Ok .. this one I've been waiting for a while now ... I've been getting progressively excited about Aperture 2! And now, it's finally here. The biggest thing that I am looking for is improvement in raw processing and speed. But, to begin with, Aperture 1.5's raw processing was already excellent to begin with! And the speed wasn't bad.

The real difference is in how fast you can achieve quality results. For standard photo processing, the differences are not going to be huge. You definitely have more creative control without having to export to Photoshop for some photo tricks, but in the end it's still another tool.

One of my favorite photo effects that I REALLY wished Aperture had was (more...)

Hey Guys ... so I was VERY fortunate to have the amazing experience of having a video shot on the new Red One video camera a couple of months ago ... the video is going to be released in a few weeks!

First off ...

This camera is nuts (and expensive)!! Imagine, for moment, that you could take a Canon 5d and make it snap photos at 24 frames a second .... that's right! 12mp at 24 frames a second. But wait! There's more. It can not only double, but triple that speed!! In the movie industry they call this resolution "4k". It's basically 35mm film, only saved to compact flash card!

Some stills ...

Ok, so these aren't 4k stills ... not even standard definition stills! But they're (more...)

Today is an exciting day for folks who shoot in the 35mm digital format. Canon announced today the new Mark 3 version of their pro 1Ds series cameras ... a 21.1 mega pixel full frame 35mm digital camera!! And it's retailing for $7,999 (not $22k like the medium format digitals!). Check out the 1ds mark III amazon page.

The best part of all is the new Digic III processing power ... I've seen some photos of the Canon 1D mark 3, and they look amazing. Butter smooth colors ... now in 21.1 mega pixels. This is going to be a hot camera. All the pros are going to want one! Just think of the doors it opens for people who want to travel relatively light into the field, but still want medium format resolution.

Another exciting news release is the new Canon 40D. Again, Digic III! Let's see ... 10.1 megapixles, Digic III, and it's got that cool highlight preservation feature. But, this camera is only $1,299 instead of the Mark III's hefty $4500. Sounds like a deal for the image quality. I'm interested to see what Nikon is going to come out with!

I recently took a trip into the Humboldt county redwoods park. Avenue of the Giants! Absolutely incredible visuals. To think, some of these trees were alive while Christ was on earth and while the pyramids were being built. Wow! Naturally, I brought my photo gear for some ancient forest photography.

I made a huge mistake in the beginning ... I forgot my tripod! I couldn't believe it! I had to work with limited options. For landspace shots, you want a small aperture to maximize your depth of field. Anywhere from f8 to f16 would be great for super wide to standard telephoto lenses. Unfortunately, I could barely get above f4.5 (and that's with ISO800 and 1/60sec shutter speed!)

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Ohhhh baby ... this fall is gonna be good, at least I hope it's gonna be good. If you do a search on "22mp canon", everybody is rumoring up a storm about the 1Ds MK3 potential release and what could be in store for it's feature set (1D Mark3's big brother). First off, a lot of people are saying "a new lens mount" is in the works. Ummmm, why? A 35mm film camera slide can produce a 22mp scan, and that's using Canon's L lenses. So why would we need a new set of lenses?? It's already got the resolution!

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I've read a lot of magazines talking about lighting up landscapes at night for some dramatic shots. Same goes for macro photography! The key is to take many shots with different lighting angles, because you never know which shot is the winner until you pull it up on the computer screen. A few obvious things have to be observed when shooting nighttime macros:

• Manually focus your shots
• Use long exposures (tripod is an obvious requirement!)
• Observe the wind conditions carefully
• Flashlight is required

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I love the 4th of July. It's a great holiday. It's the United States birthday, people light off fireworks, and we have backyard barbecues! When I think of photographing fireworks, I usually think of the big ones. This year we had the small variety (California approved) ... the whistler, phantom, tuber, snake, jack rabbit, snow ball, golden shower, and on and on and on! I decided to grab my Canon Rebel XT and try out photographing the light show in various apertures and shutter speeds (hand held).

The interesting challenge in photographing fireworks is the tradeoff between long shutter speeds and dynamic range. The fireworks are bright, VERY bright. Too long of a shutter speed and you get huge over-exposed spots. Too fast of a shutter speed and you only capture specks of the explosion.

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In continuation of my gear sluttiness, I start to foam at the mouth over the new Canon camera bodies (specifically the new Canon EOS 1D Mark III). I just looked at Amazon.com and saw that one of there third party sellers is now selling the new cameras!! Whoo hooo! But ..... I've read a lot of stories around the net.
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I've been slowly adding my Death Valley pictures to Flickr over the week. I had three days in the park (broken up over 5 days) and I was blown away by the beauty! It's an amazing place, you can see for miles across the valley floor and the mountain ranges are as unique as an alien world.

The first day was nice ... 70's ... nice cloud cover to accent photos. We stopped by Zabriskie Point and I filled the camera full of photo's. I took wide angle, standard, telephoto ... everything but macro shots. The clouds were amazing, perfect accents to the landscape. The lighting could have been better (it was around 3:30pm or so), but I'll take what I can get

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I was "digging" today and found out about this photo editing tool called "Picnik". It's completely Flash based (from what I can tell) and allows you to do basic post processing of photos. Control the white balance, saturation, contrast, exposure, sharpness, etc. Pretty cool. To the left is a picture from Death Valley at Zabriskie Point that I took last May, edited in Picnik! They've also got a feature to edit your Flickr photos (or any public Flickr photo). Even better!
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