Sorry for the rush of Canon-specific deals lately, but it just doesn’t seem like there are as many good savings out there for users of other systems at the moment.

We talked a while back about 50mm 1.8 lenses as being one of the first upgrades an SLR shooter should get.  Optics at 50mm aren’t too difficult for camera manufacturers, so a 50mm lens is usually a cheap and bright addition to the kit lens that came with your camera.  It’s particularly well-suited to indoor photography, as the wide aperture lets in several more stops of light than the average kits lens.

Abe’s of Maine has the Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens on sale for $89.95 with free shipping and no sales tax.  And if you enter the coupon codes FRIEND10 or LOYALTY10, you can knock another $10 off.  At $80, this lens is a great addition to your kit and give you a little more versitility with the light you can shoot in.

Photographers learn to value quality in a photograph above all else, and that’s why working on the Web can be a frustrating experience: you have to make compromises. In general, resized images for the Web:

• Are less sharp
• Introduce compression artifacts that reduce image quality

Pros will debate very specific editing techniques to prepare photos for the Web, but I wanted to give a guide for beginners.  Here are some basic steps you should be following to make sure your images display correctly online.

Choose the right file type.

This goes without saying, but you’d be surprised how often photographers still make this mistake. In 99/100 cases, you should be saving your photographs as JPG files for the Web. JPG is a file type that’s optimized for displaying photography online, and it offers enough compression without compromising image quality.

Chose the right file dimensions.

Full-resolution photographs never cut it on the Web. You’re going to want to downsize considerably. Consider this - the average width of a Web site today is right around 800-900 pixels. Today’s digital cameras are capable of taking images several thousands of pixels wide. You’re going to need to edit - and downsize - your photographs for the Web.

A good rule of thumb is this: try and keep the longest end of your photograph around 500-600 pixels for a LARGE image, think more in the 300-400 pixel range for a medium-sized image. This should help keep your file sizes low and keep your users happy. If you want to offer a full-sized image, great! Just make it as a link from a smaller thumbnail. Your users will thank you.

Examples of some common Web file sizes:

Choose the right compression.

Just as you needed to downsize your images for the Web, you’re also going to need to reduce the quality too. A small - but consequential - percentage of Internet users still don’t have high-speed access, and you’ll lose out on their page views if your images take too long to download.

When you reduce the quality of a JPG image, you introduce something called file artifacts. These look vaguely like digital noise, but they’re not produced by anything in your camera. They’re results of the compression algorithm discarding visual information in your image in order to reduce the file size. Optimizing images for the Web is a challenge between getting the file size as small as possible while keeping the image quality high. Generally, you want a photograph to be around 50-60 kilobytes for the Web….much larger and your pages will take too long to load. Too much compression, though, and your images will end up looking like this tortured flower.

Resize your images - don’t let the browser do it for you.

Part of the <IMG> tag in HTML lets you define an image’s size when inserting in on a Web page.  For example, I can define an image that’s 1200×800 pixels as 300×200 pixels by entering the following HTML code:

<img src=”my1200×800image.jpg” width=”300px” height=”200px”>

But the results will be far from perfect.  Here’s what the result looks like, versus an image that was resized down in Photoshop and inserted at its correct dimensions:

The browser-resized image takes too long to load, and looks bizarrely oversharpened.

The image resized in Photoshop looks a little softer, but it’s much more pleasing and takes much less time to download.

Handle your resizing in your favorite image editor; please don’t leave it to the browser.

Sharpen after you resize

Softness is a side effect of most algorithms image editing software use to resize photographs. So don’t be afraid to sharpen your image a little bit after you resize - even if you’ve done it previously in the editing process. A little sharpening makes our city image that much more pleasing for the Web.  Just be careful - a little goes a long ways.

We’re back after our end-of-summer vacation, and I wanted to share with you a great blog I found during some downtime in the last week.  We’ve linked to the personal blogs of professional photographers in the past, and indeed, this whole blog thing seems to be catching on with the pros.  So many photographers are writing blogs and giving great insight that you can learn from as an amatuer shooter.

I don’t think there’s a much more marquee placement in the business than the cover of Sports Illustrated, and David Bergman earned this week’s spot.  That’s only one reason you should read his photo blog.  The other is that he is generous in sharing a number of his different shots and he isn’t stingy with the details on how he shot them.

Bergman also gives you tons of insight on what it’s like to shoot for one of the biggest magazines in the world, so if you harbor any dreams of being a pro (or just like to live vicariously), check out his articles like this one on the kit he travels with and the burden it often proves to be.  Budget it defintitely is not.

http://www.davidbergman.net

Summer’s coming to a close, and fall - with all its gorgeous photo opportunities - is fast approaching.  We’re going to be giving you all the guides you need to take better fall photos, but we wanted to give you a reading list for the last of the doldrums of summer.  Here’s our slide show of your recommended reading list - hover over it to read my comments and to see the complete list.

Happy reading!

I’ve been happy that a few Cheapshooter readers have followed up with the Canon Loyalty Program post from a couple weeks back and shared their experiences.

Reader SeattleGuy exchanged his “ancient” Powershot S100 for a refurbished Rebel XT, and he said the process went smoothly:

Well, it took 4 days longer to get the camera than I thought. But it was worth the wait. Sure, there is the newer 10 MegaPixel model on the market right now, but you can’t get one for anywhere near $310.00 USD.

The camera seems perfect. It is the silver model rather than the black model, but it is spotless. The finish is perfect. The lens is perfect as well; glass, finish and even the contacts are clean and shiny.

The kit came with everything I expected. Besides the camera body and lens there were the manuals + software, charger + battery, strap, eye-piece cover, all caps - everything except a cover for the hot shoe. But I don’t see where that is included even on newer models..

The pictures are great and all of the settings seem to work, I’ll need more time to be 100% sure about that.

Thanks Canon..!

So if you’ve been hesitant to test it out, give it a shot.  Canon’s number for the program is 866-443-8002.

Also, here’s one more idea.  If you want a cheap upgrade to a digital SLR, older Canon cameras are available pretty cheap on eBay.  For example, here’s a Canon S100 on eBay for under 30 bucks.  While it might not be the most ethical thing in the world, I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t fulfill the trade-in requirement.

In another role, I occasionally read obscure real estate blogs.  Never did I think that it would pay off with some cool photo info, but I found a relatively cheap and easy way to get into aerial photography.  Well, aerial photography of a sort at least.

Welcome to pole aerial photograph, an easy way to get your camera off the ground and change your perspective.  This particular setup is used for real estate photography - taking better pictures of houses to use in real estate listings.  And while it’s not the most mobile setup in the world, it would be an interesting way of changing up your perspective for something as simple as a local sporting event or family gathering.

Here’s the details on how it was assembled, straight from the original thread.  The author is using a Canon Digital Rebel and the remote software, but the method could easily be adapted for other camera models - you might just lose the benefit of the computer preview:

USB extender ($6 from eBay, i got it from the same seller as the cat 5 Cable, I think the cable and extender was $25)

75 ft Cat 5 cable, plugs into one section of the USB extender and then directly into the USB port on the computer.

My Hot Stick find was the key to my low cost. They normally run $300-$500 dollars. The one I got is 50 Ft. The highest I’ve ever had it with the camera attached is 40 Ft and it was swaying substantially. I would suggest a 35 Ft Hot Stick maximum unless your very daring.

The other section of USB extender is on the other end of the Cat5 cable. I used a Hose clamp to attach a carabiner to the pole. I use the carabiner to attach the Cat 5 cable so It’s not pulling down on the plug attached to the camera. Then use then Canon cable to plug into the camera. (I always get a “slow USB” warning on the computer screen because of the distance but it doesn’t effect the outcome. The picture DL’s to the screen in 3-4 seconds.)

The EOS utility on your computer does allow you to remotely operate the shutter but I was more comfortable with a remote shutter release (besides I wanted one anyway) I found a non-infrared style remote shutter release on eBay new for $10. The receiver end plugs into the camera, the other end is a key-fob size button with a 6 inch antenna.

I determined that a half inch piece of galvanized conduit was exactly the same size as my tripod head so I cut off about ten inches, flattened one end with a hammer, drilled a hole and used a bolt to attach to the universal mount on the end of the Hot Stick. I also had to use a jig saw to cut a slot in the end of the conduit to allow for the tripod head mounting screw. The mounting screw assures that the tripod head will not fall off the conduit.

With everything attached and “on” then, the hot stick raises in 5 ft sections with a button release. Raise to the height you want, align the camera in the general direction and snap the first shot. DO NOT move the pole or the angle, review your shot in 3-4 seconds on the laptop screen then adjust angle, pitch, height as you see fit until you get the shot you want. Use the widest angle you can without distortion. You can always crop out the unwanted streets and neighboring houses.

At $300-500, a Hotstick isn’t exactly the best option for a shooter on a strict budget.  So the question becomes — how much do you want to risk your camera?  The post also discusses the merits of using a tree-trimmer, window washer or painters’ pole.  It just might require more effort/risk to secure your camera in.

How much of a difference does the additional height make?

Certainly enough to make a striking difference and to make a boring photo much more unique.  There’s also a Flickr group devoted to pole aerial photography with some other cool examples.

I’m going to try and put a rig together, but I wanted to put this out there now to see if we get a few people interested in refining this method a bit further.  I’ll work on finding a bit more elegant and simple of a solution, but if you have any suggestions, post them in the comments.

]]> http://www.cheapshooter.com/2008/08/26/do-it-yourself-pole-aerial-photography/feed/ http://www.cheapshooter.com/2008/08/25/photocalc-on-location-photo-assistance-for-iphone-users/ http://www.cheapshooter.com/2008/08/25/photocalc-on-location-photo-assistance-for-iphone-users/#comments Mon, 25 Aug 2008 21:52:35 +0000 Dan http://www.cheapshooter.com/?p=545

If you have an iPhone, the flurry of recent development for the new Apps Store produced a nice, cheap photography tool for the novice- to intermediate-level photographer.  Meet Photocalc, an app that gives you an easy way to calculate some of the more complicated variables involved in taking a photograph.

The app, which costs $2.99, comes with three different calculators - an exposure, depth-of-field and flash calculator.  The exposure calculator isn’t the most useful thing in the world - most digital cameras can do the same thing with metering, obviously - but if you’re trying to teach yourself to be a full manual shooter and to recognize the light conditions quickly, it can be helpful.  Of greater use is the depth-of-field calculator, which combines focal length, distance and aperture to tell you how much of your photograph will be in focus.  It’s a handy way of making sure your photo is as sharp as you want, and depth-of-field is difficult to gauge when looking at images on a camera’s tiny LCD screen.

There’s also a handy reference mode with a glossary of common photographic terms and rules.  But the coolest feature is the sunrise/sunset mode.  Photocalc uses the iPod’s autolocation feature to automatically determine your location and give the sunrise and sunset for a given day.  If you’re trying get that perfect “golden hour” of light, this is a great feature to have.

It also works with the iPod touch, though you lose the autolocate feature.  Check out more at the Photocalc site.  For less than a price of a cup of coffee, it’s definitely a good add to your toolbox.

I feel bad for the Nikon shooters, who were left out of the Canon Loyalty Program last week. This is small consolation, but if you use a Nikon SLR, there’s a great deal going on at Amazon for a solid starter telephoto lens.

The Sigma 55-200mm f/4-5.6 DC lens isn’t the fastest or sharpest on the market, but if you’re looking for a second lens to augment the kit lens that came with your Nikon SLR, it’s a good choice. Typically this lens goes for about $150, but Amazon and Cameta have it on sale for $60 + $7 shipping. It’s definitely worth it at that price. I’ve had great luck with my Sigma lens, and no problems with Cameta in the past.

This lens will give you the range to start doing a little telephoto work, and it’s not a terrible lens for sports photography in broad daylight. Just be careful - the relatively small starting aperture at range (f/5.6) makes this ill-suited for lower-light conditions. Still, for the budding SLR shooter, it’s a must at this price.

Click here to check it out.

By the way, Cheapshooter is going to start updating more times per day! Be sure to add our RSS feed or subscribe to our e-mail list to make sure you don’t miss a thing.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted this article on a cool photo installation at Wimbledon that used grass as film in an innovative way. Since then, I’ve spent some time looking around the Web for other applications of this idea. I tracked down a tutorial on how to develop a photo on a geranium leaf and if anything, I think the results are cooler than the grass photo installation at Wimbledon.

The original tutorial has disappeared now, but I tracked it down in the Wayback Archives and I’m going to reprint it here with credit to give it a permanent home. It’s a great project for a slow day, and I’m definitely going to try it out as soon as I can.

Credit for the original tutorial goes to Grand Illusions, which has tons of other interesting content unrelated to photography.

The word photography comes from the Greek “photos”, meaning light, and “graphos” meaning drawing, but the ancient Greeks didn’t invent photography. The word cameraa comes from the Latin “camera”, meaning room, and “obscura”, meaning dark. It’s not surprising the Ancient Greeks didn’t invent photography, after all, they never liked to get their hands dirty, but the Romans, who would have been at home in the “Dark Room”, could have invented photography, but never did. Why?

Nowadays, most people take photographs. Remove the modern cameras and film, and many homes still contain the things needed to produce a photograph, things which the Romans could have had access to as well.

What do we need to produce photographs?

• A dark room or box
• Lots of light
• Something which is sensitive to light
• A way to focus the light
• Chemicals that will reveal and fix the image

Until the recent development of digital cameras, most photography involved the use of films coated with various light sensitive compounds of silver. The sensitivity of certain silver salts to light was known from about 1727, when Johann Heinrich Schulze published his findings in the Nuremburg Academy of Natural Philosophers. But many natural things are sensitive to light. Long ago people noticed the effect of light on green plants, or how it made coloured fabrics fade. It is the effect of light on plants that makes Roman Photography possible.

This is what you need

• One healthy geranium plant with large leaves
• A dark room or large box
• A slide projector
• A slide of a high contrast negative image
• Methylated spirits or other strong alcohol
• Tincture of Iodine from a pharmnacist
• Various pots, jars, trays and small boxes

How it all works

The chlorophyll in healthy green leaves captures light and uses its energy to join together carbon dioxide and water. The result is the organic compound we call starch. It is the basis of much of the food we eat. Starch is white, but if you drop a small amount of a solution of iodine on it, the starch turns black. So that’s it really. All you have to do is get a plant to produce lots of starch in the right place, then stain the starch with iodine. Don’t let a few details prevent you starting straight away.

Keep the geranium in a dark room or box for two days. During this time the plant will use up all the existing starch in the leaves. Snip off one leaf, leaving plenty of stalk attached. Fix the leaf flat against the outside wall of a small box, gently push the stalk through a hole in the box.

Arrange for the cut end of the stalk to rest in a dish of water, to keep the leaf fresh. You can use sticky tape to keep the leaf reasonably flat. In a dimly lit room project a small but very bright image onto the leaf. Leave it to expose for about four or five hours, depending on the brightness of the projected image. After the exposure you should be able to see the effect of the light on the leaf, in the form of a faint, pearly image.

Now comes the violent bit. You have to kill the leaf, for the good of your art, you understand. Drop it in boiling hot water. After a minute or two, remove the now very limp leaf and place it in a bowl of cold water. Allow the leaf to fan out to a mere remnant of its former self. It should look like a fragile translucent pale brown thing, floating on the water.

Place a few drops of Tincture of Iodine on the surface of the leaf; after twenty or thirty seconds rock the bowl gently to spread the iodine. Slowly the positive image should appear, your first, and possibly last, photo on a geranium leaf. You have to keep the leaf in water, and after a few hours the image may fade, but you can restore it any time with a little more iodine.

Shooting in black and white is just one way to exercise your photographic skills. Photo by camil tulcan.

Just like any other skill, becoming a better photographer takes a lot of practice. There are so many different variables to control - lighting, shutter speed, aperture, ISO - and it takes time to understand how they work together to produce the perfect image. But if you’re impatient, here are five quick and easy tips to start improving your photographs today. Each is designed to exercise a certain part of the photographer’s brain and to get you thinking more carefully about the shots you take.

1. Shoot a roll of film.

Yes, it’s an anachronism in today’s day and age, but there’s no better tool to help you think about every individual photo you take then a film camera and a roll of film. Think about it. A photographer with a digital camera is like a soldier with a machine gun - just press the trigger and fire away and eventually something will hit. But a photographer with a film camera is like a sniper - each shot has to count. This forces you to slow down and think about every individual variable that goes into a photograph. You don’t want to waste a single frame, so you’ll spend that much more time thinking about the composition and lighting and all the camera settings that come into play.

And, as an added bonus, you get to get it developed. So often I’ll fire away for days on my digital camera, only to store my photos somewhere in the dark recesses of my hard drive. There’s something to be said for getting a set of prints, of having something tangible to represent the photo shoot.

2. Shoot in black and white.

One photography teacher once told me that you should never shoot in color unless it adds something to the image. It’s an interesting approach, not one I necessarily agree with, but it definitely holds some truth. Especially in this era of Photoshopping and saturation effects, color can distract from the image itself. And in some cases, it can compensate for poor composition or photographic technique.

Shooting in black and white places a larger burden on the photograph. Color isn’t there to add any sort of wow factor to the image - you have to carry it through your composition alone. Shooting in black and white is a great way to force yourself to really make the photograph interesting, either through the subject or through a unique perspective. There’s a reason nearly every basic photography class starts out with black-and-white photography: there’s still no better way to prove your chops as a photographer.

3. Create a time lapse.

Photo by iseemooi

There are some pretty cool examples of time-lapse photography online, but we’re not going to create anything that impressive. This is just a simple exercise to understand the quality of the light better. Choose a subject - it doesn’t have to be anything impressive, really, but make sure it’s outdoors, stationary and in direct sunlight for most of the day. Start around as early as you can with your first photograph, and then come back every hour or two and take a new photograph until it’s too dark to continue.

Load up all the photographs at the end of your experiment and peruse through. You should be able to get a better handle on what times of day create better photographs and at what times it might be best to set the camera down. It’s a tedious exercise, but one that will certainly help you appreciate the quality of light more.

4. Experiment with depth-of-field.

Strong macro photography begins with a good understanding of depth-of-field. Photo by abdhakamabdah

It seems like beginning photographers often struggle with the idea of aperture and how it affects their photographs more than any other concept. Here’s a great way to really nail the idea down. Choose an object you’d like to photograph. Set it outside on a bright day - we’re going to need a fair amount of light for this experiment - and start by shooting it on the widest aperture possible (smallest f/number) from as close or as zoomed in as possible. Then, take another photograph at every couple aperture settings until you get to the smallest aperture possible (highest f/number). Notice how the depth-of-field becomes wider with the smaller apertures.

But don’t stop there - zoom out (or back up about four or five feet) and repeat the same exercise again. You’ll notice that the depth of field from further away is much greater than it is from close range. This is because the depth of field is regulated both by the distance to the subject and by aperture.

In addition to macro photography, this is a great exercise to help you with portrait photography too. Beginning photographers often wonder how to get that creamy smooth background (dubbed bokeh) in their portraits behind the subject. It’s a function of depth of field. If you limit the depth of field, either through using a smaller aperture or by getting closer to the subject, the background will be less in focus.

5. Look at your EXIF data.

Did you know your digital camera doubles as a recorder? It’s true. The vast majority of digital cameras record and store tons of information about every photograph they take - aperture, shutter speed, focal length, time, etc. This data is contained within an EXIF tag, stored inside the image itself.

Choose a few photographs that you’re particularly proud of. Do you think you’d be able to reproduce them, or was some luck involved? If you’re not confident in your abilities to replicate the photograph, cruise through the EXIF data. Look at the aperture and the shutter speed, and see if you can understand why they made the image as great as it is. Look at the time you shot the photograph, and look at how the time of day affected the quality of the light. All these variables are important to consider when you’re shooting a photograph, and there’s no better teaching tool than your own greatest shots.

Confused about how to access the EXIF data for your images? Check out this online EXIF viewer, which will let you examine your images without having to install any special software.