Technical Discussions
What You Need for a Product Photography Toolkit
Product photography helped keep my business afloat during the extended Covid-19 lockdown, which also helped me develop my skills through the pandemic. And while this isn’t a typical article you might find on our blog – we focus on more of the technical aspects of lenses and camera sensors – I have…
Sensor Format Size and Image Quality
In the last 10 or 12 years, I’ve owned and made many images with APS-C (with crop factors between 1.3 and 1.5), full frame (FF), and 33×44 (MF, or crop MF, depending on your level of precision – and maybe your agenda). During that time, I’ve also used larger MF cameras and a 72×96 mm Betterlight…
How to Expose Raw Files – Part 2
_This is Part 2 of an article published last week. For the best understanding, please read part one by clicking here._ Last week, we talked a bit about how the camera exposes raw files and used an analogy of rainwater and buckets to explain that. Today, we’re going to dive into the topic more and…
How to Expose Raw Files – Part 1
Throughout the two-century history of photography, the subject of exposure has been repeatedly addressed and hotly debated. In the film era, people talked about exposure and B&W’s negative development in two ways. At first, when most of the photography was done with sheets and plates, it was…
How Your Camera and Image Processor Determine Colors
The Internet is full of debates along the lines of: - Whether Sony colors are better than Nikon colors - Whether Canon colors are better than Sony colors Sometimes, people are talking about in-camera JPEGs, and it is possible to have a moderately fruitful discussion. How fruitful it might be…
How Sports Leagues Build out Elaborate Instant Replay Systems
Many sports started as a somewhat primitive idea – most involve a ball of some sort, catching and throwing, and added elements to make the game competitive and unique. However, in the last few decades, technology has made its way into professional sports in a big way. From coaches making plays on…
How Your Camera’s Focus Bracketing System Works
For many years, photographers have had focus-stacking programs like Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker. You can now get the capability in some general-purpose image editors like Lightroom and Capture One Pro. Focus stacking software takes as input a series of images of the same subject with the focal…
Advanced Photography Lighting Techniques – Feathering & Zooming
Lighting within photography holds a reality – It’s easy to understand, but really takes years to master. As such, you end up seeing a progression with photographers who start using studio strobes that looks very similar to the Dunning Kruger effect chart – where they figure out basic principles,…
How the Light Placement Alters Your Subjects
When teaching basic lighting principles, I break down how to light a subject into having three basic variables – Intensity of Light, Quality of Light, and Direction of Light. The intensity of light is pretty simple in its execution – how bright or dim your light is. Quality of light refers to…
How Your Flashtube Position and Shape Changes Your Light Quality
When I learned that Lensrentals.com would start carrying the Profoto Pro-11 and Profoto Pro Heads, I was really excited. Not necessarily because they’re the workhorse standard for large-scale commercial photography, or that Pro-Heads are commonly what I use in my own work, but because of an added…
Taking Apart the Canon EOS R5 Mirrorless Camera
Let’s get one thing out of the way in the first sentence. If you’re here to understand the mysteries of thermal flow in the Canon R5 I can tell you everything I know without doing a teardown: It’s small, it’s weather-sealed, and photo-body cameras have limited ability to get heat out of the camera.…
The Fujifilm GFX 100 vs Salt Water Teardown
*Lensrentals.com, 2020* So today is “Every Dark Cloud Has a Silver Lining Day.” The dark cloud involves a Fujinon GFX100 medium format camera that went out on rental, got used in a dive housing, and ‘suddenly died for no reason.’ Except on further investigation, well, maybe it got a little wet, but…