City Scapes at night

If you have a tripod and live in a city then night photography is something you will enjoy, how could you not. Add in some water and your opportunities for extravagant imagery multiplies. Exposure is an issue because your camera may want to even out the light and dark areas so you end up with pictures that are just too light with burnt out highlights so be prepared to play with the exposure compensation control. Focusing can also be a problem as the camera’s auto focus struggles in situations where there is not much light, as all your main subjects will be beyond infinity you can put the camera into manual focus and set it to infinity (the sideways 8 symbol). Long exposures or high ISO settings are likely to introduce more noise than you would want but put up with it and enjoy the results anyway.

This post on Lightstalking will give you lots of inspiration

Emmanuel Huybrechts

SChrista

How to Take the Perfect Spring Flower Macro Photograph

Here is another tutorial from Christopher O’Donnell

“The warmer weather means more opportunities for one of my favorite styles of photography: macro images of flowers. With a dedicated macro lens (or specialized filter), you have the means to create some artful photographs using only the environment your backyard provides.”……..more

The difference between full frame and crop sensor DSLR cameras

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Back in the stone age when we all used film, 35mm became the gold standard film size.  When we switched over to digital, there was no film to be used.  On most DSLR cameras, the digital imaging sensor, which replaces film, is significantly smaller than 35mm film.   In 2002, the first sensor that equaled the size of 35mm film was produced.

Canon was the first mainstream camera manufacturer to produce a DSLR camera with a sensor the size of 35mm film.  I can just imagine how the meeting went when the executives at the Canon marketing department sat down and tried to think of a way to make their new DSLR seem ultra-incredible and make everyone else’s camera seem like it was half a camera.  They accomplished this task by calling their 35mm equivalent sensor a “Full frame” DSLR camera, and decided to call all other DSLR cameras “Crop frame” cameras.”……………..more including pros and cons of the various options

Here are some pictures that might help you understand the size ratios of the various sensor sizes

This explanation has images taken from full frame and crop sensor cameras from the same location using the same focal length of lens, it is a useful read also....here

In the image above I took two pictures from the exact same location with a 30D and a 5D. I used the same lens (Canon 24-105 f/4L IS) on both photos at a focal length of 24mm. By overlaying 100% size images on top of each other you can see how much more of the scene is captured by the 5D’s full-frame sensor (the color 30D image is on top of the black & white 5D image).

Here is another example of the two images                                                                            Crop Sensor

Full Frame Sensor

Got a new camera? Techniques and Rules All New Camera Owners Should Know

Did the holidays find you the proud owner of a new camera. You may be well versed in the details and techniques of digital cameras but if not then these tutorials will be very useful to you. You might also want to consider taking one of our courses scheduled for the new year. Starting towards the end of January we have a range of camera and technique based courses that if you are lucky enough to live in Oxford you might want to take.

Lomo Look

A while ago there was a great interest in poorly engineered Russian cameras that gave distortions in terms of colour and sharpness to the images it produced. The Lomo camera became a short lived star towards the end of the film era and the main factor affecting the way it produced images was the plastic quality of the lens. Even today there are many websites that laud Lomo images, there are fans and followers of things Lomo. In recent years the company was bought to save it from extinction and of the basis of the cult of Lomo has had significant success in many ways including introducing a range of film based cameras that could take multiple images at the same time.

 

The Lomo look is coveted by some digital users and there are many tutorials on how to get the Lomo look. As the choice of film and processing had a great impact on the way that the image looked it is less to do with the camera than the process so there may be many different Lomo like tutorials. These two are a before and after on one type of photoshop conversion and here is a YouTube vid tutorial on how to achieve the result.

Bruce Elder, journalist, Sydney Morning Herald

What do you think? Is this a technique that might freshen up some of your images? Let me know if this tutorial is useful and the sort of thing you want brought to you via this blog.