is learn the main rules of good photography and composition that you can get from here: http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/photography-the-rules-of-composition/
It’s important to learn how to take photographs well. It gets boring seeing the same setup on every single photo. First rule…do not center every photograph and go on and get close to where the action is. Headroom is one thing but footroom and composition is very important.
Let’s talk about another area of focus…tools. Right now the only tool you need is you. You are equipped with everything you need to take good photographs. You do not need to buy a $200 tripod nor a $10,000 lens nor a $1000 flash. Step back…buy those things only when you need them and if you’ll use them more than once.
If you’re only going to use the camera component once or twice, consider renting. What? You can rent lenses, flashes, and tripods? Yes…and you can even rent another camera.
Just do a Google search for camera rental and check out the vendors. You can also check in your community. Stores like Camera Exchange in San Antonio, rent equipment and should you decide to buy it, they apply some of your rental fees to your purchase.
Next time…I’ll update you on when you can go wildflower hunting and where you can get the best clusters. Hint: you will need to get in a car and drive. Sorry…your backyard isn’t going to cut it unless you live on a farm.
12.1
09
by jachamp ·
This shot was taken with my Nikon D40 using my Tamron 70-300mm in macro mode. It tooks many shots to get this right as this web was floating in the breeze. Add to that the fact that I didn’t have my tripod, and you have this soft focus shot that has some wonderful shots around the edges of this crab spider. This shot was one of many I took Thanksgiving afternoon and made for a good dessert treat (and no…I didn’t eat him).
10.17
09
by jachamp ·
Recently Nikon annouced it’s newest product, the Nikon D3S. This is a camera for professional photographers and those who have money to spend on camera equipment. The D3S does something that the D3X and other D3 models have never done, shoot video at 720p at 24 fps. While that is not the 1080p at 30 fps that we’ve come to love in our video, it is a marked stepped up from nothing.
Now the D3S is more of a minor upgrade than a new model. Nikon has beefed up some things and refined others.
For instance, the new key part of this camera is its ability to manipulate the ISO settings. For the amateur, the ISO setting determines how long the shutter stays open and how much light is allowed to come into the auto-focus sensor. In this case, it can use a short 100 ISO or a lengthy and an amazing 102,400 ISO. Yes…you read right. I’d love to see how grainy those shots come out looking. And unless you are using still life, shots at that speed will blur dramatically. Even the light movement of a flower from an overhead ceiling fan will make an image almost unuseable.
Now this camera can shoot up to 11 frames per second , although Nikon’s data indicates it will only shoot 9FPS, with a buffer that will allow you to shoot a hundred shots or more continuously and store them on its spacious dual Compact Flash card slots. The cards can be setup for overflow, copying, or you can shoot RAW on one card and JPEG on another. So long as you don’t confuse which card has what when you are post-processing I’ll assume the headaches would be minimal from this.
This camera does autofocus by color tracking or you can fine tune it. One of the things about a camera of this magnitude is the control the photographer has over it. You can pretty much adjust anything to your liking or to fit your shooting situation.
So if you are interested in plunking down your debit card for this little bad boy, be prepared to shell out close to $5,200 and that’s for the body only. It uses Nikon AF-S lenses so if you are upgrading from another Nikon camera, the lens support should be smooth.
Nikon says on their site that these cameras will be available in November so it gives you time to stop paying your bills in order to come up with the cash you’ll need for this.
And yes…you can mail me donations and I’lll put them to good use in buying the older D3X. Why? Because it should come down in price now that the newer version is out.
10.11
09
by jachamp ·
I had this talk with the students both in my hardware and in my networking classes this week and feel it’s an important enough thing to warrant its own post. I have a student, who had an issue with his hard drive, for those technically saavy amongst you, his hard drive lost its partition table and hence all of the contents of that drive. For the uninitiated let me explain; the partition table is like a giant database that gives the operating system a map of where things are. So when the system loses this map, it loses everything and all you can do is reinstall Windows, Linux, or whatever operating system that you use and start all over.
You can see how easy it is to lose everything…all those special moments and all those memories…gone.
So let’s talk about backups…the hard part is choosing a service. There are many free services available to help you store your images online. What you are looking for is a service that is reliable, does not change your image sizes (and there are many that do), provides you plenty of free space online and makes it easy for you to upload and access your content.
For simplicity’s sake, I will put these in a list for you:
Windows Live SkyDrive–This is probably the largest online storage site that you can find for free. If you use Windows and Internet Explorer (and that’s most of you), this is real simple. You simply sign up and begin using this. You get 25GB of storage on their servers to use as you see fit.
Windows Live Photo is another free service from Microsoft. The Skydrive is designed for your documents and photos while Photos Live is a cross between social networking and photo storage. You get the same 25GB that is in your SkyDrive account. This is simply branded under a different name.
Flickr is a free service from Yahoo. Your access is limited and you need to check their site as the terms may change. http://www.flickr.com/help/limits/#28 will explain the details. (Please note–I have an upgraded account with Flickr and it works well for my purposes).
Photobucket is pretty much a mirror image of Flickr. They allow you to store up to 5,000 images on their site for free.
Imageshack is another free service that I am not that familiar with. I know they provide you with URL’s to your images much like Flickr and Photobucket so that you can embed them in webpages, emails, or online posts. They also have some limitations.
Photoshop.com is the site I reviewed in my last post. In addition to giving you editting tools, it also provides you with 2GB of free space and 20 GB will cost you $20/year. Now most sites give you access to some sort of photo editting software. Flickr provides you with access to online editor Picnik and Microsoft’s Live tools give you access to a Microsoft’s Live Photo Gallery.
Picasa is the free image hosting service from Google. Picasa lets you store up to 1GB of web albums on their servers. Now this is the smallest I’ve seen however, if you use Firefox and have a Gmail account, you can download a plugin which will allow you to use the 8GB of email space Google has given you for file storage. There are some limited editting tools which will suffice for most purposes.
Now the one thing to remember is that if you are uploading very large files (the Canon Mark V raw file is about 77MB in size) these sites may alter them and convert them to JPG or it may simply shrink them in size. Flickr’s free service restricts the image size that you or your users can download and others may do the same. Your mileage may vary.
But remember that even if you lost you original version of that special pic, any sized backup is better than nothing. I am writing this in the hopes of encouraging you to save your history and to save artifacts for those who will follow us; our children, grandchildren, great-great-great grandchildren plus who knows which descendant of ours will be famous one day and a cousin can point to an old photo and say “See? we are too related!”
Next time…we’ll talk about pay image hosting sites.
10.1
09
by jachamp ·
- Sunflower in my backyard editted in Adobe Photoshop.com
With some mild fear I decided to try out Adobe’s online image editting solution, Photoshop.com. Now this is a nicely crafted site. It has many of the features that sites like Piknik and Picasa offer with something that are decidedly Adobe.
The first thing you should know is that the basic account is free. It’ll cost you an email account but that email account that I used to sign up with has yet to see one single piece of spam from Adobe or Photoshop.com. The basic account will let you hold up to 2GB worth of images. That sounds like a lot and it is for most point and shoot camera users.
If you are using a high end Canon Mark V with the default 77MB file sizes, then you know what your limits are and you probably are not looking for free online storage solutions for your photos.
Now let’s talk about free solutions for a minute. It is important that you do not store precious and rare photographs only on your home PC. Heaven forbid that a catastrophe strike, you will lose those memories. It is okay to do backups of your home pc files, pictures, and video on to DVD’s or some other onsite storage solution however, you should also make use of Flickr, Picasa, Photoshop.com, Photobucket, SmugMug or the plethora of online storage offerings.
So now that we have established that it is wise to move your photos off of your home PC and on to a storage site where backups are done routinely, let me add that you should have a copy at home too.
Now Photoshop.com gives you many tools for editting, cropping, and in many other ways manipulating your images. It does not give you all of the tools that you would get with Photoshop CS4, CS3, or any other Adobe Photoshop boxed software offering. It does however give you just enough tools to take a plain image and spice it up a little or maybe get rid of those demon eyes your puppy gets from the flash bulb.
It also lets you integrate your images with Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook and possibly more coming soon. You can choose to share photos on Photoshop.com with friends or ban outsiders from viewing your work.
Adobe also makes available paid versions of this site which offer you more storage. You should check the site for pricing as it may change from the time I write this and the time you read this.
I really cannot applaud this product properly. You will have to try it for yourself.
09.30
09
by jachamp ·
I have a nice Nikon D40 DSLR camera that I have had now for almost two years. While I certainly am not ready for a D700 or D300s, I would like to get input from you as to what kind of camera I should get next.
I am leaning towards the D90 or maybe a used D300 if I can get the price right.
Since I shoot a lot of sports and nature stuff, I would like it to have a fast shutter speed for continuous shooting, >4 frames per second in burst mode but I’ll be practical about it and can hang with this one a little longer under someone knows of a better camera down the pipeline.
09.11
09
by jachamp ·
For starters while perusing through the thousands of photos I have taken I stumbled upon this choice shot taken of Alcatraz prison from my balcony aboard the Royal Caribbean Mariner of the Seas.
Spooky photo of Alcatraz with no effects
I have more shots but nothing this dramatic.
08.10
09
by jachamp ·
While Tamron makes a really good lens, I am increasingly unsatisfied with the performance on my 70-300mm with macro. Then again..you get what you pay for.
Either way…this is a remarkable macro taken with a Tamron lens.
Enjoy– http://tamrontechstips.typepad.com/tamron_blog/2009/08/flowery-dew-drops.html
08.6
09
by jachamp ·
Okay…so I have sent off to Nikon asking them to test drive their new D300S DSLR camera. This thing is a huge step up over my current D40. For starters the new D300S takes up to 8 pictures per second and it gives the user more control over the camera than my D40 does.
It shoots with 12.3 megapixels of clarity in your images plus it also offers 51 autofocus points which is substantially more than my D40.
The camera is a professional grade camera. It has a remarkable movie feature but my understanding has been that it can only shoot about 5 minutes worth of moving video. That’s apparently the most a 4GB memory card can hold but surprise! This model features both a compact flash and an SD card slot.
In actuality, Nikon unveiled several DSLR’s as well as a number of new cameras in its Coolpix line of cameras. I have one of the lower end Coolpix models and it takes very good photos and it is a great point and shoot camera.
I don’t expect Nikon to say yes but it’s worth a shot.
07.31
09
by jachamp ·
It started with Netscape 2. You would visit a site and in order to remember your settings and other information that would be annoying to reenter over and over again, so the web site would place a cookie on your computer which stored all the details of your previous visit(s).
Then came tracking beacons and phone home applications that were placed on your computers. Now we have the case of Amazon’s reading device, the Kindle, which not only tracks your reading habits; it’s not happy enough with that ability. Now Amazon has the ability to remove content it does not think you should have.
Today, MSNBC has a story about a 17 year old advanced placement class student who lost all of his work and his copy of George Orwell’s 1984 when Amazon discovered that it had been selling an illegal (pirated) version of 1984. While it is not the teen’s fault that Amazon was lazy in checking the authority of the person offering the electronic copies of the novel for sale, it is also not up to Amazon to simply turn on its tracking devices and wipe the book off of you e-reader.
What bothers me is the level of control companies have over our lives. OnStar can turn off your car while you’re driving it. Microsoft has the ability to turn off your PC while you are using it. Music “rental”..ahem subscription sites, remove your ability to play music that you have paid them for. Other sites, like Yahoo music, go out of business and then turn off their authentication servers which prevent you from playing back material that you have paid for and thought you had every right to listen to.
The truth is, since Microsoft came up with the idea of licensing, your ability to enjoy media in a format that you have paid for has been significantly diminished. Media companies have retained more control than ever over your movies, music, and reading material. If you want to break this trend, you’re going to have to sacrifice.
Quit buying entertainment. Quit going to the movies. Quit wasting your money supporting businesses just because you might like what they have to offer. When you make a purchase you are supporting their bad policies that make honest people into criminals.
