MyPublisher

As I have posted before, I am a huge fan of digital photography.  I am always looking for a service to use for printing high quality prints and photo albums.  Clearly, there are the big names like Shutterfly, Snapfish or Kodakgallery.  These are good options, but I have two concerns:

  1. Quality – The quality on these albums are good, but not excellent from the reviews.  This is not to say that you shouldn’t order from them, but that they typically would not be the best source for a family heirloom quality album.
  2. Upload – The problem with both of the above services is that they require to upload your images before you can create your album.  This may not sound like much, but can get lengthy if you are dealing with 100+ photos. 

Continue reading MyPublisher

Sports Photography

Frequent visitors to this blog know that I am very interested in digital photography.  I have created a number of posts highlighting key elements of digital photography.  Recently, I ran across a very interesting blog authored by a professional sports photographer from a newspaper in Seattle, WA.  Here is a link to the site and I recommend that you check it out.  I will be adding the site to the blogroll.

Canon 50d dSLR

I have posted in the past about cameras and dSLRs.  My preference has always been for Canon cameras and so I was interested when they recently announce their new midrange 50d.  Personally, I have always been a huge fan of their previous model, the 40d and so was curious how the new model compares.  I recently ran across this early preview.  The interesting result is that the 50d does not provide a substantial improvement in image quality or low light performance over the previous version.

Other recent reviews in photography forums have found the same thing.  It is interesting that camera manufacturers keep upping the megapixels and yet it seeems that image quality is not increasing at the same rate.  It will be interesting to see where the manufacturers go from here.

Digital Camera Sensor Size

One of the big differences between different digital cameras is the size of the sensor.  We a continuing megapixel race between all of the manufacturers.  The interesting point to think about is "Are all all megapixle measurements the same?"  The answer is not what you would think.

The short answer is that a megapixel measurment is consistent and so a camera that has 15 megapixels will have the same resulting image size regardless of the camera.  The issue really has to do with pixel density.  That is imagine the sensor is the size of a coin.  15 megapixels on a dime will require much smaller pixels than the same image size on a quarter.  This is the big difference between dSLRs and P&S cameras.  Pretty much all dSLRs have larger sensors then the average point and shoot.  This translates into better image quality since the required pixel size to achieve the resolution is larger.  It also means that the dSLRs handle low light situations better since larger sensors mean greater light sensitivity.

If you are interested in view in this graphically, I suggest that you check out this link.  It graphically shows the difference sized sensors used in various cameras.  It definitely puts this entire conversation in perspective.

Photoshop Tutorials

Photshop is a fantastic photography application that can do so much.  The challenge with it is that it is so powerful that it can be insanely complex.  There are typically many different ways to do the same thing.  The amount of work to the different approaches to a different solution will vary.  My general strategy is to try to search the Internet to learn about the different ways to solve various problems.  I recently ran across this site which lists many different URLs with tutorials on a variety of different types.  One of the problems I have been trying to fix is double chins.  I found this video on YouTube on that specific topic.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jIiGx0XPvU[/youtube]