Canon & Nikon’s Answer to Sony

September 8, 2018

So as most everyone knows Sony started building Mirrorless full frame cameras a few years back and their early models had LOTs of issues. Poor battery life, poor EVF, crappy AF and the list went on and on. Some of Sony’s models have even overheated when trying to shoot video, which made them worthless for Youtube users. Now, don’t get me wrong, Sony has come a LONG way over the last few years and they have ironed most of their bugs out, the EVF is better now, they added EyeAF to make portraits easier and better. They have even made …

Canon & Nikon Full Frame Mirrorless Rumors

August 20, 2018

So recently Nikon announced that they will be releasing their first Full Frame Mirrorless camera this year and they have even released a teaser video about it that you can check out on Nikon rumors.com You can see in the video and stills that the new camera has a much larger mount than their current mounts. With as large as the new mount is, it might even be possible that the camera might even be larger than full frame, but I doubt it’s medium format. This is incredible as Nikon has not changed their mount …

Stay Away from Western Digital Hard Drives

July 14, 2018

So this week’s blog post is written to help others, especially photographers, but anyone that owns a computer as well. I have worked in I.T. for almost 30 years now and at one time in American there were several hard drives makers on the market. You had Western Digital, Maxtor, Toshiba, Seagate and a few others. Well as happens in most industries, over time the larger companies buy out the smaller ones, either to eliminate the competition or because they have some innovative tech that the larger company wants. Well at one time, Western Digital and Seagate were the premier …

Don’t Let Equipment Envy Hold Back Your Photography

June 23, 2018

One of the things I see people ask all the time is “What camera body should I buy?” This questions is subjective as everyone will give you a different answer and usually with some sort of bias. “Oh buy the Canon 5D Mark IV or the Sony A7RIII or Nikon D800” or whatever. The reason why I say the answers you get will be biased is everyone will answer you based on their favorite camera. And they will tell you things like, “You need this camera because it …

Light Painting

February 6, 2018

So I am working on finishing my Bachelors in Digital Photography and for the last 5.5 weeks one of my classes has been Special Topics 1, which has been all about Light Painting. Light Painting is all about doing long exposures at night and then using a light source to “paint” into your photo. Although I love shooting long exposures, I had never tried light painting before this class and you can create some beautiful images with this technique but it takes a LOT of practice especially if you want to write out words in your images. You have to …

New iPhone 8 Plus Portrait Mode with Lighting

November 30, 2017

So not too many weeks ago Apple released it’s new iPhone 8 & 8 Plus phones as a replacement for the iPhone 7 & 7 Plus and also announced the iPhone X, which released on November 3rd. You might remember back in my Feb 17, 2017 post. I talked about the new Portrait mode on the iPhone 7 plus, well Apple has stepped up it’s game with the new iPhone 8 Plus. In this new iPhone, Apple enhanced their Shallow Depth of Field algorithm to make your portraits even more amazing considering it’s not a DSLR, but they also added some …

Canon’s New 6D Mark II

October 19, 2017

Back in November of 2012 Canon released the original EOS 6D which was a nice 20.2 Megapixel full frame camera with a retail price of around $2,000. I bought the original 6D and loved the camera dearly, even though it was considered an entry level full frame camera body with a plastic upper housing to allow it’s built in WiFi and GPS to function. Even though it was limited to only 11-point autofocus sensors with 1 cross type sensor in center (x-type is sensitive down to −3 EV), I really loved the camera for it’s WiFi and GPS abilities which allowed the …

Macphun’s Aurora HDR 2017

July 24, 2017

This week I wanted to write about another of Macphun’s wonderful programs called Aurora HDR 2017. Macphun keeps turning out program after program for photo editing on the Mac platform and Aurora HDR is another home run for people who want to create stunning HDR’s without needing three images of varying exposures. This first image is the starting window when you launch Aurora HDR 2017. When you fire up Aurora HDR you get a small simple window that allows you to drag and drop an image and then click the Create HDR button. Now the software loads it’s entire editing …

Macphun’s Noiseless

June 20, 2017

This week I want to continue my blog articles on Macphun’s great photography apps for Mac. This time I am writing about Noiseless, which is an app to remove noise from your images, making them look better. When you are shooting in low light and using high ISO, you will end up with the grainy speckles in the photos known as noise. The reason for this is because your camera is attempting to compensate for the low light. Anytime you bump up your camera’s ISO settings you run the risk of introducing noise, especially anytime you use an ISO above …