Photography Trek: Chimney Tops Trail The Great Smoky Mountains National Park has hundreds of miles of hiking trails with never ending photographic opportunities.  For this trip I visited Chimney Tops Trail which is only a few miles from Gatlinburg.  Chimney Tops Trail is a moderately strenuous hike and is about 2 miles to the summit of Chimney Tops.  While I didn’t reach the summit on this trip, there was plenty   Read More ...

September, 2009: With the release of the new H4D-60, the first H4D camera and most recent addition to the Hasselblad H System, Hasselblad marks the beginning of a new chapter in the history of medium format DSLRs. The H4D-60 will feature True Focus with APL (Absolute Position Lock), making auto-focus substantially easier and more accurate for photography professionals. As part of the celebration honoring the first manned lunar landing and   Read More ...

COPENHAGEN, September 28, 2009 – Phase One, the world’s leader in open-platform medium format camera systems and solutions, today announced the Phase One 645DF camera. Engineered in partnership with Mamiya Digital Imaging for superior quality image capture and ease of handling, it sets a new standard for high flash sync speeds – up to 1/1600 of a second. Also today, Phase One announced the availability of three new high performance   Read More ...

GOLDEN, CO (September 16, 2009)… PENTAX Imaging Company redefines the entry-level digital SLR category with the introduction of the K-x digital SLR.  This latest PENTAX camera offers high-end features including Live View and HD video.  And, since there’s no rule that SLR cameras must come in black only, the K-x will be available in a choice of white or black, as well as special, limited edition red and navy. Priced   Read More ...

A typical landscape scene can easily have a range of 10 stops or more. But with modern digital cameras, we can only capture around 8 stops. And when we go to print, we are further reduced to about 5 stops. The rule of thumb for shooting a scene with a high dynamic range is to “expose for the highlights and let the the shadows take care of themselves.” This works   Read More ...

If you own a Canon EOS Digital Rebel series camera, you can save a little money by building your own remote shutter release cable with a few spare parts from Radio Shack. Some of the parts, and at least the tools you should have already. If you don’t already have some of these things, you may not save yourself much money by building your own since they are not all   Read More ...

People occasionally ask what kind of equipment I use to take my photographs when I’m out in the field. Obviously, a camera is required, but to get the most productivity there is a lot more that goes into making a good photograph than just a camera. Most of the time I carry a backpack with me that has the necessities. Below is a picture of the bag, what is in   Read More ...

Normally, when you take a picture through your digital camera, the camera will crop a few pixels around the edges. This is because some steps involved in processing the image are dependent on reading the data for a pixels neighbor. Since the edges don’t have all of the neighboring pixels, the camera crops these out. For my camera, the Canon EOS 400D, the output size is 3888×2592. This is, however,   Read More ...

Every camera maker has their own proprietary RAW format. They can often have different RAW formats for each of the cameras that that make. RAW converter software has to deal with all these different formats. As time goes on, it is likely that new RAW converter software will not old cameras. It would be nice to be able to keep our RAW images for years to come just as film   Read More ...

If you are looking to get the most out or your photography, shooting in RAW is a must. In my previous article RAW vs JPEG I explained some of the advantages of shooting in RAW. In this article, I wanted to share a little about my experiences with some of the many RAW converters that are available. There are many different RAW converters out there and for the most part,   Read More ...