Piclens

I ran cross this site called Piclens and let me tell you, if you deal with or browse thru alot of photos this is a must have.

Piclens allows you to view thousands of photos in a easy to navigate 3D world.

Pocket Wizards VS. E-Bay trigers

This has been a on going debate for quiet sometime now are Ebay triggers just as good as the ever so popular Pocket Wizard? Today I will simply put my two cents in the bucket.

First lets start with the champ,
The POCKET WIZARD Retail price $189-$200
These lil puppies come at a hefty price but are still the industry standard for remotley firing off camera strobes or other studio lights. It is much better to put a pocket Wizard on each light you want to fire rather than trying to route sync cords to each light. this creates a mess of wire cables that get dameged easily and causees a tripping hazard that can possibly injure your clients are worst yet cause your expensive lights to go crashing down to the floor.

Another option is to use a master slave set up where one strobe or light synced to your cam can remotely fire other strobes with out having to run additional sync cables. The other strobes or fired by detecting the flash from the first strobe then firing it self. this has a slight advantage over using sync cables but it also has it draw backs. For this setup to work the slave strobes need to be indirect line of site to see the flash or it will not fire.

Both the sync cable setup and the master slave setup or useless if you need to spread out your lights over a long distance.

The best way to fire your strobes is by radio frequency, this is how Pocket Wizard and Ebay triggers fires strobes. The pocket Wizard is a Transceiver, meaning it is both a transmitter and a receiver. I will not go into the specs of pocket Wizards, If you want that goto their site www.pocketwizard.com Everyone I speak to and on almost every photography forum I visit everyone gives the Pocket Wizard the thumbs up. the only complaint is the price. Most lighting set-ups consist of at least 3 lights and at $200 a piece that is $800 just to fire your strobes. Yes that is $200 a piece, you need one for your cam and one on each light. Since I don't own a pocket Wizard I can't speak much on it, But at $200 a piece I had to look for another option.


Cactus Triggers, or as they are more known as
Ebay triggers or Jokingly called Poverty Wizards Retail $25 these economical Pocket Wizard alternatives or a must for any photographer on a budget. They use the same basic principle of Pocket Wizards allowing you to remotely fire your studio strobes but at a fraction of the cost. Now I will not lie and say that the catus system is perfect cause its not, The electronic assembly is real basic as well is the construction of the unit. I don't realy have a problem with the transmitter but the receivers plastic body feels like it is going to break in any second. The lil plastic footing used to atach your hot shoe strobe to a light stand is real flimsy. I have to retighten the lil screw each time I move the light stand cause the weight of my flash makes the unit tilt down. This is a easy fix but they should have done this in production. Another fault is the battery cover for the receiver falls off real easy, I almost lost mine several times. Once again easy fix.

The biggest complaint about the Cactus triggers is the reliability. Most users complaint that the triggers only fire 95% of the time. I must disagree with this I have not had any miss-fires due to the fault of the system it self, all miss-fires were caused by me. I will list the major causes of mis-fires and if you are aware of these issues you should have no problems with your Cactus triggers.

1. Low battery power in your Cactus unit or in your flash
2. not allowing your flash proper time to recharge before firing again
3. your flash/strobe going into stand-by mode
4. placing your strobes to close together causing interference
   
5. trying to remotely fire your strobes over long distances
6. trying to shoot beyond your cameras sync speed
7. shooting in a place where a lot of wireless devices are being used causing inference
   

If you are aware of these seven things you should be able to shoot without any problems.

The Pocket Wizard sounds like a great system but after using my Cactus triggers I just cant see me shelling out $800 to fire my strobes when I can take that same $800 and buy

• 1 transmitter
• 4 receivers
• 4 vivitar 285 flash heads
• 4 light stands with umbrellas
  
• 4 Rosco Gel Swatch books
• 2 rolls of seamless paper and background stand
  
• and still come out with some change jiggling in my pocket
  

The world of (SLR) Single Lens Reflex Cameras

A digital single-lens reflex camera (digital SLR or DSLR) is a digital camera that uses an automatic mirror system and pentaprism or pentamirror to direct light from the lens through the viewfinder eyepiece.

The basic operation of a DSLR is as follows: for viewing purposes, the mirror reflects the light coming through the attached lens upwards at an approximately 90 degree angle. It is then reflected by the pentaprism to the photographer's eye. During exposure (when the photograph is taken), the mirror swings upward, and a shutter opens, allowing the lens to project light onto the image sensor.

OK, that is all you realy need to know about SLR cams, if you want more techy stuff you can do a google search for the history, how they are made, etc... but for now lets move on to exposure

Histograms

Histograms

Now from these Two Videos you should have a pretty good understanding on how your cam records a image and why the Histogram is so important. But if you still don't get it let me dump my two cents in to your learning bucket

A properly exposed picture will have a somewhat even spread of pixels through out the histograms X axis, form Zero the darkest pixel your camera can record to 255 on the right side the brightest pixel your camera can record. for a total brightness scale 0f 256 (0 to 255).

If you under expose a picture you will have most of your pixels to the far left side with most of your image falling out side of your cameras range (PIXELS THAT ARE BEYOND 0) this means your camera did not even see that part of the picture, the image was so under exposed that the darkest shadows of your pic has no detail at all it's just black

and If you over expose your picture the same thing goes for the right side of the histogram if you over expose to much the high lights in your image (THE BRIGHT AREAS ) will show up as pure white with no detail to them at all, We call this blown high lights or a washed out pic.

The key is to try and use your camera full range from the darkest dark to the whitest white, this will give you a pretty even exposer, giving you detail in your shadows as well as your high lights.

But sometimes you can't reach the whole scale with out changing the mood of the pic, you don't wanna shoot a night scene where you can't even tell it's night time.

When you are capturing a image and most of the image is dark or in shadow most of your image pixels will be to the left of your histogram. This is fine as long as you don't touch or go past the 0 pixel mark, for every pixel you go over 0 that means that pixel is lost and will not be represented in your image. once again same thing for real bright pictures go as far to the right as you can with out passing 255.

Well How do I move my pixels when i take a pic?

Simply change your aperture or shutter speed. your image was under exposed because you didn't let enough light hit your film/sensor. And since you have read my other post you know you can let in more light three ways, shoot at a longer shutter speed, open up your lens aperture , increase your cameras sensor sensitivity to light by raising your ISO.

I'm back

I know I know, I have been gone for awhile. I had alot going on but I'm back now thanks to a new friend, a fellow photographer re inspired me to pick this project back up. So lets go. I think we left off on ISO, we are now moving on to The Histogram. The Histogram is on e of the most powerfullest (lol, IS THAT A WORD?) and most unused misunderstood features on our cameras.

I guarantee you after you learn how to read a Histogram you will never take another over/under exposed picture again you ready? watch this lil Video then join me has we dive into the Histogram