Anyway, camera is a robot. Proof? Rafie, while studying for his final found this:
(Click on the image above for larger view)
Oh yes, we’ll get back when we are finished with our exams and some projects. Wish us luck guys!
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Youtube is the web. Lets face it. The whole world watches youtube, uploading and downloading it. You’d be hard pressed to find a pretty good channel for teaching photography. Most of them are just videos on a video cam, while the person mumbles away to himself. It’s like trying to find a single grain in a barn full of haystack. Where simply do you start?
But lo and Behold! There is hope for photographers wanting something of decent quality AND content. For that i give you the Nikon Help Hotline. A channel on youtube dedicated to Nikon users. And im not talking just about usual beginner bodies here, im talking about Full Frame FX, D3x, Full frame lenses, Film photography, Old Manual Nikkor Lenses, you name it, he’s got it, and probably done a review of it too.
Nice channel design, and how do you say it..emm.. a bit Nikony ; p
It started off by Joey Spina, a professional photographer, a young professional at that as well, about my age. Now the channel is run by his team. A goldmine channel on youtube this is. This channel has been the place where i learnt things initially, the videos are awesome.Top notch quality. There’s nothing to hear but the pleasant track of songs, but thats only because the tutorials and reviews are written on screen. How convenient is that?! Now you dont have to listen hard to what ever the person’s saying, you simply rewind it a little and up pops the text again.
Is this quite possibly camera porn? ooooh yeaaah ; p Just a sneak peak of whats available for your viewing pleasure. Click on photo for larger size.
So go ahead, stream the vids to your hearts desire. I know you want to. You’ll be thanking me for it after that ; P
Owh and before i run off leaving you guys drooling, here’s the link to the Hotline
And to top that up, they have a flickr account.
Enjoi_learning
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We know that once you buy your first SLR, you’ll get those gear addictions coming on, wanting all the new gear, the best tech on earth. Wait, hold on, read our checklist before running of buying stuff that you want, but might not need.
Usually in my bag by Thomas Claveirole
Like going of for camping, you gotta have your Camera bag Essentials:
- Camera Bag lined with foam-rubber compartments
- camera body with body cap and neck strap
- favorite lenses with lens caps
- lens hood
- film and/ or media cards for DSLR’s
- air blower brush
- lens cleaner solution and lens tissue wipes
- electronic flash (speedlight/ strobes)
- extra batteries
- remote release
- notebook and permanent marker
Optional
- handheld exposure meter
- filters such as UV haze, skylight, polarizing, neutral density, graded neutral density, light amber, light blue
- tripod, monopod, and/or beanbags
- gaffers tape/ duct tape
- plastic bag or sheet to protect equipment in wet weather
- umbrella
- extra camera equipment
- equipment manuals
- 18% gray card
- re sealable plastic
- reflectors
- slave units for electronic flash
LENSA’s kit. Full list of camera equipments available on our flickr page
Tool Kit
- film changing bag
- film leader retriever
- swiss army knife
- filter wrench
- small socket wrenches
- jeweler’s screwdrivers
- tweezers
Safety
- flashlight
- compass
- whistle
- water
- snacks
- medical first aid kit
- reflective clothing during night-time shooting.
Note: You don’t have to have everything on the list. The trick is to know which item to bring along for the particular photo session. Happy hunting ; )
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Few months ago, we have posted about photography Rule of Thirds. Now we share with you our favourite pro, Chris Marquardt from Tips From The Top Floor
Sample image from Chris regarding the Rule of Thirds
Are you using it? Maybe we can showcase some of your rules of thirds which you posted on Lensa flickr group pool.
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Okay, this is probably the best part of photography. It shows how diverse it can be. We bring you…
- I’ve-been-here photography
Fun Times at The Eiffel by hipposrunsuperfast.com
- I-cook-this photography
egg by House of Sims
- Birthday photography
Grace and the Cake by RBerteig
- Jump-and-shoot photography
Le jump des People of Marseille / Gens du Sud! by Elvire.R.
- Just-a-random-shoot photography
Calculate by hashmil
Choose which one that you like most? 
Let’s V.O.T.E
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Bristol Museum kept the exhibition top secret for as long as possible. Not letting even the city municipal know what was going on behind the museum’s closed doors. Up until the day of the exhibition. Then, all hell broke loose. Hordes of people stormed through the doors to see Banksy’s never before seen artwork.
You see, for those of you who are unaware of Banksy, he is simply, a graffiti artist, a damn good one. His works littered the streets of Bristol (his hometown), London, and god knows what other streets and cities. Even going so far as grafitti-ing the wall separating Israel and Palestine.
Now what makes his work different from other artist is the fact that his works are highly controversial, thought provoking, challenging the norm. His works involve making fun of politics, the way we are as humans and how we work. Banksy provides us with heavy topics but putting it in an entertaining way even a small child can understand.
I have just recently just got back from a road trip, Bristol being one of the stops. And I was just dying to go see his works. It was just 4o minutes after the Museum opened up on a Sunday morning. But the line was already stretching the whole block outside of the Museum, and mind you, the exhibition has been going on for a good 2-3 weeks now.
In my opinion, if they could get this many people to a MUSEUM, then they should do this kind of collaboration often. You have families, old folks, skater kids, trendy folk, small kids going to see Banksy. Imagine that, a museum. Not even a theme park. Upon entering the museum we were greeted by a large burnt out ice cream truck, which funny enough has the ice cream on its roof melted. Couldn’t figure out what it means though, Banksy expects people to figure it out on their own, no description given.
Owh and you can take pictures coz he (Banksy) doesn’t believe in copy rights. What’s cool about some of his works is that he takes classic artworks from other artist and basically alters them at his own pleasure. What’s even more astounding is that he can replicate the individual stroke of the respective artist so that the alteration seems like it was done by the original artist. So Banksy has guts, is a genius and apparently damn TALENTED.
The first main hall we were lead to, has his never before seen artwork on display. There’s even a slice of what his workstation looks like. Then the second hall in the museum was set up like a zoo with cages filled with his animatronics sculpture like art, a security camera on trees in a nest titled, “Mother camera and her chicks”, a monkey working on a painting in deep thought, an old Tweety bird swinging locked up, a chicken den with hatchlings when looked closer are actually chicken nuggets. All thought provoking and brilliant at the same time.
After that, this is where the fun starts. His other works are all over the museum hidden amongst the existing museum displays. So visitors basically have to hunt where his artwork is. Which to me is just awesome. Somehow the museum and Banksy have come up with a win-win situation where the museum gets the visitors to look at all the museum’s dinosaur bones, stuffed animals and pottery (all the normal museum stuff), and Banksy gets to mess up what ever he wishes to in the whole museum. In the end you pretty much cover the whole museum in the process. You see parents telling their children about art and animals while the kids and parents alike are being entertained by Banksy’s antics. Weirdly enough it’s all very educational.
So if you do have the chance to go to Bristol or is in the UK at the moment with no plans, I HIGHLY recommend seeing his artwork. No fee, its FREE. To wrap it up, no one actually knows who Banksy is, not even the Museum, they deal with his close associates. During the preparation of the exhibition, Banksy was among the ones in the team. Though no one knew which one. And that ladies and gentlemen, is why Banksy is not cool, he’s sub zero.
A LOT more pictures in our Lensa flickr photostream! To the right of you.
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In this article, we will try to be a bit educative in a sense we would like to show you how reviews are important especially when you are buying camera equipments, especially the expensive ones. We will share with you few websites and links so that you can cross check between them when you are conducting your own research as we have talked about the photography buying guide in the past (prosumer or DSLR) in the past.
Validity of reviews
If you go and check out the review for Flip Mino HD on Amazon.co.uk, you will see range of reviews from 2 stars up to 5 stars. Many people have used it and we should know that good product comes with a reasonable good price as well. Most of the time, we tend to look at the high rating and neglect the other side of it.
Despite that, we would really love to see if the bad reviews are valid in terms of the knowledge of the product, field and also the main concern of the product. We would love to share with you two kind of users and let see which one do you prefer to listen to:
Person A: He has been using video recording and streaming for years and said it is a good product while he practically using it after he mentioned about it.
VERSUS
Person B: He never uses a video recording gadget and bought the same product while not liking it.
Brand based
Judging a product according to the manufacturer is the short cut provided that you have already own and use the product itself. Obviously when buying a lens, you will find Canon and Nikon lenses will be much more expensive than the third party lenses such as Sigma and Tamron. There are several factors, but generally, you are paying for two things when you buy something:
- quality of the product (that the manufacturer offers)
- brand name
(Photography) Website reviews
Apart from the validity point mentioned above, we mentioned regarding cross checking the among websites and see their ratings. They tend to give quite an honest review especially the pros and cons (advantages and disadvantages) of the product. However, it depends in which stage your research at that point you might:
- Comparing budget DSLR to semi-pro DSLR
- Comparing budget DSLR cameras among the competitors
Once you have decided which camera to choose, what we usually recommend our readers is that you again compare the reviews of the product among different websites. Below are the example of the Nikon D300 from several websites:
- Camera Labs: 9.0 out of 10
- DP Reviews: 9.1 out of 10
- TestFreaks: 7.4 out of 10
Your call
Now it is your call to judge. If you see and analyse it carefully, TestFreaks has quite a low rating on D300. And we know most Nikon users wanting that camera apart from the D3X and D700 so badly! : )
Quick analysis: TestFreaks runs their website based on user reviews which in reality 248 users actually rate the camera D300 with an average of 9.5 out of 10. If you learn Statistics, you will understand that if you have small number of factors that you consider in the test, if one of them have a low rating, it will drag the overall rating and this (one) low or high rating is called extreme point(s).
So, basically in general, you need to apply some knowledge application when deciding what to buy and what to look for. Statistics isn’t always dodgy, it is people who make it looks dodgy. Get it?
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Counting towards LENSA 100th post… Yes, we’re excited. Sorry for the long silence, we’re a bit busy with our assignments and exams. But Rafie is doing fine with his so he decided to give a go at recording photoshop tutorial on framing. It is not that hard if you learn the easy way to do it. This is probably the most efficient way of creating a frame like the video image thumbnail. (errr.. he sounds a bit sleepy, lol!)
We hope you enjoy!
Framing made easy from MOHD RAFIE KAMARUZAMAN on Vimeo.
So, if you have any questions, please shout out loud at the comment. Be nice! Cheers
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Well, some of you might want to buy memory cards and if you already have one, you would probably be thinking about replacing or upgrading your memory. In this article, we will help you by giving a few tips on buying memory cards for your camera.
Memory card type
First of all, before you buy it online or from the shop, you need to know what type of memory card your camera uses. For example, my Canon EOS 400D uses Compact Flash (Type I or II) type of memory card while a Nikon D80 uses a SD/SDHC.
Tips: Remember that NOT all camera uses the same type of memory card!
Size
How big should the size be? And by big, we mean (capacity wise). This would be the biggest problem of all time. If you are like me, in which case you only take pictures depending on your mood and is quite efficient in transferring it to your computer, than 1 or 2GB is enough. If you love taking photographs and don’t want to be worried anout running out of storage, you might want to consider 4GB or 8GB. Then it also depends on your Camera, the more the megapixel, the more MB a picture would require. A nikon D3x’s RAW pic file is almost 50MB for 1 picture. So thats definitely something to consider. Next is your workflow. Do you shoot in RAW, FINE Large JPEG, or RAW+JPEG? Shooting in RAW takes up a hella lot of memory as thats uncompressed data of an image, compared to a compressed image file such as JPEG.
Tips: The file size of 1 medium sized JPEG picture is about 1.3 MB,and 1GB equals to 1000MB. So i I guess you can calculate the approximate memory size required for your usage. However, the speed of file transfer should also be considered, which we will discuss in the next point.
Speed
The picture above shows the 8GB SanDisk Extreme IV CF memory card. Well, if you look carefully there’s a 45MB/s which allow file transfer of 45MB per second. It’s about 45 pictures of size 1MB in 1 second and this is what we are talking about. If you have like 1000 pictures, not having a fast speed memory card will require you to wait for a long time. Notice above the 8GB print is the initials UDMA, to use this card your DSLR must be able to support UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Acces) type cards, which high end cameras have, not all cameras support this function. And were talking about Nikon D3 or nikon D3x and the Canon equivalent. Personally i use a Sandisk extreme 3 8GB CF card. Unless you’re working in a hurry or is constantly uploading thousands of pictures, you dont really need a fast card.
Tips: Speed (of file transfer) is crucial when you have big size of memory card.
So, I guess that’s all for now, thank you for reading and if you have a camera, could you please vote the size of memory card that you have. Thanks and see you next time!
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We havent posted Photography 101 articles for quite some time, so in this article we’d like to do a simple summary of in camera Metering, which are, Matrix, Center Weighted and Spot. Those names apply to Nikon, it should be the same or around the same name for Canon. Here goes the article with some example pics with it:
Matrix metering:
I picked an ipod (for its white surface) and a dark red background carpet as an example. In matrix metering, the whole frame is nicely exposed but some detail is lost in the ipod, as it it slightly over exposed.
The camera evaluates the entire area of the frame. Meaning that the exposure is of the entire frame, so if you have an object with a really bright background, chances are that the object might become a silhouette because the camera is trying to calculate the exposure of the entire frame, background and foreground. While you’d get a pretty nice background, your object will be dark , with some details. But Matrix metering does work most of the time.I set it as my default metering system as the camera does a pretty good job calculating the correct overall exposure. Matrix metering is not recommended with AE lock or exposure compensation, but hey, rules are meant to be broken.
Centre-Weighted Metering:
Both subject and background are nicely exposed with sufficient detail. It is metered around the centre of the frame. Bringing out the ipod detail a bit more.
This mode is similar to the metering method used in early 35mm SLR cameras, and some photographers still feel at home using it. The camera meters the entire frame but weights the centre portion in the 8 mm reference circle so that it accounts for 75% if the meter’s recommendation. You can change the size of the weighted area to 6mm, 8mm, 10mm, 13mm or average (which i wouldn’t recommend except for very specialized purposes because it simply averages the entire frame without emphasizing any segment).
Spot metering:
In the picture above, the ipod’s detail have been recovered but leaving the background dark. It is spot metered around the centre, which is the ipod’s clickwheel.
Nikon’s spot metering system works well in situations when precisely metering the subject is the most critical exposure concern, when unimportant elements in the scene have unusual reflectance, or when you want to compare specific areas of the scene to evaluate their differences. When spot metering is selected, the camera meters a 3mm circular area that is 2% of the frame. This is centered around the active focus area or in the centre of the active area in Group dynamic Auto Focus. If Closest subject priority is in use, the Frame’s central focus area will be metered. This mode is suitable for pics with a bright background and the main concern is the detail of the subject. Also perfect for concert and event photography.
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