This came up the other day on the photo discussion list at work, where one of the guys pointed out one of the many millions of flame wars on the subject and stated that there had to be one correct answer to the question of how the 1 over focal length rule (meaning if you have a 50mm lens, you need to have your shutter at least at 1/50) applies to digital SLRs with crop-factor.

After Christmas, I spent a bunch of time getting used to my new setup and building a lot of little bits to get my lighting where I want it to be. I also took a step back and decided I didn't like where my whiteground photos were going at that point; I wanted to do something else...

I'd also like to remind folks to keep backups. See, I'm in the midst of data hell and I only lost one night of sleep over it... and some pictures I took lately.

When I started out doing portraiture, I did only outdoor portraits during the golden hour. If you don't have much gear, it's great. My first portrait shoot was taken on my Canon A95 and came out quite well. And I did my art indoors with lightpainting...

While there's still ample availability of cameras, film, and people to develop it, everybody should give crossprocessing a shot at least once! I've written about it before; it's a great way to force yourself to not shoot completely realistic pictures.

I love the *idea* of stitched panoramas. I've been more in love with the idea until very recently, because I kept having problems getting them to stitch...

I'm unsatisfied with the present set of tutorials out there about how to make panoramas, so I thought I'd write my own. Most of the tutorials were written using many of the assumptions that old software enforced upon you. Modern stitching software is leaps and bounds above that and Hugin has become very modern very recently...

Depth of field brackets on cameras are quite handy to start a discussion about picking the right aperture to get a desired depth of field and suggest the concept of the hyperfocal distance. I wish more lenses had them. I've got an old Vivitar Series One lens that has a quite pleasant set of depth of field brackets that work at any zoom length. Modern zoom lenses don't even try to get this right.

My first look at Efke IR820c

I'm going to write out a proper entry about my exploration of IR film as part of my series black and white and how I explore it. But I'm in the midst of information to share, so I'm going to share my thoughts and news now and worry about writing out a proper chronology of exploration later.

The Quantaray MS-1, backgrounds, umbrellas, and models

One of my friends was digging her film EOS camera out of storage after shooting digital and she wanted to understand what it was doing, so she asked me what happens when you tell her camera to ignore the DX coding on the back and set things manually.

If I look at the advances in sensors and sensor processing that are coming out of the labs and sometimes even shipping in products, I realized something interesting. The game has changed at the research labs. See, previously, the goal was to make a sensor that had the highest resolution. Now, the goal is to still ship sensors with more megapixels but without changing the "real" resolution. And this may be a good thing.

I've come to realize that my tripod needs to be replaced. Like, right now...

Why film "looks" better at different speeds, super-high-speed films, dynamic range, and other issues necessary to understand film speeds.