Hey Every one! Hope your having a great week! This week I want to go over some hacks and best practices that I have developed over the years of photography.  We all have little things we do to help us along and some of these I may have mentioned in other blogs along the way. These are things that I do that seem to help me when I'm doing my photography thing. Some of them might not seem like photography specific related things but they will help. So here are 10 hacks or best practices that might help you.

1. Keep an organized photography bag. Keeping a organized bag will speed you up when you're out photographing. Having a specific spot for everything in your bag does a few things. First it keeps you from loosing stuff.  If you have a specific place for everything you can quickly know when something is missing.  Because you will have an empty space where there is not suppose to be.  I lost a camera strap for over a year because I just shoved it in my bag where it wasn't suppose to be and when I went looking for it I couldn't find it because it was a black strap in a black pocket and I didn't see it.  This was at a wedding I was shooting and I took the strap off because it was getting in my way I said to myself Ill just put it here so it won't get lost. Well it was lost even though it was in my bag. I ended up getting a new one before I found this one and now I have two. The second thing it will do is speed up you're photography.  When you're out shooting you don't have to look for something you know where it is and you can quickly get to it without searching.  You can do it in the dark because you will be so familiar.

2. Keep micro fiber clothes everywhere.  You've heard this hack before. If your like me you have these little micro fiber clothes laying around everywhere. You get them at the eye doctor in almost every electronic you buy they just accumulate. So in every slot of my camera bag I put one or two at the bottom under a lens or under a battery.  That way when I'm out in the field and I need one there is one very handy.  I always have one in my pocket also. So if I'm shooting away from my bag I can pull one out.  It also comes in handy if you're out shooting with a friend and they need a cloth you can quickly pull one out of your pocket for them to use. This has happened to me more than once.

3. Gaffers Tape. Gaffers tape is wonderful. Its very sticky but it does not leave a sticky residue when you remove it. It's like duct tape without the mess. It comes in handy when putting cords away or just to hold something together.  I stick this tape in various places to always have it handy. I will put a piece on a large lens hood or wrap it around something like a lens brush so I always have some in my bag without taking a roll of it with me. This tip can get you out of a jam.

4. Medicine.  If your older like I am sometimes you need the help of say a Tylenol or a Tums to get you through the day. Instead of taking a bottle of each I use an old film canister and put a few of each in and use it as a pill bottle. This works great and is the perfect size to keep the weight and clutter down in my camera bag. I then can wrap Gaffers tape on the outside the bottle to use like in the item above.

5. Emergency Rain Poncho.  I always have an emergency rain poncho with me. Here is the reason. I went to a state park to shoot a waterfall its about a mile or so hike in to get to the fall. When I left the weather was fine but one of those afternoon thunder storms snuck up on me and it started a downpour.  I got pretty wet.  I did have a Plastic bag that I covered up my gear with but I got soaked. From then on I carry one of these little disposable ponchos with me.  They only cost about 5 dollars and really come in handy.

6. Take an umbrella. Along with the tip above about rain ponchos. If it looks like you'll be shooting in the rain. Maybe doing street photography take a small umbrella with you. Not so much to keep you dry or your camera dry but to keep water spots off of the front of your lens. Theses little umbrellas are handy and deploy with a touch of a button.

7. Check Camera Settings before you arrive. Make sure your camera is ready to go for that first shot.  If your going on a camera shoot before you leave or travel make sure your camera is set up to shoot the second you arrive. Make sure the ISO is set to where you want it.  Maybe you were shooting Night photography and you have the shutter set at 30 seconds and you don't check it. When you arrive at the first spot the next day and you frame up your shot and click! Nothing happens for 30 seconds and you may miss the shot. So give your settings a once over before you leave so this does not happen to you.

8. Batteries, Batteries, Batteries. While most of us are shooting digital and even more are shooting mirrorless cameras always have fresh batteries at the beginning of the day. One of my mirrorless cameras is notorious for eating batteries. So the night before a day trip or after a day of shooting on a multi day trip the first thing I do when I get to the hotel or at my house is put a fresh battery in my camera. Charge up the one that came out and any that you have used up during the day so the next day you have a fresh set with you. Nothing can stop your photography like a dead battery. Be prepared and always carry a spare or two.

9. Have lots of SD cards. Another of my nightly checks before a trip is to make sure I have an freshly formatted SD card in my camera for the nest day. When I arrive at my hotel after a shoot I pull out my SD card and insert a fresh one and format. Boom! Camera is ready for the next day! The one I took out I backup and store in a camera wallet. I shoot one SD card or more per day and a fresh one every day. These cards are fairly cheap and beside a dead battery this can stop you from shooting. If you're shooting and your card gets full and you don't have another then you are stuck deleting shots off of your card to make room wasting time. I always carry one or two spares with me just incase I have a card go bad or I fill one up.

10. Comfortable Shoes! Wearing comfortable shoes is one of the best things you can do for your photography shoot. Trying to hike or walk a city street or just being on your feet for an extended time. If you don't have comfortable shoes your feet hurt and you can concentrate on the matter at hand , shooting! Wear comfortable clothes as well. Tight fitting binding clothes will also make you uncomfortable leading to missed shots.

Well there are ten hacks or best practices. I could probably come up with more with a little thinking. I'm sure there are some stuff that you do that could help us. Share a hack or best practice that you do.  So until next week please stay safe and get outside and shoot!

Hey Everyone! Hope your having a great week. Last week I talked about the advantages of shooting a crop sensor camera which kind of highlighted the disadvantages of shooting a Full Frame Sensor camera. So this week I wanted to highlight the advantages of shooting a full frame sensor camera.  A disclaimer I am not a professional photographer although I have been paid to shoot things like weddings , portraits , events etc… but I do have 45 years experience of playing with and obsessing with cameras.  From film to Digital. I have owned several Full Frame cameras and currently have a Sony A7III in my camera bag. My first full frame camera was a Nikon D800 a fantastic camera with a 36MP sensor on it and it made great images.  The main difference between the crop sensor camera’s and the full frame sensor camera is of course the Sensor Size. Not in Mega-Pixels but is surface area.  So here goes some advantages of shooting a full sensor camera.

1- Low Light capability. The surface area of the sensor of a full frame is larger than a crop sensor  and catches more light. Bodie Island StarsMax Stansell Photography If you had a 24 MP crop sensor and a 24mp full frame sensor the size of each of the pixels of the full frame is 1.5 or more larger than that of the crop sensor.  The surface area allows it to catch that much more light which makes the full frame sensor better in low light shooting situations. Say Astro photography, Wedding photography or anything that is in low light. The images with have more detail and less noise than that of a crop sensor in the same situation.

2- Shallower Depth of Field.  The depth of field is how much of your frame is in Gardenia focus. A shallow depth of field is great when taking portraits or isolating your subject with a busy background. This is maybe the biggest plus for me. I love that blurry background or Bokeh.  This makes full frame camera’s great for weddings, portraits sessions or almost anything that shallow depth of field is wanted.

3.- More resolution.  Mega-Pixels wars!  These full frame sensors can be from 12mp to 60 plus MP.  This comes into play when cropping in. So in post production maybe you took a shot of a scene but only liked one corner of the image with a large MP sensor you can crop in and not hurt the quality of the shot.  This can make this great landscape or wildlife shooters.  For example if you had a 42mp sensor camera and you cropped in 1.5 times you now have a 19mp image. Which is still great for printing. 

4. - Dynamic Range.  With a larger sensor you have a greater dynamic range. What does this mean? I’ll give Antietam National Cemetery you an example now the numbers I’m using are made up and are just used to make the point. If I use a crop sensor camera at 24mp and shoot a shot lets say between total black and blown out white there are 1000 shades of grey or color.  With that same 24mp in a full frame sensor maybe you would have 2000 shades of grey or color.  Normally you can’t see this unless you zoom in and look at a certain point of the photo and compare side by side but it is there and it is an advantage of full frame cameras. So the transition between colors will be more fluid with the full frame and more pixelated with the crop sensor.

5. - Larger Camera and lenses. For those that have large hands this can be a plus and I hate to say it but if your shooting professionally customers like to see a photographer with a larger camera. For some reason they think that you have to have that large camera to shoot professional.  And that’s not so. But it can be an advantage if your shooting professionally. So there’s that.

There you have it 5 advantages to shooting full frame sensor camera’s. They are great camera’s and I shoot both crop and full frame and I love them both.  And if you took photo’s from both camera’s and mixed them up and showed them to someone they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference of which camera took them. Believe me I have done it.  Well that’s enough of that until next week.  Keep shooting no matter what camera you have and get outside!

Hey Everyone! Hope you had a great week. This week I want to talk about Mirrorless Crop Sensor Cameras and the advantages they hold. First of all what is a crop sensor camera? A crop sensor camera has a sensor smaller than a Full frame sensor camera which is the size of old 35mm film. There are Micro 4/3rds camera's and APSC cameras. These are the ones I'll be mainly talking about but there are all types and sizes of camera sensors.  Crop sensors get a bad rap from a lot of the Full Frame and Medium format shooters.  But they are great cameras and can take great photographs. I use crop sensor camera's and full frame camera's.  But I wanted to give you some reasons to use crop sensor cameras. 

- They are smaller. The bodies tend to be smaller and more lightweight than their full frame counterpart. AMT2016-sony-a6300-review-0423-2Photographer: Anthony Thurston Especially if you are comparing them to their Full Frame DSLR counterpart. This makes them great for travel , landscape, street .  Anywhere you have to carry your gear. One of the first reasons I went to mirrorless crop sensor camera was because of size. I did a lot of hiking at the time and my full frame DSLR was just too big and heavy.

- The lenses are smaller. This is a big advantage from the full frame counterpart. Much more than the bodies the lenses are much smaller and lighter but still give you great quality. This with the smaller bodies make them great for travel photography.  You can get very good lenses in the crop sensor size.  And sometimes they can fit in your pocket! Street photographers like the smaller lenses because it makes them more inconspicuous when in a crowd.

- Less expensive.  The crop sensor and bodies and lenses are cheaper than full frame cameras.  Almost by half!  A 24-70mm 2.8 full frame lens can cost up to and beyond 2000 dollars but a crop sensor lens with the same specs only 1/2 the price.  The money you save on equipment is more money that you can spend on travel and experiences.  

- Smaller File Size.  The files that these camera's produce are much smaller than the larger sensor camera's. This creates two advantages for you.

    - This makes the camera quicker!  More frame rates! Crop sensor camera's are used for sports photography quite often because they are quicker when a photographer has continuous shutter on the cameras can be very fast and buffering is not as much as a problem as with full frame cameras. So great for Sport and Wildlife photography.

   - The smaller files are great on your computer also!  The smaller files take up less room and are easier for your computer to process! What does this mean? It means you don't have to update your computer as much and you can use that money for more experiences.  The smaller files make them easier to process and to store! 

Price Landing -Larger Depth of Field- The depth of field in these cameras are generally larger than their full frame counterparts.  The depth of field is the amount of the photo that is in focus. Say if you took a photo with a 50mm lens equivalent on a full frame camera and a crop sensor camera and they both were set to F4 the crop sensor would have more of the frame in focus than the full frame camera.  This is an advantage when shooting landscapes or anything you want more depth of field.  I use my crop sensor camera for Landscapes for that reason. Dasiy Field

To sum up there are many advantages to using a crop sensor camera. They are lightweight, smaller, cheaper, smaller file size and larger depth of field. When I was first considering a crop sensor camera I only shot full frame. I was worried about quality. I got an inexpensive crop sensor camera and used the kit lens that it came with and started comparing similar shots used with each and I couldn't tell the difference. I liked the crop sensor so much I sold all of my full frame stuff and shot only crop sensor for many years .  I've just recently got another full frame camera to play with. The quality is great in these little camera's and are a great investment for anyone wanting to get into photography.  Next week we'll talk on the advantages to Full sensor sized camera's. So until next week get outside and keep shooting.