Digital Photography Tips and Techniques

Snapfish is a digital photo printing, online photo albums/sharing site by HP. If you visit their front page, you will most likely see the offer “first 20 FREE”. However if you visit the site by this link: http://snapfish.com/bhg5, the offer will instantly change to “first 30 FREE”. This seems to be the best offer among the online photo printing services. I hope this helps you just a little bit if your budget is tight.

Fall is one of the greatest times for photography lovers to have fun. The richness of the fall colors can be phenomenal and beyond imagination. Cool breezes and blue skies are also inviting for us to get out and shoot. Here are some tips for capturing the great fall colors.

1. Find out where and when

Check out the fall foliage maps, or call the traveler information center of the places you want to visit. Most foliage maps represent only the average foliage status. At higher elevations, or with sudden cold flows from the north, the weather conditions can bring the peak colors earlier. Warm weather will postpone it. You may be thinking about going to the mountains or national parks for the fall foliage colors. The truth is, however, you may not need to leave your own city or neighborhood to capture some nice fall colors.

2. Capture the landscape

Nothing brings people into the scene better than a wide angle landscape photo. Go for a panorama if the scene is really wide.

Shenandoah National Park

Unknown place near Shenandoah NP

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The EXIF data embedded in the photos you took may contain surprising amount of data. On some photo sharing sites I have seen people complaining about people removing the EXIF information because they are interested in learning photography from other peoples photos. However there are always reasons people want to remove this information. So here are some free tools for you if you really want to do so.

1. IrfanView. you can remove the EXIF information from individual photo or many photos using batch process.

2. Jhead. This is what I use. It can do a lot more on the EXIF data.

• To remove the EXIF data from all files in current directory, type the following in windows command shell:

jhead -de *.jpg

• To remove only the comment field by third party programs (e.g. Photoshop)

jhead -dc *.jpg

• To get rid of all unnecessary data

jhead -purejpg *.jpg

3. jStrip. It has both command-line and graphical user interface. It also supports batch processing.

4. ExifTool. Another powerful command-line tool.

• Remove all meta information

exiftool -all= *.jpg

• Alternative method: rename exiftool to the following name, drag and drop your files on top of the icon

exiftool(-overwrite_original_in_place -Software=).exe

Digital Photography School has a post titled 5 Situations When Manual Focus is Better than Auto Focus, in which the author listed five situations where manual focusing might be easier. I will try to extend on what is already an excellent post.

1. Macro work

Many people find manual focusing during macro photography easier. There are several reason for this. First, the lens may hunt for focus due to poor light conditions. Auto focus may either completely fail or becomes inaccurate. Secondly the point you want to have the sharp focus may not be at the center or any of the AF sensor locations. With very narrow depth of field, focus-and-recompose technique typically doesn’t work well for macro photography. In this case, manual focus will help you out. Not only it prevents the camera from focusing on wrong part, but also it allows you to fine-tune the focus with the help of the DOF preview function. Remember the camera focuses and meters with lens aperture at its maximum opening and stops down to the desired aperture when the shot is taken. What you see is not what you get in terms of DOF.

In situations when the DOF is not very critical, and you can place AF sensor point right on the spot, you may find auto-focus work quite well with good light. If you are chasing ants or bugs that move erratically, you may also want to stick with auto focus when possible.

For best results, your should try to always use a solid tripod. If you are serious about macro photography, you may want to consider specialized setup such as a focusing rail. Instead of turning the focus ring on the lens, which also changes magnification on many macro lenses, many skilled photographers use macro focusing rails for macro photography. The desired magnification is first set on the lens, then the subject is put in focus by sliding the camera and lens in and out without turning the focus ring on the lens.

2. Low light

If the camera has difficult in acquiring focus automatically, it makes sense to use the manual focusing. However, in the dim light, the viewfinder is dim too. If you don’t have a good eye, stay with auto focus. Most modern digital cameras now have low light focus assist system via a built-in lamp on camera body, or internal or external flash unit. They work remarkably well.

3. Portraits

This really depends on what portrait types you will be shooting. If you want to get into the artistic type that only leaves small part of facial feature in sharp focus and let the rest blur out, go for it. An alternative approach is to auto-focus using selected focus sensor point based on the desired composition. Read More…

Hasselbald announced its upgrades to the 39MP (5412×7212) 48×36mm full frame digital SLR H3D announced a year ago. LetsGoDigital appears to have the most detailed coverage. If you cannot afford this top of the line model (H3D-39 II), which is about $37K, you may want to consider the less expensive ones: H3D-31II (31MP, 44×33mm) and H3D-22 II (22 MP , 48×36mm), which will cost you about $30K and $25K, respectively.

I cannot find what the exact specs are for the new model, but the old model has maximum shutter speed of 1/800s and maximum ISO of 400. The camera is probably not for anyone who wants to needs the high shutter speed and high ISO performance, even if you can afford it.

The autumn is just around the corner. With hot summer coming to an end and nature bringing out a brilliant show of colors, photographing the Fall foliage is going to be a fun activity for digital photography lovers. Here are some resources for fall foliage status that can help you with questions such as where to go and when to go.

• Weather.com Fall Foliage Maps. This site offers various foliage maps by US regions.
  • Current foliage status by region (US, Northeast, East Central, Southeast, North Central, Upper Midwest, Northwest, Southwest)
  • Normal peak times by region (US, Northeast, East Central, Southeast, North Central, Upper Midwest, Northwest, Southwest)
• The Foliage Network. This site provides accurate foliage information across the United States. Information are gathered by foliage spotters twice a week and analyzed by staff to generate high quality information for different US regions (Northeast, Southeast, Midwest).
• Fall Foliage Reports and Touring Info at About.com. This site has state by state listings of fall foliage hotlines and information sites.

Cokin does not make the best filters but they do have a very well designed filter system and a very large selection of filters. It is somewhat ironic that I cannot really find much useful information on their official site when it comes to learning more about the filters. The official site lists all the filters but few demonstration and comparisons between the filters. Welcome to Cafe Cokin, an unofficial Cokin filter system site. Start from the front page, or the Guide, or learn some tricks. If the site doesn’t answer your questions, you may want to join the discussion group.

Push processing (pushing, uprating) is a well known film photography era technique, in which the photographer intentionally underexposes the film then compensates for the underexposed film by over-developing it in the processing lab. Typically this is done by telling the camera the loaded film is rated for higher speed than it actually is. The purpose of using this technique is to obtain the needed shutter speed to avoid blur caused by camera shake or freeze motion.

With today’s digital technology, the sensitivity of the sensor (ISO) can be easily changed at any time to obtain the desired shutter speed. In the film days, it would have meant exchanging the film in the camera with another roll that is rated at a higher speed. Is there any more incentives for underexposing then compensate it in post-processing (the equivalent of a film processing lab) with today’s digital photography? After all, many people suggest that the shadow needs to be properly exposed to avoid noise. Before answering this question, let’s look at the results of my recent experiment. Read More…