Technical

Many smart photographers offer free backgrounds, aka wallpaper, to people and potential clients. What's a wallpaper? It's an image used as a background for a computer, a tablet, or a cell phone. The problem with the wallpapers is that you need to offer a wallpaper at the resolution of the computer/device or it will look bad. Ask the owners of the iPad 3, aka the new iPad. Many apps and wallpapers do not support the new resolution and look terrible on the iPad 3.

Sit down, strap your seat belt, there will be some math involved.

• Select the photo or the photos
• Print and output to JPEG. Sounds simple but remember the math…

For “regular” computers, this means desktops and good laptops, you should set the resolution to 96 ppi. For the iPad 1 and the iPad 2, the resolution is 1024 by 768 pixels at 132 ppi, For the iPad 3, aka the new iPad, the resolution is 2048 by 1536 pixels at 264 ppi. Many Netbooks have a screen resolution of 1024 by 768 at 72 ppi. The iPhone 4 has a resolution of 960 by 640 pixels at 326 ppi.

You will need these numbers. What does this all mean? It means that you will have to make a few wallpapers of the same image for the different sizes and resolutions.

Many people confuse Burst Rate with Frames per Second (fps) speeds:

• Burst Rate: How many of photographs you can take in a continuous/single burst without shutting down.
• Frames per second: The speed at which you can take consecutive shots.

The burst rate is related to how much internal memory the camera has. The higher the RAM, the higher the burst rate, but eventually the camera needs to store the images from the internal memory onto the memory card.

As you can see, I was able to get the face in focus through the reeds across the pond. Here's is the crop.

There are two ways of locking the exposure settings:

1. Do nothing, it's already done for you if:

   • You are using Evaluative and
   • You are using One-Shot AF

   Whenever you are pressing the shutter half-way in evaluation and one-shot modes, all Canon dSLRs (to date) do an AE Lock. You can see it in action by moving the camera around and you will see that the exposure settings will not change.

By now, you must have heard that Adobe will release Photoshop CS6 in the first week of May. One of the big new feature is the cloud! I see and read a lot of “misunderstanding / misinformation” about the cloud. People use the word “cloud” just like people used the “information super highway” expression in the years 1996-1997.

1. What's the cloud? When they talk about the cloud, they either mean that the data and/or some programs are on computers/servers that are accessed via the Internet. In the “good old days,” the data and/or the programs were stored on the local network. You could walk to the server room and see the computers, the lights, the cables and some techie that was looking after the whole “shebang.” The advantage and/or the problem with the cloud is that you do not know what's inside, how it's configured…

According to the manual, the Canon 7D has 3 customs settings: C1, C2 and C3. Contrarily to the manual, I use 6 custom settings.

1. I paid full price when the Canon 7D came out in September 2010.
2. I want to get my money's worth.
3. I'm special ;)

Like everybody else, I first used the C1, C2, and the C3 Camera User settings.

• C1: My basic Av default setup, ISO 400, f/6.3, Daylight, Zone Af, and High speed continuous.

Canon has extremely sophisticated focusing systems, but there are still people that can't make them work. Most of the problems are due to the fact that they do not understand how Canon has designed them to fit all the various possibilities/combinations. I explained it on DPReview.com. Here it is in a slightly different format.

One Shot

The AF assumes that the subject is static

• If the subject is static, The AF will achieve focus immediately and that's it, you can remove your finger from the back button, it won't keep on focusing.
• If the subject is moving, the photos will be out of focus.

AI Servo

One of the common problem with the Canon 7D, 60D and 1DMk4… is that the first couple of photographs are fuzzy, and all the other photos after that are sharp and crisp.

The 2 major causes are:

1. The IS/VR, in the Canon lingo: Image Stabilization, in the Nikon lingo: Vibration Reduction in the Nikon world
2. The focus

Image Stabilization/Vibration Reduction

In Canon and Nikon cameras, the image stabilization (VR in Nikon) is in the lens. The other camera manufacturers followed Olympus' lead when it created the image stabilization directly in the camera body.

The image stabilization/vibration reduction uses some motion sensors and 1 or 2 micro-gyroscopes to shift, either some element of the lens, or the CMOS/CCD sensor. Basically, it introduces another movement to counter-act your movement. You can see it in action if you mount a “not a new generation” IS/VR lens on a tripod with mode 1 enabled with the head slightly loose, then the camera will start to drift.

It takes half a second for the Image Stabilization/Vibration Reduction to kick in. This means that the IS/VR engages half a second after the focus has been engaged. The IS/VR has started, but it hasn't achieved stabilization yet. It can take between another ½ sec to another full second to achieve stabilization. With the new Canon L lenses and the new Nikon VRII lenses, when the IS/VR has been achieved after another second, the IS/VR reaches the Lotus position and achieves “nirvana” to give the full 4 or 5 f/stop of improvement.

This is the equivalent of using a tripod.

Focus mode

You can select the AF Point with the Joystick/Multi-Controller without first pressing the AF point selection/Magnify button. This applies to:

• Single-Point AF
• Spot AF
• Zone AF

But you first need to configure the camera:

1. You need to assign the Joystick/Multi-Controller to the AF Selection button with the Menu > Custom Function (2nd icon from the right) > C.Fn IV: Operation/Others > 1 Custom Controls (p 217 of the manual) > Assign the multi-controller to the AF point direct selection (p 220 of the manual).

   You need to do this only once.

Whenever somebody complains that their photos do not look “right”, the “Mr Know-It-All” will always give the same answer:

Hey, idiot! Why are you asking that dumb question? Obviously, you didn't calibrate your …

Just add the word monitor, printer…

Does calibration help? Yes, but not as much as you think, the problem is that it's almost impossible to match colors over different mediums. You can say and do whatever you want, you will never be able to exactly match the LCD screen that is illuminated from behind to a print that reflects light.

So what can you do? You have to make some choices and decisions.

You can calibrate everything and use Pantone colors (standard colors) in your photos, while matching the Pantone colors at every step of the way and hope/pray that the other people viewing your photos/prints are also fully calibrated from their lighting to their Adobe RGB capable LCD monitors.

You can decide that most of your photos are used for screen display by other people or to be viewed in various web browser, on iPhones/smartphones, photo frames…

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.

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.

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.

1. 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

Everybody knows, by now, that there are two steps to the shutter button:

1. 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.
2. 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.

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.