Photography: mixing shapes and colours
I recently watched this video, and it’s amazing. I am a fan of Chase Jarvis. I recommend it to everyone that are suffering from “photographers block” or anyone who likes to boost his creativity. I really like it and changed my perspective about a lot of things.
Enjoy.
Chase Jarvis CURRENT: The Consequences of Creativity from Chase Jarvis on Vimeo.
I was pretty moved by this short film, “Transform”, made for Scott Kelby by Zack Arias, a full time photographer. He said so many true things, than I felt very inspired an very ambitious, considering I am a photographer still at the beginning of the journey.
And here is the movie, be patient…
We are constantly bumping on this “Aperture” notion, especially when we are trying to buy a new lens. Well the main function of a camera lens it’s to collect light. But often we need to control the amount of light coming in: some times we need more and other times we need less. Well this is the job of the aperture (which in fact is an iris), to control the amount of light getting in ( the larger the diameter of the iris, the more light gets to the image sensor). Another fact that aperture controls is the Depth Of Field.
So the aperture is measured in F-stop : f/1.8, f/2.8, f/10, etc. The smaller the f number (value), the larger is the diameter of the iris, and the 
bigger the f number (value) the smaller is the diameter of the iris. You might ask “Why it’s so twisted?”. Well because the F Number is represented by the formula F/D (F= focal length, D= diameter of the iris). So as you can see the diameter of the lens varies at different focal lengths.This is because a 300mm lens needs an larger “hole” to collect the same amount of light as a 50mm lens with with the same aperture. In fact that’s the reason why those 300mm, 400mm, 600mm, are so huge, because they need a hole large enough to catch enough light. Also that’s why there aren’t super telephoto lens like 600mm with small f/number, for example f/1.8 (first of all will have a microscopic depth of field, and second of all will be an enormous).
As I promised a few posts back i would like to start talking about some basic aspects of the camera. Like Shutter Speed, Aperture, ISO, Camera Settings, etc.
Today I will talk about Shutter Speed. Here is a list o things you should know about this:
As the name says, it’s the speed of the shutter is opening and closing. In fact it is measured in the time the shutter stays open (from 1/8000 of a second to 30 seconds and more in the bulb mode). So if you take your photo with 1/250th of a second the shutter stays open for 0,004 (1/250) seconds, or if you take it with 1/25 of a second the shutter stays open for quarter of a second. Read more…
Since a few days I’ve talked about ways of backing up your photos, I think it appropriate to talk about organizing your photographs, since keeping your photos organized helps to find your well organized photos.
First of all it’s very useful to use a software that helps keeping you organized and even helps you finding your images much faster. Since there are dozens of software packages for this kind of job it all comes down to personal preference and a few very important features that would help you a lot, like:
I have compiled a list of software packages for your organizational need.
For professional users (has a lot of professional features) :
For regular users (has all the feature you need for our every day family photos) :
Although you have whatever software you need you still have to know some other things. To be more specific here is my work flow when I come from a shoot:
As you can see I am a little paranoid, having three different copies of the photos.
Bottom line is experiment, and use what is better for you and not time consuming. Happy organizing. 
Photo by chadh
The worst nightmare of a photographer worst than get his equipment stolen, it’s to lose his photographs. Being in digitized era the risks of losing you photographs and even documents, it’s higher than in the film era. There are a bunch of risks, from accidental deletion to hardware failure, file corruption and the list goes on.
Losing a photograph it’s worst than loosing something you created, which can be recreated the only thing you’re going to lose it’s time. But a photograph, you cannot go back in time and nail the exact same shot (I also consider that a photograph is unique, there aren’t two photos that loo the same even if there where shot at the same time).
So I will try to give you some advices on how to protect your precious photographs.
Every time you copy you photograph from your camera to your hard drive the first this you have to remember to do is to back up onto a DVD or CD. There are so cheap compared to how much trouble can get you out from.
Due to fact that I love shooting landscapes, I am in love of the new Canon 5D Mark II. Talking a lot about it a friend asked me what’s that special with this camera compared to my Canon 40D. And it all came to one major difference: the 5D Mark II has a full frame sensor and the 40D has a crop sensor. So in this article I will try to explain the “Crop factor” notion, and the difference between them.
Full frame notion. A full frame sensor has an area of 36 x 24 mm and it’s close to the area of a 35mm film camera, back in the film days.
Crop factor. Well many of the digital cameras, from compact to DSLR cameras, have different image sensors with different dimensions. Most of the sensors have sizes equal or smaller than 36 x 24 mm. Because of the smaller sensor, the camera tends to capture less than an image giving the effect of cropping. There are a lot of crop factors starting from 1x (the Full Frame) and going all the way to 2x (Olympus), for DSLR’s and going even further than 6x for compact cameras. A 2x crop factor refers to a sensor size 2 times smaller than the full frame meaning a roughly 18 x 12 mm sensor size.
Now let’s see how this translates in the actual size of the image:
A couple of weeks ago ShutterVoice was announced in a beta testing state where only a few were chosen to test it. Now it’s finally out for you to buy with a price tag of 30$.
For those of you who aren’t aware of what this software can do here’s a quick summary. Shutter voice enables you to control you camera (that’s connected to your computer) by voice, through the Canon EOS Utility. It allows you to change a whole bunch of settings just by telling that to your camera. Unfortunately it can be used only by Canon owners. Here’s more information and don’t forget to watch the video demonstration. This software is excellent when you are testing different light setups and the only model available is you.
I would like to add that among those few people chosen to test ShutterVoice I was chosen as well. Played a couple o hours with the software and I have to say that I was pretty amazed of what it can do. But, you must have a very goo microphone and you must be able to speak clearly so that the computer understands what you want. You might want to know if I was that impressed that I would want to buy it, the answer is YES, but I won’t for know until I upgrade my Canon 40D to a camera that can automatically focus in live view mode. That is because my 40D can’t automatically focus so still i have to go back an forward to my camera to focus.
 |  | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
This is an automatic translation and might not be accurate. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Copyright © 2010 Constantin Chirila Photography All rights reserved. Blog powered by Worpress.
See my Technorati Profile