Rain can surprise you most any time of year of course, but when the seasons are changing your odds of being caught by a passing shower are all too real. Precipitation during the winter months is a given, and summers here in the northwest can be gorgeous, but spring and fall can be a bit iffy. Not only do you need to keep yourself dry, but your camera gear will thank you for keeping it dry as well….
Last week, we looked at how to remove the quick release clamp from a ball head to allow you to customize your tripod to best meet your needs. I’m assuming you have either already removed the clamp from yours or have bought a head without the clamp attached. If your ball head still has a clamp, stop now and read part one of this article, published lasts week. If you do now have a ball head without a clamp, it’s time to find out how to add a new one….
More than likely, if you own a Markins, Arca Swiss, Kirk Enterprises or compatible tripod ball head, it came with a quick release clamp fastened on top. These days though, several companies sell replacement clamps in various styles, and Markins even sells ball heads with no clamp at all for the do-it-yourselfer. If this gets you thinking about customizing your setup, you may find some helpful tips in this, the first of a two-part article on adding or replacing your quick release clamp. This week, I’ll look at how to get your old clamp off, and next week I’ll discuss how to attach the new one….
Conventional wisdom is that one can achieve a sharper image by stopping down to a smaller aperture, but this misses the mark in two fundamental ways. First, the image will always be sharp at the point of focus. What a smaller aperture gives you is an apparent sense of greater sharpness by extending depth of field over a wider range of distances in front of and behind that focus point. Second, a phenomenon known as diffraction can cause you to actually get progressively less sharp images beyond a certain aperture, even at your focus distance. And it is this second point that is the subject of this week’s PhotoTip article….
I hoped it was just a bad April Fools joke, but it wasn’t. While down in Portland, Oregon yesterday for a meeting of the Nature Photographers of the Pacific Northwest, my laptop flaked out. It didn’t die completely, but the hard drive turned out to have a bad block, and that block turned out to be used by the System Registry. On the scale of important parts on a Windows system, this is right up near the top. I was pretty well out of commission. But rather than being forced to reinstall everything, the problem was fixed in just over an hour, thanks to a remarkable program known as SpinRite….
When I introduced the Earthbound Light Solution for Curves (and other goodies) in Photoshop Elements just over a year ago, I also wrote briefly about a nice plug-in known as Curvemeister that I’ve been meaning to take a more detailed look at ever since. By now, Curvemeister is up to version 2.1. Mike Russell, the program’s author has indeed been busy, and the thoughtful features found throughout the program are the obvious result….
The generic rule of thumb is that you can expect to successfully hand hold your camera down to a shutter speed of one over the focal length. For example, if you are shooting with a 200mm lens, hand held shots should generally be sharp if your shutter speed is at least 1/200 second. The rule was devised back in the film days though, so it’s worth taking a look at whether digital has changed things especially after spending the past two weeks looking at other effects of the digital crop factor….
Continuing with our exploration of the effects of sensor size and digital crop factor, it’s time to consider depth of field. Normally, DOF changes when focal length does, but since digital doesn’t really alter focal length, it might be tempting to think that sensor size won’t affect depth of field. In reality though, it does, but by how much, and even whether it decreases or increases, depends on how we compare things….
Continuing with our exploration of the effects of sensor size and digital crop factor, it’s time to consider depth of field. Normally, DOF changes when focal length does, but since digital doesn’t really alter focal length, it might be tempting to think that sensor size won’t affect depth of field. In reality though, it does, but by how much, and even whether it decreases or increases, depends on how we compare things….
Back in the good old days of film, everything seemed so simple. Focal length was focal length and lenses produced the field of view we were accustomed to. But digital changed things. The printed pictures still come out the same size, but there’s something sized differently in how they get shot. We call it the “crop factor” or “focal length multiplier,” and it’s the topic of this week’s PhotoTip article….
Nikon wants every user of their digital cameras to feel that Nikon Capture is the best tool to use for converting their raw images. Regular readers here know that I have mixed feelings about how successful they have been at providing a program to live up to that aim. It is in this context that I wanted to present a few first thoughts on their recent announcement of the new version, dubbed Capture NX….
When you look through the viewfinder of an SLR camera, the image you see is focused on the aptly named focusing screen. The standard screen that ships with Nikon cameras is called the “B” screen, but many landscape photographers switch to an “E” grid screen instead. This is the same thing as the regular one except that it has an added tic-tac-toe grid etched on it. Lining the horizon up with a grid line helps to avoid problems with crooked pictures. The only problem that remains is how to actually replace the screen….
There’s a Black and White mode in its Photo Effects palette, but since Nikon Capture lacks a channel mixer, it would be easy to assume it can’t control how much of each color is included in the resulting grayscale image. But in fact, it can. Indeed it can do so rather well. Here’s how….
Every serious photographer I know who has shot film carefully safeguards their negatives or slides. No matter how good a print or scan made from one is, the actual piece of film is the reference standard. After all, it alone contains the complete information captured by the camera. For digital photographers, the raw file is at least as important, but its safety is currently far less assured. Allow me to elaborate, and suggest a way that you can help to improve this situation….
After spending some time last week discussing how sRGB and Adobe RGB differ, it seemed an opportune time to bring ProPhoto RGB into the mix. While the gamut of Adobe RGB is bigger than that of sRGB, ProPhoto RGB is really big. But is bigger necessarily better?….
As more and more photographers dip there toes in the developing trays of the digital darkroom (to stretch an analogy perhaps further than necessary), the choice of color space becomes a more frequent topic of conversation. But all is not necessarily as it appears since not all programs are color management aware….
Last week, I wrote about adjusting saturation in Photoshop using the Hue/Saturation tool. Given the importance of color, it’s no wonder I wasn’t able to cover everything. So this week I’m picking up where we left off. I mainly covered the middle of three sliders, the Saturation adjustment. I don’t feel too bad though for neglecting the other two sliders in Hue/Saturation since even Adobe only mentions two in the name of this dialog. For the record, Adobe should have called it Hue/Saturation/Lightness since the other two sliders are Hue and Lightness….
Color can make for images with added impact. Anyone who has ever shot Velvia knows that. In the digital age, the tempting thing to do is to set your camera for increased saturation, but there are better options. Too much of a good thing is not necessarily better, and you can gain a great deal more control by fine tuning things in Photoshop than by letting your camera do it. Here are a few good ways to do so….
Welcome to 2006. I know it really doesn’t seem like another year could have gone by, but it has. As a new wrinkle on an old tradition, here are some ideas for New Years resolutions you can feel free to add to your own personal list….
I’ve written extensively here about some of the technical aspects of photography. I hope you would agree with me though that cameras and lenses, Photoshop and color management aren’t all ends unto themselves but are instead in the service of something more. I want to spend some time this week to examine just what that is, at least for me personally. There’s a good chance it may well resonate for some of you too….
