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Category : Technology

Make every picture count

…because you never know which one will end up getting published all over the place. In a previous post, I talked about how any picture can end up spreading like wildfire, especially on the web. Shortly before the post, I shot an image for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that went viral on sporting websites. Although my thoughts on the matter at the time were a bit more juvenile, it is still interesting to see where your pictures end up. In […]

Transit of Venus

Today was a big day for astronomers. It marked the last transit of Venus until 2117. In Rockford, the Rockford Amateur Astronomers gathered at Lockwood Park to share their high powered telescopes with the public for a safe viewing of the event. One astronomer helped me get a better view by guiding my lens up to the eye piece of his four inch refracting telescope. I couldn’t hold still enough to view the whole sun through my lens but I […]

Camera phones

It wasn’t that long ago that we all laughed at the idea of cameras built into phones. They were low resolution and hideous quality. The picture of  your grandmother in the backyard looked more like a blurry shot of Big Foot running through the brush. Even with that said, phones with cameras were treated and sold like luxury items. Pretty quickly, it seemed that it became difficult to buy a phone without a camera. I had one on mine for […]

DIY nodal slide: Perfect panoramas

I remember having to do a panorama in a high school photography class. Mine was of a tree line across a lake shot with a 50mm lens on my old Pentax ME Super. It looked ok. Most things lined up. For fun, I tried another one. On the second one, the subject was much closer. When I started to line up the images, I realized it just wasn’t going to happen. Nothing lined up. At the time, I didn’t know […]

The “Chris Lee button”

Let me start off by saying this is a techy and camera-specific post for shooters. Chris Lee is an excellent sports photographer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Apparently, he is also excellent at reading the owner’s manual to his Canon 1D. Many professional photographers shoot their camera in a full manual mode to ensure they have the most control of the exposure. This works great until the subject you’re tracking runs into a shadow and your settings are now three […]