 
Hey Everyone! I hope today finds you healthy and safe. Today I want to talk about something that is near and dear to my heart. Camera bags! I have had dozens of them, and I now find myself with what I think for me is a great combo. To me, camera bags aren't just a fashion statement but must function with ease and have all the bells and whistles that I want in a camera bag. To me they are tools, and no one bag fits the bill although I do have one that is close. I use three bags and, depending on what I am doing or shooting, will decide what bag and camera setup I use. Out of the three bags I use, only one of them is actually a camera bag. I have adapted other bags to take the place of camera bags. The three bags I use are the Shimoda Action X 30 liter camera bag, the MountainSmith Daylight Lumbar Pack, and the Zpacks multi-pack. I have used all kinds of bags over my many years of photography, and these three are the best and the longest-used camera bags that I have used. I'll start from the smallest and work my way to the largest.
Zpacks multi-pack - I first acquired this pack for backpacking. It was made by Zpacks that is a leader in
backpacks in the backpacking industry. They were one of the first to use Dyneema for material in their packs. Dyneema is a material that pound for pound is stronger than steel and is waterproof. This pack was made to be a chest pack on my backpack, but it can be used as an over- the-shoulder bag and as a fanny pack. I use this bag for my everyday camera use. I carry a point and shoot Canon G7XmII for my everyday use, and when I go for lunchtime walks or driving from town to town, this is the camera that I have next to me. The bag is large enough to hold my camera and a few other things. I can throw it over my shoulder or use it as a fanny pack. I love this little bag and will keep using it.
MountainSmith Dalight Lumbar Pack - I got the idea for this pack from Chris Burkard, an adventure photographer. He uses this bag as a shooting bag. I bought this bag and got a cheap insert to put into the bag to protect camera lenses and such. I use this bag mainly if I'm shooting an event or when doing street photography. I had an extra Peak Design camera strap (another story), so I used this to make a shoulder strap which is much better than the one that comes with the bag. This bag is large enough to carry one body and up to three lenses, filters, and such. I usually carry one body and a few prime lenses when doing street photography. It works great, and I can change lenses quickly. People who have shot with me know that I call this bag my purse. It can even tote my iPad mini with no problems, another plus when doing street photography. I can stop at a coffee shop, have some coffee, and pull out my iPad to edit or browse the net.
Shimoda Action X 30 liter Backpack - This is my landscape and hiking bag. I love this bag and have had this one for over a year. I got it off of a Kickstarter production. It's made out of a ripstop water-resistant material. It was made for action photographers who ski and mountain bike, but it is perfect for landscape photographers. I shoot a crop sensor camera, so the 30 liter is perfect for me. But they make 50 and 70 liter bags also. Attention to detail from a photographer's standpoint is what I love about this bag, and the craftsmanship in making this bag is great. Very high quality. I won't go over all of the details of the bag, but you can look it up on Google
and read all about it. It is used by modern professional landscape photographers such as Nick Page. I like that it has a roll-top to it so when I go out in the morning all layered up I can shed the layers and have room in the bag to put them with no problems. I usually carry one to two bodies and three lenses: my 10-18, 16-70, and 70-350mm.
With these three bags, I have the tools to move quickly and protect all of my gear while out and about shooting the world around me.
Until next week please stay safe and healthy, and get out and shoot.
Hey Everyone! I hope today finds you healthy and safe. Today I want to talk to you about why I think you should calibrate your monitor and how to do it. If you're a serious photographer in the modern age, calibration of your monitor is a must, and here's why. When you see colors in a scene, you want the same colors to be printed and published online. When we develop our photos on the computer, we use the screen, and we want to make sure that the colors we saw are the same colors that we have on our monitor. In other words, you want to make sure that the red ball you shot with your camera stays red throughout the process of processing your photographs to screen or to print. Your monitor must know what red is. Monitors' colors tend to drift, but with our eyes we don't really see it. So if I bring in a photo that I think was more red than I'm seeing, I can boost the color in my photo editing software. But if your monitor is seeing red, lets say more pink, then the output that you choose can be different than you saw. Have you ever printed something and the colors were wrong? The reason is that your monitor was not calibrated and you made adjustments that you didn't need to, and then when you printed it looked wrong. When you calibrate your monitor, you are telling it that red is red, green is green, and so on. So when you edit your photos, what you see are the real colors. If you're like me, I don't see colors as well as everyone else, and I depend on the monitor being calibrated to keep me in check. And if you go further down the chain, you can also calibrate your printer, but that's a discussion for another day. Having all of your machines calibrated also helps. If you have a laptop and a desktop computer and you go between them editing photos, you want the monitors to be calibrated so that when you adjust one it looks the same as the other. Okay, I may be rambling a little, but the point is you want your monitors to be calibrated for the best results.
How and when to calibrate. I calibrate mine monthly. You could do it more often but for me once a month
seems to do the trick. The how to this question is a little more involved. First, you'll have to get a monitor calibration tool. This tool hooks to your computer via USB, and then you place it on the screen of your computer. You start the program, and your screen will go through a sequence and show all of the different colors in the color spectrum. This device will see those colors and, when the program is finished going through its sequence, it will make adjustments to your screen so the colors are correct. Like anything else, you can spend as much as you want on calibration tools. But for about $150 you can get an entry-level one. X-Rite or Datacolor Spyder X Pro seem to be the leaders in this. I have an older Color Monkey from X-Rite that I have been using for years, and it does okay.
I highly recommend calibrating your monitors for accurate colors and also for the consistency that it will give to your photography. So until next week, keep shooting, get outside, explore, and have fun!
Hey Everyone! I hope today finds you healthy and safe! This week I want to talk about coming up with ideas that can become photo or just personal projects. First of all, I think personal projects and photography projects are great, but coming up with the idea and what your project is going to be is a bear. Photography and personal projects give you something to plan for and something to really look forward to. I am a list guy. I make a list for almost everything, from daily activities to long- term goals. This past year I had a couple of goals or projects. The first one is this blog. I wanted to post a blog every week. The biggest challenge with this goal is coming up with topics to talk about. I get ideas from all kinds of places, when I'm driving to work, taking a shower, almost anywhere. I get the idea and then think about how my blog will be written. But if I don't write it down, I can get distracted and lose my train of thought. So I have a place in my home office/gear locker/laundry room where I have put up a dry erase board where I can write down all the ideas I have. I try to stay ahead and have two or three already written. Then all I have to do is put some photos with it.
Another big project this year was my state park project. I wanted to visit all of the state parks in North
Carolina in one calendar year. This took a lot of logistics and planning to do. Some of these parks were far enough away that I had to plan overnight stays, which meant camping. You know how I like to camp. There were 34 parks and 52 weekends. I should be able to handle that, right? Well, then the virus hit us, and all of the state parks closed for a few months. But I got around that and took a week of vacation and went to 9 state parks to get me back on track. I had a printed state map with all of the state parks and a spreadsheet where I would check off each state park as the year came around. I kept track of this on the dry erase board in my room. This project gave me the drive to go out and shoot while the virus and everything associated with it tried to keep me down and out. So projects keep you going.
Another photo project I had this year was to post to Instagram each day. I wanted the photos to be better than just a bunch of iPhone shots just to fill up space. At first, when my state park project started, I had plenty of photos to choose from. But then when all of the state parks closed, the project got me back into older photographs and maybe reprocessing some of them. That was a blessing, as looking back at all of those old photos brought back memories of times past.
Right now I am trying to come up with a big project like the state park project for next year. On my idea board (dry erase board), I have many ideas of projects. I am still thinking about and researching what project I'm going to start at the beginning of the year. I want it to be a big project, and I want camping to be a part of it also. So that's a challenge. But right now I have 6 project ideas on the board to choose from and hope I get more in the coming days. Also on my idea board I have big "to do" items, like paint the trim on the house and clean the garage. These are items that I just want to get off of the board. I would much rather be out shooting, fishing, camping, or almost anything else, but these to-do items. LOL I also have some special projects on the board that I want to do, like there are some modifications that I want to do to my teardrop trailer to make it more specialized/unique. My idea board helps me prioritize what projects to do and what to do next. Some people may be able to keep all of this in their head, but for me the board makes it much easier to make decisions on what to do. The idea board also helps me keep up with upcoming trips. The virus has made campsites hard to get (everyone is trying to get outside), so I have to reserve well in advance and the board helps me keep track of that. And of course I also put all of these dates in Google Calendar to help remind me.
Well, that's enough rambling for now. I hope this idea will help some of you make some photography projects and get you outside to shoot. So until next week, keep safe and healthy.
 Max Stansell Photography
Hey Everyone! I hope today finds you healthy and safe. This week I want to talk about black and white photography and why I like it. Way back when, when photography was shot on film, black and white photography was much more prominent than it is now. At the beginning of photography, it was all black and white because there wasn't any color film available. But even after color film was invented, black and white was still the norm. In what I call the hay days of photography, from the 1920s to the 1960s, just about everything was on black-and-white film. I love looking at all of those old photos from my family and even in the National Archives from all of the famous people you think about when studying the art of photography, all shot in black and white. Majestic landscapes, news, sports, and portraits were all shot in black and white. Maybe I'm just nostalgic from the days gone past. But to me, things shot in black and white have that "timeless" feeling that I don't get with color photographs. There are lots of blogs and all kinds of tutorials that explain all of the techniques of shooting in black and white, but I'm more concerned about how a photograph makes you feel. I imagine that younger photographers who grew up with
 Goldsboro Fire House
all-color all the time don't feel the same way that older photographers do about black and white. Don't get me wrong, there are some younger photographers that dabble in black and white. But most of the time it's color, vibrant color, that they go to. So when do I like to shoot black and white?
 Max Stansell Photography
Portraits - I love black-and-white portraits. To me, they seem to be sharper, show more detail in the face, and show more expression than color portraits. Think of all the black-and-white portraits of old movie stars or politicians that were taken in decades past. You see those photographs, and they just pop off the page. You get to the soul of the photograph without cluttering up the photo with all of that color. I have a wall in my house where I have photos of my family members, but I made them all in black and white because I think they just look better. An old saying about portraits that I really like is "If you take a portrait of someone in color, you're taking a photo of their clothes; when you take a portrait in black and white, you take a photo of their soul."
Landscapes - Big majestic landscapes are great in black and white! Ansel Adams, one of the most--if not
the most--famous landscape photographers, shot in black and white. Even though in his later years color was available and he dabbled in it, he preferred black and white. I think that in some landscape photographs color just muddles up the photograph, makes it too busy. But if you change it to black and white, sometimes it just jumps off the page. Try to change some of your favorite landscapes from color to black and white. All of them won't work well, but some of them will be a lot better than the originals that you thought were great.
 The MetroCommuters waiting for the Metro in Washington DC.
Street Photography - Nothing says black-and-white photography like street photography. Capturing scenes and cityscapes in black and white is the norm. This style of photography is where I think black and white really shines and is probably where it is the most used in today's photography. I think, again, it's the timeless look of the photograph that it shows.
As you can see, I'm a big fan of black-and-white photography. Please experiment with black-and-white photography, and I'm sure you'll become a lover of the "monochrome experience" like I am. Until next week, please stay safe and healthy and get out and shoot.
Hey Everyone! I hope today finds you healthy and safe. This week I want to talk about making an end-of-year book. This is something I started a few years ago at the suggestion of my photography club. We were making them to share at an end-of-year holiday party. But I really think that everyone should have one. So what is an end-of-year book?
An end-of-year book is a collection of all of your best shots from your year of photography. There are all kinds of books you could make, from family books to books on your pets, but this end-of-year book would be a book of all of your best work. If you're like me, I may go on a photoshoot and shoot 500 shots. Out of those, I may only have one or two that I would like to share. And out of those, maybe only one of them is noteworthy of printing in a book. But over the course of a year, you may have 40 or 50 really great photos that you should print. An end-of-year book is a great place to put them.
Let's talk about why I think you should print a book. The first reason is that most of us, myself included, do not print enough. We don't have shoeboxes full of things we have printed like we did in the past. Instead, we now have them on a disc or drive somewhere, and nobody will see them or pass them down when we are gone. An end-of-year book is an easy thing we can do once a year to print our great work and have something tangible for people to hold, something to pass down to our grandchildren and theirs. I recently made a book of all of my mother's photographs. She has Alzheimer's and knew her memory was going, so she sat down and labeled and sorted all of her photographs that she had. I found all of them in boxes, took them to my house and digitized a lot of them, and made a book that she could hold onto and look at the photos. I had them labeled with the names of the people from her past so she could remember now that her memory is not good. Books are a great way to do this. I should do more of them, but I'm pretty lazy like everyone else.
This year I had a solid photo project of photographing and visiting all of the state parks in North Carolina in one calendar year. I've got it all done now (pat on the back), but now I have to make my end-of-year book about state parks. There are 34 state parks, so the book will be at least 34 pages long and probably double that. There are all kinds of places where you can get a book made, from Shutterfly, Blurb, Snapfish, and a lot of others. You can even get a book made at your local drugstore, like Walgreens. They usually don't cost much, and it usually depends on how many pages and the quality of the book you're making. The bottom line is that it's much cheaper to make the book than it would be to print all of the photographs.
I know I have rambled quite a bit here, but the bottom line is that this is a great way to share your work with something that is tangible and something that you can pass down through the ages. So until next week, take some notable photos and get outside!
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