Imagine losing all of your photos, videos, music and documents stored on your computer

At right this very moment, your data is at risk from any number of different ways of being destroyed, lost or overwritten. In an ideal world, computer hardware would never fail, laptops would never get knocked onto the floor and burglaries would never happen in your neighbourhood. In reality, these things can and do happen, often with serious consequences.

Fortunately, making back-up copies of your important computer files is easy and having a back-up can mean the difference between days of lost work and a few minutes of restoration time.

(more…)

For years, I’ve been holding off buying a graphics tablet and making do with a mouse to carry out my graphics work. You’ve probably tried editing an image using a mouse at least once in your life and can appreciate it’s not the most natural way to ‘draw’. Since my reintroduction into the world of photography, I’ve found I’m doing lots of post-processing work and only having a mouse at hand was becoming a bit of a chore.

I decided to take the, not so great, leap and purchased a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet (the black, serious, business-like model )

Editing images in Photoshop has never been easier! Granted, I’m still getting used to working with a pen instead of a mouse, but I’m reaping the benefits already. A hands-on tutorial is provided as part of the software bundle

(more…)

Up until recently, I was using an ancient copy of ACDSee I’d obtained from a magazine cover CD for browsing images on my computer. For years, ACDSee was one of the best image browsers available mainly due to the blazing speed at which it opened images for viewing. The secret was to pre-fetch the next image whilst you were looking at the current one; simple, but extremely effective.

Over the years, I’d tried various upgraded versions of ACDSee, but none ever really matched the performance of the version I already had. This was in no doubt due to ACDSee becoming bloated as more and more, some would say unnecessary, features were built into it.

Whilst this meant that my primary image browser lacked modern features such as RAW support, it didn’t really matter much to me since being able to view a large number of images very quickly was much more important especially since I wasn’t shooting in RAW.

Fast forward to almost the present day and I’m shooting almost exclusively in RAW when using my EOS 40D and having to import my photo’s into Lightroom before I’m able to view them.

Not any more…

(more…)

Today, the air was calm and the early evening sun was offering some great lighting for some more testing of my new 100mm macro lens. Our garden isn’t currently looking particularly exciting at first glance, but on a macro level it’s a completely different situation. With a few flowers coming into bloom, it was an ideal opportunity to get my tripod out and get down low with the vegetation…

When done well, I’ve seen macro photography offering some fantastic perspectives of the world around us, but making little things big wasn’t quite as easy as it seemed. What could be easier than to get up close to something and pressing the shutter release? Well, actually, a lot!

Of the different types of photographs I’ve taken, my first real stint into macro photography was probably the most involving so far for a couple of reasons:

First of all, as well as making subjects appear closer than they really are, a telephoto lens also magnifies any movement of the lens or the subject so good camera support and a reasonably fast shutter speed are essential. Faster shutter speeds usually mean choosing a faster (larger) aperture or increasing the ISO sensitivity at the cost of increased visual noise.

Secondly, faster apertures combined with a telephoto focal length and a subject that’s only a short distance away from the lens result in shallow depth of field. Whilst this can make a photograph appear more dramatic, it means there’s less of your subject in focus. So in order to get more depth of field, a smaller, slower aperture is needed.

So on one hand, more light and faster shutter speeds are required and on the other a smaller aperture is desired for increased depth of field. I think half of the fun of macro photography is in trying to find a balance between the two sets of requirements. If you have it, technology can help help; image stabilisation to reduce camera shake, image sensors with improved light sensitivity to give less noise at higher ISO settings, and ring flash units to ‘freeze’ moving subjects for example.

That said, technology isn’t always better than using what nature provided us with especially when it comes to focussing macro shots. I found that the 100mm Canon lens would sometimes hunt and so I had to position an autofocus point on a subject, focus and then compose the shot. That might have worked well for landscapes, but even the slightest movement can throw focus out and that includes the repositioning after auto-focussing. It didn’t take long for me to switch the autofocus off and I’m glad to report that the Canon lens had a very smooth focussing ring making it much easier to get what I wanted sharp.

Many of the most interesting subjects in our garden are to be found close to ground level so that means getting down and dirty quite literally. Fortunately, my tripod has legs that splay, allowing the camera to get close to the low-level action and the LCD live view feature of the EOS 40D made manual focussing a cleaner affair as I didn’t need to lie down to do it.

The 40D’s mirror lock-up feature helped to reduce the risk of camera shake further by making sure the camera mirror was already flipped up and any movement caused by my finger pressing down on the shutter release button was eliminated by using the short self-timer.

All in all, I had a fun-filled hour and managed to get some shots I was happy with. For such ’small’ photography, it really does make you think a lot!