Friend of this Blog and all around good shooter Paul has found an interesting site to recommend - SLRGEAR.COM. If you haven’t visited the site before you will find a very useful lens review tool. Particularly the interactive “Blur Index” graph which helps you visualize how changes of aperture and zoom length effect image sharpness.

These folks haven’t analyzed every lens, but they sure have hit most of the popular lenses available. Navigating the website is easy but not overly graphic, just poke around for a moment or two and you’ll get the hang of it.

I had a small surprise when I looked at the inexpensive Canon 18-55 IS and the Nikon 18-135 lenses. Take a look – low price doesn’t always mean poor performance!

I have seen several creative uses for photo books as I mentioned yesterday. There is some incredibly original work being produced and it’s a lot of fun to see it come to life.

The two ideas I’m writing about today are for personal photo books. In both cases the person who designed the book created each page in software at home before placing the order. One person used Photoshop and the other used Elements.

The first example is from someone who didn’t care for the created content found on the kiosks. She has the skills and the desire to create something unique. Her book contains images she captured at a local park.

Her first task was to create three or four backgrounds to use behind her pictures. Since she knew she was going to be doing this in advance she shot a handful of images that had color but not too much detail. She chose one of these images per page depending on the content they would back up and created an image 11X8.5 at about 50% opacity.

Then it was a simple matter of dragging and dropping other images onto the background, sizing them and creating captions. Once it all looked right, the page was saved as an 11X8.5” JPG at 300DPI. Twenty pages later a complete set of pages was created for the book. And the book is completely unique, nobody else has one that looks like it!

Sample of created album page


The last example is similar to the one above but it’s a journal. In this book the images didn’t fill the full page. Hand written journal entries were recreated on the pages describing the images and the event; in this case a fictitious RAGBRAI day was the basis for the example.

Sample two page spread of journal style photo book


When it comes to personal publishing there really are few rules on content. We have one customer who writes and illustrates children’s books about her child. She brings in hand lettered and illustrated pages and either scans them in and makes her book (if she wants multiple copies) or has us bind the original pages. Another company in the construction business who uses these techniques to create inexpensive leave behind photo books of previous projects for prospective clients. I often print my own images on 100% cotton rag stock and have them bound in a leather hard cover.

As photographers we have always thought of 4X6 prints as king and today that just isn’t so. Today there are dozens of options available at affordable prices that can take the place of an album of prints.

The next time you are photographing an event or a trip you might consider taking the next creative step. Publish yourself in both pictures and words, I think you’ll find it liberating to your creative side!

At the risk of making an “Advertorial”, there is a class of lab products I really want to get front and center - it is the entire array of non-traditional image publications. Even the name seems vague and confusing doesn’t it? I’ll just call it personal publishing going forward.

So just what is this stuff? Personal publishing means that any person can publish anything in any quantity. And in our case that means photo related products. This category refers to photo books, folded photo cards, scrap book pages, collage posters, calendars and more.

Not all that long ago, if you wanted to print one greeting card with one of your images on it you had to order 1,000 or more before any printing company would give you the time of day. That was pretty expensive with all of the fees for plate setup, cutting and folding on top of the basic printing costs. You can imagine the costs associated with printing a full book of your photos instead of just a simple greeting card!

Then along came print on demand and digital presses and printers.The possibilities for digital presses are staggering. However the one product that I really want to discuss is the photo book.

The photo book product group suffers from a deplorably bland name. There is also a problem because as easy as the idea of a photo book is to describe, actually making a photo book can be confusing and a royal pain. Now I’m not writing this to provide tips on the nuts and bolts of photo book creation. You can get that here: Book Tips
What I’m writing about today are the creative applications of photo books that I have seen over the last year. It isn’t all about hard bound family albums.

For just about every idea mentioned below Photoshop, Elements or similar software is required.

Brochures and Handouts – We have often needed a short supply of multi page handouts or brochures for presentations or trade shows. We create full page 6X6 layouts with text in Photoshop, flatten and save the files as a JPG with names that refer to page numbers – 001.jpg. At a kiosk or online we choose the 6X6 “flipbook” style ( a soft, self cover book with staple binding), we then select the correct layout option and drag and drop our created page into the layouts. Creation in Photoshop: 30 minutes to several hours depending on complexity. Book ordering time: about 10 minutes. Product turn around time: about 1 hour per dozen brochures.

(Sample of a Photoshop created 6X6 brochure page)

If you shoot weddings or anything else that you are paid for wouldn’t a brochure like that go far with prospective clients?

Picture Archive – Wouldn’t it be nice if all of your pictures were in albums? Wouldn’t it be even better if each image was labeled with its file name and you knew exactly where the CD was? The newest idea for a book is just such an archive. Not widely available online yet because of the sheer volume of images used to create them, photo archive books are becoming very popular in stores. An archive book is a 12X12 hardbound collection of all of the images on a memory card or cards.

The process is pretty easy at a kiosk. First, load the memory cards into the kiosk. Next select Picture Archive as your product. Add a CD-ROM and a DVD Cinema and you’re done; now you just have to wait an hour for the good stuff. When completed you are presented with a black 12x12 hard cover photo book. Inside all of your images are arranged 9 to a page and about 2X3” in size. The background is a complimentary black color and the file name is listed below each image. In the back of the book are your two disks attached to the inner cover: A CD-ROM of all the image files plus a DVD with a video slide show of the images set to music. At around 35 cents per image (up to 200) this is a bargain product and an organizational life saver. Your time at the kiosk: less than 10 minutes, 20 minutes if you choose to wait while the DVD burns. Product turn around time: 1 hour.

Not just for your own images! This is another great wedding shooter product - what a way to present the proofs!

I'll have two other ideas for photo books tomorrow. In the mean time begin to think about other applications for publications of this type - they don't all have to be new baby or vacation books!

For years I have looked for the perfect camera. I’ve wanted a camera that worked the way I do. It would fit my hand perfectly too, every knob, button or lever falling under my fingers and thumb exactly where they should. Controls would be fast and responsive allowing me to use the camera intuitively. Essentially the camera would become transparent; as though there was nothing between what I see in my mind’s eye and the final image

I’ve lost count of how many cameras I’ve owned and used over the years looking for just the right one. But there have been many features or components on these cameras that I have come to appreciate and my dream camera has them all.

The silence of a range finder-style camera. If you have never used a quality range finder camera you have to give it a try. The bright and direct view through the optical viewfinder is limited only by your own eyesight. But far and way the biggest advantage is the lack of noise in operation. <snick> That’s about all you will hear. No mirror slap, no shutter cocking just a quiet and near silent <snick>

The interchangeable lenses of an SLR system. How in the world I ever got along with a fixed lens on a camera I’ll never know. I like the creative options that changing lenses provides. Matching just the right lens to the situation requires some skill, just like selecting the right club out of your golf bag.

Hot shoe and external flash are a must. I am a huge fan of flash. The dinky little flashes built into most compact cameras or the red eye inducing pop up flashes of DSLR’s just don’t thrill me. I’m not looking for reach, I’m looking for control. I want to be able to add just the right amount of fill flash outdoors on a sunny day. And I want to be able to use studio lighting without adding two or three adapters.

A vertical shutter release is required. The add-on grips that are available for many DSLR’s today make shooting in portrait orientation effortless. The advantages of duplicating operational buttons in the vertical position and added battery power make a vertical grip a no brainer for my style of shooting.

It has to be of compact size and lighter weight so I will carry the camera more often. This is again a selling point for a rangefinder camera. Usually half the size of the SLR cousins, a rangefinder is hard to leave at home when they are so easily pocketed.

There are a few cameras that are very close to my dream camera already available. But a Leica M8 at around $4,500 (body only) isn’t going to fit my budget but then neither will the lenses. Panasonic had their DMC-L1 but it lacks an optical viewfinder.

No, I’m still looking for my dream camera and someday I’m sure I’ll find it.

While selling cameras or giving classes I try to make the case that in order to have the most options with your images you need to capture them correctly in the first place. That as a photographer you should shoot like Photoshop doesn’t exist.

The first argument against Photoshop is that most people just aren’t skilled enough to make changes without making it obvious that a change was made.

The second argument is one of preference. Did you get into photography to take pictures or to edit pictures on a computer? Whatever your answer is, that’s fine. However understand that if Photoshop is your best answer to most problems you are dedicating a lot of your time to facing a computer. Time you could be behind a camera instead.

Over the years I have found that there are three lens filters that keep my computer time to a minimum. I try very hard to shoot in a way that keeps my computer time low, so that if I’m using Photoshop it’s because I want to not because I have to.

(The example photos are in the post below this one)

The first filter I always have is the polarizing filter. Nothing else can do what a polarizer can do for your pictures. By blocking scattered light a polarizer intensifies blue skies and the green of foliage. Polarizing filters will also eliminate glare off of windows and reflective surfaces. This will likely be about the most expensive filter you will ever buy. I suggest buying only one polarizer in each filter size your lens kit needs and share it among lenses.

The second filter has become even more important with digital cameras – a neutral density filter (ND). Think of it as sunglasses for your camera, an ND filter reduces the amount of light equally across all colors. Few digital cameras offer a film speed lower than 100 ISO, but what if you’re outdoors on a fairly bright day and you want to use your lens wide open to blur a background? Or on that same kind of bright day you need to use a slower shutter speed? The answer is a neutral density filter.

I stick with 2X and 4X ND filters; this gives me a one stop (2X) and a two stop (4X) choice. If I want to make a waterfall or fountain look like a smooth curtain of white, a 4X will do the trick on almost any day.

Weird Tip-O’-the-Month: Here is a very unusual use for an ND filter. The scenario is taking pictures of a statue in a tourist environment. You want a shot of the statue but every now and then a person walks through the area. You can’t block off the space to prevent the people from walking in your picture zone, but you can slip an ND 8X on your lens and take a long exposure. You can setup to take a 4 or 5 second exposure and an individual walking through your shot will be rendered invisible!

(I have no digital example of this technique but I found one online at this link:
http://www.ephotozine.com/article/Using ... ity-filter)

The third filter I recommend is a split ND filter. These filters are terrific to use when you need to balance a brightly lit area and a darker area so that both show detail in your final image. Consider a shot of a bright blue sky with a few white puffy clouds and a field of flowers. If you expose for the flowers the sky will be over exposed. The answer is to use a split ND filter that knocks down the brightness of the sky without also reducing the brightness of the darker field of flowers. Or as in this example where the foreground was overly bright and detail was lost in the statue.

There is a fourth filter too and it is the simple UV filter. You can tell a high quality UV filter because it does absolutely nothing noticeable to your image. From my point of view, a UV has only one purpose in life and that is to protect the front element on my lens. I have often pried broken UV filters off of the front of lenses with pliers for customers who have experienced an unfortunate meeting of lens and floor. The UV filter is a total loss, but the front lens element is unharmed. To me, this makes a UV filter cheap insurance and I have one for each lens.

Now for the last piece of advice in this entry: Buy the very best filters you can afford, don’t go cheap. Filters are the very first glass that your image will pass through and it needs to be of the highest quality. If you own a digital camera, save up and buy filters made for digital cameras. They will cost three, four or five times more than their cousins designed for film but there IS a difference.

So that’s it, my filter pack that goes with me everywhere. Some folks dislike threading and rethreading filters on their lenses. Others think filters just aren’t necessary. I think they are missing out on far better pictures and a more satisfying photo experience.