Epson America Press Release

Popular Epson Online Experience Digital Printing Course Now Available via Authorized Photo Dealers

Unique On-Demand Program Enables Photo Enthusiasts and Advanced Amateurs to Learn Digital Printing Secrets of the Pros at Home at Their Own Pace

LONG BEACH, Calif.—(Business Wire)—Jan. 18, 2005—In response to the ongoing demand for high-quality education in digital photography, Epson America Inc. has begun offering its Online Experience digital photography and printing program via authorized photo dealers, making it even easier for photo enthusiasts and advanced amateurs to participate in the valuable on-demand program. This unique program offers participants expert techniques, valuable tips and insider secrets the pros use to create spectacular digital prints.

Fujifilm Press Release
 
Fujifilm Professional is to host three free mini-marketing seminars at the Focus-on-Imaging exhibition on Monday 28 February.

The seminars will be run by marketing expert Darron Hartas and they will be aimed at helping every professional photographer market their services better.

Whether you shoot weddings, portraits or commercial work, there is something for everyone in each half-hour presentation. Darron and his team at WPS Media help run the Envisage marketing programme on behalf of Fujifilm Professional.

Taking place opposite the main Focus exhibition halls in Concourse Suite 1, the presentations are aimed specifically at those who want to know more about Fujifilm Envisage and how the marketing initiative can help their businesses. There’s no need to book and entrance is free of charge. Plus, those who would like to enroll on the Envisage programme may do so at a special Focus discounted rate.

Apogee Photo have published a new article all about the depth of field preview function, which means that only SLR camera owners need apply. Is that small button that makes the viewfinder go dark actually worth using after all?

“Landscape photographers are very opinionated when discussing the camera’s depth-of-field preview button.  Professionals applaud its virtues.  However, many amateurs say it’s a waste of time.  As opinions go, there is no middle ground.  People either love the depth-of-field preview, or they hate it.  This article will explain how the depth of field preview operates, its problems, and a few tips for making it work well for you.”

Website: Depth of Field Preview: Friend or Foe

Warning: technical colour management article coming up! Digital Outback Photo explain the reasons why they have switched from using the Adobe RGB colour space to ProPhoto RGB…

“We followed the discussion about ProPhoto RGB for quite some time. Yesterday we had a conversation with a friend who understands color management and this made it pretty clear to us. We would never claim to be experts and do not even intend to get any expert status. But the arguments we heard were just too convincing.

All what we write here matters if your main goal is the fine art output (most likely prints).”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Why Use the ProPhoto RGB Color Space?

Press Release

The Just Show Me How Professional seminar series helps photographers improve their digital workflow

Industry-leading imaging companies share professional digital workflow secrets to photographers in 10 cities nationwide

NEW YORK, January 10, 2005 – How do digital photographers handle thousands of pictures, maintain quality and efficiency in their work, and stay competitive? Several leading digital photography companies - including Extensis, GretagMacbeth, Lexar, Mirra, Nik Multimedia, Wacom, Microsoft, Adobe, and Blue Pixel - have partnered together to address these questions. While most professional seminars focus on the camera, editing, or printing, the Just Show Me How seminar gives photographers the tools and knowledge they need to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of the complete digital process - after they’ve taken the picture. The Just Show Me How Tour for professional photographers begins in February 2005 and will visit 10 cities through April 2005.

Digital Outback Photo have published a good article about correcting colour in your images using a gray card, a technique that works equally well for both digital and film cameras.

“In the real world, the lighting conditions are usually less than idea for color correction; outdoor or indoor lighting is seldom close to the photographic ideal color temperatures for ‘daylight’ or ‘tungsten’. This can be resolved fairly easily by capturing a photo of a gray card in the same lighting conditions and correcting to the gray.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Color Correction using a Gray Card

Bob Atkins has published a short, technical guide to digital sensor size, looking at several digital cameras with different physical sensor sizes but all with a nominal 3 megapixel (3MP) pixel count.

”“So what” you might think, “if you have enough pixels, what does the sensor size matter?”. Cameras with smaller sensors use shorter focal length lenses to get the same angular coverage as cameras with larger sensors do with longer focal length lenses. So if you have a 28-105mm zoom on a Canon D30,  a 10-37mm zoom on a Nikon 995 or a 7.4-28mm zoom on a Minolta Xi, you get approximately the same shot. What’s the big deal about the physical size of the sensor? Why does it matter?”

Website: Bob Atkins - Digital Sensor Size - Why Size Matters

About.com has a handy list of tips to help out new digital camera owners with their recent purchase/gift.

“Digital cameras are great! They let you experiment and learn without the hassle and expense of film developing. They give you the freedom to take more pictures—lots more pictures! But they also open up a whole new world of technology and terminology that even proficient film photographers may not be familiar with. Fortunately, you can bypass the confusion by visiting the links in this article to learn about and avoid the most common pitfalls and mistakes many new digital camera owners make.”

Website: About.com - Top 7 Digital Camera Newbie Mistakes to Avoid

Wind-Up Labs Press Release

So you have a new digital camera. Now what? Tips to enjoy digital photography and safeguard holiday memories

BOSTON—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Dec. 30, 2004—An estimated 10 million digital cameras were sold nationwide this holiday season and experts agree new camera owners will take hundreds of photos each in the first weeks. Yet most consumers have no idea how to manage, properly save or get the most enjoyment out of these photos. Here are tips to organize and share digital photos from Wind-Up Labs, maker of HeyPix!, a new digital photo organizer and sharing service.

10 Tips to Enjoy Digital Photography

1.  Think of your new purchase as more than a camera.  Think beyond simply taking and printing photos.

2.  When taking photos, keep elbows close to your body for stability, and pre-focus the camera by pressing the button halfway down
  before taking the shot to avoid the second or so of shutter lag time.

And I thought my camera bag was too heavy - it looks positively feather-weight compared to all the kit that Michael Reichmann carries around, which he shows us in his latest article over on Luminous Landscape:

“For 13 days in early January, 2005 I will be leading a photographic expedition / workshop in Bangladesh. Together with about a dozen other photographers we will be exploring this little-known but fascinating country – by boat, road and on foot. This workshop has been planned for more than half a year, and though my colleague Pierre Claquin has lived, worked and photographed there for some dozen years, and has provided everyone with equipment advice, actually deciding what to bring (as well as what’s possible to bring) is an interesting challenge.

I thought that I’d share the thought process with you, as it is one that all photographers go through when heading off on a shooting trip. There are so many factors involved, from intended as well as potential subject matter, to flying restrictions, to weight and bulk concerns.”

Website: Luminous Landscape - What’s in the Bag – And Why?

“Troubleshooting Your Images” is PCMagazines in-depth guide to solving some of the common issues that affect new diigcam owners in particular; blurry and grainy images, over and under-exposed, dodgy colour. It might just stop you actually tearing your hair out in frustration (no guarantees though…).

“Nothing is more frustrating than looking at a photo you took of a once-in-a-lifetime event only to find that it didn’t turn out. Maybe it is blurry, dark, or “noisy.” Many new digital-camera owners become so frustrated that they give up entirely, or keep replacing their cameras, hoping to find one that magically takes the photo they want every time.

Instead of throwing your hands up, if you spend a little time looking at your problem images, thinking about what might have happened, and practicing with your camera on your pets, children, or garden, you’ll be ready to grab those images of a lifetime when it really matters. In this article we discuss a variety of common causes of poor digital images, and present some tips on diagnosing and correcting the problems.”

Website: PCMagazine - Troubleshooting Your Images

Every photographer has been confused by the subject of digital image sizes - pixels, resolution, ppi, dpi - what are they and how on earth do they relate to each other? Bob Atkins has a handy guide which answers all of these questions:

“The way you control how large an image appears on someone’s monitor screen when viewing your images on the web is by changing the height and width in pixels If your original image is 1600x1200 pixels it will probably be too large to see all at once on 95% of the video monitors out there. It will also be slow to load since it will be a large file. If you want someone using an 800x600 display to be able to see your image clearly, you need to change the size to, say, 600x400 pixels (remember the browser window is smaller than the full monitor display).”

Website: Bob Atkins - Digital Image Resizing

PCWorld have published a brief but still fairly useful guide to using your digital camera in cold conditions. Unfortunately they fail to mention anything about keeping the actual photographer warm, a working camera is not much use without a warm and functional photographer!

“When you bring the camera back indoors, odds are good that you’ll get some condensation on the lens. Be patient. It’s a bad idea to wipe the lens off to take more pictures: You can scratch the lens in the process. Also, if you wipe the lens and the condensation pools up around the edges, it can leak into the inside of the lens assembly. That’s a really bad thing. So let the condensation evaporate on its own; it shouldn’t take long.”

Website: PCWorld - Cold Weather Photo Survival Guide

Digital Outback Photo have published an article about EXIF metadata, which is a lot more interesting than it sounds! What is metadata, how can you access it, and what should you do with it? All these questions and more are answered…

“EXIF metadata is always at your fingertips, thus providing you with valuable information during every step of your workflow. However, the EXIF metadata of an image needs to be interpreted within the context of the camera/scanner which it was taken/scanned with and thus its correct use isn’t necessarily a “no brainer”. It requires some initial evaluation time to understand its potential and use in your workflow. But once you determined how to read and utilize it best, EXIF metadata becomes an even more powerful source of information to you and your workflow.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Using Metadata in Your Workflow

Interested in reducing the noise in your digital photos? Then take a look at Photo.net’s latest article:

“This article is about a method of reducing noise in images taken with digital cameras - especially long exposure and/or high ISO images taken with digital SLRs. The simplified workflow presented here is derived from more advanced techniques of noise reduction (known as calibration) that are used in scientific and technical imaging. Because of limitations in the software tools commonly available to mainstream photographers, and because of limitations to the image-making equipment, there are several significant differences between the technique described here and a proper calibration of a scientific image. Still, the method here can result in significant aesthetic improvement to many digital images that suffer from noise.”

Website: Photo.net - Using Image Calibration to Reduce Noise in Digital Images

Photoxels have posted a great introductory guide to night photography:

“Night photography has an attraction all its own. There’s something about scintillating lights from office windows hanging in the dark of the night—a modern version of the starry skies—that appeal to us. Whether it’s a city skyline, lamp posts on a dark and deserted street, or the front of your house all decked out with holiday lights, the challenge of capturing the mood of a night scene depends on whether your digital camera is capable of night photography and on a couple of simple techniques.”

Website: Photoxels - Night Photography

About.com has published a good guide to filing and finding your digital images.

“Digital files offer some advantages and some disadvantages over film in terms of storage. The important thing is to plan for it, and then make sure you put those plans into practice. The key files to store are the raw files direct from camera - the digital equivalent of your negatives. It may also be convenient to store the processed tiff or jpeg files, but these could always be recreated from the originals.”

Website: About.com - Filing and Finding your Images

Digital Outback Photo have a new contributor, Brad Hinkel, and a new article, Digital Printer Test Strips, to offer you today. Reminds me of my old darkroom days…

“I strongly recommend that you learn to properly profile your monitor and to use profiles for your printer and papers. Profiles will make the process much easier to get good prints; the monitor can be a very good representation of your printer output if you learn to use color management well. But the monitor is not a perfect proofing tool for your final print; it provides the first step for creating a good print, but once you have decent prints, how can you create the final exceptional print. I use test strips to allow me to easily evaluate the effect of minor adjustments to my prints; these allow me to quickly fine tune my prints to that one exceptional print.”

Website: Digital Outback Photo - Digital Printer Test Strips

VisionAge have published a new article that looks at the issue of colour spaces in digital cameras. It’s written from the perspective of the Olympus E-1 DSLR, but there’s a lot of information that applies to other camera models too.

“Adobe RGB or sRGB: that is the question! There has probably been more written about the two color space options online in the last few years than discussions of Mr. Shakespeare. It’s hard to blame photographers for being confused considering the complexities of color management, the conflicting advice on some photo Web sites and the added considerations of capturing RAW data.”

Website: VisionAge - Color Management by the Numbers

If you have ever wondered how big you can print your digital photos, then wonder no more, as Craig Froehle has published a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet that will work it out for you.

“One question I get asked a lot by friends and family is “how big can I print this digital photo?” My answer is always “it depends,” which then requires a lengthy discussion of pixels per inch and viewing distance and other mundane topics.

So, I put together a little Excel spreadsheet that should help you determine what size prints you can make with reasonable quality based on the size of the digital photos you have. You can get it here or click on the screen capture below (you have to have Microsoft Excel to use the file).”

Website: Digital Photo Printing Worksheet