New Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi/400D
This week Canon announced the new Digital Rebel XTi (400D in Europe). The XTi will have a 10.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor, a new EOS Integrated Cleaning System, and a larger and brighter 2.5†LCD and 9-point AF system. The maximum frame burst increases from 14 to 27 large JPEGs and from 5 to 10 RAW files. So how much better is this camera?
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RGB Color Channels. Photo © Jim Doty Jr.
There are several ways to convert color images to black and white. One simple way that provides a lot of control is Chanel Mixer which is part of the recent versions of Adobe Photoshop. Read how in the full article at my web site.
If you read this blog regularly and think I’ve been doing a lot of portrait work lately, you are right. I will be back to landscapes this fall (I think).
Three of Ryan. Photo © Jim Doty Jr.
If you do everything right during the shoot, it is pretty simple with digital photography to put one person in more than one location in the same photo, provided the light source remains constant. It didn’t take much longer to composite the above photo in the computer than it did to set up and shoot in the first place. Working on the tiny details of the photo took a lot longer than compositing three photos together.
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Ryan’s Yearbook Photo? Photo © Jim Doty Jr.
Ryan’s senior pictures will be even more unique than I had planned. We showed up at one of my pre-selected outdoor shooting locations, only to find these two dancers using the same location to shoot a video-tape for a national competition. (A good location is a good location.) They were doing the last few “takes” as we arrived. It would have been a shameful waste of good talent not to include them in some of Ryan’s pictures.
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Memorial Church, Stanford University. Photo © Jim Doty, Jr.
Stanford University in Palo Alto California has a beautiful campus.
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The Merced River Below Half Dome, Yosemite National Park. Photo © Jim Doty, Jr.
Half Dome and the Merced river from Sentinel Bridge is one of the classic photo locations in Yosemite Valley.
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“Gates of the Valley”, Yosemite National Park. Photo © Jared Doty.
A bigger version of this photo is currently located here.
Can a hand-held, 6 megapixel point-and-shoot digital camera take a better photo than an expensive 12.8 megapixel D-SLR and a high quality lens?
As soon as we arrived at “Gates of the Valley” (also called “Valley View”), my son Jared took a series of seven, hand-held, vertical photos with a Canon Powershot S3 IS camera. I was busy setting up my tripod.
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Gates of the Valley, Yosemite National Park. Photo © Jim Doty Jr.
“Gates of the Valley”, also know as “Valley View”, is one of the best views of Yosemite Valley and is a favorite spot for photographes at the end of the day. This location is on the Northside Road toward the western end of the valley about 4.3 miles west of Yosemite Lodge. It is marked on almost all park maps and photographic guide books. It is worth scouting out ahead of time so you can find it quickly at the end of the day.
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Fireworks over Yukon Oklahoma on old U.S. 66. Photo © Jim Doty, Jr.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
From the Declaration of Independence, signed July 4, 1776. Written by Thomas Jefferson (1762-1826). 3rd US President (1801-09).
To see an engraving of the original and George Washington’s personal printed copy, go here.
to read the entire declaration, click the page 2 link at the right
Ryan. Photo © Jim Doty, Jr.
It was bright and sunny today when I took this photo.
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An open post from Representative Zoe Lofgren who is on our side in the Net Neutrality debate in Congress.
Guest post from Rep. Zoe Lofgren
May 26th, 2006
Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee passed H.R. 5417, the “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act of 2006,†which I introduced with Committee Chairman Jim Sensenbrenner, Ranking Member John Conyers and Rep. Rick Boucher last week. This is the first bill with real protections for Net Neutrality that has passed any committee in Congress, and I am proud to be a part of it.
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A plan before Congress, backed by big telecom dollars, could gut the internet’s first amendment: Net Neutrality. What is at risk is your right to choose the internet sites you want to go to, and even your right to receive emails from whomever you want. Do your part today to protect your internet rights and save Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality means YOU choose the sites you want to visit, and they are provided to you without outside intereference.
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Canon Chairman and CEO Fujio Mitarai (right) and President and COO Tsuneji Uchida during a news conference in Tokyo, May 11, 2006. REUTERS/Issei Kato
This could be the beginning of the end of an era.
“TOKYO (Reuters) – Japan’s Canon Inc. said on Thursday that it would consider halting development of new film cameras as it focuses resources on digital models, the latest sign of the rapidly fading role of film in photography.
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Rachel. The original file straight out of the camera is on the left, and the digitally optimized image is on the right. Photos © Jim Doty, Jr.
This is an excerpt from a longer article:
“Point and shoot digital cameras are designed to produce punchy (colorful, high contrast) photos right out of the camera. This saves the average person from doing a lot of digital work on their computer. There is a cost: images that lose valuable photo information that shows up in lost highlight and shadow detail. Pixelation, banding, and other problems can show up in large prints. Fortunately, many of the better point and shoot cameras will allow you to tone down the in-camera image processing if you want to work with the digital files yourself and maximum quality is important.
You’ve been thinking about trying an online photo lab. It sounds simple, send your files over the internet and the photos arrive in the mail a few days later. But how good is the quality? What about cost? How long does it take? How good are the poster prints?
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Mt. Sneffels, San Juan Mountains, Colorado. Photo © Jim Doty, Jr.
A common problem for nature photographers is the contrast range between bright skys and a darker foreground, or a bright scene and a much darker reflection of that scene in a lake or pond. Expose for the bright part of the scene and the dark part disappears. Expose for the dark part of the scene and the bright part is washed out. For years, the secret weapon for such situations has been the graduated neutral density filter (also called a graduated gray filter or split neutral density filter).
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Kati. Photo © Jim Doty, Jr.
This photo was taken as part of the shoot for Kati’s senior pictures.
Microsoft has free goodies for photographers. Book mark www.microsoft.com/prophoto/ and check it out on a periodic basis. A variety of helpful articles are posted on a regular basis. Under DOWNLOADS you will find Microsoft’s Raw Image Viewer which has been updated to include the Canon 5D and the Nikon D200.
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Arches, North Court, Mission San Xavier del Bac. Tucson, Arizona, 1968. Photo © Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.
Where would I go if I were in the Tucson area and wanted to take pictures? I’ve never been to Tucson, Arizona, but I do know the places that are highly recommended in a lot of photography magazine articles. The top three are the San Xavier del Bac Mission, the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, and Saguaro National Park.
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Receptionist, plastic surgeon’s office. Photo © Jim Doty, Jr.
If the light is right, you can take a portrait almost anywhere. This young woman is the receptionist behind the counter in a doctor’s office. By special request, I had taken an “environmental” portrait to illustrate an article I had written previously for my Reflections blog. Then I moved in closer to get a head and shoulder’s portrait.
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The March 2006 issue of Popular Photography (pages 64-74) has another “Shoot-Outâ€. This one is between the low-priced digital SLRs with 6 to 8 megapixel sensors. “Low priced†is a relative term since digital cameras are more expensive than film cameras. The “street price†for these cameras (body only) ranges from a low of $570 to a high of $790. At least in D-SLR terms, these are the budget models.
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Morning light on Denali (Mt. McKinley), Denali National Park, Alaska.
Photo © Jim Doty, Jr.
Early in the morning of March 3, my primary photo website rolled past one million page visits. That was hard to imagine when I started the site a few years ago. In 2000, the first full year the site was online, there were 4,432 page visits for the whole year. Now the site has around 36,000 page visits per month. My thanks to all of you who visit!
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Upper Tahquamenon Falls, Tahquamenon Gorge, and the ice and snow covered Tahquamenon River. Michigan U.P. Photo copyright © Jim Doty, Jr.
Upper Tahquamenon Falls in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (U.P.i) s a great place to take pictures. At 200 feet wide, with a 50 foot drop, and a flow of up to 50,000 gallons of water per second, Upper Tahquamenon Falls is one of the largest falls east of the Mississippi. The falls are west of Paradise, Michigan on M-123 in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. More information, along with another photo, is here.
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Hans (left) and Sophie Scholl with Cristoph Probst (right), leaders of “The White Rose” resistance movement. Munich Germany, July 1942.
UPDATE, March 21, 2018: Some of the links in this article no longer work. This article has been updated with new links here.
Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie were part of “The White Rose”, a group that opposed Hitler and the Nazi party. Hans served as a medic on the Eastern (Russian) front from late July to October 1942. One month later, 300,000 Germans were trapped in Stalingrad and only 5,000 returned to Germany. . . .
Photos on this site (as well as my other blogs) actually live in my albums at ImageEvent.com. When you view one of my posts, the photos are pulled off of ImageEvent’s servers. They are running v-e-r-y slow today (which is unusual). That is why images are slow to show up here, or don’t appear at all.
