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Last night I took what I would consider my first attempts at semi-decent planned photos. I took photographs of some golf shoes in the smaller soft box I'd constructed. There were several problems with the actual shoot:

Three 60W bulbs - and a flash - are apparently not quite enough light, somehow. I suspect my implementation [...]

I spent some time at Lowe's today, and I've built the frameworks for two "do-it-yerself" soft boxes. I got some five-foot lengths of half-inch PVC pipe for a whopping cost of $0.97 apiece, some three-way and 90° elbow joints for about $3 per ten, and eight round butt caps for $0.24 apiece. Total cost: under [...]

Modern aperture settings are marked in the following sequence: f1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32, 45, and 64 etc. While the numbers may seem random, the fact is that each step is 1.414 times the previous step (1.414 is the square root of two).
Each f-stop represents a doubling or halving [...]

A day or two ago I put together my studio package. I still may have a few pieces left to go (including an upgrade from the Canon DR XT to the XTi), but the main parts are in place. They include:

The DigiBee setup from Alien Bees. This includes two B400 strobes, two umbrellas, two 10' [...]

Ron and I ventured to Dobbins Landing tonight at about 7:15 to shoot the holiday lighting the city of Erie puts on the tower there. It was a good use of my evening, and I learned a fair amount. These photos are untouched except some moderate angle adjustments, cropping, and resizing. EXIF data follows each [...]

I'm looking to put together a mini home photograhy studio in a corner of my basement. I'm imagining some cloths (white, black, and a dark green perhaps to start) that I can mount or drape over a 6-foot frame (three sides of a cube). I can construct a few soft lighting boxes pretty easily and [...]

Merry Christmas!

I must be magical, for I can make things go "poof" like you wouldn't believe!

Every fall, I like to visit Fuhrman's Cider Mill to get some fresh apple cider. The deliciously sweet drink makes your worries go "poof" if only for a little while.

Carey took this picture with our point-and-shoot (the Canon SD 550). This is the little baby orangutan (Leela) at the Erie Zoo. Both Leela and her dad (Joe) respond very well to Little One (but nobody else) each time she's there.

Scott talks about a possible (or not) Photoshop replacement from Apple. I would love one. Most of my work in Photoshop centers around:

Cropping
Resizing
Adjusting hue, saturation, balance, and the like
Adding simple gradients (to blur to white the edges of an image)
Adding circles, arrows, lines, etc.

And for this I have to wait ten seconds every time I [...]

You can read about them here. Basically, in edit mode with the retouch or redeye tools selected, hit ctrl-capslock-9 and then hit tab to cycle through three hidden, "advanced" tools. With some key presses, you can change some characteristics of the tools.

Carey isn't comfortable using the SLR (a Canon Digital Rebel XT), so we're looking for a low-cost, small, point-and-shoot camera. I'll define low cost as $350 or less. I'll define point-and-shoot as one that ideally uses CompactFlash cards. I'll define "small" as something Carey can lug around in her purse or I can carry around [...]

I was watching a DVD and doing some work on my computer when a small beam of light shone through one of the holes on my office window's venetian blind. The beam of light happened to be centered on the Apple logo at the bottom of my 23" Cinema Display. I took this picture pretty [...]

Something I've yet to get into as my "learn my camera" phase has been put on hold by the immediate need to "use my camera" is white balance. Some day I will read this article on white balance. I know the basics. I just have to develop confidence in applying them, and that will come [...]