Book Review - Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain

(click on image to purchase this item from amazon.com)



This book is a fantastic way to get more creative - not just about learning to draw but to see whatever you're creating in a more meaningful way. A big part of any creative enterprise, from drawing to photography to writing a screenplay, is to get at the feelings about the subject - not just create an accurate representation. This book taught me more in a few lessons that 20 years of reading dozens of other books and looking at art.

You don't have to a be "talented sketch artist" to get going on the exercises in this book - just a willingness to do the exercises. I'm a photographer, and can draw a little. But I'm nothing compared to most artists who use pencils and pens. However, I still got so much out of this book and doing the exercises and have been able to push my photography even further because of it. So, yeah, by now you've probably guessed I highly recommend this to anyone who is pursing a creative career or just a creative life.

Hack a Canon

http://lifehacker.com/387380/turn-your-point+and+shoot-into-a-super+camera

Well, I don't know if I'd call it a Super Camera, but this hack is pretty cool if you want to push your Canon point and shoot into a better camera. The Canon Hacker's Development Kit, aka CHDK, is a firmware enhancement you put on your camera's memory card and it does magic.

What does this do to it? You can get RAW files for better images, you can add Motion Detection for security or shooting lightening, etc. You can play games on your Canon P&S. Some of the tricks are really cool, like way higher shutter speeds such as 1/12,500 or faster - which is faster than my dSLR Canon 5D, or really really slow like 65 seconds - yes over a minute.

If you like to shoot videos and - like me - are disappointed with your P&S's short video capture time, this hack will be something you'll have to do.

There's quite a few scripts being developed for this hack to add even more new features. Someone even developed a game to play on your P&S.

NOTE: I have not tried this myself, so don't know how good or stable the hack is, but would love to hear from someone who's done it.

Lots of people coming by

Yesterday, BestPhotoLessons.com had 139 people come to the site and viewed 350 pages.

I just compared the yearly stats and every year visitors just about doubles. We've almost had as many visitors so far this as we had last year.

It's really gratifying to see so many people using the site. Thanks to everyone who visits.

And if you would like to suggest more things you'd like to see here, by all means leave a comment or email us.

Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman

Gorgeous photos and essential wisdom from those who've experienced life and have made a difference, photographed and produced by New York photographer Andrew Zuckerman.

We should all take these lessons to heart - and for the photographers, be inspired both by the photography and scope of this book, which includes a DVD with the interviews.


The Trailer:








Also see the web site for the book if you want to learn more and see the "making of" - great for us photographers. www.wisdombook.org

Getting the perspective

Pretty much every camera now has at least one zoom lens. But how do you make better use of the various lengths of the lens (or lenses if you have more than one lens)?

Try this, pick a subject preferably a person or person sized object. Set your lens to the longest it goes and move yourself until the subject pretty much fills the lens. Now, zoom out just a bit and move until the subject fills about the same amount of frame. Zoom out some more, and move again. Keep doing this until you've gone through the whole length of the zoom on your camera.

Now review the pictures and check out how each image looks.

Bathroom 100

Learned this from the Tech Guy Podcast: Go into your bathroom, close the door and shoot 100 photos of the inside of your bathroom.

The first 30 are easy. Then you have to work at finding new things and new ways of seeing the very familiar. I'd never heard of this exercise before, but thought it sounded cool, so I did it.

Now, I recommend you do it - this is one of the better exercises I've done.

New Blog for the site - and "Depth of Field" vs "Sharpness"

This is a new section for BestPhotoLessons.com - we're adding a blog to add some new content to the site in ways that may not need a full article or stand alone page. By all means, leave a comment or otherwise let us know if there's anything you'd like to see on the blog or on the site.

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Onto The Blog:

Might do a video of this - a viewer of our YouTube videos asked about sharpness of a lens and best aperture for that as opposed to depth-of-field. Great question.

As a rule, the highest sharpness of a lens is about 2 stops closed down from the maximum aperture - ie. if the maximum is f2.8, then f5.6 would be about as sharp as the lens will get (f2.8 --> f4 -->-f5.6 = two stops.)

Imagine you have a group of friends standing in front of you, about 7 feet away, and you want to shoot a picture of them. You're using the 24-75mm f2.8 lens that I have, and you set it all the way out at 75 mm to get a tighter image, and at f5.6 for "the maximum sharpness." In the group, the nearest person is 7 feet away, but the furthest is 10 feet away. You focus on the nearest person and take the shot.

However, when you later see the shot on your computer, the nearest person is very sharp. But, everyone behind her are all fuzzy. Hmmm. What happened?

At a distance of 7 feet with that lens and fstop, the total "depth" of the focus with that lens is only 8 inches. The near limit is 6' 7" and the far limit is 7' 6" - so your back person is now 2'6" out of the ideal focal range.

Being persistant - and doing a little research - you re-assemble your friends, and take the shot again. But, this time you set the camera to f16 and focus on someone in the middle - between the nearest and farthest people, about 8'3" from the lens. Now the near limit of focus is 6'10" which is closer than the near person, and the far limit is 10'6" which is just past the furthest person - the total depth of focus has increased to 3'9" (up from 8 inches before.)

Looking at the image on your computer you can see that the middle person is pretty much as clear as the front person was before, but now everyone is acceptably in focus and looking great.

Technnically the focus point is a little softer than at the lower f stop, but its so close you can't really tell without scientific instruments - and you've gotten the "out of focus" people back into the shot.

All of this, of course, changes with different focal lengths, different distances to the subject and so on. You can do some research online to find out more. If you really want to get technical, you can look up "Circle of Confusion."

I recently downloaded an iPhone app called PhotoCalc which gives you all these numbers, and a lot more information as well.

Hope this clears a few things up for those who need to know.