PJ. Morley

Not photography related but it is an important issue. Whether you believe the current theories of global warming and climate change or not. It is true to say that as a species, we do waste a lot of energy and resources unnecessarily.

The politicisation of global warming aside, there is definite evidence that we are causing damage to the environment and destroying the delicate ecological balance that we depend on so much, not necessarily through climate change but through pollution and the destruction of the natural habitat of other species that form part of a complex and intricate web that we, as occupants of this planet depend on.

Visit Earth Hour to see what’s going on and how you can make a difference.

http://www.earthhour.org

So you’ve got a compact camera and it has a dozen scene modes to choose from one of which is the portrait mode but there are others such as landscape, fireworks etc. They’re OK aren’t they? Generally they work quite well even if they don’t allow for much in the way of fine tuning.

And then you make the transition from digital compact to digital SLR and suddenly, your choices are much more limited. You might get portrait, landscape, sports and macro but anything beyond that means you need to know a thing or two about setting your camera for a particular type of photo and of course, you want to get a little more creative and go beyond the formulaic settings that make all your images look like everyone else’s. What’s worse is you spend a good chunk of money on your digital SLR and the results from your compact look better. Surely that can’t be right. A digital SLR should give results much better than a compact.

Well it will give better results as soon as you have an understanding of how all those scene modes work. Once you get that, you can play with the settings on your SLR to recreate them but of course you want to do more than that. And you will, once you understand the scene modes you can apply those settings to your digital SLR but with an unparalleled level of control to take your photography to the next level.

So let’s get started. Continue Reading »

Most compact cameras aimed at the enthusiast have a multitude of not so useful settings like fireworks, museum, underwater, sports and portrait etc. Does the average photographer spend that much time taking photos of fireworks or underwater to deserve its own setting? I don’t think so but then again if you want it, it’s there.

For the prosumer i.e. a digital SLR, those options are generally restricted to landscape, macro, sports and portrait mode. Useful? Maybe but if you are going to spend in excess of 2 weeks salary on a camera and then buy lenses on top of that then maybe it’s a good idea to learn the basics.

Now whilst all of these settings may be useful, even if it is only rarely i.e. the museum setting. None are difficult to learn and remember and none are difficult to set up using basic shutter speed, aperture and iso setting combinations. What’s more you get more control over the final image by doing it yourself.

What I’m suggesting is that if predetermined settings are to be included in the firmware, they should be ones that are time consuming and sometimes difficult to work settings, for example hyperfocal distance to achieve front to back sharpness (and I don’t mean that random A-DEP mode found on some Canon cameras)

So how about these settings instead?
Continue Reading »

Manipulating the depth of field when you take an image is a useful skill to learn whether you want to achieve front to back sharpness for a landscape or whether you are after an artistic effect or want to direct attention to one particular part of an image with distracting background or foreground elements artistically blurred. When you are trying to lean the relationships between factors that affect depth of field, there’s nothing more guaranteed to confuse you than an in depth tutorial. Does the thought of juggling formulae like

H=(f x f/Nc)+f

and

Dn=s(H-f)/(H+s-2f)

and

Df=s(H-f)/(H-s)

put you off completely? Well read on to learn a much simpler approach.

Continue Reading »

Download Black and White Actions

These actions are from the Black and White Tutorial but I have posted them here for easy download. Enjoy.