After a recent play of photography at the airshow, I witnessed some photographers using a 2X teleconverter (TC) on their gear. Naturally, feeling a bit jealous that I couldn’t zoom in  as close with my 300mm I started looking at using the teleconverter, and while this discussion will continue again a few things to note:

• using a TC uses up light so you need to have a fast lens in place. For example a 2X Nikkor will work with a AF-S lens and maintain AF capability if the lens is a f2.8 so for those using a f4/5.4 70-300VR (a quite popular purchase) you are sadly stuck in manual focus land (which has issues).
• using a TC on an already long focal lens may actually be degrading to the image so ask around or test them yourself. You may need to pair a TC an long prime lens.
• a good TC isn’t cheap, and not all are compatible with your camera’s AF and metering, so do your research.

Thanks to my friend Greg, here’s a helpful PDF for you Nikon owners.

As many of us from the film camera days have found out, moving to the DSLR has brought many enahancements but also a big bane.. focusing aids for manual focus. I miss the old split prism focusing aid on an old Canon film camera I used to have, it just seems now with the DSLR’s even using AF assist in manual mode getting a great focus is hard to get.

Doing some searching I came across a couple of useful bits of information. First an article why manual focus isn’t easy, and also a company that makes split prism filters for your camera!

I totally happened upon seam carving by total accident, which of course means that it has to be cool; I mean we hardly find the coolest stuff when we mean to… or is it just my luck?

Anyways, seam carving is a process that alters the dimensions of an image by intelligently removing pixels, or adding pixels to the image by way of an algorithm that determines which pixels carry little importance. There is a full whitepaper to read and a video demo. Acknowledgment goes to Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir whom developed the alogrithm and presented at SIGGRAPH 2007.

In a quest for realism, we often put too much emphasis in the rendering engine. While a good render engine is good to have, let’s face facts that it is still expensive to go the distance in the render engine alone. So, let’s say hello to the post process and my first in a series of battling sterility in our rendered images.

First up, film grain. If what we are trying to do is be photo realistic then we should consider the medium of film. (more…)

As part of the ever evolving techniques in CG lighting, image based lighting is something you can create yourself with your own camera. Granted, you will need to invest in some camera gear to get the image you want (i.e. wide angle lens for environment maps) but the technique of HDR images is pretty much the same and can be quite enjoyable for any photography you might be doing.

Here’s a few links to get you started and educated in the techniques of HDR photography:

Bracketing, Basic HDR information, Some Digital Photography and HDR tutorials