“I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words bother me.”—A. A. Milne
The beginning of the year is a busy one for trade shows, ranging from the huge Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas that showcases everything from the latest vacuum cleaners to digital cameras. On top of that, there’s the classic Macworld Expo in San Francisco that while a shell of its...
Many years ago, along with some fellow writers, I visited an Agfa—remember them?—facility in Brussels. During the tour one of the leaders asked, “What do you think of the idea of adding a phone to a digital camera?” We all laughed and thought it was the dumbest idea we’d ever heard. It turned out that he was asking the wrong question; it should have been, “What do you think of adding a camera to a phone?”
"You will not be able to plug in, turn on, and cop out." --Gil Scott-Heron
Is the raw file format the solution or the problem? According to OpenRAW (www.openraw.org), "closed, proprietary, raw file formats present many immediate and future challenges for photographers." Some of their reasons...
People who use digital cameras tend to shoot more images than when they had to pay for film and processing, but management and organization of these digital files is not free. You need software to organize those images...
Proving you can, in fact, change your tune; Paul Simon revised the lyrics to “Kodachrome” when performing the song in Central Park in 1991 to “everything looks better in black and white.” Picky photographers insist “monochrome” is more precise because it covers images made using sepia, blue, or other tones, while images using only shades of gray are black and white.
When a photographer leaves the studio to go on location, they need to start packing. It doesn’t matter whether you’re slinging gear into a Range Rover or a baggage handler is stuffing it inside an Airbus, you need tough, dependable bags and cases that are up to the job. How do you pick the bags and cases that hold your equipment? Like green bags? Prefer anonymous bags? Want a hard case? What about wheels? The answer to these questions and more are found in this month’s installment of “One Case to Schlep.”
A reader recently e-mailed me, asking, “I noticed you and other professional photographers don't always use right-click protection or watermarks (on your sites.) It seems like you'd want to protect your photos from unauthorized use. I'm not a pro but even I wouldn't want someone to grab some of my photos as their own.”
Each of my Web Profiles columns will now include suggestions on how to increase the number of people who not only visit your Web site or blog but want to come back for more. To provide real world examples, I’ll pick sites that put these tips into practice.
In my July 2016 column I posited several reasons why you shouldn’t use Adobe Flash, including blocking millions of iDevice owners from viewing your photography. Yet Flash remains popular, as you can see by one of the sites I hoped to feature this month but could not because my computer is Flash-free.