AlienShots, A Photographer’s Blog

New Canon EOS Rebel XS/1000D

Posted by iShoot - 14/06/08

1. Better JPG burst: The 1000X can shoot JPGs at 3 frames per second 2. Image Stabilization 3. Digic III processing: better overall image quality, noise reduction, and performance 4. Live View: with a 2.5 inch screen… nice features, If an additional $250 is not a problem, then you should maybe consider the D40 which I would recommend.

Beautiful Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III

Posted by iShoot - 31/05/08

What a beauty …

Self-triggering cameras?… chicken

Posted by iShoot - 25/05/08

Increasingly photographers are using infrared triggers, timers to help them get “The Shot”. They set if off, and retreat into their tents for a good sleep or a few cans of beer on a hot day. Ok, so where is the thrill here? For me its the scene, the shutter sound , the camera edges sliding from sweaty hands, the adrenaline rush from the fear of being attacked and all the little things that make taking a photograph such an exciting and thrilling event.
So they are scared? who isn’t. I am scared when I see a big dog for god’s sake. The most usual answer you will find is; ” we don’t want to intrude..” or ” the animal will change it’s behavior or be scared” or ” it cant be done otherwise” It’s like hiring someone to take pictures for you in difficult and dangerous terrains, while you are relaxing somewhere and then take the credit because it was your camera… sounds ridiculous I know. I don’t mind placing self-triggering cameras where its impossible to be, but to place such cameras to capture an animal passing by or an animal engaged in some activity, doesn’t impress me. No Sir.
That’s because I don’t see the final result as being the most important but the entire process, the entire experience. Like a football game, sure to win is important, but you go to watch football because its a trill, there is room of the unexpected and you don’t say “the result was beautiful” but say ” the game was beautiful ” and you celebrate the result . Thats one of the reasons I don’t shoot at the zoo, looking at locked up animals like that is pathetic. Am I boring? yeah right.
Be creative. An animal will smell you?, see you? thats not necessary true. First you can reduce being smelled by a carnivore covering your clothes with mud and plant extracts, you can also hide in the shallow waters of a water hole and wait for the perfect shot, if a crock doesn’t bite off your legs first. This was supposed to be a joke. This whole post today indicates that I am tried, I am tried…. remember that line from the movie One fly over the cuckoo’s nest ?

Ain’t this cool?

Posted by iShoot - 22/05/08

I am seriously considering this..

GeoTagging

Posted by iShoot - 08/05/08

Being able to Geotag ( latitude, longitude and altitude) your photos is an extremely cool feature. Today you need an external GPS system attached to your camera, but soon we will see that feature built in with most cameras. Never the less external GPS systems are small devices that do not add weight or clumsiness to your camera and some of them operate on a single AAA battery while others use your camera’s battery. In either cases the battery is used only when a photo is taken so the batteries do last for about 800 photos or more on a single charge according to manufactures that is. Check out PhotoFinder , Jelbert GeoTagger, or for Sony Cameras GPS UNIT f/DSC

Film/

Whenever you transfer photos from your camera to your computer, the GPS data is transfered too through EXIF data. It works by syncing the time on your camera with the GPS devices internal time, so each photo is tagged by the time of the shot and its exact geographical location. You can then combine it with Google maps or other maps form the manufactures and have an exact location of where your photo was taken in an error no larger then 10 meters. What a cool feature for marking urban landmarks and places of interest. check out Panorado , Trip Tracker is very nice too. There are many tools for uploading your Geotagged photos, a cool one is PictureSync because its easy to use and works with many photosharing sites like Flickr, Facebook, Smugmug, Shutterfly and a bunch of others. If you are adding Geodata manually you can do that through Picasa by visually locating a point on Google Earth

You can go to Google Maps for example, and search for an interesting landmark near you. Its like when you travel abroad and when you arrive at a town go and look at the local postcards. Investigating local postcards is a great way to find the best shooting locations without wasting precious time, then simply try to improve on those shots you saw in the postcards, maybe you can look at those places of interest from different angles, different time of day, or simply try to capture some details. I do that all the time.
Yes, Geo tagging is useful for wildlife photography too, but bare in mind that animals migrate and move over huge distances, water holes dry out and vegetation changes but I would love to try one on my next shootout. If I get one soon I will post more details.

Memory cards

Posted by iShoot - 07/05/08

I am a bit paranoid about losing my pictures from a memory card before I had the chance to transfer them to my computer or external drive. So i tend to go for more smaller size cards then one large memory card. for example, I would prefer a 2GB or a 4GB card over lets say an 16GB or 32GB memory card. If one fails at least I still have some images in the other card then relying solely on one large memory card.
I tend to shoot in RAW format, so 100 images will take up considerably more space on my memory card then 100 Jpegs, still I wouldn’t place more that 200-300 images on one single memory card for the reasons mentioned above. On a single 4GB card you can store about 1000 Jpeg images from a typical 8 megapixel camera.

Think about it the next time you go somewhere for a shooting session. Avoid placing a memory card form one camera to another without formating it first, because this may corrupt you images, especially if moving one card to and from different camera brands. You may have seen the xxx speeds advertised next to different memory card models, and actually that speed matters if you are shooting in continuous mode with 6 or more fps and all in RAW format like sport photography or in bracketing modes. On the other hand if you tend to mainly shoot Jpegs and only occasionally use multiple shots then simply ignore the advertised speeds. Again, It also has to do with the speed and buffering capabilities of your camera but for most usages the standard card speed are quite adequate. Perhaps you should check the recommended card speeds by your camera manufacturer, because not all cameras would benefit from ultra high speed memory cards and you would be paying the extra for nothing.

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