The Photography Tip of the Week #074

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Podcast

Keep it firm

074 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

It’s time to check your camera, even though it’s working just fine.  Your lenses are clean, there is no dust on the body and your strap is secure.  But there is another thing you may need to check… the firmware.  Firmware is the software that runs inside your digital camera.  From time to time the camera manufacturer will post updated software (or firmware) for your camera.  These updates often include speed enhancements, new features and sometimes fixes to the way the images are processed.  In short there is generally no reason to not upgrade the firmware.

No image with this tip

So take a moment to go to your camera manufacturer’s website and see if there’s a firmware update for your camera model.  If you don’t know where to go just search on “firmware update cameramodel” where the cameramodel is the model of your camera.  They will have detailed instructions on how to check what version you have so you can see if your camera needs updating or not as well as how to perform the update.  In most cases the update is as simple as putting a file on a newly formatted memory card.  You put it in your camera with a fully charged battery and it does it’s magic.  Having a fully charged battery is very important.  You don’t want the camera to lose power part way through the update cycle.  In some cases you can just connect the camera to your computer and update directly without transferring to a memory card.  It really is that simple.

One thing you may have to do after the update is to change the date and time and any other user specified information like your copyright info or special settings. So don’t update your firmware right as you are heading out the door for your next photo session.  Pick a nice afternoon when you have plenty of time.  It shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to perform the update, but I find that I like to use the time afterwards to look through the menus and see what new functions and abilities are buried within.

I need a break

Posted by Philip in General, Photo Philosophy

Careful what you wish for… I got a break yesterday, a broken lens.  One of my favorite lenses is now broken, my 50mm f1.8.  I like it better than the 50mm f1.4 because it’s much smaller and less expensive.  Being smaller it’s easy to carry around in a pocket.  And it’s almost as good as the f1.4 for a quarter of the price.  So I have a broken lens and a replacement on the way.  I’ve been meaning to replace it for a while.  Somehow it had gotten a piece of lint inside the lens.  I suspect it worked it’s way through the focus mechanism to make it’s way to the inside of the lens.  On a really small f-stop you could see the log in the field of view, but since I used this exclusively for it’s large aperture, it wasn’t that big of a deal.

So an order to B&H Photo using the NAPP member free shipping code saves the day and some aggravation.  So if you are looking at a great lens to buy, the 50mm f1.8 is a wonderful buy.  They are inexpensive and if you break one… it’s not too expensive to replace.  Once the replacement is here, I may be able to finish taking the broken one apart so you can see what’s inside.

The Photography Tip of the Week #069

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Podcast

Strange images from expecting one setting and having another.

Don’t you just hate it when you’ve been photographing for a while and realize that one of your camera settings was set wrong.  I hate to admit it, but that’s happened to me a lot.  Either the ISO was too high or the lens was on manual focus and if I didn’t have a LCD on the back of the camera, I wouldn’t have figured it out for days.  So here’s a good habit to get into:

The Photography Tip of the Week #066

Posted by Philip in Photo Philosophy, Photo Technique, Podcast

No Rush Hour

066 Photography Tip of the Week (audio)

One of the golden rules of outdoor photography is related to what photographers call the golden light.  There is an hour around sunrise and sunset when the sun produces “golden” light. This gives you a rather unique quality to the light that cannot be reproduced any other time of the day.  It starts about 20 minutes before sunrise and lasts about 40 minutes afterwords.  For sunset it starts about 40 minutes before sunset and lasts about 20 minutes afterwords.  There are some subtle differences between sunrise and sunset, but for all practical purposes the light and benefits of outdoor photography between these times of day are the same.  Here are a few added benefits of the golden hours of the day.

1) Softer light – The angle of the sun is low on the horizon.  The light has to travel through more atmosphere due to the curvature of the Earth.  This spreads the light out more than when the sun is high in the sky.  This diffuses the light over a wider area and creates soft light and smooth shadows.

2) Longer deeper shadows – The angle of the sun is so low that the shadows are very long.  This also has the added benefit of creating deeper shadows.  Because of this I often will even shoot exposure bracketed images just in case I need to make an HDR image.

3) Color shift – Since the light of the sun is going through a steeper curve of the atmosphere there is a prismatic effect that changes the wave length of the light, shifting the colors.  Depending on the altitude and the composition of the atmosphere (any added junk in the air) this color shift can be very pronounced.

And one more thing – Fewer people in the morning.  There are fewer people out in the evenings as well, but sunrise is great if you want to photograph without a lot of extras in your scene.