John Paul Caponigro has a wealth of information for photographers on his website www.JohnPaulCaponigro.com and in his blog. I have taken a number of workshops with him, and greatly value his knowledge, experience and teaching skills.

With newer, higher megapixel cameras, files sizes keep increasing. I’m not complaining, because in general, properly captured images from higher megapixel cameras have greater resolution and detail, if that’s important in one’s work. It’s certainly important to me. But, 16-bit files are twice the size of 8-bit files. Continue reading →

In three previous posts, I discussed iPhone apps that can help photographers make better images. Well, here’s a brand new app by Michael Frye, Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite, that will definitely be installed on my iPhone before I visit Yosemite. Check out the video demo on the link and all the information about this VERY well designed app. This one’s a keeper!

For photographers (and videographers) in the U.S., there have been a number of recent situations where the police have stopped the photographer from shooting in certain locations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has published a paper providing guidance on the rights that photographers have.

Read this information carefully, and remember, while you might have certain rights, to what extent do you want to challenge those rights if confronted by a law enforcement officer?

An additional link on the ACLU website is titled “You Have Every Right To Photograph That Cop.”

Interesting reading!

For this post, I’m going to discuss two very useful, but very different apps. “Tide Graph” provides tide information for virtually any location in the U.S. “f/8 DoF Calculator” provides everything you need to know to determine and properly set your camera for controlling the area of “perceived focus” in your images, otherwise known as depth of field (DOF).

“By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea …”

A little over a year ago, I helped organize a photography master class along the Northern California and Southern Oregon coast. A friend and I arrived 4 days before the master class began to scout potential shooting locations. Here’s a case where I hadn’t done all my homework, and it was an iPhone app to the rescue!

As we drove up and down the coastline, it quickly became obvious that “to be at the right place, at the right time,” we needed to know something about the tide tables, a subject I admittedly, knew nothing about. As we were trying to determine the best times to shoot a number of coastal locations, it was very easy to determine the direction of the sunlight using LightTrac. In some cases we wanted to shoot sea stacks close to the shore, but the questions became, “how high will the water be?” and “will I be standing on the beach or in 4 feet of water at shoot time?”
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In the first post in this series, we discussed that knowing the direction of sunlight (or moonlight) has an enormous impact on your photograph, and suggested some fantastic apps that can help you plan ahead for where the light will be. In this post, we’ll take it to the next step, because knowing where the light will be assumes that the sun has a direct path to the subject of your photograph, and that the light is not filtered or completely blocked by cloud cover. Unfortunately, in addition to the “light,” we have to be aware of the weather.

Continue reading →