Seagate External Hard Drives
I read about a professional photographer who lost a bunch of photos because they were all on just one external hard drive with no backups. The cost of recovering the photos, if they can be recovered, will run between $500 and $5000 depending on the number of photos and the complications involved in the recovery process.
Five Seagate external drives daisy chained via the USB ports.
Don’t lose your digital photos to disc-rot or a hard drive crash. Choose the best archival storage options. Continue reading
Memory Cards in Think Tank Memory Card Holders
Memory cards are the “film” for your digital camera. Quality is important. You don’t want to have a card failure and lose your important photos. A reliable brand is important.
Granite Ledges and Otter Cliff, Acadia National Park, Maine
Your camera falls down a mountainside or off a cliff. An unexpected rogue wave drenches your valuable photo gear in salt water. Your photo backpack is stolen from your home, motel room, or trunk of your car. To add insult to injury, you learn your homeowner’s insurance will not replace the value of your damaged or stolen gear.
My grandson inside using my laptop to control the tripod mounted camera outside.
CamRanger provides wireless image transfer from your camera to your laptop or smartphone. CamRanger also give you wireless control of your camera with your smart phone or laptop.
I just purchased the Sky-Watcher Star Adventurer 2i. I read several comparison articles before making my choice. I put it through its paces and decided to write a review with a basic introduction as to how to use it. Not only does it work, it works very well. This photo of the Andromeda Galaxy was taken on my first night out with clear skies.
Camera and 70-200 telephoto lens mounted on an iOptron SkyTracker and iOptron ball head.
You would love to take beautiful, long exposures of the night sky, but even with a 24mm wide angle lens the stars start to streak with exposures longer than 20 seconds. And with a 300mm lens the stars start to steak after just 2 seconds. Not that long ago it would cost you well over $1,000 to buy the equipment that would follow the stars and allow you to take longer exposures.
Incident Light Meter, Sekonic L-358
There’s no question that in some complex metering situations, an incident light meter can be quicker, faster, simpler, and more accurate than the meter in your camera. Many incident light meters can also measure light from an electronic flash, a huge bonus when you are using a flash in the manual mode.
Some of my favorite all purpose photography books.
Out of hundreds of books in my photography library, these are my favorite all purpose photography books. This is a list of the books that were the most helpful to me when I took a serious interest in photography, and I continue to refer to them. These books were written back when film was king, but that makes them all the more valuable to today’s digital photographers. Some digital photography books get so bogged down in digital technical information that the heart and soul of photography can get lost. The best film photography books are about the heart and soul of photography. They are light and shadow, subjects, form, texture, line and shape, and visual impact – all of which applies to digital photography.
Norman Rockwell’s classic painting “Freedom from Want” was created in 1943 and was part of his Four Freedoms series. It was inspired by FDR’s annual address to Congress, January 6, 1941. That address became known as the Four Freedom’s Speech. Contemporary photographers and artists have been inspired to create contemporary versions of the Four Freedoms. This is one of them.
“Freedom from Want” (1943) by Norman Rockwell
I love Thanksgiving! When I was growing up, we spent many a Thanksgiving and Christmas at Grandpa’s house. Thanksgiving was a much anticipated and happy time. We would often leave home on Wednesday afternoon after dad got home from work. It was a long 7 hour drive to Grandpa’s house in those pre-interstate highway days, so it would be really late by the time we arrived.
RØDE warning and registration page.
If you aren’t careful, you could end up with a fake RØDE Microphone. If you already bought one, here’s how to tell if it is fake. If you don’t have a RØDE mic, here’s how to avoid buying a fake.
RØDE VideoMicro in use at Acadia National Park.
Let’s face it. While many recent DLSRs, ILCs and smartphones can give you excellent visual quality in the videos, the sound quality of the built in microphone leaves a lot to be desired. For a modest amount of money you can bring the sound quality up to par with the visual quality. That is why video mic sales have exploded.
Really Right Stuff makes an excellent, simple to use panorama set up that won’t take up a lot of room in your camera bag. After using bigger, more awkward panorama gear, switching to Really Right Stuff’s set up was like being in panorama heaven. It is compatible with the Arca-Swiss-System.
Square Jellyfish smart phone tripod mount with conversion plate for an Arca-Swiss compatible tripod head.
After seeing too many incidents when smart phones popped out of their tripod mounts and came crashing to the ground, I decided it was time to write this article.
Two ball heads and two 3-way heads.
A good tripod head will save you lots of frustration. For still photography I recommend two types of tripod heads. If you do a little of everything you will want a quality ball head for the quick and easy aiming of the camera. If you only do landscape or architectural photography and you want precise separate controls in each axis of motion, you will want a 3-way head.
Looking for a tripod? Choose wisely. Other than a camera and a good lens, nothing can make a bigger difference in your photography than a good tripod. This is the place to find information, recommended models, and links to more information.
Forget-Me-Nots, Thorne-Swift Nature Preserve, Michigan
There are several ways to do closeup photography. Closeup filters, extension tubes, and macro lenses are the most commonly used options. The best gear for you depends on your preferences, how you want to work, the subjects you are after, how much stuff you want to carry, and how much you want to spend. I cover your best options.
Lens Calibration Tools
A lot of photographers have discovered their almost sharp lens was actually a very sharp lens once they tweaked the micro-adjustment settings. You will get sharper images if you adjust the settings for your specific camera and lens combinations. You do this using the micro-adjustment settings in the camera menu along with a lens calibration tool which you can buy or make yourself.
iPhone photography has become a huge thing. According to Flickr, their millions of users take more pictures with an iPhone (47%) than any other camera. A lot of iPhone photographers are looking for add on lenses for their phone, and that may include you. So which lenses are the best?
The Olympus Tough (TG) Waterproof Camera System
Water, sand, and grit can wreak havoc with ordinary cameras, so unless you have a waterproof case for your camera (more about that later), your best bet is to get a rugged, waterproof camera for underwater and the beach. This is especially true if you are around salt water.
GoPro HERO12 Black. Click image for a larger version.
Looking for a small, mountable, “ideal for sports and action”, inexpensive, high definition video and still camera with a waterproof housing and image quality that Lucasfilm (the Star Wars people) calls “amazing”? This camera will go anywhere and mount just about anywhere. Prices range from $279 to $399 (which is a lot less than your typical DSLR with HiDef video).
Just a few of many Canon refurbished cameras and lenses from the Canon USA web site.
Do you want to buy a Canon DSLR and/or lenses on a budget? Is video quality important to you? This article is for you.
Canon EOS R5
The holiday season is here and I am getting the usual questions about which digital cameras I recommend. In every price range there are some cameras that are better designed than others. How do you find them? That is what this article is all about.
Canon T7 refurbished kit with camera and two lenses.
Yes, you can get a quality, name brand DLSR with two lenses for under $500 at Canon USA. I found this particular special this afternoon for $440.
Flash adapter and umbrella for a shoe-mount electronic flash.
There are a lot of practical and inexpensive (more or less) gifts for photographers. Here is a nice list of items starting at $8. To make it easy to track them down, these items are individuality linked plus most of these items can be found in the Misc Goodies section of my photography store which has direct links to Amazon.com. Prices are current as of the date of this post, but prices do fluctuate. Some items can be temporarily unavailable. These items are not listed in order of price.
Painting with light is an interesting technique that gives you a different kind of look from using a flash unit or ambient light. As with other kinds of light you can make your subject as light or dark as you want. For these images I went with a darker, low key look.
Total Lunar Eclipse, Super Blood Moon, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, September 27, 2015
Don’t miss it. The Beaver Moon Eclipse happens late this Thursday night through Friday morning, November 19, 2021.This article will show you how to photograph it. Continue reading
When I read at various astronomy related web sites that it was possible to see all of the naked eye planets in one day on or around November 16, 2020. I decided to try and photograph all of them, along with the moon and sun. As an added bonus I would photograph Uranus. It is not visible to the naked eye but easy to photograph with an ordinary camera and lens with a long exposure. Neptune was also out but I thought it would be too faint to pick up in a long exposure. I was wrong. To my surprise and joy, Neptune showed up as a tiny streak of light on my images.
I was comparing the Canon PowerShot SX280 HS with other cameras with similar features (shirt pocket size, 20x zoom range) like the Panasonic Lumix ZS30. There weren’t full reviews of either camera so I went back to reviews of the Canon SX260 HS and the Panasonic ZS20, assuming the current cameras would be somewhat better than the older models and that both would have the pedigree traits of their predecessors (which is often but not always the case for a camera’s family tree).