Olympus OM-D E-M5 Review:Four thirds (17.3x13mm) sensor 16.1 million effective pixels with 4608x3456-pixel output Weather...
Recent Articles
Precise Cursors
Getting a paint stroke to be precisely on the desired pixels in an image can be extremely difficult. Very often photos have straight edges where something that needs to be cloned, healed, or painted lies along the edge. That edge might be a person’s shoulder or the curb of a street, a hem in a [...]
Negative Vibrance
The Vibrance adjustment is available in Photoshop’s companion RAW editor Camera Raw, Adobe Lightroom, and now Adobe Photoshop CS4. Vibrance provides a slider that will add saturation to the less saturated colors in an image first. Add the ability to ignore skin tones, and Vibrance becomes one of Photoshop’s super-tools. Vibrance is used all the [...]
Lens Blur at Light Speed
Lens Blur is a terrific tool, and just one of the filters in Photoshop that’s very useful to photographers. But I’m not here specifically to teach you Lens Blur because that might take the entire chapter. I’m here to give you an unusual technique that will speed up your work with Lens Blur and save [...]
Orange Safety Cone
Orange safety cones, you can’t miss them. There’s a reason—because they scream out to anyone driving, walking, or riding a bike that there is something up ahead to watch out for and not run into. I don’t go out for a public shoot without an orange safety cone in the car, just in case. (See [...]
Archery Quiver Microphone Holster
Previously, I wrote about an archery quiver as a tool to tote around a small tripod. That quiver was cloth, but some quivers have a hard shell and, like the quiver here, hang holster-style from a belt. A hard-shell quiver makes an excellent and accessible case for a shotgun microphone. (See Figure 7.22.) The convergence [...]
Light Bulb Base Adapters
There is a dizzying array of lighting solutions available for photographers and videog-raphers. Some of these lighting tools overlap, although you’ll often see different lights, and light modifiers, if you search the photo and video catalogs. With the convergent media that dual-use cameras provide for still and video, photographers can really benefit from keeping several [...]
Vinyl Gutter
The kind of tracking shots I’ve referred to are really fake tracking shots, because without a track, it’s not literally a tracking shot for video. If you want to move along with your subject, or move toward or away from your subject, with a more controlled motion than you can get with the mover’s dolly [...]
Mover’s Dolly
If holding the camera on a boom via straps on your waist doesn’t steady the camera enough for you, or you have trouble walking with the camera this way, you may want to attach a tripod to a dolly for a moving video shot. A mover’s dolly is ready-made with four wheels on ball-bearing pivots [...]
Large Hook-and-Loop Straps
We can’t all afford a professional device to steady video where the videographer is moving. There is some terrific equipment out there for just that use, but it goes beyond the bounds of irreverent tools. But there are ways to make your tracking shots—that is, video where you move along with, or toward, your subject—at [...]
Light Bulb Changer
My neighbors keep coming over to borrow my light bulb changer. I keep the large one on a painter’s extension pole. Sometimes I use it to change burned-out floodlights that are installed high up on the eaves of my house. But sometimes I use it to hold a camera high up to get a bird’s-eye [...]
