Photography Posts

Just a quick question to the photography crowd out there. Does anyone have any experience selling photos on microstock websites? A couple of people have asked me if I’ve ever put any photographs on microstock sites. I haven’t, mainly because I feel pretty strange selling photos for 50 cents each. Truthfully though, most of my photos sit there collecting dust anyways and don’t make any money, so I was just curious if there’s enough volume on those sites to turn over any non-trivial cash-flow. Drop a comment if you have any idea. Thanks.

It’s probably because it’s been so nice these last few days at home, but I’m actually finding myself itching to shoot another wedding this summer. To that end, I’ve started assembling a wedding photography section. It needs a lot of work, but at least I have something for now until I can spend a bit more time on it.

Felt good to shoot a few photos tonight. You can view the original over on Flickr.

I did something similar in Feburary of this year for Northern Voice, and I thought it would be a good idea to try again. Given that Barack Obama was one of the first presidential candidates to embrace social media, I thought I’d do a celebratory mosaic using a public photos posted to Flickr. The image is constructed using Flickr photos from everyday, normal people, the same people who helped Obama and his grass-roots campaign to secure the presidency. The search tags used on Flickr were “obama election victory” and “obama celebration”. The result is a mosiac using 1600 images. Enjoy. If you’d like to see a higher resolution version, head on over here.

One of the areas of my website that I lost with the last theme change was my photography section. To be honest, it wasn’t that complete before, but since photography is such a big part of my life, I miss having it around. Tonight I sat in front of the TV and put together a new one. I extended some recent code I had written for SmugMug to pull in my photos from there. I’m going to slowly add some of my photos that I think might interest organizations looking for Vancouver photos, or various photography from some of the concerts I’ve attended. So, feel free to head on over and check out the new photography page.

Ok seriously. What’s up Canon? Today you announced the new EOS 50D camera, but everyone has been waiting for the new 5D announcement. The 5D is a great camera, but it’s nearly 3 years old already. Since it came out, you’ve released the EOS 20D, the EOS 30D, the EOS 40D and now, the EOS 50D, all with APS-C sensors. We get it, you like the 1.6x crop factor. But it’s time to up the ante. While Nikon is coming out with cool features like HD video, you’re just regurgitating the same formula. At least put out a few 1.3x crop factor cameras or something.

As I alluded to in my previous post today, I’m definitely looking at getting into video sometime in the near future. Considering I ordered a camera shortly after writing that post, “near future” is actually more like “early next week”. I spent a solid twenty minutes or so trying to figure out what type of camera I wanted to purchase, and eventually narrowed it down to a few different ones. In terms of features, I’ve always wanted a camera that could do 24P. Most consumer cameras shoot at 30 frames per second in an interlaced format, which is quite different than how film is shot. Most big budget films are shot in 24 frames per second, so I wanted a camera that could simulate that effect. Right away, that criteria shaved down the available cameras to just a few. The second feature I wanted was optical image stabilization. Without it, […]

I’ve been saving some money for that last little while, fully expecting to make two purchases in the not too distant future. One of the first items will be a full frame camera body. I was forced to make a purchase of the 40D last year simply because I didn’t trust my current camera enough to shoot a friend’s wedding, but truthfully really wanted to get a full-frame instead. Canon’s only affordable (at least to me) full frame is the Canon EOS 5D, but unfortunately it’s about 3 years old now and doesn’t have a lot of the new bells and whistles in it. Canon has been basically silent on the replacement for it for the last year or so, and I’m wondering if they no longer wish to provide a low-priced full frame going forward. Given that the 5D is around $2000 and that the next full frame is […]

For those of you who follow my Flickr and my blog, you’ll remember a few weeks ago I encountered some of my photos being used commercially on the Internet without my permission. For a while there it looked like the only recourse was going to be through legal channels, but after meeting with everyone today at a coffee shop, I’m happy to say we’ve all agreed on an arrangement that should work out. I spend a lot of time trying to make sure rights of photographers are respected, and even went so far to do a podcast with the guys at Creative Commons last year. So I’m obviously glad that this issue was resolved peacefully and everyone walked away happy. I’m more than content to put this issue behind me and move on.

It should come as no surprise that photoshop is a much better tool that iPhoto. iPhoto is a free package that ships with Tiger and Leopard, and allows you to do quick adjustments to your photos. While obviously not marketed towards a high-end market, it’s easy to use and is a fairly decent tool to have a in your photography arsenal. Unfortunately, sometime around Leopard, my iPhoto experience seemed to get a lot worse. I never really figured out exactly what happened, but there was a clean point in time where I felt iPhoto started really underperforming. The other day at the BC Festival 150 I made the decision to start shooting RAW. I’ve always sort of guessed that RAW yields a higher image quality, partially because there’s no JPEG compression involved, but also because RAW images hold 12 or 14 bits of data per pixel as opposed to JPEG’s […]