Puchasing an SLR camera is no small endeavor. It takes a lot of study on what to get and a lot of money to actually get it. Naturally, we want to protect our cameras.

According to the official page for the Photokina show, the company “Made will be launching two lines of Products at Photokina this year. The first, Camera Armor, is a line of elastomeric cases for digital SLR cameras that keep cameras fully protected and instantly ready for action, with access to all features of the camera right out of the case. Also included under the Camera Armor umbrella are the Palm Strap and Ergonomic Shoulder Strap products. Both are engineered from stainless steel and neoprene to provide comfort and security for photographers who travel to wild places and want to protect their investment wherever they go.”

I didn’t see a price, but I’ll be watching for one. Let me know if you find it.

(Source Article)

The “exposure” refers to the amount of light that reaches the image sensor. This amount of light is controlled by:

1. Aperture- The aperture determines how big the opening is for the light to pass thru. Aperture is expressed in f-numbers. (e.g f/8 or f/5.6)
2. Shutter Speed- The shutter speed determines how long the light will be allowed to reach the image sensor.

Hopefully you’ll be able to get just the right exposure for your images. If you use the automatic modes on your camera, it will usually do a pretty good job in selecting the aperture and shutter speed for your shot to be properly exposed. However, if you like to try your hand at the manual settings, you may see that your photo is overexposed or underexposed.

• Underexposed- Not enough light to expose the image properly. You’ll see that your image is too dark.
• Overexposed- Too much light was allowed to reach your image sensor. Often, the brightest areas will be burnt out and you won’t have detail in those areas.

If you are wondering how to expose an image, I would take my chances with underexposing the photo. Usually, an underexposure will allow you to use a photo editing program to pull some detail out.

Of course, to be really safe you’d want to use a technique called Auto Exposure Bracketing (AEB). With AEB turned on, you can take one picture at normal exposure, one picture at an increased exposure and one at a decreased exposure. Most SLR cameras have a setting that makes it easy to set up AEB.

I mentioned earlier that I was going to be attending Photoshop World in Las Vegas.

Well, I went down there yesterday and it sum it up…I was a little bummed. I strolled thru the Expo and it didn’t take very long. I brought my camera, bu failed to find anything picture worthy. I was surprised at how small it was. It took up one corner of one convention hall at the Mandalay Bay. I think one of the big draws for conventions in the past were the good deals that some distributors would offer. But, with the internet, that is now obsolete. I could match any of the prices they had there online at any time.

The big names were there. Peachpit, Canon, Adobe, Epson, etc. But, the booths seemed to entail little effort. Maybe everyone is focusing on Photokina 2006.

I will say this though. They did have few theaters set up with people giving demonstrations. The man showing Portrait Tips in Photoshop was really good. Microsoft was giving a preview of Vista but there were only two people watching that demonstration. The whole place was swarming with Powerbooks and iMacs.

I love the ease and power of WordPress, but to use it as a photoblog takes some tech knowledge and a hosting server of your own. WordPress is what I use for my personal photoblog.

But, if you want a quick way to make a photoblog, you ought to try the nice service from Photoblog.com. It’s easy to set up a photoblog there. You can access your blog with “http://username.photoblog.com” and it plays nicely with LinkedIn.com.

It’s free so why not give it a try? Photoblog.com

I just read a nice article on how to express motion in your photos. It deals with the different ways to freeze motion, or to use the panning method to show the motion. If there are any readers out there just learning about action photography, this is a good place to start. Later, I will be writing about shutter speed and how that will determine how action is recorded in your photos.

The article: Expressions Of Motion In Photography

(PS, the image used here is from The Swing Jumping Pool. If you are looking for a fun Saturday activity, get out your camera and take some swing jumping photos.)

Time lapse videos are so interesting to me. I love to watch as a flower quickly blooms or clouds swiftly move across the sky. If you’ve ever wanted to create something like this with your digital camera, you ought to check out the Pclix LT1000.

With the Pclix LT100 you can trigger the shutter of a digital camera every second or every hundred hours plus anywhere in between all in one second increments.

What a great idea. It’s a little pricey ($140) but it does work with a huge list of cameras. You can buy it here.

PS, you’re not limited to just videos with this. Over on “daily dose of imagery” I saw the coolest photo that was created with the Pclix. Check it out here.

What a great shot. Any tips on how you got the hair so soft?

(If you’d like your photo to be featured on FreeMacPhoto, just submit it to the FreeMacPhoto Flickr Group)

In one of the Flickr groups that I follow, a kind fellow wrote a script to fake the LOMO look in Photoshop. If you haven’t heard of Lomography, it was essentially digital photography before digital photography. Fun, every-day, oversaturated pictures. This type of photo has quite a following. In fact, it has it’s own international society.

I had a little fun with the free Photoshop script. If you’d like to try it out, grab it in this Flickr group discussion.