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If this title sounds vaguely familiar to you we are probably about the same age, for those of you that don’t know Dire Straits here is a link to history!

We know you love FYP and we also know that you are not always at your computer and therefore can’t get on your browser to keep up-to-date with the latest postings.  Rather than watch you flop around on the floor, I’m going to share some additional ways that you can read your favorite FYP authors during your morning  or afternoon travels, lunchtime or even lying on a tropical beach like me.  If you are reading this congratulations, you already know the most popular way to read the great articles from the most diverse photography writers on the web!  In this posting I’m going to explain elements of the little yellow box on the site inviting you to “Get Fueled”

RSS

Really Simple Syndication more commonly known as RSS is a great way to aggregate feeds from your favorite sites.  RSS comes in both desktop and mobile forms and allows you to go to a single place to receive all your latest updates. Google Reader is a popular desktop and mobile RSS client if you have an Android phone you can get it from the Android Marketplace.  Apple fanboys/fangirls you are not to be left out, a version for iPhone is available here.  Blackberry users , like me, will have to be content with Viigo, it is not quite as intuitive but it does the job!

Once you have your preferred method you can click on the “SITE RSS FEED” link and then select Google Reader and FYP will be added to your feed.  Full and complete articles are available for you to read at any time just by opening your RSS reader and selecting Fuel Your Photography.  This is especially great for smaller screened mobile devices where mobile browsers are a pain.

Email

Keeping up by email is even easier, simply enter your email address in the field in the yellow box that says “Suscribe by Email” and then click the subscribe button new articles will be emailed to you immediately after posting.  Depending on your mobile email client you may not receive the full multimedia experience.  Your mileage may vary!  You will not be sent any Unsolicited Commercial Email (SPAM) by subscribing to the email feed.

Twitter

FYP maintains a very active twitter feed, a link to every article published is posted here along with select other tweets, follow us on twitter @FuelPhotography.   One of our Twitter secrets, for you die hard photographers and tweeters you can follow the list of our writers and keep up with their tweets.  Be advised that writers tweets are their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of FYP.  If you are brave and not faint of heart follow TeamFYP.

Facebook

Facebook??  Heck yeah, we are on Facebook!  You can find our page here and Facebook provides an additional forum for you to give feedback and easily share our articles with friends and groups, we really appreciate when you do so.  Feel free to fan us on Facebook.   We also have a page strictly dedicated to our FYP/500px Photography Contest, have you entered yet?

Google +

What is Google +?  Google Plus, like FYP, is a great place for creatives, however not as targeted as FYP, we know we are among your top photography resources. FYP maintains a page on Google Plus and reaches out to photographers and photography lovers alike, if you are on Google Plus circle us at gplus.to/FYP, if you are not yet on Google + join here mobile clients are also available.

Flickr

Check, we are also on Flickr and if you are too you can post 2 images per day to our group for feedback of other members.  We look forward to seeing your shared images!

I’ve shared with you some great ways to interact with FYP, I’m interested in hearing how you use it in the comments section below.

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Behind the Lens is a new series that allows you to learn a bit more about your favorite FYP Writers.  While we know your enjoy their articles, sometimes you just want to know what makes them tick!  We are pleased to provide that insight for you.

Hugh Walker is an amateur photographer who lives on the beautiful island paradise of Barbados with his wife, Cheryl and 14 year old daughter, Giselle. Photography is a family affair for the Walkers; Hugh’s wife and daughter being award winning photographers, having both won numerous medals and special prizes at the annual Barbados National Independence Festival of Creative Arts. As Hugh put it: “We have a healthy family competition going on and so far I am losing to the ladies”. However, Hugh is not to be outdone by the family, having won silver and gold medals as well and special prizes in Architectural, and Black & White photography.

Hugh has a passion for landscape photography and one of his greatest dreams is to have the opportunity to travel to exotic locations and be exposed to a wide variety of landscape scenarios. In late 2010 he took one such memorable trip to the Grand Canyon. His comment about the trip being “The temperature was about 5 degrees below zero and there is this guy from the Caribbean, with an insane smile on his face, shooting everything in sight an loving it! It was a dream come true”.

Besides landscape photography he has dabbled a bit with portrait photography. Hugh is however drawn to architecture and abstract photography. There is something about the lines of a building that intrigues him. Each building has a character that has been developed through the design elements used by the architect, and he loves to try to find it and demonstrate it in an artistic manner.

Hugh loves to create images that are dramatic in nature; his point of view is that “We see the ordinary every day in our lives and I strongly believe that the images we create should not be ordinary, but should attempt to take the viewer to another place”. Hugh embraces colour, but loves black and white. His initial exposure to photography was in the era of film and the wet dark room . “Black & white was the medium we used because we could not afford to process colour, because of the cost of the chemicals and papers. We had full control of the black and white process, from developing to printing”. Today he embraces the digital tools, especially Adobe Lightroom and the Nik suite of plugins. His favorite tool is Nick Silver Effects Pro which he finds is best at black and white conversion.

When it comes to equipment Hugh has a foot in both of the major camps. He shoots both Nikon and Canon. Some may think this is strange but he finds that both have their weakness and strengths and that being slavishly tied to one system does not fit his profile. Favorite lens are the Canon 100mm f 2.8 L macro, and 70 -200 f2.8l and the Nikon 16-85 VR . Favorite software products are Adobe Lightroom and Nik Silver Effects Pro.

Hugh’s work can be found online at his portfolio site  http://Art4life.zenfolio.com

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I’m not a hunter, but I imagine wildlife photography is a lot like hunting.   You wear neutral-colored clothing, spend a lot of time tracking wildlife in the bush, get dirty, wait a lot, and you’d better have some decent aim or else you waste a bunch of shots.

On my most recent bear photography trip to the Katmai wilderness in Alaska, there was a lot of downtime between bear sightings. Sometimes the boat ride into bear territories was 1.5 hours long. In the meantime, however, there was no shortage of wildlife photography!  Bald eagles, osprey, sockeye salmon, and Alaskan wildflowers were common sightings and welcome diversions to the waiting.   I actually found that photographing birds was so much fun, that we spent an entire day at a bald eagle nest just watching and waiting. A particular pair of eagles kept us waiting for nearly an hour as the perched in the sun… finally when we put our cameras down to give our arms a rest, they decided to take off in their glorious flight… they probably enjoyed this game as much as we did!

American Bald Eagles, Alaska

Fireweed

The first and most important thing I learned about wildlife and nature photography is that it’s worth getting to know your subject.  This will help create the opportunity for the shot, help you find the most common locations for your subject, as well as their behavior patterns and best angles.  If all your shots are of a bear’s rear end or a bird flying off into the distance away from you, chances are you are approaching them to quickly or too closely.   Their comfort level will reflect in the images.  This is not only important for the great wildlife shots, but also important for the general well-being of the wildlife.   Often, birds have to conserve their energy to hunt and survive, and cannot waste that precious energy flying away from people who are stalking them and chasing them away from their hunting or nesting grounds.  So consider the well-being of your subjects and it’ll show in the images!

Juvenile bald eagle

Osprey, hunting

For me, I find that shooting hand held worked better than shooting with a tripod.  Before you all go tsk-tsking me, just hear me out!  If I know my subject will be staying in a small contained area, obviously the tripod is the better choice. However, in the wild, animals don’t stay in viewfinders or boxes!   When the eagles took off in flight, I found it was so much easier to track with my body rather than with a tripod, and this resulted in sharper images.  Sometimes I wanted to get down at ground level to get a different perspective of the bears, and I could maneuver my body much faster than I could my tripod.  Sometimes the bears would walk right past us and I wanted to back up to give them room and actually fit them in my 100-400mm lens; it was much easier to scoot myself backwards than awkwardly fumble with a tripod in my waders and 5 layers of clothing.  This is not to say I shot without support- often times I braced my left elbow on my left thigh while kneeling, especially when shooting from the boat.  I also had a 500mm lens with me which was literally a bear to carry around and maneuver (8.5 pounds!); I did benefit from a tripod in this situation but missed out on many shots as sometimes I could not maneuver fast enough to catch the charging bears or swooping osprey.

Taken from the boat, no tripod

Camp Dog Winston, practicing my non-tripod moments

Tripod mandatory, low-light at dawn, long exposure

I do not typically consider myself a technical photographer, but in wildlife photography, sharp, focused images are paramount- I suppose it is akin to having good aim in hunting.   For flying birds, I liked to have a shutter speed of at least 1/1600, but lighting conditions did not always comply (birds are most active in the early morning and late afternoon when the sun tends to be lower).   For the most part, I tried to aim for their eye when shooting; this generally gave me good results and more of the bird ended up being in focus in the end.  Most of you will know what I’m talking about – when you get that gorgeous, perfectly timed, sharp bird image, it makes all that waiting and planning worthwhile.  In my opinion, “getting that image” is far more difficult than spraying a shotgun full of birdshot at a group of ducks.  Photographing birds is humbling and the more I try it, the more I realize there is to learn. Any bird photographers out there willing to share your favorite websites, or a tip or two?  Maybe I’ll devote another blog to the bird photography alone!

Takeoff

Landing

As we were leaving the wilderness, hunters were flying into the region to scour the land for moose, heralding the beginning of moose-hunting season.  Just as the hunters were returning to camp with their trophy heads (I will leave my personal opinion of hunting out of this!), we returned to camp with cameras in-hand, excitedly downloading our daily images into our cameras and backup drives.  Wildlife photography is a lot less bloody than hunting, and instead of cleaning your kills, you just have to clean your lenses.   True, you don’t get to eat your photographs, but the images are trophies nonetheless and great for wall mounting- not to mention the peace and exhilaration that comes with being outside in nature.  Happy shooting!

Success- Alaskan brown bear with sockeye

Trip planning: There are many ways to get to the Katmai wilderness and numerous outfitters that do photography tours. If you are not experienced in the area, the best way to go is with a guide.   We used www.bearguidealaska.com and flew in from Anchorage, Alaska into King Salmon airport.  Bring clothing in layers and insect repellent.  Rain showers can come on quickly and unexpectedly, so waterproof packs or drybags are recommended for your equipment.  Also refer to my previous post for other lessons I learned on this trip.

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There are many different kinds of editing software out there today for many different styles of digital photography.  Cell phones and iPads even have editing software built directly into their camera apps.  Just as DSLR’s are getting easier and easier to use, many software companies are also making their editing programs simpler to use.

Apps like Instagram have become an instant hit with the hipster photography crowd.  If you’re unaware of what Instagram is, I’ve often heard it described as a place where an amateur iphone-ographer can use their phone to take a picture of a shoe, throw a few filters on it and then call it art.  Its growing fame has bled over into more mainstream styles of photo editing.  There are plenty of websites out there that offer premade filters that you can download in order to use Adobe Lightroom or Photoshop to add these same filters to your photos with one click.

I’m going to explain many different points about Adobe Photoshop and it’s advantages as well as a few things to stay away from while showing you some before and after shots that will highlight for you some of the really simply fixes and some more artistic changes that  I’ve used in the past for actual clients of mine using Photoshop.

I could just fill this article with clichés like, “Use it, don’t abuse it”, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”, and so on and so forth, but I’ll save you the headache.  I will however encourage those of you that are now learning to use Photoshop, to experiment as much as you can and find out everything that it can do because even after three years of self-study and more recently a 16 week college course on Photoshop, there’s still a plethora of tools that I continue to discover.  When I first started using Photoshop I discovered soft focus, so I soft focused all the time, and then I discovered color spotting, and I wanted to color spot all the time, etc.  It took some time but I realized after so long that there is a time and a place for everything, except the white vignette, I still believe there is never a time or place to use a white vignette, but I digress.

1.  Shoot in RAW format:  I am going to avoid going too deep into an argument that could probably “fuel” an entire article on it’s own, but what I am going to say is that there are many advantages to using RAW over JPEG.

2. Pretend like you’re shooting JPEG: What I mean is, the fact you’re shooting in RAW should be an afterthought, a backup almost.  You should try every single time to have your picture look perfect right on the back of your camera.  If it doesn’t you have RAW to fix it, but even in RAW you can only move your sliders so far before the quality of your photo starts to degrade.  Noise especially will go up if you boost the exposure too much in an underexposed picture.

The only thing I would ever put on auto would be white balance.  This is something that if you don’t have a gray card (or know what a gray card is) or have a situation where you’re going from inside to outside repeatedly, such as at a wedding reception, then the white balance can be changed without doing any real damage to the photo in Photoshop.  Just remember, if it looks good in your LCD, its going to look great in post processing.

3. If the photo is bad, the best you’re going to get is mediocre: This is the opposite of what I previously talked about.  But this is talking more about the composition of the photo more than it is talking about the settings of your camera.  Photoshop can fix exposure, saturation, contrast and other things, but if you just did not get the right angle or did not compose the photo in the best possible way, there isn’t much you can do to fix that.  You can crop some, but you must realize that when you crop a photo you lose those pixels completely that were cropped off.  So you can very easily turn a 12 megapixel photo into a 6 megapixel photo and is not going to print nearly as well.

4. The best Photoshop job is the one that looks like you haven’t used Photoshop: When I first started my degree program my professor sent my portfolio off to a friend of hers that was a successful fulltime wedding photographer.  The comments I back were the same all around.  Less filters, less filters, less filters…  (yes I too used too many filters at one point), but as I looked back through the same photos that I had sent her she made good points.  Behind the filters were good photos, I was making the mistake of trying to show off my Photoshop skills where it wasn’t needed.

Website after website are out there trying to sell you packages of filters that frankly all look the same to me, so my suggestion to you is, save your money.  Don’t get me wrong I have a few Lightroom presets that I tend to use, but less is more.  Especially in wedding photography, when it comes to the artistic portraits of just the bride and the groom I will use split toning, vintage filters, or something else to the style that the bride likes, but when it comes to pictures from the ceremony and reception I tend to think more of a documentary standpoint as far as keeping the photos as realistic to the eye as possible.  Correct your photos, enhance your photos, don’t just throw a filter over it because you don’t know what else to do.

5. If you have to look for something to fix, stop fixing: This was my biggest problem when I started post processing my own photos.  I was always looking for that next thing to fix, can I dodge and burn something else, does she have fly-away hairs, are her teeth white enough, etc.  What I then learned was that I should only fix the things that detract from the photo.  If your subjects teeth aren’t bad, don’t whiten them more or you’re just going to make them look overly white which in turn will actually MAKE them distracting.  There’s a balance you have to find.

Finally, I’d like to say there are a lot of tools in Photoshop CS5 that I think are invaluable to have the biggest of which is the content aware fill function as seen above in a before and after set.  You can eliminate people, cars, trees, anything almost as long as the area around the thing you’re trying to eliminate is not too complicated.  It takes the area surrounding the item and does some super crazy algorithmic equation stuff that even though I’m a computer nerd, I won’t even begin to try to understand, it compiles those pixels together to fill that section based on what’s on each side of it.  So needless to say if you’re trying to delete something that is on the edge of something you may or may not get a clean edge.  Just like every other tool in Photoshop you just have to experiment until you figure out it’s quirks.

So how do you feel about Photoshop?  Do you feel it’s something that’s over used or something you should feel free to use as much as you possibly can?  Do you edit manually or do you use actions and presets?  What’s your favorite Photoshop tool?

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When I was a child, I was inspired by a photograph.  You all have seen the one, a Grizzly bear in the midst of Alaska’s Brooks Falls, mouth open, with a salmon leaping right into it.  There are many variations of that image, but even as an 8 year old, it was clear that this was definitely on the “Bucket List” (before I even knew what a Bucket List was!) I swore that someday, I would go to Alaska to go bearwatching during salmon season.   So before I ever even owned a camera, I knew I had to witness this amazing phenomenon in person.

Researching the trip took quite a bit of effort.   If you run an internet search for “Alaska bear photography,” a dozen or so companies pop up.   I did not want to go with a big group that would dictate how long I could be out in the wilderness, and I did not want a large group that would scare away bears.  It was also important to me to find a guide who was not only a bear expert, but an experienced photographer guide as well.  When searching for a wildlife photography trip, read a lot, ask questions, and find the guide that suits your needs the best.

Sockeye Season

Fresh as it gets

Katmai National Park has the world’s highest concentration of brown bears (Also called Grizzly bears in North America), at an estimated number of over 2,000.  The majority of bear viewers visit Brooks Falls, one of the only developed areas of the National Park, but few go beyond the viewing platforms there.   Rangers at the park are very careful to prohibit feeding or human confrontations with the bears, and as a result these bears are uniquely indifferent to and unafraid of humans.  This “perfect storm” of conditions allows photographers to get relatively close to the amazing animals.

Mother and Cub fishing

Mother and Cub

After much research, we were lucky enough to have veteran guide Phil Sanfilippo take us (3 people including the guide) out for our 6 day safari deep into the Katmai wilderness (3 plane flights, then a float plane, followed by a boat ride to camp).   Never once did we have to use bear spray, deploy a flare, or shoot a firearm at a bear.  They just kept fishing, eating, and doing their bear thing.   There is inherent risk in being within close proximity of these large omnivores, but you can minimize those if you respect their space and take the proper precautions set forth by your guide.

At times, bears passed within 10 feet of us and none of us broke a sweat (OK, maybe a little!)… but we just kept on shooting!  Despite my guide’s pre-trip advice, I rented a 500mm telephoto lens, but found it to be actually too much zoom (And too heavy for wading upriver for long periods).  Most of the time the bears were so close, my 100-400mm lens was more than enough.  As an added bonus – I wasn’t tripod-dependent with my 100-400mm lens (as I was with the 500mm) and was therefore more mobile (I like to sit, squat and do Kung Fu while I shoot) with the constantly moving bears.  In addition, these bears perceived us as less threatening in a kneeling/squatting posture as opposed to standing, so flexibility and some leg endurance was truly an asset in getting the best images.  This particular juvenile bear (below) sneaked up behind us while we were photographing another bear, and was less than 10 feet away when it decided to dry off with a mighty shake.

Subadult bear drying off

A few things I learned on this trip:

• Find a bear guide who treats the animals ethically and does not pressure them or chase them.  Relaxed, natural animals will show in your images and stick around longer for you to get your shot!  When you spend a long time with these animals, you learn that each bear has its own distinct personality.
• Make sure you have a good pair of waders or a guide who can provide them.   At times you will find yourself shooting in waist-deep water, and these were some of our best shots!

• Along the same lines, you must have a good drybag for your equipment.   Rain comes and goes in the Katmai, and you could be a 2 hour hike and boat ride away from camp.
• Be prepared to wait, get wet, cold, and dirty, and wait. and wait some more.  It is not a zoo, so bears come and go as they please.

• Keep your spare batteries warm so they don’t drain as quickly.  I kept mine in my fleece pocket close to my body.
• Bring lots of memory cards and your hardiest backup storage device.  Each evening was spent downloading and backing up images.  Power was via generator at camp (only accessible for a few hours each evening).

• Mosquito repellent.  I cannot stress this enough, there are all sorts of biting flies, gnats, and the like (See above picture for example!).  We learned to welcome rain because it meant a respite from the insects.
• What the images don’t show you:   The smell of dead and decaying fish, kneeling in bear excrement, the 5 layers of clothing I’m wearing, and the ear-to-ear grin on my face.

Surveying the carnage

• Brooks Falls can be very crowded during salmon season (July-Aug).   They limit the number of photographers on the platform and the amount of time you can spend there.   We avoided this location altogether, so I cannot comment on that experience.   If you have shot there, I’d love to hear about your experience and see your images!
• Bears change;  after coming out of hibernation, their coats are more scraggly and they are thinner.  Towards the end of the season (when we went), there are fewer fish, but the bears have filled out and their coats have thickened in anticipation of the winter.   The salmon runs are unpredictable but follow a general pattern from year to year.  Contact your guide for advice.

Most importantly, this trip made me regress into that wide-eyed 8 year old kid again.  There were lots of “wows!”, “Did you see that?”, and “That’s awesome!” intermingled with the sounds of our shutters going as fast as they could.  I found the fountain of youth, if only for a week, by living out this childhood fantasy.  Simply reliving that childhood glee made everything worth it.  There is no better source of inspiration than a dream come true.

Jumping for fish

If you are looking more Alaskan inspiration or ideas, I recommend Wild Things Photography which showcases some of the amazing work of Alaskan photographer John Hyde.  Alaska is filled with areas of pristine wilderness, breathtaking landscapes, and awe-inspiring wildlife.

Has an image ever made you dream of travel and exploration?  Stop making excuses and go.  And bring something back to inspire the rest of us to go too.    Happy travels!

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I don’t often go on a rant but this is my Molly Wood! A recent amazing display of lack of understanding for technical matters related to photography by a company whose business predicates on the medium brought me to the point of writing this article.

At some point, much to manufacturers delight, we have all been on the megapixel roller coaster. Why the “roller coaster” you ask? I use this term not because I’m being overly dramatic, but because it really is one. We’ve all been conditioned that the more megapixels, the better the image will be – that is the upside. Then we find out that this is not actually the case and that is the downside! This is one ride, thankfully, that I’m no longer on!

Recently a San Francisco based company that connects travelers with accommodations in local homes approached me because they were looking for interior/architecture photographers all over the Caribbean (Yes, that company). As part of their service, they offer professional photography for the homes listed on their site.

I’ll go through the requirements below briefly so you can see they were quite logical until they got to the megapixel issue. As they indicated, the selection of photographers is conducted by our global photography team based in their headquarters in San Francisco, USA.  Their decision is based on the following criteria:

The photographer is located in a city where we have demand for photos: it doesn’t make sense to ask our photographers to spend hours commuting for a job that should take around 30-45 minutes.  We select photographers located close to an area where we foresee enough demand for photos.

CHECK

The photographer can communicate in English: It doesn’t need to be a perfect English, but it must be good enough to allow a smooth communication between our photographers and our photography team based in the US.

CHECK

The photographer has a proven portfolio: It’s great if you already have experience with real estate or architectural photography, but this is not a requirement. We have had great experiences with talented photographers that are specialized in other kind of jobs such as weddings and products.

CHECK

The photographer has a professional-grade camera: You will be needing a 12.1MP DSLR camera (or higher) and a wide angle lens and a flash, depending on the location.

Uh oh, herein lies the problem, apparently they are still on the roller coaster!

The email exchange that ensued was as follows:

Reply from me:

Hi, I am interested but I currently shoot with a 10.1 MP Nikon D200, however I shouldn’t see this as a problem as I currently make fine art prints up to 20×30 inches with my files. By the way, I only shoot in RAW.

Let me know if I should proceed, thanks.

Reply from the San Francisco based company:

Hi Jeremy,

Unfortunately, we require all our photographers to use a 12.1 MP dSLR camera. This is for archiving reasons.

Thanks!

I did some research and found that the largest image shown on their site was 629-by-426 pixels and upon further research I found that my camera, a Nikon D200, which I’m extremely happy with and not yet ready to upgrade, captures images that are 3872-by-2592 pixels. Taking this information into account, I decided to look at displays and found that the Apple’s 27” Thunderbolt display’s resolution is 2560-by-1440 and even the huge 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display delivers a 2560 x 1600 pixel resolution.  Given that the image from my camera exceeds the resolution of today’s largest computer monitors, I was at a loss as to their reasoning.

I know all those figures are tough to get a handle on, so let me make a nice infographic for you. I have adjusted the graphic below so that relative sizes are constant. In the image below, the RED image is what originates from the camera, the YELLOW is the maximum the 30-inch Apple Cinema HD Display can show, the GREEN is the maximum an Apple’s 27” Thunderbolt display can show, and the BLACK is the size of the image that they actually use on their site:

My interest was certainly not the compensation offered, which they also outlined in their criteria:

We pay a standard fee per session. Each photo shoot pays $45 USD plus up to $10 USD for travel expenses ($.50 per mile traveled). This service is paid directly by ****** within 7 business days of the date you’ve uploaded the pictures into our system. The whole payment process is held online. You just have to register your bank account in our system and we will make a deposit directly into your account.

I was interested moreso in doing the architectural shoots purely for the purpose of stretching my legs and shooting something that I’ve shot before, but don’t normally shoot — every photographer wants to get out of the box sometimes.

Now don’t get me wrong, the company in question is within their rights to set guidelines as they see fit, but rules with no reasoning never sit well with me. This just sounds like another Netflix/Qwikster melee.  The company has made arbitrary decisions without a full understanding of the forum they ventured into. As photographers, we know that computer monitors display 72dpi and knowing this would mean that an image that is 3872-by-2592 pixels would need a monitor that is approximately 53-by-36 inches to be displayed in its entirety. The company in question has committed a cardinal sin akin to someone remarking “you must have a nice camera to get images like that.”

This begs the question, what exactly are their archiving criteria? While I can appreciate wanting larger files because I shoot RAW and keep all my RAW files, images shot with just about any modern dSLR can be blown up to fit on a billboard.  I cannot comprehend their rationale, but I can offer them this advice:

• A bad photograph is a bad photograph, regardless of the number of megapixels.
• Unless you are planning to make huge billboard images, 5 megapixels are more than enough.

What are some of the experiences you’ve had with people not fully understanding technology and photography? Share your experiences with us in the comment section below.

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Do you carry your camera every day?  Do you take photos every day?  “Yes” was my answer to both of the questions in 2009.  On January 1, 2009, I started my own 365 project; for those of you that don’t know the 365 project, you take a photo a day (thought next year in light of the leap year it will be a 366 project), then upload and share it on the Internet.  You can shoot anything: self-portraits, skyscapes, landscapes, seascapes, still life subjects, food photography, or wherever your interest take you.  You can stick to one theme for the entire year and build your skill in that arena or you can shoot variety of things you encounter in your daily life.

On January 1st,  2009, I started shooting and sharing a photo every day.  The theme I chose was “My Tokyo.”  I wanted to share with my audience what I saw in my daily life. I don’t remember why I started the project now, but it may have been because I wanted to try something new with a newly purchased point-and-shoot camera or  I may have gotten inspiration from people who had been engaged in their own 365’s at the time.

Did I finish my project successfully?  Yes, at the end of the year I had taken and shared a photograph each and every day.  I kept shooting what I saw around Tokyo, trying to give the people who visited my photo stream on Flickr a virtual tour of my city and my life;  It was really hard.  When I had to work late, I shot a stuffed animal at home before going to bed.  On one stormy night, I had to make do with the bottle caps of Coca Cola for my daily photograph.  Some results were not very creative at all, but I learned something with every single click, regardless of the difficulties I encountered through the year, my 365 project has made what I am as a photographer.

I started the project in Kabukicho, Shinjuku, and ended in the same place.

There were countless reasons I could have given up the project, but I stuck to it.  Why?  I’ll share the reasons for my successful completion of my 365 project here.

I Always Had My Camera in My Bag or Pocket

I used a point-and-shoot cameras for the entire project; either a Panasonic’s Lumix DMC-FX35 or a DMC-LX3.  Everyone suggested to me that I should, “Carry your camera all the time”  to successfully complete the project and there’s no denying that is probably the single greatest suggestion towards my success.  Photo opportunities are everywhere, there may be a nice subject right in front of you right at this moment if you look around.  While the performances of small cameras may not as good as large DSLRs,  I didn’t want to carry a large heavy camera with me all the time because I was not a pro photographer and my goal was not to strengthen my arm muscles and in order to compete in an arm-wrestling match.  My goal was quite simply to take a new photograph each and every day!

Don’t pass interesting subject matter without clicking.

I Didn’t Push Myself Too Hard Artistically, But DID Think All the Time

I always wanted to shoot “wow” photos.  Breathtaking sunsets, flowers with morning dews, etc, etc , but such moment didn’t often come for me.  Except for weekends, the time I was able to spend on photography was limited to before work, at lunchtime, or after work; so I often had to wander around after dark or rummaging through my house trying to find a subject that I wanted to capture.

I was most depressed when I shot this …

Another problem I had to surmount and was the distance from my home to my workplace.  It is approximately 3km and takes only about 15 minutes by bike, such a short distance provides limited subject matter to shoot when you consider taking 365 photographs over the course of a year.  I shot this and that and  this and that, at times it seemed like there was nothing left to shoot halfway through the project.  So I decided to explore angles, distance and everything I could think of with the same subject old matter.  The photos I took didn’t have the “wow” factor,  in fact they may not have been artistic at all, but because of this, I was able to improve my composition skills immensely.

This is the slide I see every day, it’s the only thing that looks interesting on the way to work. I have no idea how many times I took photos in this tiny park.

Crowd-sourcing Support

One of the reasons I shoot photos is that I want to share my take on Tokyo with the people all around the world.  Luckily I had a few on-line friends when I started the project and the more visitors and comments I received, the more motivated I got.  I had a lot of visitors every day, and all of them were looking forward to my updates, or at least so I thought.  Some of my friends were also very vocal in their support, they browsed through my photos from time to time, gave me their feedback and praise.  The viewer feed back was so inspiring for me that the chances of dropping the project became slimmer and slimmer.

This is the photo that was viewed most. I was happy when my efforts paid off.

In order to capture my viewers interest there’s one thing I did when uploading photos on the Internet.  I always added a short passage expressing what I saw, felt, or thought of the photo, however,  I was mindful not to make the passage to long as I didn’t want to bore my viewers.  When I thought the photo was not good enough to encourage people leave comments, I took pains to write something even more enchanting to hook viewers.

Photo Buddies

Some Flickr friends of mine visited Tokyo, and we sometimes went photo-shooting together.  Seeing them taking photos was really inspiring for me, I gained many tips that  that expanded my vision.  Of course I tried to imitate the ways they shot even though they had large DSLRs while my compact camera was as small as a cigarette case.

A friend from Vancouver loved cats. He took cats, and I took them. They are not cats actually, but my camera was not good at capturing real cats :P

Another friend from Austin was really good at capturing night lights, so I tried to do the same thing with my point-and-shoot camera.

If you are ready to start planning your own 365 project and you want to find friends/support on-line, joining the 365 Project website is a good place to start.  There are also many inspiring  groups on Flickr, and daily themes circulating on Google+.  Eric Leslie has lists themes shown here on his website.  Now are you inspired sufficiently to want to start your own 365 project in 2012?  In next month’s article, I’ll write about the things I tried during in 2009 and hopefully give you even more catalyst to embark on your own 365 project.

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Used with permission By Francis Flinch (CC-BY-3.0)

My first introduction to what would become “the cloud,” happened eight years ago, when a small start up company called Delicious (formerly del.icio.us) made its debut. This new service allowed us to store our bookmarks in a whole new way via tagging and descriptive text.  It didn’t take long before various mutations of the ‘cloud based’ bookmarking craze began to crop up vying for our business. A few notable companies stepped up to the plate, and some made their mark, however, I was never able to find one application that could truly “do it all.”

Like every other new application that pops up with a lifespan similar to that of a snail trying to cross any given street in Manhattan, I was leery to give up my current work-flow, however, being the geek, I decided to give it a try, and have never looked back.  Recently surpassing the two million user mark, and reviewed by the likes of The Wall Street Journal, TIME, and Lifehacker,  Springpad oozes features and tools that invoke flashbacks of ripping open presents on Christmas morning, all the while remaining robust, intuitive, and professional.

I had the honor to sit down with co-founder and CEO Jeff Janer, who along with Jeff Chow (Product Development ), and Jason Horman (Chief Architect ), launched Springpad in 2009, and discuss some of the features of Springpad, as well as what is in store for future releases.

The first stop on the “question express” was regarding Springpad’s “free” service, and how long before we were presented with a new choice to upgrade to a premium subscription, which would allow us to take advantage of increased space or “member only” features? To my delight and surprise, Mr. Janer’s answer was plain and simple, “We have no plans to charge users for this service.” Although we discussed how this was possible, it is beyond the scope of this article.

The tables turned briefly as I was asked how I use Springpad, which I was more than happy to answer.

From a photographer’s viewpoint, I use Springpad as a “scouting” tool. I am constantly on the prowl for a new location to shoot, and whether I come across it by accident or intentionally, the chance that I will have my high end gear along for the ride is slim to none.   A perfect example of how I used Springpad to record a location happened just last week.  One evening as I made my way home from work, I encountered a major traffic jam. It looked as though it would be a good hour until things were cleaned up, so I decided to try an unfamiliar back road. As I rounded one of the windy turns, there it was; A small, almost hidden cemetery, with headstones dating back to the seventeenth century!  This was definitely a spot that needed revisiting, but I wasn’t sure when I would be able to swing back, or the exact location.

Springpad to the rescue!

Using my iPhone, I opened up the free Springpad app, and navigated to my notebook called “photo scouting.”

Notebooks make up the core functionality of Springpad, and are extremely powerful as you will soon learn.  With my “photo scouting” notebook open I chose “search nearby.”  This is especially helpful if I am completely unfamiliar with the area, as it will generate a map using nearby places as a reference.

If I want to further detail the directions, I will try to record a street name, or in this particular case, the name of the church.  Next I chose the “add a photo,” function from the drop down menu and began taking snapshots of the cemetery from different angles.  The native camera launches within the application, so there is no need to take the photos, save them, and add them later, although that is an option.

With the photos automatically saved to my notebook, the next step is to add a voice message using the “record audio” function, also launched from within the application, describing the shots along with anything that may stand out (ie this headstone would make a great HDR, etc.)

The remainder of my work-flow includes tagging, typing additional notes, or choosing an additional function.  The entire process took under 10 minutes, which included the photography, and I barely scratched the surface of what this app is capable of accomplishing. For a deeper look into Springpad and all the features available, check out the main blog as well as their YouTube channel.

Mr. Janer shared some other ways that photographers are using Springpad. For instance, photographing your gear for insurance purposes in the event of theft or damage. You can also use the built in barcode scanner ​to grab the details of the model and brand of equipment you are using!  Speaking of bar codes, anything you scan into Springpad becomes a bargain hunter’ dream come true. Springpad integrates an alert system that will let you know if the brand of equipment scanned happens to go on sale. This goes for anything you scan into Springpad; it’s like having your very own personal assistant keeping an eye out for a price drop or a special offer specific to anything you save.

As if Springpad hasn’t already made it a breeze to save stuff you want to remember and organize them into notebooks, another exciting feature, which was announced the day after my conversation with Jeff Janer, is the ability to customize each notebook. Imagine having twenty or more notebooks, each one with its own look and feel, including custom sidebars, “add menus,” and backgrounds!  FYP readers will be especially excited to know about the ability to upload your own photograph to be used as wallpaper for your Springpad desktop, and it carries over to your mobile device be it a smart phone or tablet. Talk about complete personalization!

Lastly, staying on the topic of personalization, Springpad is rolling out what Mr. Janer termed “True Collaboration,” which will allow you to share out entire notebooks. Think Google circles on steroids. My first thought of how this might be used is the ability for wedding photographers to share photos with newlyweds. The photos can even be arranged on a “cork-board” style wall, allowing anyone with “share permissions” to drag and arrange the photos, make notes, add their own photos, etc.

The most impressive part of Springpad for me is the endless features and options, while remaining uncluttered, and intuitive.  As my title implies, Springpad is your virtual Swiss army knife.  As it continues to grow and new features are added, I cannot imagine needing anything else to keep my creative life in check.  Be sure to visit the Springpad on Twitter and Facebook, as well as their blog and YouTube channel for in depth ways to use this amazing tool.

Now if you will excuse me, it appears I am being pulled over by the local police for writing and driving!  This may take a while, so in the meantime, head over to Springpad and check out this amazing software for yourself.

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Photography is a hobby for me, therefore, I always strive to find gear that is reasonably priced, if not outright cheap.  This is a category where the Cactus V5 flash triggers fall squarely and here is my review of this remarkable piece of equipment.

Ever since David Hobby made the Strobist style of lighting using small flashes off-camera popular, the market for products that allow photographers to take their speedlights off the hot-shoe and control them remotely has literally exploded.  In particular, we have seen the emergence of a number of transmitters, which take the impulse that the camera sends to the flash through the hot-shoe and throw it, via radio signals, to a receiver that is connected to the flash, thus letting you put the latter wherever you want.

The undisputed kings of this category are undoubtedly the Pocket Wizards, which are considered to be the most reliable, feature-rich, and well-built of the pack.  Especially with the new MiniTT1/FlexTT5 pair, with its ability to transmit the TTL signals employed by Nikon and Canon cameras to automatically determine the correct flash exposure, Pocket Wizards occupy the top tier of the market.

Most hobbyists that would like to do some strobist-type shooting, however, are wary of spending a few hundred dollars on a pair of PocketWizards, which are the minimum required to control a remote flash, or even more than that for controlling multiple flashes.  Therefore, a market has emerged for cheap and simple transmitters and receivers.  While these do not generally offer the features and the robustness of brand-name devices, they can be reliable and reasonably sturdy.

A well-known brand of radio flash-controlling devices is Cactus, which is distributed worldwide by Gadget Infinity.  The latest version of this product is the Cactus V5 transceiver.  A transceiver is a single device that can act as a both transmitter and a receiver.  When you buy a pair of Cactus V5 transceivers, you receive two identical devices that can be configured for transmission or reception via a small switch on their side.  You put the transmitter onto the hot-shoe of your camera, connect the receiver to a flash, set the two to use the same radio channel and, whenever you press the shutter button on your camera, the flash activation signal is relayed, via radio frequency, to the receiver, which in turn fires the flash attached to it.

While the transmitter is mounted onto a camera via the hot-shoe, the receiver can either use the hot-shoe connection method, a PC-Sync cable or a plug cable.  A typical hot-shoe flash can be mounted on top of the Cactus V5, using the female hot-shoe connector that is on top of it.  This is ideal for when you want to remotely trigger a Speedlight.  When you want to trigger a studio strobe, you can use a PC-Sync cable or a plug cable to go from the transceiver to the flash unit.

A Cactus V5 Transceiver on its stand

If you are just starting out, you will need a couple of Cactus V5 devices and possibly some kind of cable.  In this case, your best option is to order the “Duo” package, which contains two units with stands, a PC-Sync cable, a 3.5mm plug cable, a 6.35mm plug adapter, a user’s manual, and a small booklet with samples of lighting scenarios.  This kit will only set you back USD $59.95 and includes four AAA alkaline batteries.   As I would not trust their charge to last for long, I recommend getting some good alkaline batteries, with spares, or a few rechargeable ones.

Contents of the Cactus V5 Duo package (batteries and manuals not shown)

I also included a shutter cable in my order.   This can be used to connect a receiver to the remote release port on your camera and use a transmitter to open the shutter remotely, instead of firing the flash.  Since the remote port on cameras is proprietary and not standard, you will need to order the correct cable for your camera make and model, if it is available.

The Cactus V5 is a black, sleek object that demonstrates some attention to design on part of the manufacturer; it absolutely will not look out of place on top of your camera.  On the bottom, it has the male hot-shoe connector and a standard 1/4″ female thread for mounting on a stand, thus obviating the need for a cold-shoe adapter.  On the top side, it sports the female host-shoe connector, a recessed button for manual triggering the receiver and a green-orange led.  When used as a remote shutter, the button can be pressed half-way down to activate metering and auto-focus, in which case the LEDs on both units light up as orange, and fully down to trigger, in which case the LEDs turn green.

On the right side, as seen when looking at the unit from the back of the camera, you can find a rotary dial with numbers from 1 to 16, used for selecting the radio channel, which must be the same for transmitter and receiver.  Channels 1 to 5, indicated by blue numbers on the dial, are “special”, in that they can be used for multi-channel triggering.  Basically, when the transmitter is on channel 1, all receivers on channels 1 to 5 will fire simultaneously.  This allows for triggering different groups of flashes, all at once or separately.  My biggest issue with the channel selection dial is that the numbers are very small and hard to read for somebody, like me, who hasn’t got the eyesight of a twenty-year-old guy anymore.

On the left side you can find a small switch that can be used to set the unit to TX mode, RX mode, or switch it off.  This is a very small switch with a short distance between positions.  Not the best design, probably.  Further along the left edge is the female plug connector for cables.  On the back side the battery compartment opens via a pressure-sensitive latch.  It is pretty sensitive, so be careful not to open it inadvertently.

Design-wise, these small switches and dials, and the battery compartment door are the biggest shortcomings of the Cactus V5.  They can, and will be, moved without noticing.  This can be especially frustrating when you have placed your flash a hundred meters or more away and you discover that it is not firing because you changed channels or opened the battery door while mounting the unit.  Always check that the receiver is working before moving away from it.

A Cactus V5 transceiver with Nikon SB-900 flash, mounted atop a light stand fitted with an umbrella adapter

After receiving my Duo kit, I used the Cactus V5 for some shoots, both inside and outside, with my Nikon D90 and my SB-900 speedlight. They always performed flawlessly and never missed a shot, save for when the SB-900 decided to go in stand-by mode.  When this happens, the receiver will wake up the flash, but there will be a small delay.  If your shutter speed is close to your flash sync speed (1/200s for the D90) the delay will cause a black band to appear on the bottom of the first photo you take after the flash has woken up.  This does not normally pose a problem in a studio situation,  but it can be inconvienent during an event, where it might mean missing that all-important moment.  If you are shooting events and your flash has a stand-by feature, I suggest disabling it.

After doing some real shots from a very short distance, I decided to subject the Cactus V5 to a more demanding set of tests.  The first test consisted of using the continuous shooting mode of the camera to rapidly fire off the flash.  I set the D90 to high-speed continuous shooting, which means a maximum of 5 shots per second, and fired a sequence of 10 shots.  The Cactus triggered the flash without missing a beat, even when I repeated the test a couple more times.

For the next test, I decided to verify how far the units can be and still work reliably.  My country club happens to have a golf practice field, with distance markers at 50, 100, and 150 meters, so I brought my equipment there and did a series of tests.  Each test consisted in a rapid fire sequence of 10 shots and was repeated at every marked distance.

Composite image showing the 50m, 100m, and 150m distance markers lit by the flash

Even in this case, I did not detect any misfires.  Though the test was conducted in the open countryside, with little chance of radio interference from other sources, the Cactus still gets full marks, considering that it largely exceeded the nominal maximum recommended distance of 100 meters.

I finally did a last test, this time using the Cactus as a remote shutter release, instead of as a flash trigger.  As with the previous tests, I performed repeated series of rapid shots and the receiver never missed a beat.  When using a pair of Cactus transceivers for remote shutter control, you have to be aware of the fact that, if you keep the test button pressed on the transmitter for more than two seconds, the receiver locks in the “ON” state and the camera fires continuously, until you press the button again.  This can be useful in bulb mode, much less so when shooting continuously.

To conclude the review, I have to say that I am pretty  impressed with the Cactus V5 capabilities and  its reliability.  Of course, at this price, you cannot expect a device that also supports TTL and high-speed sync, but if you are comfortable with manual settings, you will be fine.  The only aspect where the Cactus gets less than full marks is the design of the switches and dials, which are to small and a bit flimsy.  The shape of the unit is also rather low and wide, so reaching the wheel that tightens the hot-shoe connector can be a bit difficult for people with big fingers.

If I were to rank the Cactus V5, it would get an A+ for price and reliability, A for features and B for physical design.

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One of the best ways to view images on the iPad is finally here, and it’s darn near perfect… almost!

In case you have been too busy creating images to poke your head around the virtual world, 500px.com has been on fire hitting over 55,000,000 page views in September 2011 alone.  It is a great sampling of some of the best photography on the web.

Photographers from around the world upload images and create portfolios.  You can follow other photographers, comment, rate and favorite images, and if you look hard enough, you can find some of the best of the best pros in the field; and now, it can all be done on your iPad.

The app syncs with your online account, friends, and can even be a great way to display your own portfolio on the go!

The format is crisp and clean, pulling the best out of each image.  Gestures are easy with the swipes and pinches that are now second nature to those in iOS land.  But there is a but.  (You knew there HAD to be a “but,” right?)

There are actually two buts:

• The first one is minor: There is no way to search for images. I tried poking around the app and couldn’t find it. I search often, especially when looking for inspiration, and quite frankly, there’s no better place than 500px for that.
• The second but is a biggie to me, and I’ve chatted with the 500px.com team about this: it is lacking the ability to upload.

Often when in the field, I will do a quick view and light edit right on my iPad.  How cool would it be to upload on the spot?  I hear the “not… yet” which makes me hopeful that is in the works.  The best thing about the folks at 500px is: they don’t jam stuff out just to get it out there.  They make sure it’s done right, thereby making that upgrade worth the wait.  That being said, the ability to upload alone would take this app from great to pure awesomeness.  For Android folks, an app for your platform is in progress and coming soon.

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From the makers of the online photo editor, Pixlr, is a cross-platform app called Pixlr-o-matic.

With a very clean and fun to use interface, this app gives iPhoneographers an interesting way to apply quality effects to their photos.

iOS version:

The opening screen of Pixlr-o-matic offers you some options to get started.  You can start with a new photo or use one from the library.  If you do not have any photos loaded and don’t want to take one, you can choose a sample image offered by the developers.

Development screen in Pixlromatic (David Pringle)

Once you have chosen a photo, Pixlr-o-matic takes you to the first editing screen.  Editing within Pixlr-o-matic is a very simple three-step process.  Each step is indicated by icons along the bottom edge of the screen, there are no real controls in Pixlr-o-matic.  The workspace contains a large preview window and a film-strip effect selector.  As you use your finger to slide the film-strip, the selected effect is shown on the original photo in the preview window in real-time.  The effects available are quite variable and each one is quite unique and intricate.  Some involve interesting alpha and color channel effects that create beautiful images.  Once you have a result you like, you move on to the next step by touching the light bulb icon on the bottom of the screen.

Lighting screen in Pixlromatic (David Pringle)

On this screen, you can choose a lighting effect to layer onto the photo.  The choices vary from light-leaks of all colors and types, to lens flares or even sparkles and bokeh.  My biggest regret is that there is no fader control, therefore many of these effects are simply too opaque to be used on most photos.  Many of these effects are quite beautiful and could work wonderfully if you could move them or change their opacity.  Again, when you are ready to move to the next step, choose the next icon at the bottom of the screen which is a frame.

Frame screen in Pixlromatic (David Pringle)

The frame screen allows you choose an edge effect or frame for your photograph.  In my opinion, this section has some of the most beautiful effects.  Even if you don’t like or choose to use the other effects, Pixlr-o-matic is worth having just for these effects.  Many of them are elegant recreations of analog film edges and others are different forms of vignettes and false camera screens while a few are grungy, textured, and artsy.  I have seen effects of this quality in high-end Photoshop filters.

The last step is to save and share your masterpiece.   The last screen is a virtual drying line.   Click on the share button and you get options.  Not only can you save the photo back to your photo library, you can export it to iTunes to pull off during the next sync.  You can also email your image, send it to your dropbox or use the social media  sharing options: Facebook, Flickr, and Imm.io.

Final piece completed in Pixlr-o-matic

But the story doesn’t end here, the folks at Pixlr have given us a cross-platform tool which we can use anywhere.  Pixlr-o-matic is available as  an Android version, a browser version, a Facebook version, a plug-in for Chrome, and a stand-alone version.  The stand-alone version is based on Adobe’s AIR environment and is very similar to the iOS version.

Desktop version of Pixlromatic (David Pringle)

The desktop version has a couple of nice touches which make it fun.  One of these is that the preview window is a virtual development tray which ripples when you move the mouse over it.  This brought back a surge of longing for the old days for me.  Some days I really miss the smell of D-76 in the morning, and Pixlr-o-matic gave me a touch of nostalgia, thanks, guys.

Desktop version of Pixlromatic (David Pringle)

The interface is mostly the same as in iOS.  There is a preview window and a film-strip, however, the icons at the bottom of the screen are not there, but your position in the development process is marked by an analog-style gauge at the bottom of the screen.  To advance forward or return to previous screens, you click on arrow buttons on the bottom corners of the screen.

Desktop version of Pixlromatic (David Pringle)

While the effects are identical to the mobile versions, as are the frames.  The sharing options are limited to simply saving the file or sharing on imm.io.

Flatiron processed in Pixlr-o-matic (David Pringle/Pringle-Art.com)

The folks at Pixlr brought us a very fun way to create beautiful art with our photographs.  While, not just limited to iOS and iPhoneography, it has a fun and creative interface which is superbly created for the multi-touch interface of the iPhone and iPad.  They have a version for just about any operating system you are working from.

Overall, this is a great little app which creates fun art.   My only criticism is the lack of any opacity control or effect movement on the photo. With these minor controls, it could make this app more useful for many more images.   If they add these functions, Pixlr-o-matic would be a solid, daily-use app.

iTunes link

Web version of Pixlr-o-matic

Rating:  ★★★★☆

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Landing at Princess Juliana Airport - St. Maarten

Photography. Aviation. Two hobbies – nay, passions that go together like Châteauneuf du pap and Saint Marcellin. Aviation brings to us fascinating subject matter, the adventure of visiting new places, and gadgets galore for those of us who appreciate technology. There are, however, unique challenges that aviation brings to the shutterbug, especially when the person looking through the viewfinder is also the pilot in command.

Cockpit Buttons

Firstly, aircraft cockpits of all but the largest jet airliners tend to be rather cramped quarters. They are very functional spaces, designed to hold two or more people, the equipment and publications that are necessary to the profession, and little else. Camera bags full of equipment are bulky, even an SLR with a few lenses may be in one’s way during the course of carrying out aviation-related duties, if not in danger of being crushed by heavy metal seats moving on tracks.

Business Jet Cabin

Luckily, there are many alternatives to that big Nikon/Canon on the market today; anything from small SLRs with zoom lenses to camera phones are quite capable of capturing compelling images – all with their unique advantages and limitations. The cockpit of the business jet that I fly is comfortable enough for trans-oceanic flight, but doesn’t leave much safe room for delicate equipment.  Therefore, unless I know I’m going somewhere that I know I’m going to really want the big guns, I get by with my iPhone 3GS.

On Your 6 (tail) -Waiting to Takeoff at Princess Juliana Airport - St. Maarten

Subject Matter

Airplanes are beautifully designed pieces of flying artwork, natural subject matter. If you don’t believe me, ask the several people I see every work week photographing my aircraft, from outside the airport boundary fence, as I prepare for takeoff. People are always interested in things they find dangerous or a bit mysterious, and when coupled with their beauty, the aircraft themselves are fabulous subject matter. The trick is to find an interesting angle or some other circumstance or even a gimmick - to bring added interest to your composition.

Rear of Business Jet

Bombardier Challenger at Sunset

Nose of SR71 Spy Aircraft

Out the Window / Air to Ground: I can’t count the number of times I’ve flown over the Rocky Mountains, awestruck by their beauty, frantically taking shot after shot of their rocky crags and impossibly white snowfields, only to be disappointed by the results.  The difference being, of course, the fact that I was whizzing by at 500 miles per hour, their size and shape made apparent by my speed.  On the screen, they look incredibly flat. However, if you catch them at the right time of day, some shadows can definitely help.  I’m not above artificially changing the depth of field using a tilt-shift app either.  HDR (high dynamic range) is another technique that is very useful. It allows me to include the relatively dark cockpit in photos of the very bright outside, giving us a view that approaches the incredible dynamic range of our eyes.

Landing at Princess Juliana Airport - St. Maarten

Colorado Rocky Mountains

Toronto Highway

Air to Air: Or, the “money shot”.  The fact is, unless you’ve made prior arrangements with another aircraft, getting a good shot of one from the air is very difficult.  Much effort and expense goes into keeping aircraft far apart from each other – for obvious reasons.  Luckily for us, advances in technology and reliability have allowed a standard called Reduced Vertical Separation Minimums (RVSM) to be implemented over the last several years.  Now, instead of 2,000 foot separating two jetliners at opposing headings, RVSM brings aircraft a scant 1,000 feet apart!  Not to worry though, the requirements for this kind of separation are quite stringent.  Below is an Emirates Airlines A-380, the double decker behemoth I’m sure you’ve heard of over the past few years.  I took this next one over France – he was 1,000 feet above me, and we passed each other at a dizzying combined speed of roughly 1,000 mph.

Airbus A380 Flyby

Places you go

Airport terminal buildings, especially those of the larger cities, often present an opportunity to capture some fantastic architecture.  Moreover, they are great places for capturing candid images of our fellow travelers.

Tampa Airport

Chicago Midway and Tampa's Airport

Growing up, most of my talent seemed to lay in drawing.  Drawing airplanes, specifically: mostly vast WWII dogfights or vast sci-fi spaceship dogfights.  Living in the Space Coast of FL, near a regional airport, an air force base, and KSC, there was plenty to inspire me in my dual interests of aerospace and art.  I was first exposed to the nuts and bolts of photography in a ninth grade photography class: I learned to develop B&W, make prints, and learned the basic rules of composition.  This love of photography follows me through my career as I’m sure yours follows you.

Looking through iPhoto, 99.9% of my photos are of my two mischievous and adorable boys, but let’s face it: photographing one’s kids is a subject that’s been done before.  As a professional pilot, my experience as a photo enthusiast may be a bit different from yours.  I’m privileged to work in an environment that’s always changing – literally.  Weather changes, scenery changes, changes in the sorts of people around me.  I’ve been places that very few people have been (i.e., 51,000 feet from the surface of the earth), and have had views of the planet that are somewhat rare.  I’ve buzzed across the USA so many times that to me, it’s as if I’m driving around the neighborhood.  Put me anywhere over the United States at 45,000 feet, let me look around a bit, and I’ll bet I can tell you where I am. But I digress…

This is your captain speaking, always have your camera ready wherever you are and have a great day regardless of your final destination.

Departure from Princess Juliana Airport, St. Maarten at Takeoff

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I like driving regardless of whether I’m in the driver’s seat or the passenger’s seat.  I enjoy watching streaming cityscape especially at night in Tokyo.  Urban music at full volume punctuated by the exhaust sound from my old Peugeot.  It is one of the most relaxing moments to me and this is one of the reasons I like to shoot at night.  I relish the process of a 30 to 60 minute journey to my selected photo shooting location while enjoying the lights from the city and the blaring music.

On one particular day, I was caught in the rain en route to the place where the architecture that I wanted to shoot was located and was forced to change the plans; I almost gave up taking any photos that day.  I had an aha moment, why not shoot cityscapes from a moving car?  Luckily I had a small compact camera with a mini-tripod, so I placed it on the dashboard of my car.  Yes, I was lucky enough to have a substitute driver too;  a friend of mine who accompanied me that day, the poor guy.

One of my earlier cruising photos taken with my smallest compact camera. Shibuya, Tokyo.

Since that day, I have been fascinated with this concept and subsequently I have taken hundreds of photos on the way to and from photoshoots.  Most of them, however, went straight to the trash bin on my PC, but some went public on Flickr, Google+, and some other photo-sharing websites.  So this month, I’m going to share with you some tips that I have discovered so far.  Keep in mind, I’m not a tech guy or even a pro photographer, so there might be some missing technical info. My apologies in advance :-)

Keep the Windshield Clean

I shouldn’t have to include this first piece of advice here because it is fundamental whenever you drive, but here it is anyway.  Funnily enough, I often forgot this part, but one should carefully wipe the windshield clean of grease, water stains, mud, anything that will creates unwanted spots or diffused reflections in your photos.

Do you see the dirty reflections in the top center?  Keep your windshield clean if you don’t want this to happen to your images. Route 246, Setagaya, Tokyo.

The Smaller Camera You Use, the Better

Actually it depends on what type of car you are traveling in.  I’m not sure, but if you own a big Land Cruiser style of vehicle, you may not have to worry about the camera size.  However, if you have a smaller dashboard, you’ll need to find a small camera to fit the available space.  If your dashboard isn’t flat, you’ll need to find a slip-proof mat to mount the tripod on.  You will also need to have a small tripod that can go relatively or completely flat.  The tripod in the photo below is the one I often used when I mainly used a small compact digital.  It can’t support big cameras but it is very portable and easy to carry.

I really loved this small fellow but it now spends most of its time in my drawer.

For bigger cameras, I recommend a clamp pod.  I first bought this with a different use in mind, but later found out that it can also go flat and it’s strong and stable enough to support my m4/3s camera.  However, it’s about 800 grams so it is not light enough to carry around in my bag.

I now use a Panasonic DMC-GH2 and a LUMIX G VARIO 14-45mm/F3.5-5.6 for cruising. I have to detach the lens hood for it to be accommodated in the narrow space between the windshield and the dashboard.

Exposure Time between a Half Second and One

If you want to have a completely blurred image, you can go with longer exposure.  However, for crisp in-focus images, you should go with the shortest exposure time possible.  I find that the exposure time between about a half second and one second works very well.  This allows you to shoot an image where the view in the distance looks clear but the resultant image still has the zooming lights all around it.

Don’t Select a Wide Open Aperture

I like bokeh shots, so I tend to adopt wider apertures when I shoot at night, however under these circumstances the story is a bit different.  I prefer to have images that are focused on almost everything in the frame, and it’s nearly impossible to get a right focus when your car moving quickly.  The higher your F-stop is, the better chance you’ll have of a properly focused image.  Keep in mind that as you raise the F-stop, your required exposure time will increase.  On the other hand, if you use a compact digital camera, you can go with wider apertures because the depth of field of compact cameras is usually greater than SLRs due to the sensor size.  Also I strongly recommend using manual focus and not auto focus (AF).  AF often doesn’t function properly at night especially when you are moving.  For this reason, I always set my focus before I start to drive, and never have to look back at the focus ring once I’ve started shooting.

As is shown in the the image above, using a remote control is also a great idea.  You don’t have to reach out for your camera for releasing the shutter.  You can sit back, enjoy the music and the cityscape, and release the shutter as many times as you want to.

The exposure time was 0.6 seconds. Roppongi, Tokyo. Also,driving around 40 kmh (25 mph) gives results that I think are nice.

Find a Street Full of Lights

As you can see so far, most of the images posted here are taken in the busiest streets of Tokyo, which are always full of lights from cars, street lamps, and buildings along the streets.  So go out on the busy streets around your area if you have any.  If you are in Tokyo, I recommend that you go out on weekends, not on weekdays.  On weeknights, the streets are always jam packed with taxis.  So chances are that you’ll be in the middle of a heavy traffic, grumbling to yourself how you I take “cruising” photos while sitting in a stationary car.

This is what I got when running between the lines of trees with Christmas lights strung in them. Roppongi Hills, Tokyo.

You’ll Never Get a Nice Result on a Bumpy Road

To me this is unpredictable, there might be ruts, patches of repair work on the asphalt and these will impact on your shot.  I always shoot several photos at a time in action mode, hoping to have at least one usable image.

Bump, bump, bump … Some people may like this image but I don’t. Shinjuku, Tokyo.

Follow a Vehicle While Shooting

If there are cars in front of you, maintain your speed and distance from them so as to keep them at the same focal point in the frame.  Then, you’ll get something to draw people’s attention with the zooming lights.

This was the first time I followed a police car.

Following a bike might be a good idea too.

Wet Asphalt Gives Nice Reflections

I don’t often take “cruising” photos on a rainy night, because I do this on the way to and from photoshoot locations, and don’t go out on a rainy day.  But if you find a spot that has nice reflections on rainy days, try “cruise-shooting” there.  I’ve heard that older types of asphalt give better reflections, while the newer types don’t. The newer ones, apparently, are designed to rapidly absorb surface water.  Be extra cautious though, because those nice reflections mean a slippery road surface.

One of the toughest things to do on a rainy day is  to keep the windshield devoid of rain drops.  You will likely need to keep the wiper on all the time, so it’s hard to get the right timing for releasing the shutter.  So trying this right after the rain might be much easier for you.

I wasn’t flying in space. To get this, I had to ask the driver to stop the wipers for a moment.

The techniques I have shared with you here will vary depending on what equipment you use.  But I hope your inspiration has been fueled a little by now.  If you enjoyed reading about this technique, please leave a comment below.  I want to hear your voices.

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[ Editor's Note: I figured a little more European Flare is necessary, so hailing from Italy comes Ugo Cei. Though he considers himself an amateur, he has a real knack for the technical aspects and composition, which I think will lend itself to FYP perfectly. His focus is on city and landscapes primarily, but the first article from Ugo lends itself to all types of genres and I hope you find it informative and enjoyable! Cheers! ]

If there is one thing that draws me to digital photography is the range of tools and techniques that photographers can use, not just to record reality as their eyes can see it, but to make things which are normally invisible visible, to capture details that the human eye can’t see, or to create entire new kinds of realities.

Techniques like High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography, stitching panoramas from multiple images, focus stacking, making a raging sea look like cotton using long exposures, freezing the motion of fast moving objects, shooting star trails in the middle of the night, or making the night as bright as day, all can be used to make us experience things that we would never be able to perceive with the naked eye.

In this article, I am going to demonstrate some techniques that can be used to effectively freeze motion and let you appreciate the details of liquids splashing and small objects smashing together.

Many phenomena happen, literally, at the speed of sound and are beyond what can be achieved using only equipment that is available to most photographers, and typically require specialized hardware that can be tricky to build and expensive to buy.  Think bullets flying through objects or smashing into glass panes, or water-filled balloons exploding.

There are some other events, however, that can be captured easily and with little or no expense.  One example is splashing liquids.  The droplets created when you drop an object into water, or when you quickly pour some liquid onto a solid, move pretty fast. You might think that, by setting the shutter on your camera to a very high speed, you would be able to freeze those, but that is not as easy as it might seem.  To compensate the loss of light that comes with a high shutter speed, either the aperture must be very large, or the ISO very high, or both.  These imply a depth of field that is too shallow or too much noise.

So, discounting the possibility of using a high shutter speed, what are your options?  Basically, you will have to use some kind of artificial lighting.  Those flashes that you can put on the hot-shoe of your camera and even use off-camera?  They are perfect for this kind of task.  They are even better, in most cases, than big studio strobes, for one simple reason: the duration of the flash of light emitted by a Speedlight can be very, very short.  The approximate minimum flash duration of my Nikon SB-900 is an astonishingly brief 1/38,500s at 1/128 power.  The lower the power used, the shorter the burst, but even at 1/8 power, which is a lot, the flash is over in 1/5000s.

What this means is that, in order to freeze the motion of a moving subject, you can light it for a very short time with the pulse from a flash and, assuming that the contribution to the exposure from the ambient is negligible, you can freeze fast motion even when using a low ISO and a small aperture in order to have low noise and large depth of field.

I used a Nikon D90 to take the pictures in this article.  A DSLR is probably the most convenient type of camera to use in this situation, but you could also use a point-and-shoot, provided it can shoot in manual mode and has a hot-shoe for mounting a flash.  I put the camera on a tripod. Any tripod will do, as long as it keeps your camera still when shooting and changing the settings.

For the light source, I had my Nikon SB-900 at disposal.  This is the best and most expensive Speedlight in the Nikon product line, but almost any flash will work, provided that you can set its power manually and you can use it off-camera. If you have more than one flash, even better.  I put the flash inside a small softbox and on a stand, at various angles and heights for the different shoots.  This has nothing to do with capturing motion, but you should take care to position the light source and use all the necessary modifiers in order to achieve the best lighting. High speed photography can be fun, but a badly lit subject is a badly lit subject, even if frozen at 1/10,000s.

For the shot of the whisky being poured, I used a couple of Cactus V5 transceivers to remotely trigger the flash from the camera.  They are cheap, reliable, and very useful. In the absence of triggers, some cameras can use their built-in flash as a remote commander.  The D90, for example, can use the pop-up flash as a commander for Nikon CLS-compatible Speedlights, and Canon has a similar system for some of their cameras.  A remote release for triggering the camera shutter is a must. I used the Nikon ML-L3 infrared remote, which is wonderful for this, as it means one less cable running around.

As for camera settings, a typical aperture I used was something between f/11 and f/16, depending on the depth of field I desired.  When shooting with flash, shutter speed does not have any influence on the flash exposure, so any speed which is not greater than the flash sync speed will work.  Remember that the effect of freezing motion is caused by the short burst of flash, not by the camera shutter.  I therefore used 1/200s for most shots, except for the strawberry one, where I used “bulb”, as explained below.  For all shots, I had the camera in manual mode and flash white balance.  It’s also advisable to use manual focus and pre-focus before shooting.

For photos of small subjects, like these, I found that using 1/32 power on the flash is generally adequate, with the softbox at a short distance from the subject.  Experiment with various power settings and flash-to-subject distance in order to find the correct amount of light for your intended aperture.  The closer the flash, the less power you need and, thanks to the inverse square law, if you halve the distance, you will need 1/4th as much power.

Now, everything that I explained so far happens to be the easy part.  If you know your instruments, you should be up and running, having taken a few test shots to nail the exposure, in a matter of minutes.  The really hard part comes, so to speak, with “posing” your subject, which tends to be a whimsical, nervous, unreliable, and unruly type.  Be prepared for hours, if not days, of frustrating retries and you can look forward to making a mess of your studio, with liquid splashing all over the place.  Cover the area around with sheets of plastic, be careful not to spill liquids over your camera, flash, and computer, and have a large supply of paper tissue at hand for drying up.

The most difficult aspect to nail, unsurprisingly, turns out to be timing the shot with the most interesting part of the splash.  A fraction of a second too early, or too late, and there is nothing there to see.  After a while, you will start getting the hang of it, however, and be able to click reliably at the right time.  Then you will still have to do lots of attempts to get that interesting shape in the liquid. For the strawberry image, I had to discard a lot of images because the fruit ended up having a thin layer of milk covering it.

The nice thing with digital is that you can easily “cheat”.  The whisky pour shot, for instance, is a composite of two shots: one having nice droplets flying around, but a very irregular pour, one with a nice pour but no droplets.  A bit of magic with selective layer masking in Photoshop is all that is needed to combine the best of the two.  Another way you can cheat is by using “fake” liquids in place of the real ones.  When doing the whisky pour shot, I ended up spilling the ‘liquor’ all over the place.  If it had been real whisky, I would have ended up being intoxicated by the fumes.  Instead, I just used tea; with the addition of water, you can make black tea look just like scotch whisky or bourbon.

In case you don’t have any device that can be used to trigger the flash remotely, similar results can be still achieved with some planning.  This was the case with the strawberry in the milk shot, where I didn’t yet have my Cactus V5 transceivers.   I advise, in any case, against just putting the flash onto the hot-shoe, as this will create a very flat, frontal light that is rather ugly. Side lighting is almost invariably much better.  For working without triggers, you need an environment that is almost completely dark, as you will have to use shutter speeds on the order of a few seconds and you don’t want the camera to pick up any extra ambient light during the shot.  In addition to this, you will need a flash that can be triggered manually. Most flashes have a “test” button that will discharge the unit at the set power level.

To take the shot, set the camera shutter speed to B (for “bulb”) mode.  You can also set it to a time of about 3 to 5 seconds, depending on the speed with which you are able to carry on the rest of the operations.  When you are ready, open the shutter, start whatever is needed to get the desired effect (like pouring liquid or dropping things), push the test button on the flash at the right moment, and finally close the shutter.  You can easily understand why this is not at all simple, since you have to juggle the camera’s remote release, the subject, the flash, and finally the release again.  It’s probably better if you have an assistant that can take care of at least one of these.  Consider also that you are operating in the dark and you will begin to understand why the success rate is much less that you would hope for.  For instance, when taking the strawberry shot, I ended up missing the bowl completely, or hitting its rim, so man times that in the end I had a bunch of damaged strawberries and only a few survivors with which to get the hero shot.

In the end, this is a kind of photography that requires a good amount of patience, but can be done at home on a rainy day, with little equipment, and can be fun and incredibly rewarding, especially when, after hundreds of failures, you get the shot.

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Today’s cameras are marvels of modern electronics, they contain powerful computers which can carry out thousands of calculation in the blink of an eye, surely they must be able to accurately capture the colour in a scene?  The digital camera does not see colour as we do with our eyes, all that it can do is to calculate what the colour should be by making use of an internal reference scale.  What then happens when you display that image of your computer screen, does it use the same reference scale that the camera does? What about your printer, is it using the same reference as your camera, and computer screen.  Well guess what , if you don’t make sure that they are all on the same scale, then what you capture and what you print may not look the same..

The complexity of colour

We could enter into a complex discussion on the origins or colour, the definitions of colour models and colour spaces ,at the end of which you could possibly write a PhD dissertation on the subject.  But hey we are photographers not colour technicians and we just need to understand how the choices that we make can affect the final look of our image.  Lets keep it simple and discuss those areas that have the maximum impact on what we do and the concept of colour management.  These two images were taken minutes apart using different colour settings on the camera and as you can see the results are dramatically different.

Colour Management

Wikipedia the online encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_management) describes colour management as “ colour management is the controlled conversion between the colour representations of various devices, such as image scanners, digital cameras, monitors, TV screens, film printers, computer printers, offset presses, and corresponding media.“  Take specific note of the words “the controlled conversion “ which suggests the use of a standardized process of allowing images to transit various electronic devices whilst still maintaining colour accuracy during the complete process from capture to print. .

Before You Shoot, choose the right colour space

A device colour space describes the range of colours  that a camera can see  or a monitor can display and is tied to the specific electronic or physical characteristics of the device it describes (e.g a Monitor which uses light to produce colour or a Printer which uses dyes).  Whilst editing colour spaces  such as Adobe RGB or sRGB, are not dependent on a device and therefore facilitate the editing of images in a standardized manner.  As photographers we work mainly with editing colour spaces and the most common ones we will encounter are  Adobe RBG (1998) and sRGB.

RGB (For Recording & Editing)

The RGB colour model is an additive colour model in which red, green, and blue light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colours. Televisions and computer monitors use RGB to reproduce colour

CMYK (Printing) The CMYK colour model is a subtractive colour model, used in colour printing, and is also used to describe the printing process itself.  CMYK refers to the four inks used in some colour printing: cyan, magenta, yellow, and key black

For best results your applications and devices need to work in the same colour space. Use a larger colour space, such as Adobe RGB, if your camera or scanner can support it.  Use sRGB for web graphics since using Adobe RGB in such settings leads to washed-out looking colours in applications that are not colour aware (e.g. Most browsers).

During your shooting, record colour correctly by setting your white balance

A digital camera needs to find a reference point which represents white.  It will then calculate all the other colours based on this white point.  In normal lighting conditions such as can be found on a sunny day, you can get by with the standard white balance settings that built into your camera.   However in tricky shooting situations where there may be a mix of light sources (e.g ambient light plus fluorescent fixtures), you will not get predictable or consistent results by just using the built in settings, this is when you will need to be comfortable in setting a custom white balance

Custom white balance sets a reference point for the camera by using an image of a neutral white or grey subject taken in the same lighting conditions that illuminate your intended subject.  Two popular methods of setting the custom white balance are to use;

● An Expodisc

● A grey Card

ExpoDiscs (sold by Expoimaging) are used to set the custom white balance. The Expodisc is screwed onto your lens just like you would attach a filter, the camera is then placed in the same position as your subject and pointed back to where you intend to take the shot from.   The white balance is then set using the cameras custom white balance menu option.  The Expodisc actually turns your camera into an incident  light meter, measuring the light that falls on the intended subject

Some characteristics of Expo Discs are;

● Relatively easy to use

● Provide accurate white balance

● Easy snap-on installation

● Since they fit directly on the lens you  may need to purchase one for each lens of a different size

Expensive (around US 120.00)

A less expensive option is the Grey Card.  Grey cards may be used for in-camera white balance or post-processing white balance.  For in camera white balance, a photo of the grey card is taken and used to set the custom white balance for a sequence of photos.  For post-processing white balance, a photo of the grey card is taken in the same light that illuminates the subject.  Later during post processing the reference photo is used in the image processing software to set the white balance point for all images taken in that session..

After the Shot (editing and printing)

You may have experienced that at some time, the  display of an image on the computer screen differs from how it looks when printed.   Don’t forget that the computer screen uses light to render your image, whilst  an inkjet printer is spraying dye ), ink onto a piece of paper whose characteristics are much different from your screen.  To avoid this mismatch it is best to calibrate your monitor and printer.  Calibration of these devices will usually provide a screen display that simulates closely what prints on paper.  There are many reasons why display and printed output may be different e.g.

● Monitors use additive RGB colour while printing uses subtractive CMYK pigments, each a different way of reproducing colour.

● During printing, ink layering and overlapping causes subtle shifts in colour not found in the individual pixels that make up a screen image.

● Printed images don’t have the same range, saturation, and contrast as a monitor, making the colours typically darker and less vibrant than on screen.

● Paper texture and brightness also affect and change the printed image.

Begin with the calibration of your monitor, then ensure that you use the correct printer driver for your printer.Within the printer driver there will be controls for fine tuning the overall appearance of colour from your printer.

Colour calibration with ICC profiles

● ICC profiles provide a way to ensure consistent colour.

● These files are specific to each device on your system and contain information about how that device produces colour.

● With printers the ideal situation is to create separate profiles based on various combinations of ink and paper because this affects the appearance of the printed material.

● For more precise colour management, you can use colour management software to develop custom ICC profiles for any device.

Colour Management Systems include tools for calibrating monitors, scanners, printers, and digital cameras so they all “speak the same colour.”  These tools often include a variety of generic profiles as well as the means to customize profiles for any or all of your devices.

Choose the calibration tools that match your budget and your need for accurate representation of colour on-screen and in print.  Examples are ;

● Huey Pro

● X-Rite i1Display

● Colormunki

● Spyder3Elite.

Summary

● Choose the correct colour space for your camera and editing software (AdobeRGB)

● Set your white balance when shooting in tricky conditions

● Calibrate your monitor

● Calibrate your printer and paper with ICC profiles

If these steps are followed, the result should be consistent and accurate rendering of colours in your photos.