The PhotoGarden Blog

Field Workshops to start May 26th!

Roger Lambert — Wed, 23 May 2012 20:29:44 +0000

Well, it took a while, but we are finally able to offer the Digital Photography 101 Camera Skill Field Workshop, as it is known in its full iteration this coming Saturday, may 26th, followed by the dates of June 9th and 23rd.

Here is the official course description of the workshop, fresh from the new Knowledge Center web pages at http://thephotogarden.com :

The Digital Photo 101 Field Workshop

Digital 101 Photo Class (Introduction to Digital Photography)

Overview:

The Introduction to Digital Photography Field Workshop is geared for photographers new to their camera who have completed the PhotoGarden Digital Photography 101 classroom course. This workshop will offer an exciting, personal, and productive way to improve your familiarity and facility with your photographic equipment, and to develop your eye for artistic composition.

Students will learn first-hand, by taking photographs in and around Burlington, Vermont how the photographic concepts discussed in the class can be put to best use with their cameras in this four-hour workshop.

Each participant in the group will receive one-on-one instruction as needed from the workshop leader, and this small-group class will cover lens and aperture selection, depth-of-field, focal length and artistic perspective, exposure and metering, selective focusing, tripod use, use of flash, and using different shooting modes.

The workshop attendees will meet at Church Street in Burlington in good weather and at UVM’s Waterman building during inclement skies.

Dig 101 Course prerequisite

Cost: $65.00 per student

Enter Your Photobook, Win $25,000!

Roger Lambert — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 20:27:27 +0000

One of the coolest new products available for those of us who like to share our photographs is the photobook. Instead of keeping our prints loose in an album, we can self-publish our work, add text , graphics and special effects, and have the whole thing hard or softbound. And for very reasonable prices, I might add, especially compared to what a one-off kind of project would have cost ten or so years ago.

A page from 2010 Photography Book Now winning photobook by Judith Stenneken

Well, one of the largest British photobook publishers, Photography Book Now, has a contest for photographers around the world for Best Photobook. There are four categories – Fine Art, Documentary, Travel and Student. First prize is a whopping $25,000! If you are seeing three zeros after the “25″, you are reading with good comprehension skills! If you enjoy creating photobooks, or have been thinking about getting started with one, now might be a good time to take action. Entries are open until July 14th, 2011. More info here.

Happy World Pinhole Photography Week!

Roger Lambert — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 14:31:32 +0000

What do Leonardo Da Vinci, Roger Bacon, and Matthew Broderick all have in common? They all used the Camera Obscura to help them in their careers, that’s what. In 13th-century England, Roger Bacon described the use of a camera obscura for the safe observation of solar eclipses. Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519 AD) described camera obscura in Codex Atlanticus as an aid for artistic drawing. And Matthew Broderick put one to even more dramatic use – he used a room-sized one to spy on his girlfriend across the street in the movie Addicted To Love (1997). How cool is that, minions of camera geekiness?

Matthew Broderick and Meg Ryan spying on Matthew's girlfriend

Of course, they took some liberties in the film – the image displayed on the wall of Broderick’s apartment was not upside down, as it would have been in real life.

What does this have to do with World Pinhole Photography Week? Well, a Camera Obscura is really just a pinhole camera, where a small pinhole acts as the aperture in a lens, defracting the incoming light into the room just like the aperture in any lens.

Manhattan scene projected into room by camera obscura

Depending on how far away is the surface that these light rays display upon, the Camera Obscura image can be small or large – as large as the room in which they display, or, in the case of a pinhole camera, about as large as the piece of film or the digital sensor in the camera.

People have been making pinhole cameras out of household objects like oatmeal boxes or cookie tins for years. And you can make one out of an old lens cap for next to nothing as well, and use it on your digital camera today. Depending on the relative size and roundness of your pinhole, you can get results which approximate your usual lenses, or you can get some very cool dreamy effects.

By the way, the effective aperture setting of your pinhole lens is determined by the radius of the pinhole itself (very small) and the distance to the sensor (about two inches). Expect a working aperture setting of about f/100 to f/200, so you will probably want to use a tripod to take your photographs, as the shutter time will likely be in seconds.

The New Nikon D5100 coming to PhotoGarden

Roger Lambert — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 18:38:38 +0000

Sporting a side-mounted hinged LCD screen, the new 16.2 MP Nikon D5100 sits squarely between the entry level D3100 and the more expensive D7000. Key features of the D5100 include:

16.2 megapixel DX-format CMOS sensor
Side-articulated 3.0″ LCD monitor (920,000 dots)
11 AF points (with 3D tracking)
IS0 100-6400 range (Up to 25,600 equivalent when expanded)
HD movies (1080p, 720p or WVGA)
4 fps continuous shooting
In-camera effects filters in both stills and video modes

The nifty new Nikon D5100 to the left of its predecessor, the Nikon D5000

Compared to the D5000, the D5100 expands available ISO two full stops from ISO 6400 to ISO 25,600, ups sensor resolution from 12MP to 16.2MP, has a larger jpeg and RAW shooting buffer, full 1080p HD video, and has a greatly improved LCD – improving from 230,000 pixels to 931,000 pixels. Significantly, the D5100 now features a 14 bit image processing engine which should add significant smoothness to its files compared to its predecessor. Not bad for about $800.00. Dpreview has a nice preview of the camera here