Technical information, usually computer related
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 3. February 2012 - 6:10
A vacuum cleaner is something that uses a fan to push air out to create some vacuum to suck up dust and dirt. So what's that got to do with Lightroom? You see, Lightroom is a software that runs on a computer.
Most computers have many fans, my workstation has five fans. Four of the fans pull air out and the fifth fan push air in.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 5. January 2012 - 6:15
Canon has 4+ metering modes:
- Evaluative Metering
- Partial Metering
- Spot Metering
- Center-weighted Average Metering
All new dSLRs have similar modes, they just call it differently
And then there's the manual mode. So what's the right way? That depends:
- On the direction of the wind
- The age of the captain
- What about the exposing to the right?
Does this sound whimsical? Because exposure is whimsical. There's no right exposure. It just depends. The metering is only one step in the exposure.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 5. January 2012 - 6:00
Just before Xmas, I started to have problems with my computer (again.) This time, it was the video card. Either the video card was on “the fritz”, or the problem was with the driver. I had an nVidia 310GT video card that came with the computer. So I bought an Asus nVidia 550GT video card for the grand total of $129 Canadian.
This new video card with the current video driver, from nVidia's website, supports hardware acceleration. This means that any of the screen operations are not done by the CPU but by the video card.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 20. December 2011 - 6:00
Canon calls it Image Stabilization, Nikon calls it Vibration Reduction, Sony calls it SteadyShot, Pentax calls it Sensor-shift Image Stabilization, Sigma call it Optical Stabilization and so on.
It's very much black magic. It's based on between two to as many as six tiny gyroscopes that track the pitch and the yaw to compensate for the movements of the photographer either on the CMOS/CCD sensor or around one of the optical element of the lens.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 19. December 2011 - 6:00
Recently, I was asked as to what was my everyday use setup for the Canon 7D. I have 5 stored settings. Yes, I know that there's only C1/C2/C3 but I can set the A mode and the M mode and the Canon 7D remember these settings.
I do mostly indoor landscapes and indoor & outdoor portraits, be it people or animals.
- I have removed the focus from the shutter. I always use the AF-ON back button or the focus will change every time that I press the shutter. See: Canon 7D and the AF-ON Button
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 2. December 2011 - 6:25
For people, it's red and for almost all animals it's green. By now, the vast majority of the processing software can fix the red eyes with just a click of the mouse. But for cats, dogs and the other animals, they get the green eyes with the flash in their face. Most software cannot process it. Here's my way of almost removing the green eyes in Lightroom, but it's not perfect, Lightroom: How To Remove The Green Eyes in Animals
If you look at the EXIF data from this photograph, you will see:
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 29. November 2011 - 6:29
Everybody knows, by now, that there are two steps to the shutter button:
- Pressing the shutter half-way activates the auto-focus, if the focus is still associated to the shutter button, and sets the automatic exposure combination in Av, Tv, or P mode.
- Pressing completely the shutter takes the photo.
What most people do not realize is that when you are in Evaluative Metering and Single Shot AF mode, pressing the shutter half way locks the exposure for 4 seconds.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 28. November 2011 - 6:40
This is an interesting book from Henry Horenstein. It's unusual. It's a book about the basics, like f/stops… as a technical introduction to photography. It's not like the “… for dummies”. This reminds me of a text book, it's structured, just like a course. It's not just for dSLRs but most of the book also applies to point and shoot cameras.
I like the “plain” English. The photos are excellent and are appropriate to the topic that they illustrate.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 11. November 2011 - 7:56
Canon Optical Image Stabilization In Action
This photo has zero, no processing, this is a straight screen capture. You can see Canon's optical image stabilization in action. As you can see from the box, both photos were taken at 1/50sec on a 70-200L f/4 IS at 187mm.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 4. November 2011 - 5:59
The Canon 580 and 430 series flashes have a zoom head. Both flashes have the coverage of lenses from 24mm to 105mm. The flash talks to the camera and ask for the lens setting and will adjust accordingly, through the fancy of the electronics … Canon calls it the E-TTL II.
What about for a Canon 7D, the T3i, the 1DMk4, the… the crop/APS-C or APS-H sensor cameras? The flash knows the camera and the flash understands the lens/sensor settings. The flash will adjust the flash coverage automatically, only if you are in the E-TTL mode.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 27. October 2011 - 5:26
Lightroom has the treatment Color and Black & White in the Basic section. By selecting the Black & White, I only get “mush”. I don't get any blacks and the only whites that I get are in the burned out skies.
Here's my way of getting “real” black and whites.
1.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 12. October 2011 - 5:36
A couple of days ago, I wrote: Lightroom: Crash and Recovery and claimed victory. Yeah! No :(
A couple hours after publishing it, crash again, and again. It was still not working.
There's no point in trying to recover the Lightroom catalog if the cause of the crash has not been clearly identified, because it will crash again, and again…
http://www.foto-biz.com/Lightroom/Crash-and-recovery
I still have some networking problems.
- But Lightroom is a single user catalog.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 9. October 2011 - 23:12
I just had a Lightroom crash. It took me a day of figuring what caused the crash, then came the work of recovering from the crash.
Usually, Lightroom doesn't crash unless there a problem somewhere else. The keyword here is “usually”. For me, it was a change in the operating system. At first, I thought that it was the drive that was corrupted.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 28. September 2011 - 6:15
Every so often I get an email asking me about the difference between the exposure and the brightness in Lightroom.
- The exposure slider makes the photo darker or lighter. The exposure affects everything: the shadows, the mid-tones and the highlights.
- The brightness slider affects mostly the shadows and the mid-tones. The brightness slider makes the photo sparkle and jump out of the screen without burning the highlights.
Some people like to first set the exposure/recovery/fills and blacks then deal with the brightness.
Submitted by Syv Ritch on 21. September 2011 - 17:06
With the AEB, Auto Exposure Bracketing, you can take automatically three or more photos with a different exposure for each photo. The Auto Exposure Bracketing is most often used for HDR.
AEB was not designed for HDR but to get the “right” exposure.
