There are some things you take for granted with a point-and-shoot, one of them is the bulb mode.  Rather, a point-and-shoot normally would not have a bulb mode.  You’d just have to grin and bear it and forget the possibilities of shooting with the shutter open and under your control for however long you want.

Thinking about it, the bulb mode is either an idiosynchratic work-around or a padoxical camera feature.  It is the ultimate in manual controls.  You have the camera taking a single picture of a subject for as long as you’re pressing the button.  And yes, you might want to have the camera on a tripod and using a shutter release cable.  I have no idea what possible subject might be to warrant a camera not on a tripod while on bulb mode.  Although I sometimes think that there might be a picture out there worth taking where you need to be holding the camera and keeping a finger pressed on the shutter button.

For the most part, I’ve used the bulb mode in night shots without a flash.  For instance, a skyline at night with all the neon signs, or a shot of a busy highway at night, these would be great for this technique.  I also use this very frequently during New Year’s celebration when taking pictures of roman candles or sparklers.  It’s fun to take a shot of a kid spelling his name using sparklers.  In such cases, I don’t really care what the aperture setting is.

Too bad that bulb mode has been replaced by “night mode” in point-and-shoot cameras.

There are some things every person takes for granted.  Eyesight, for instance, is an easy enough ability which is low priority, till you lose it, you start having problems with your eyes, or you start having headaches.  For an SLR camera (film or digital), most everyone will say that the most important part is the lens.  And most everyone will also say that they bought the lens without any idea how well it works besides the zoom factor or the f-number.

Most lens buyers would not take the time to shoot a picture before buying a camera.  In fact, practically nobody notices that a kit lens may not give the sharp pictures.  And to think that there are some lenses out there which are more expensive than the camera body.

The most common problems for a lens are barreling and pin-cushioning.  To understand this better, understand the main feature of a fish-eye lens: the edges are curved and the middle is enlarged.  This is barreling taken to it’s logical end.  Named after the way a barrel has curved sides, barreling is a side-effect of wide-angle lenses.  The wider the angle (like that of a fish-eye lens) the more pronounced the barreling.  For regular wide-angle (28mm for a 35mm camera) this should be nonexistent or insignificant.  But with a shorter focal length, barreling would be inevitable, and would be only a question of how much does it affect the picture.

On the other end of the spectrum, pin-cushioning occurs when the straight lines on the edges of a picture curve inwards.  This effect is more common with long lenses.  Barreling and pincushioning are both sides of the same coin, and it’s an indicator of how good the zoom lens is.

Barreling and pincushioning are less common in primary lenses, as these fixed-length lens were designed not to have these effects.  There are 18mm wide-angle lenses with minimal barreling. Minimal meaning that it’s noticeable but kept low, and therefore acceptable.  And for fixed length long telephoto lenses, pincushioning is almost nonexistent.  At least these problems do not appear or are kept to a minimum.  It would be a shame to have a 400mm reflector lens with noticeable pincushioning.

There is only one way to check if the lens has this problem and that’s to take a picture, preferably of straight horizontal and vertical lines.  If it’s not possible to take a picture and develop it, you would have to content yourself in looking through the viewfinder.

For a point-and-shoot and bridge cameras with large magnification (5x and up), expect barreling and pincushioning to appear in shots with the wide-angle and maximum telephoto shots.  There’s nothing anyone can do about this, as the lens are not interchangeable.

However, there is a workaround and it depends on studying the camera.  Take test pictures vertical lines.  The multiple shots should be from the widest angle to the highest zoom.  Study the resulting pictures and take note at what lens lengths the barreling and pincushioning becomes pronounced.  And if you don’t want these effects to appear (and ruin) your pictures, then don’t use these arbitrary lens limits.

One of the easiest photography projects there is is a silhouette.  All that’s needed is a light background and a dark foreground subject.  That being said, the next step is to find the right subject or picture topic.  That’s the hard part.  It’s not easy to find something interesting if you won’t be able to recognize any details about the subject, because the subject is supposed to be a big shadow.

For the best dark foreground with an interesting background, I usually choose sunsets.  There are lots of possibilities with sunsets.  There’s the play of clouds with the rays of the sun going through them, or the bright red disk hovering on the horizon and reflecting on the surface.  With a sunset background, there’s more than enough time to shoot lots of pictures, but maybe not enough time to prepare for the picture.

A sunset background, with the reddish light, makes the foreground that much darker.  If you shoot the subject with the sun directly behind it you would get nothing but a black shape (the silhouette).  If you’re lucky, you would be able to shoot the sun’s rays as well.

A traditional silhouette would be a profile or side view picture of a person or an object.  If this is too static, you might try a picture of kids playing, but with the sun almost at the edge of the horizon, or at least very low.  This would add more emphasis on the shapes up front.  Pictures are static, and a silhouette makes a picture more static than it already is.  It’s useless to shoot set pictures, like groups or people with the sunset as backdrop, the picture might accidentally turn out as a silhouette.  Instead try to shoot a picture denoting some action, like kids playing.  This would make the shadows in front a lot more interesting.

With digital camera pricese getting cheaper, specially good, high-megapixel digital SLRs, a lot more people are into selling pictures.  One such site where amateurs sell pictures is DeviantArt.com, however, this website is not primarily into selling pictures.  For serious picture trade there are stock photography sites and agencies.

Stock photography is one way of making money out of pictures.  The idea is that the photographer still owns the picture, and allows the buyer the use of the picture.  One other way of earning from a picture, specially for  professional photographers, is to take in commissions for works from ad agencies, book publishers and other users.  The resulting works would be owned by the entity which commissioned them.  In stock photography, the pictures are for limited use or one-time use, or with various exclusivity options.  There’s also the older business model of paying royalty for pictures.  The royalty is paid for every use of a picture.  Nowadays, there are stock agencies which offer non-royalty use.  There is a one-time payment for a limited time and unlimited use.  Even then, there are some pictures which have been sold multiple times and earning the photographer a lot of money.

Stock photography is like an inventory of pictures for sale by a buyer.  To be successful, an agency must have a big volume in stock.  Some agencies (and photographers) specialize in a specific style or genre.   Other agencies, pick a wide range of pictures and photo styles.  For a photographer, compiling large numbers of pictures of a particular style or genre would be best.  Specializing on wildlife or cityscapes would allow the photographer to hone his craft and develop his technique some more.

Some people think that owning a camera is already automatically means that they take good pictures, or that the pictures are good enough for selling.  In stock photography, this is not a problem as the industry started with photo discards from journalism assignments.  And besides, this is a numbers game:  the more pictures a photographer has in stock, the greater the chances from him earning because somebody picked up his picture.  For a stock photographer, having 100,000 pictures in stock means that he’d probably earn more than 10 times compared  to having only 10,000 pictures.

There are a lot of stock photography sites on the web.  And it’s not a bad idea for an amateur to submit to these sites.  It’s one way of earning money from photography.

The Nikon D90 may not be Nikon’s top-of-the-line, but the press and reviews almost seems like it.  This is mainly because it’s the first DSLR with a full 720p HD video capability.

The video has a 4GB limit, which translates to about 5 minutes of HD video.  This is not a camera limitation, but a limitation of the solid-state drive’s file system.  These camera SSDs are all using a file system called FAT (FAT16 or FAT32 depending on the flash drive size).  The largest file a FAT32 file system can write is only up to 4GB.  On regular-sized video this would have been good for 15 minutes.  But for HD, this is good for only about 5 minutes of video.

Note, though that when watching video straight from the camera, there would be some stutter, because of the difference in frame rate.  The D90 captures video at 24fps, while standard NTSC video is at 23.976fps.  The HD video would be better if it was pre-processed with a video editing software.  However, Nikon seems somewhat remiss in creating a good enough software for the HD video.  Unfortunately, coming up with great post-production software is not something Nikon is well known for.

For all of that, the combination of Nikon lenses, and HD video would be great, specially if it was edited and output as HD quality.

The D90 does not come with a full-frame sensor but rather it uses the same size sensor as its predecessor, the D80, but it delivers a larger picture with 12 megapixels (compared to the formers 10 megapixel).  This is nothing to scoff at.  Specially considering that Nikon has always had smaller sized pictures (in terms of pixel size) than Canon (or even Sony).

The camera has a 3-inch LCD with Live View with face recognition (maximum of 5 faces).  Additionally, the image stabilization is in the lens and not in the camera.  The D90 also has the same dust-prevention system as the Nikon D300.

Priced less than $1000, the price point is aggressive for the features list.  This camera has a lot of sensibilities because of the pricing and the HD potential.  Most point-and-shoots already have video, but HD video is still around the bend for most.  Videographers would insist that this is not a serious camera for shooting video.  However, the Nikon advantage has always been their lenses.  It’s important to remember that only high-end pro video cameras have interchangeable lenses.  There are a lot more things a videographer can do with interchangeable lenses.

If we were to judge an industry maturity by the percentage of volume sales compared to an older (and more mature or graying) technology, then it’s safe to say that the digital camera industry has come of age.  The sales of digital cameras (excluding camera cell phones or cell phone cameras) have for several years now outstripped the sales of film-based cameras.

Another mark of a mature industry is the segregation into market niches.  There have been no significant market segregation for film-based cameras in recent years.  In contrast, there has been a lot of new niches in the digital camera market.

One such segregation is what’s called the bridge camera.  It’s no longer a niche, but an industry all its own.

A bridge camera is a high-end digital camera which bridges the gap between digital SLR’s with interchangeable lenses and point-and-shoots.  As a half-way point between these two markets, bridge cameras however are tend to be on the higher end of the middle pricing.

Among the selling points of the bridge camera is the ease of use (like a point-and-shoot) with lots of options for shooting styles and conditions, and a relatively large optical zoom range of at least 10x.  Most bridge cameras have the regular features like white balance, landscape mode, portrait mode, a night mode, sports mode, as well as a some SLR settings which include full manual mode and aperture-priority settings.  Additionally, some bridge cameras also have the option to save to TIFF or RAW.

What makes this line appealing is the capability for lens attachment, much like SLRs.  The lens has a screw groove for filters, and add-on lenses like multipliers and macro attachments.

For the most part, the bridge camera is where the manufacturer, puts its advanced features for the point-and-shoot lines.  This gives the avid amateur photographer or hobbyist the feel and features of a digital SLR with the capability to switch to relaxed point-and-shoot photography.

Cam-whoring is a very common exercise for the bored camera owner.  In some instances, there are those who have bought cell phones in order to play around with this exercise.

I don’t subscribe to the term.  I would rather use the more formal “self-portrait” to describe this activity.  Taking picture of oneself is an honorable tradition, and it would do well to come up with a self-portrait which reflects your personality.

Here are some tips for a game and unique self-portrait:

• Use the self-timer and a tripod.  This is a basic requirement.  You can do without the tripod, as long as you can set the camera somewhere stable.
• Unique means one of a kind.  It doesn’t necessarily mean that you were original in how you shoot the self-portrait.  You don’t need to limit yourself by borrowing from Ann Leibowitz or Avedon or Helmut Newton.  You can recreate shots from paintings by Van Gogh, Rembrandt or Norman Rockwell.  (Though one Norman Rockwell self-portrait would be difficult to replicate:  it’s a triple self-portrait of himself working at the easel, painting a self-portrait, and with a mirror where he’s looking at himself.)
• Create an image.  Project yourself into the picture.  Smile with your eyes, or better yet, allow your eyes to communicate with the camera.  Send a message through your facial expression.
• Dress up the image.  That is, play dress up for the photo shoot.  Get some old clothes and do a retro shoot.  Or bring out the neckties and coats, and do a corporate shoot.  Or go with a holiday theme: like Halloween, or Memorial Day or Fourth of July.
• Or create a story.  The best pictures relate a story.  The image may be static but it conveys something or an event to whoever is viewing the picture.
• Compose the picture as if you were taking the shot.  Ask yourself, how did you compose your best pictures, and then recreate it with yourself as the subject.

These and more ideas result in pictures which are a lot more fun to look at than just the regular cam-whoring pictures from cell phones.

There are some subjects which don’t look good unless they’re shot in close-up.  It’s not that there’s no story when taking these pictures, instead, the focus veers away from the subject unless the shot is taken up close.  These are distances as close as 10 ot 20 cm away from the subject.  However, not all lenses can come in close “nose to nose” as it were, to these short distances.

Lenses have a minimum focusing distance and when shooting at a distance less than that all you would get would be a blur.  To remedy this, you can use a macro lens.  Macro lenses have a very short minimum focusing distance and allows detailed pictures out of small objects.

Alternatively, you can use a macro lens attachment.  This is a lens you attach to the end of camera lans, and it shortens the focusing distance of the camera.  This is a cheaper alternative than buying a macro zoom lens or a bellows attachment.  For bridge cameras, a macro lens attachment is the only choice.

Macro photography is one type of photography which is more of an exercise in patience rather than in composition.  The detailed focusing and framing of the picture pushes conventional composition ideas to the back of the mind.  There is a lot of detail to take in, and thoughts of composition techniques do not come easily, unless these techniques are already part of the photographer’s repertoire.

Additionally, the subject is brought to the fore and the dynamics of the picture becomes the composition.  For instance, when taking a picture of the head of a dragonfly, the attention to the detail is the primary concern.  It’s not everyday you can shoot one.  Composition does not really take a back seat, but you hope that the composition concepts you’ve learned stick and has become second nature to you as you include these ideas into the picture.

Macro photography is a taxing exercise, but it is well worth the practice.

Source: PopPhoto.com; Tokina Auto-Focus Lenses

With new model releases of digital cameras, what the regular consumer sees of specifications is usually the camera resolution, the number of pixels.  What’s less obvious is the how sophisticated the software that’s included in today’s cameras.  Better and faster auto-focusing, better optical zoom, faster continuous or burst shots, do not mention the amount of mechanical movements inside the camera and increasingly, in the lens.

Although auto-focus motors were initially built-in to the camera body, motors started to be included into the lens during the early 1990’s.  This resulted in faster focusing and zooming and quieter cameras.  Camera manufacturers like Nikon and Canon also had an edge against third-party lens makers who develop and market mount-compatible lenses, simply because they knew the software to control the lens functions.  It has taken some time but the major third-party lens manufacturers, which include Sigma, Tamron and Tokina, have all caught up with the camera makers in including autofocus mechanisms into their lenses.  But more importantly, the lens manufacturers have also included anti-shake mechanisms in the lenses.  The mechanism includes sensors and gyros to detect small movement.

Shake is a common problem, and depending on the situation, may not lead to blurred pictures.  In some instances, some blurring is expected.  For instance, a head-on shot of a participant in the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain will have blurs.  And it’s even if you use a tripod, there is a certain amount of shake involved when you use an SLR (whether digital or film-based).  And since shake cannot be totally controlled even when using a tripod, the software/hardware in lenses which minimize or eradicate shake is a welcome development.

There’s a rule of thumb when it comes to handheld shooting:  The shutter speed denominator should be larger than the focal length in mm.  As an example, with a 50mm primary lens, the shutter speed should always be faster than 1/60 second.  If the shutter speed is slower than 1/60s, then use a tripod.  Otherwise, the shake would be noticeable.

As long as you are using a primary lens, there should be no problem remembering the “shutter speed threshold” (if we may call it that).  However, when using a zoom lens, it’s hard to check what the focal length is just before shooting the picture.

The anti-shake mechanism and software in lenses helps a lot in this situation.  In most instances, having this feature allows the photographer to have sharp pictures even when shooting two or three stops down depending on how steady the photographers hands are to begin with, as well as the camera weight, and lens length.

Anti-shake or image stabilization is a lot easier with point and shoot.  Digital point and shoot don’t have the same complexity as DSLRs.  The smaller lens, smaller sensor size and lighter body don’t add up to as much blur as DSLRs.  In fact, the main source of blurs for point-and-shoot SLRs is the auto-focus as it might not have focused properly before the shutter button was pressed.

Source: Digital Photography Review

Metadata is defined as “data about data.”  It’s computerese for both a dictionary of definitions about data, as well as the definition of data itself.  The term is more commonly used in large data installations called data marts and data warehouses, and is very important in data mining.

In everyday language, a metadata defines both the database and its elements, or a spreadsheet and its columns, and how these relate to another spreadsheet with different columns, and to another and to another.  And a data warehouse is a large repository of related data, of which a subset is called a data mart.  And data mining is the process of getting specific information from the mountain of data.

At this point, it’s all technospeak.  In real terms, this is the problem of anyone with a digital camera.  The source of the problem is the ease of taking pictures.  With this ease of use, comes lots of pictures.  With lots of pictures, it sometimes takes a lot of effort and time collating the information:  Where was the picture taken? What is the subject or topic or occasion? How was the picture taken?  What camera, lens, lighting and film settings were used?

A regular guy who’s trigger happy with his single camera would soon find out that he’s deep into this kind of problem.  We multiply this complexity by the number of manufacturers of digital photography devices and software and we now have the beginnings of chaos: every bit of information has to be sorted, collated and tagged manually.

Last year, the Metadata Working Group was formed to address this issue.  The Metadata Working Group is an alliance composed of Adobe, Apple, Canon, Microsoft, Nokia and Sony and aims to standardize metadata embedded in digital pictures.  If you have a photo stored in your computer, check out its properties and the list you see is the metadata as defined by the camera manufacturer. If you edited the picture, the list contents now varies.  Some properties changed, and some items have disappeared or been replaced.

To this end, the Metadata Working Group has just released a guideline which suggests methods to increase interoperability and storage of shooting settings and other associated data in digital images. It also aims at standardizing the availability of metadata across all applications and devices, making it easier for users to create, organize and share their pictures.

What this means is that if the JPEG or RAW file followed the rules of storing information, you can run this through a software (which also follows the guidelines for metadata) and organizes the pictures for you.  Right now, no such software exists.  You have to organize your pictures manually.  And as any photographer knows, after a certain point, manually organizing pictures takes more time than taking pictures.  And the more information you deem is important, the longer it would take to organize.

The members of the group represent big names in different related industries.  And it would be to everyone’s advantage to make a standard metadata accepted by all the other manufacturers.

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