Three Crucial Tips to Improving Your Photos

1. You can take a great photo with "any" camera. You just can't take any "great photo". You can make a great photo with any camera as long as you understand the limitations of that camera. Example: If you are using a box camera from the 50's you probably won't get a sharp close-up of a bird 50 feet up in a tree. Conversely you could get a stunning shot of your family standing in front of that tree 10 feet away.

2. Vision, knowing how to compose a shot will raise the level of your photography 500 percent. Making a great image can be as simple as getting in the right position to take the shot.

3. It's better to take a make a great image with a "average" camera than to take no image at all because you don't have the latest gear. Use what you have and understand why you need a certain piece of gear; not just that it's the hot item. Having the best stuff is not as important as learning how to use whatever you have.

Spring Cleaning and your online species!

This post is generated to spark an entry on your spring cleaning to do list. We all clean out the garage, attic or closets but what about all the stuff that's collecting dust on your hard drive. Those of us who are avid surfers of the web end up with tens of megabytes in pdfs, emails, photos and trial software. However, the area I want to cover today is bookmarks. We all do it... find some great article, product or whatever and we hit the old keyboard shortcut to save that link. It goes somewhere, but what happens to it in a week, 6 weeks or longer? If you're like me you may visit a couple of times when it's fresh on your mind and then later when you look through your bookmarks you can't remember why you saved it in the first place. I call this species, linkus packraticus. To solve part of the problem you can add descriptons and put them in folders etc. but the real problem is that we are amassing information for which we have only one giant container. How to organize all of that is a topic for another post or perhaps many posts but the real issue is time. How many sites can you realistically keep up with and digest, five or ten?

We're swimming in a sea of information and often cannot connect the dots because the purpose for the information has yet to be defined. The context must be provided by you and I, which goes beyond the fact that someone simply wanted us to see it. Many things are trivial enough that they won't affect our daily lives but some things, big issues take time. There are at least two approaches 1) simply take everything they say at face value and truthful or 2) do your own thinking and research, which takes time. Those who wish to influence our thinking are hoping we will choose option 1.

As the volume of thought and opinon increases and is pushed up to the web, we the lowly digital citizen must learn to navigate the flood so as to not drown in the process. If strategies useful to all are revealed, we will be happy to post them here.

6 Ways to feed your body and Soul - Don't miss these!

Update: Improve your online presence with these two sites:
Hubspot
Grader

Nikon Rumor: Update
No new D5000 from Nikon, for the latest from PMA
check out the 1001 Noisy Cameras Blog


Podcast:
Screencastsonline, Mostly Mac video podcast with great tips, tricks and tutorials, huge backlog
of tutorials for some of your favorite apps. Subcribe at iTunes.

Learn photography & Photoshop:
Pioneer Woman, One of the most interesting reads on the web covering everything from great
cooking to photoshop. Check it out.
Digital ProTalk, Award winning photographer David Ziser hosts a this blog that is chock full of
great photo and photoshop tips, video tutorials and more. Whether you are a pro or not you can
find great information to improve your digital images.

More on digital imaging and your digital life:
This Week in Photography - weekly podcast drops every monday and is a great resource for
photographers of all levels.
Want to mange your digital life? What about those gigabytes of photos etc. sitting there on that
hard drive. For all things mangement and backing up check out this brand new site Managing 
Managing your digital life.

Gold Mine:
Chuck Green's ideabook.com a treasure of graphic design tools and learning, plus jumpola one of the best bookmark pages on the net about design.

Great Finds from Around The Web

Image from the cameras voice © on Flickr

Improve your online presence with these two web tools:
Website Grader
Twitter Grader

Nikon Rumor:
New entry level DSLR D5000 coming at PMA March 3, 2009 ?

Podcast:
This week in photography, tips news and prizes from the pros and their special guests. Sign up for free at iTunes.

Gold Mine:
Chuck Green's ideabook.com a treasure of graphic design tools and learning, plus jumpola one of the best bookmark pages on the net about design.

How to take great photographs

Perhaps a bold title but true none the less. We shall define great for the sake of this post as simply a photograph that captures your vision and also follows some basic guidelines of photography.

• Step One: Get yourself and your camera in position to take the photo. Sounds simple but often overlooked. You cannot take photos of Lions in Africa unless you go to Africa; find the lions and have the necessary kind of gear to capture the shot; more about gear later. Scouting, looking and thinking can make great improvements to your photos. Take time to look at what's in the frame, ask yourself what shouldn't be there and then check the light. Could this shot be improved if I were in a better position, keep asking these questions. Edit out everything that is not the photo and then set your exposure, white balance etc.
• Step Two: Composition. Use books, the internet or library to obtain some grasp of how geometry and light play a role in making memorable photographs. The rule of thirds is a good place to start but nothing is cast in stone there will always be exceptions to the rules.
• Step Three: Gear. Probably the most talked about and discussed aspect of photogrpahy is the type of equipment one uses. The first professional advice I received after buying my first SLR in 1980 was this, find the right tool for the job becasue it's not necessarily about the brand or the specs. In other words a telephoto lens won't do you any good if it's a wide angle lens you need. As for specs I've "never" heard anyone complain about a photo because there was too much purple fringing or other scientifically measureable aberation. To be fair these "can" matter but they are way down on the list for most of us.
• In this age of digital photography here are some basic considerations for gear. Regardless of what type of photography you shoot the two most important components of the camera are the lens and sensor. All the rest of the stuff you read about is how to get the light through the lens to the sensor. The gear is to a large degree determined by the type of photography your shoot. Landscape and wildlife require better and longer lens generally. Sports or action photography requires fast shutter and flash capapbillity. Studio work; generally for pros, requires a broad range of equipment and skill in order to shape images that don't naturally occur. For the rest of us we need something in the middle ground that will take the kind of shots we most often want to take. The best approach is to do your own research and get a few "informed" opionions to be sure you're not overlooking something.
• If you are one the more fortunate souls and want to take advantage of the latest technology you might want to look at cameras such as the Canon 5D MkII or the Nikon D3 or D700 which offer superior low light capability without the need for flash.
  

Canon 5D Mk II - Report, Samples + Video

I won't voice a lot of opinon on the new Canon 5D Mk II other than to say that it breaks some new ground and opens doors to new photographic vistas.
The Acclaimed Photographer Vincent Laforet has done some tests which he generously shares with the help of Canon.

Video shot with the 5D :
Behind the Scenes:
Download Still Clips:

Additional information and comments on the blog.
Even as a Nikon shooter I have to applaud Canon for the ground breaking work.

Nikon or Canon, Who Wins? (hint) it's the photograhers.

While I don't usually dig too deeply into the rumors flying around I am not beyond entering to an occasional speculation. Such as it is on the near eve of Photokina 2008 which will be held during Septermber 23-28. While I don't have all the scoop, there is one site that has a great repository of Camera and Photograhy info and that is 1001 Noisy Cameras. Click the link for the full details.

Allthough there are may speculations, rumors and announced products one that caught my eye was the following from the WIRED blog.

• The background: Nikon put out a print advertisement in Rangefinder magazine, regarding an announcement to be made at next year's WPPI (Wedding & Portrait Photographers International) conference. The teaser reads "Don't miss it. It's gonna be BIG!"
  
  This subtle hint combines with a leak to Nikon Rumors which seems to show the specs of a new, larger sensor, called MX Format. The final piece of the puzzle comes from the afore-mentioned Nikon Watch: A reader tells them that the MX sensor will be a huge 48 x 48 mm. That's right, a decidedly old-school medium format square sensor. A big sensor that will sport a whopping 48 megapixels.

Elsewhere rumors hint at a Canon 7D or a large format camera; indicating that Canon has not been idle in face of the new challenge by Nikon's D3. All in all the photographers are the winners because the camera manufacturers are making it possible to capture more images in more situations. Photokina starts in a little over two weeks; we'll know a lot more then!