GPhotospace – gives you 7+ GB to store and share your photos

GPhotospace it’s a Firefox Plugin made by Google to complement the Gmail email service. This plugin offers you a space of 7GB and growing ( it increases based on how long you use the service) to store your photographs and share them with your contacts/friends/relatives/clients or keep them private.

I will try to point put some pros and cons:

Pros:

• A lot of space to be used as a space to back up your photos
• Amazing speeds in uploading photos (it took me like 2 seconds to upload 5 photographs)
• It’s a free service
• Secure sharing

Cons:

• You don’t have a personal web page to share it with the world (at least until this version)
• It work with Gmail, so you have to register for a Gmail account
• You can only share the photos by sending emails to your friends
• There is no community like Flickr has.

Bottom line is that it’s an amazing service to use it to present photographs to your friends/relatives, and  has an even greater use for businesses by having a quick way to present a bunch of photographs to your clients through email.

Seams that Google try to compete with Flickr. Even if its not rising to the expectation, i still give Google a chance. They have a history of improving their services so that its clients are happy. And lets not forget that it’s a FREE service

You can learn more about GPhotospace’s features here and you can create a Gmail account here.

Tags: Google, Photography, Release, Software, Web

10 ways to protect your camera gear

If you own a DSLR you have probably spent a lot of money on the camera, lenses and other accessories. That is why protecting your gear must be a mission for you. Here are some tips on how to do that.

1. Invest in cleaning tools. Investing in proper and good quality cleaning tools it’s the first step into be more careful with your camera. It is a relatively cheap investment compared to the price of your gear. You can get rid off with paying just 15 to 40$. Don’t risk ruining your gear by cleaning it with the wrong set of tools. There are 2 set of tools: one for you camera exterior interior and lenses and one for you image sensor.
2. Cover your lenses. Covering you lenses with an UV filter it’s another way o protecting it from scratches, dust, smudgy hands, and even dropping, since  you don’t damage your front element of the lens but you will damage your UV filter which it’s way less expensive than your lens. An UV filter it’s about 10 to 100$ depending on your lens diameter and of the quality of the UV filter. But be aware that buying  a cheap filter might change the way your photographs come out that being in a negative way Read more…

Tags: Camera Gear, DSLR, Photography, Tips & Tricks

Update: Nikon released the brochure for D3x DSLR camera

A few days after they leaked by mistake the new D3x, Nikon released the brochure of the camera. It contains some test shots and the full specifications list of the camera.

You  can check it out here.

Tags: Camera Gear, DSLR, Nikon, Photography, Release

Nikon D3x leaked.

Nikon has leaked their own announcements themselves by mistake. How did this happened? Well, it appears that they released their magazine named “Nikon Pro Magazine” in Europe to early, before they could launch the “official announcement”.

The new Nikon D3x is a full-frame DSLR camera with a 24.5 megapixel 16-bit EXPEED image processor. Here are some more specifications:

• 24.5 megapixel the highest resolution seen in a Nikon DSLR to date
• 16 bit EXPEED image processor (35.9 x 24mm)
• 51 point autofocus system
• 5fps continuous shooting (or 7fps at 10 megapixel)
• ISO range 50-6200
• Extra High Active D-Lighting
• Live preview shooting mode
• 3 inch LCD screen with 922000 dots
• Extremely durable magnesium construction with economically optimized and weather-sealed
• Dual CF slots

According to cameraworld.co.uk the price of the D3X camera is expected to be around £5500 (they even take pre-order deposits of £20). And it is said that will be released  in December.

I wonder if it’s worth buying it. Beside the high megapixel number there is not much improvement compared to D3. I guess that this D3X it will be a relief for fashion/portrait/product/etc. photographer , but a disappointment for wedding and sports photographers photographers where they need speed and god image quality at very high ISO.  But we will wait and see how it will present itself.

You can read more here or here.

Tags: DSLR, Gear, Nikon, Photography

Take better Photographs tips.

Often happens that when we copy the brand new photographs from the camera on our PC and look at them we, see a lot of “very good photographs”, but when we show it to others we find that are quite not that good. That is because our photograph has a lot of visual and compositional mistakes and doesn’t tell a story ( being a wide subject I will talk more about the composition in another post ). This facts can make your photo very unappealing. We are often fooled by the fact that we know the whole story of a photo because we were there, but our viewer wasn’t there so he must understand from the little point of vie caught in your photo (We have a subjective look on our photos and might block us from seeing the mistakes). But it’s always a good idea to have a “fresh eye” so don’t be afraid to ask for opinions.

So here are some advices to follow that will improve your skills in taking better photographs:

Read more…

Tags: Composition, Photography, Tips & Tricks

ShutterVoice, control your DSLR camera by voice.

As a photographer you always try to learn new things and try to find different and better results for the same problem or want to improve you skill in photography area.  So, you have a day off and you want to practice a little at home or in you studio. You set your camera and your lights, but you need a subject to take a photograph of. Sometimes is hard to find a subject wiling to loose time just to be you guinea pig, so the best subject which is always willing to be photographed “in the name of evolution” is you. But all the time you find yourself running to you camera to see results or change settings.

That’s why developer Scott Forman started the creation of ShutterVoice software and was originally created to ease the process of shooting lighting tests with himself as the subject, This enables you to control the Canon EOS Utility software ( that comes with your DSLR camera ) with spoken commands. This is programmed to be out on the market by the end of the next month.

Without touching the keyboard, ShutterVoice allows for broad control of EOS Utility, it’s possible to use command phrases that adjust aperture, shutter speed, ISO, set focus distance (autofocus in Live View is possible too, though with the EOS 50D and EOS 5D Mark II only), rotate pictures and enable the control of EV compensation, color temperature, white balance and more, shown in the screenshot and video bellow:

Read more…

Tags: 50D, 5D Mark II, Camera Gear, Canon, DSLR, News, Photography, Software

Histogram. What it is and how we can use it?

You often saw this “histogram” when editing a photograph in, for example, Photoshop. Or you saw it on your camera screen right near your photo. Some of you might of ignored it, others even asked themselves but thought that it’s not that important to know.

Well, histogram it’s a powerful tool in digital photography because it can tell you whether or not your image has been expose properly, it can tell us whether the lighting is flat or harsh.  It will not only improve your skills on editing on the computer, but as a photographer as well.

Read more…

Tags: Brightness/Contrast, Histogram, Photography, Photoshop

Brightness/Contrast, got better for editing photographs

A few years back when i seriously started to use Photoshop, i was a heavy user of the “Brightness/Contrast” adjustment, until some day i have read an article that said that’s incredibly wrong to use this adjustment because it shreds your histogram.

Increasing Brightness with any version of Photoshop until CS3 will add whatever you set the control at to every pixel in the image, shifting everything towards the right in the histogram. When are decreasing the brightness , all will be shifted equally darker. The tone of every pixel moved right or left equally with the same value, even when some parts of an image needed it more than others. The traditional version of Contrast adjustment was equally simplistic in how it operated, stretching or contracting contrast equally over the entire range of the histogram.

A photograph can contain 256 brightness levels ( from 0 which means pure black to 255 which means pure white). Let’s say that our photograph has a brightness level from 20 to 180. When we increase the brightness by let’s say 20, the new photo will have  a brightness level from 40 ( the old vale + 20) to 200 (the old value +20). So the Whole histogram is move to the right, when decreased move to the left.

So for the last two and a half years i only used Curves and/or Levels adjustments for increasing contrast and brightness. Now I saw that “Use legacy” option and started googling to see what exactly does and I found out that… Read more…

Tags: Brightness/Contrast, Comparation, Editing, Photo Test, Photography, Photoshop