Dom Bower and Jared Polin catch up

Catching up with Jared over in America and discussing the projections for photography over the next year, the royal family, jewish holidays, tax, christmas pressents, and a load of other crap,

tell me what you think of the video and if you want more.

Nikon 105mm f/2.8 Micro lens review

This is now an old lens but a macro lens is always going to be a winner in the terms of sharpness of an images.

Here I give you a review of what is one of the best lenses you can get and for the price you can get it at on the second hand market, probably the best lens you can possibly buy.

More details after the break

Low Light Photography Tips

I get a lot of questions some impossible to answer, most of the impossible ones are about Low light photography.  i.e. shooting at night time or at dusk.

One of the impossible questions I have been asked is:
How do get sharp photos in low light?
I want to keep my ISO really low, and I cannot use flash and i am using a kit lens 18-55.....
(A) Not going to happen! unless you want to get shots which are silhouettes of people running with the setting sun shining straight into the camera.

You need flash if you are shooting sports in the dark. You need super High ISO if you are wanting to get fast shutterspeeds, and you will need quality glass which is f2.8 to help you keep those shutterspeeds high.

Anyway here are some more tips about what you can do with night or low light photography




here are a couple more videos after the break

Adobe Lightroom Tutorials

Ok Here is what 95% of my photo editing workflow is based around Adobe Lightroom.

Lightroom from version 2 onwards has been brilliant (the first version was not that advanced and really just a cataloging) but from version 2 you were able to do gradients and adjustment brushes, spot removal and smoothing of skin.

Here are a bunch of videos to let you see how I work and also how to get the most out of your Adobe Lightroom software when editing your photos



More videos after the break

Gimp Tutorials

On this page you will find a lot of different videos all related to the free photo editing/graphic design software called Gimp (GIMP which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. it is a popular open source alternative to photoshop.) Its free to download and you can get it from HERE

Ill start off with the most popular video and that is how to make it look like you are holding your own head away from your body

For the videos click the link below

Chromatic Aberration expained

and here is an example of it in video and showing you how to you can reduce it with stopping down a bit ie going from f2.8 to f4
 click below

Canon 5d Mark 2 with the Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 HSM Macro lens

Just before Xmas I managed to get to have a good trial with the Canon 5d Mark 2 and the Sigma

70-200mm f/2.8

I was shooting rehersal footage for a burlesque dancer in Edinburgh at a very dark night club venue (during the day) and shot it from two angles, one straight on with my Canon 550d and Nikon 20mm f/2.8 ais lens and from further back and at an angle with the Canon 5D Mark 2 and the Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 lens both shooting at f/2.8 and at around 800 or 1000 iso.
more details below

Macro Magic (making things invisable)

shot with the nikon 105mm f2.8 af Micro lens (macro) on the Canon 550d camera at 720p.  The effect you are seeing here is the focusing being changed from far to near.

Nikon lens to Canon EOS camera adapter

You can put Nikon lenses on Canon cameras, you just need a simple little adapter,

The links below is pricing from £11  to 200pounds.

The most basic really just is a piece of metal, with that you loose autofocus, and auto focus confirmation and you also loose aperture control unless you have an older lens that has the aperture ring on the lens

Second type you still loose auto focus and aperture control but you gain Auto Focus Confirmation (the little dot on your screen saying you are in focus)

The most expensive ones give you the ability to change the aperture so you can now use it with your G lenses (normally they are stopped all the way to their smallest aperture such as f22) You still do not get auto focus!






All the links to the different types of adapters below

Happy New Year, time to spend some cash!

So Over the holiday season I was up in the Highlands of Scotland with the family.  I had a lovely time and got right stuck into working on my book again, and totally re-worked the first 60 pages. I am really happy with it now.

I came back just yesterday to find I had 34 email, 20 facebook messages and 59 comments on youtube to follow up on. so been very busy with that.  Here is one email that I thought was quite appropriate, This guy Joe has got 1000 to spend on a new camera and is not liking the Canon 550d (t2i) anymore and is wanting to go away from canon, so I could have emailed him back but instead I thought more people would be interested in the reply,