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› archive for April 17th, 2009

When the Lighting Gets Tough…

When the lighting gets tough, I start getting headaches. I’m talking, of course, about balancing ambient light and one or more speedlights with modifiers. Sure, speedlights conveniently give me their GN, but, to be fair, that’s the second most headache-inducing measurement in photography (outdone only by watt seconds, which doesn’t actually describe performance but consumption, ouch). If I had the time to do some division and cross-reference some formulas and had a cloth tape measure at all times I could probably mostly figure out what I need to set my trusty old SB-25 on from 15 feet away to expose the side of my model 1 stop brighter than the ambient 8 in the morning Indiana sun.

But that sucks.

So, I’m giving up, giving in, and picking up one of the digital camera accessories I’ve more or less blown off until now: the light meter. Light meters have long been a staple of professional studio lighting, and the typical “good” ones can measure both the ambient light and the light coming just from strobes. So, instead of trying a lot of iffy theoretical maths and ::shudder:: calculus, I can just pop my flashes. POP! And the light meter tells me the aperture I would need to properly expose them. POP! F11. Sweet. Easy.

Want your own life-simplifying light meter? Check’em out here, or stop in and ask our used department about them (for you budget-conscious students)



More Expo Lead-Up

In its way, my post about the recent Olympus lecture is part of a series of posts I’ll be doing to run us up to the Expo, focusing on little bits of history and development for some of the big names that’ll be approximately ten feet below my current position in a couple weeks.

The Original Nikon F

The Original Nikon F

Next up is the stalwart Nikon. This year marks the 50th anniversary of their legendary F mount. First introduced for the Nikon F SLR (funny how that works out). Apparently the F mount isn’t just one of the longest lived mounts, it’s also got the honor of having had the first perspective control lens for a 35mm camera (and that introduced in 1961, only two years after the introduction of the F system.)

Today, of course, the F mount remains one of the two biggest mounts on the market (competing with next post’s topic, the EOS mount from Canon). And, the most recent wave of lenses for the F mount have certainly been incredibly well-planned and solid efforts (the new pro zooms and perspective controls certainly spring readly to mind.)

So, stop by in a couple weeks, play with 50 years of mount heritage. Our Nikon rep will love seeing you.



Zoomity Zoom

The Poweshot SX200IS cameras front and back

The Poweshot SX200IS cameras front and back

You used to be able to guess how long it would go by looking at it’s resting size. That was then. These days even the smaller ones reach out farther than you might think. For example lets look at the new Canon Powershot SX200IS camera. Shorter than an iPhone and about three times as thick, (I used to use “the pack of cigarettes” reference as a comparison gauge for things like this, but…) it is a small package. That is until you turn it on, turn it on and zoom the lens and it just goes and goes. Zooming 12x from its 28mm wide starting point all the way out to 336 mm equivalent maximum it has power in a small package! There’s also 12.1 megapixels, optical stabilizer, 3inch LCD screen even HD movie capture, it has all the stuff you would expect in this generation of Canon Powershot cameras, but the zoom in that package. Not what you expected, Wow.

Just like it says, 12x Zoom. Cool huh?

Just like it says, 12x Zoom. Cool huh?




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