Quick Tips

Lens Compression and Perspective Exaggeration

Lens compression looks like the distance between near and distant subjects in the frame is reduced. You will read many photographers say they like the “compression” delivered by a telephoto lens for portraits or the lack of “compression” in a wide-angle lens for landscapes. The words make sense because of what we see, but we are not seeing any compression, instead we are seeing perspective exaggeration.

RCAF Vampire

There are many opportunities to photograph aircraft over the course of the summer from big air shows to smaller, local events. Getting good shots at air shows is not hard, but some tips are going to help you out.

We will use different settings for different types of shots, but do work to keep your ISO as low as possible for the best colour and dynamic range.

Understanding Radio Triggers for Flash

Ask any professional photographer and he or she will tell you that being able to control the light is incredibly important to a truly successful image. We will think about position of the light, time of day, light colour, quality and direction. When it comes time to supplement or replace the ambient light with flash, how can we achieve this goal?

Digital Darkroom: Post-Processing for Still Photos

As a photo and video instructor, I get the opportunity to meet folks who are at different places on their creative journey. At some point, most come to the juncture where they want their finished work to be more than what comes straight out of the camera. In this first of two articles, we will take a look at the rationale and options for still photographers, who are, or are considering moving into making their images better through post-processing functions.

Depth of Field - Feature Image

We know by now that a camera lens does not focus at multiple distances at the same time. There is only one place that will be in perfect focus from the focal plane, and that is determined by where you focus the lens. When we focus a lens, there is only one focal plane to subject distance that is in perfect focus.

Yet we see that some areas in front of, and some areas behind our point of focus can also look sharp and that range can be different depending on some specific criteria. This zone that we perceive as being sharp versus the area that we perceive as being soft is what we are calling the “depth of focus”.

Better Backup

Fault Tolerance: At its simplest, you treat two physical disks as one, with one being a live copy of the other one. If the primary fails, the second kicks in and things work as they always did except you get an error that a disk has died. It’s easy to do, but as each disk is a replica of the other, it’s not particularly inexpensive.