The company has developed a small compact Kit that is said to be perfect for the photographer just getting into the field or the photographer that wants to start using flash and flash modifiers but isn’t sure what to purchase.

Currently a lecturer, teacher, and writer, Sam Abell’s celebrated career includes positions as a contract and staff photographer and photographer-in-residence at National Geographic magazine. This 1959 photo of his father at the Painesville, Ohio, train station is the homepage image of his website, samabell-thephotographiclife.com.

PortraitPro 12 offers face relighting for the most natural face enhancement It includes new, patent applied for face relighting technology, so you can now literally show your subject in their best light, bringing out the beauty or character of any face naturally. It offers an enhanced capability to slim faces and take the weight off that the camera puts on. Face slimming can have a dramatic effect on how happy people are with their photos.

The hybridization of cameras and phones has produced various manifestations of late, one being the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom, reviewed here a few months back, which looks like a smartphone with a camera/lens grafted onto it’s front. The Galaxy NX comes at this combination from the other direction, a decidedly camera-like design with built-in Android functionality, sans phone capability, but with all the other amenities and accouterments included. And there’s no confusing this with a smartphone, what with it being 3x5.5x2.25 inches in size, the benefit being a very large back display, 4.77” on the diagonal and width to height ratio of 2.5 x 4 inches.

These days it seems that using LED lighting systems for studio portraiture is like puppies and kittens—everybody loves them, and why not? All you need to do is turn on an LED light panel and shoot, right? While there’s obviously more to it than that, the WYSIWYG nature of LED lighting is especially helpful for new or aspiring pros who want to get up and running quickly or in applications where the lighting needs to be consistent so lots of portraits can be made in a short amount of time, something event photographers will take to heart. With that in mind I recently tested Bowens’ Mosaic LED light panels (#1). Originally developed for film and video use, they are available in models designed for mounting on traditional light stands for portraiture, so I put them to work in my home studio.

The arctic sun was just about to make its brief dip below the mountainsto the north when I arrived at a cluster of strange monolithic rocks on the ridge. I cursed myself for not carrying my tripod on the evening hike, but I hadn’t expected to stumble on something quite so strange and photogenic. I braced myself on a tussock of soft tundra and began snapping images of the glowing rocks. I clicked the shutter, recomposed, then clicked again. As I made images, it occurred to me that I was quite possibly the first person to photograph these rocks. They weren’t marked on any map, and the nondescript ridge was just one of many in this part of the range. That, I thought to myself, is one of the great things about photography in the Brooks Range, it was unlikely that anyone had made the same composition before.

Epson America has announced the newest addition to its award winning portfolio of Signature Worthy media. Engineered for the most discerning professional photographers, artists, museums, and fine-art reproduction houses, Epson Exhibition Watercolor Paper Textured is designed to deliver a distinctive feel along with rich blacks, a wide color gamut and smooth tonal gradations for the ultimate in quality, both visually and tactility.

The Olympus E-P5 has a classic viewfinder camera design but doesn’t have an optical or electronic viewfinder. It does have a swivel monitor which can be folded up- and downward and offers very high resolution (1,037,000 RGB dots). Its 3:2 aspect ratio shows additional information on both sides of the viewfinder image, which has an aspect ratio of 4:3 when taking images in the highest image resolution setting. By pressing the “OK” button in the center of the control field additional parameters are shown as overlays on the right-hand side of the live view image.

I’ve seen my share, and I expect you have too, of people who basically spray the area hoping to get a keeper. I’ve also seen photographers who wait…wait…and wait some more to catch that decisive moment. I’m neither of those types. I think of what I do as mindful shooting: I know what I want the photo to look like; I preconceive and previsualize the moment; I control the situation as much as I can to get that moment; and I’m prepared to work with what I’m given and what I can’t control in order to get a good result.

Lexar has enhanced its Professional CompactFlash (CF) range with higher capacities. The new Lexar Professional 1066x 256GB CF card offers a read transfer speed up to 160MB per second and write speeds up to 155MB per second. The Professional 800x CF card is now available with a capacity of 256GB, as well as the industry’s first 512GB memory card, both with read transfer speeds up to 120MB per second and write speeds up to 75MB per second. The cards dramatically accelerate workflow and provide high-speed, reliable performance to capture and transfer high-quality photos and 1080p full-HD, 3D, and 4K video.