Gear

04 Apr Why DSLR’s Are Better Than Point-and-Shoots

More specifically, what makes a DSLR superior to a point and shoot? That's a loaded question, but lets look at the major factors to consider buying a DSLR if you are serious about photography. A DSLR camera is requirement if you are looking at attending a Matty Photography workshop, and you'll see why next. Control, Quality, and Performance are the three of the many factors we are going to look at today. There are ALL KINDS of bells and whistles on today's cameras, but we are going to specifically concern ourselves with the ones that really truly matter when it comes to making a photograph. Control is pretty basic really, but hard to appreciate/understand if you do not know how cameras capture light in order to make a photograph. In short, the camera has a couple parts that vary their size and speed in order to capture the proper amount of light. Most of your point and shoot cameras to not allow you to control this. In turn, you lose control of your image taking. I mean... how can you control your camera and take the photo you want if you can't control your camera's functions in which determine all this? These mysterious functions that I speak of are aperture, shutter speed, and ISO, all which contribute to making the image. If you do not fully know what these are or how to control them, you are not taking the photograph, your camera is, you are just clicking the button. Now don't you feel special? ;) Learning these functions and how to control them are covered in-depth and practiced in the beginners workshop, so don't sweat not knowing this information, just know that it's important stuff. A lot of students will walk into the beginners class with a camera that they do not know how to use, but by the end of the class, they are all well-skilled in how to take the photos they want with a DSLR and do it great!

18 Mar Thee Backup Solution

25 MBs a pop, yes, that's right... every time I click the shutter on my 5D mkII, the 21.1 megapixel DSLR consumes 25 megs on the memory card. The real concern is not how fast today's cameras fill up 8 or even 16 GB memory cards, it's at the end of the day when I have a total of 10-20 gigs of file data to upload, edit, and store. Shoot 3, 5, however many sessions a week... you start eating up disc space like crazy. I store and backup every picture I've ever shot in the last 5 years. I used to store all of my data on a 1 TB drive, then have another 1TB drive to backup the first drive in case of a drive failure. It was annoying, cumbersome and I got real tired of all the manual backups. Enter the drobo unit. The drobo is the best thing to happen to anyone who needs a simple, no thinking required, redundant storage solution. It's a RAID'd external hard drive setup (RAID is a fancy acronym meaning if you lose one or two drives, you still retain all of your data). I won't go into the details, you can surf the drobo site for that. The drobo unit can hold up to 4 hard drives of any size, you can even vary the size and make of the drives. The drobo unit then takes all of the drives and combines them into one large virtual drive. For example, my drobo has four 1.5 TB drives, and all RAID'd together as one drive, providing space for redundancy across all drives, I get a little over 4 TB of storage. Like I said before, I can have up to 2 drives fail at one time, and all of my data is still secure. This all provides me with a massive storage device with the peace of mind that all my data is safe. It can connect up to your PC or Mac, with high-speed USB and firewire interfaces (it also can be configured and hooked directly into your network and accessed from any machine on that network).

27 Dec Warning – Sharp Glass Ahead

I'm trying to make an effort to write more posts about some of my equipment, 'cause I know that other photographers out there in the market for new stuff would like to hear feedback about this stuff from real people they know, and not some crummy product review on adorama.com. I'm also going to try and make a spot on the site that details the current equipment I use in the field. Before I go off about how much I like this piece of glass... it's important to note that for all of you photographers in the beginning or even middle stages of your learning don't get too consumed with buying super expensive gear and thinking it'll make your photos magically turn to gold. A sharp lens and a poorly executed photo composition is still a poor photo, no matter how heavy and expensive your setup may be. Invest in some knowledge and gain solid skills in the field before you blow your savings on equipment that won't help your game too drastically in the beginning. I've taken many awesome photos in my years, and some of my top favorites of all time were taken with a $900 body/lens Canon Rebel setup.

06 Nov Wireless Flash – PW FlexTT5

A wireless flash trigger system, ya gotta have it. A must have with on-location lighting photography, but I'd argue almost a must have in the studio as well. No one needs to be tripping over those old dinosaur sync cables now-a-days. Of course we all want them, it's just a matter of if you can pony up the dough for a couple. Pocket Wizards, if you know anything about flash photography and the technologies used to talk to your lights, I'm sure you've heard that name. It's the Cadillac of wireless flash, an industry standard in pro photo, and they are not cheap. They fire from a 1000 feet away (don't ask me when you'd ever need such range), you can fine tune them using your computer for super specific needs, and they can carry your camera's flash settings wirelessly to hot shoe flash units from across the room. There are a ton of photog geeks out there writing post after post about these little gadgets, not to mention the manufacturer's site where you can read up on the fine details, so I'm just gotta give you the easy-peasy, simple, practical use for these things, while trying to leave out as much geek speak as I can.