Wednesday, February 4, 2009

WAY TOOOOO COOL

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Auto Photography

I have become very interested in automotive photography as of late. Weather and schedules have kept me away from pursuing over the past couple weeks, but I had a couple older shots and have been playing with them.....take a look










Hope to have some new photo's soon!

Sunday, January 4, 2009

Really cool Youtube Video

Photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz using the new Profoto lighting system.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Silver Efex Pro

My wife purchased a copy of Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro for Christmas. I decided to do little comparison of the B&W Conversion tool in Apple Aperture vs. Silver Efex Pro. Below are the photo's in color, Aperture conversion and SFX conversion.

Original Color Photo


B&W Conversion using Apple Aperture


B&W Conversion using Silver Efex Pro

These conversion were done using the default setting of both programs. I have to say that the default from Silver Efex Pro has much better definition and contrast than Aperture.

I will be playing with this software alot in the days to come and will post more thoughts as I complete more conversions.

Happy Holidays!

Monday, December 15, 2008

Megapixels.....

"I have to upgrade my camera, because the latest model has more megapixels."

Really?

Do you honestly think that more megapixels mean better pictures? Actually, in some cases (most) more megapixels means softer images.

Let's say you have a standard 8.5x11 piece of paper. Now, draw 6 million dots on that piece of paper. Let's take the same piece of paper and draw 8 million dots, 10 million dots, 12 million dots, and so on. What happens as you add more dots? They get smaller and closer together in order for them all to fit on the paper. This is the same concept with digital camera sensors. The more megapixels you add, the smaller and closer together they get.

Smaller pixels = Digital Noise
Digital Noise = Grainy Photo's
Close Pixels = Softer images

Let's talk about how pixels that are close together create softer images. Let's imagine that each of the dots on the piece of paper are actually small cups. When the image is passed through the lens and ends up on the sensor it is presented as colors of Red/Green and Blue. Each "cup" fills up with the color, if the "cups" are really close together and there is any shift in the camera (shake) the "cups" will get the colors of the next "cup". When the "cups" are further apart, there is less chance of the colors filling up the next "cup"

Whew....thats alot to say....

Let me break it down. As I moved from 6 to 10 to 12 megapixels I had to shift on how I photographed to account for the greater amount of pixels.

For the majority of people out there, 6-8 megapixels is more than enough. Let's face the truth...how often are your pictures used for anything other than web images, email or prints that are no bigger than 8x10.

So, if you want to upgrade a camera don't do it just because you think you need more megapixels. Do it because you want to achieve higher ISO's or more frame per second or 14bit color depth.

Hope this helps to clear up some of the myths out there about megapixels.