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Helpful Steps To Choose A Great Lightweight Portable Tripod
by Roberta Hochreiter

The tripod is an absolute must because after hiking into an area you become winded and tired and are much less likely to hold your camera still. Also, if you are using a telephoto lens, setting up a panoramic shot or using long shutter speeds you will need a tripod to eliminate shake and create sharper photos. You’ll want a tripod that is lightweight, compact but still has the features you need.
1. Important Elements in Chosing a Tripod
No one tripod will meet all your requirements, so you must determine the elements most important to you and chose the ones which meet your main needs. When you are purchasing a tripod you want to pay attention to these five things.

1. Weight
2. Height [with and without the center column raised]
3. Stability
4. Durability
5. Ease of adjustment

The lighter tripod is easier to carry around. There are trade-offs, of course. The lighter tripod is not as stable particularly when raised to its maximum height. There are materials on the market now such as carbon fiber, which help cut the weight of larger tripods. The down side of these tripods is the price. They are quite a bit more expensive than those made of aluminum.

Height is crucial, because standing hunched over your camera all day will really put a crimp in you enjoyment. Also, you want to think about the portability of the tripod. The smaller it compacts down, the more portable it is.

Stability is very important because this is basically the point of using a tripod. Some tripods come with a hook in the bottom of the center post so you can hang a weight on it to keep it steady, particularly if it is windy. Camera shake, even just a little will decrease the quality of your photographs. A tripod is just about mandatory if you are going to take long exposures, use a telephoto lens or take panoramic shots. Read the rest of this entry »

Important bits and pieces for landscape photography.
There is a lot of photography accessories on the market today - some are very useful, but most of them are a waste of money. Here are five of the most important accessories for landscape photography

Tripod: A tripod is important for one main reason, keeping your images sharp. You’ll want to select a small aperture to maximise depth-of-field, so you should be using a shutter speed of less than 1/60 second. It’s impossible to get a sharp image holding your camera in your hand at these slow speeds.

When choosing a tripod pick one made out of carbon fibres, these are light to carry but are sturdy in the ground. Choose a tripod that the legs will spread out far, this will help to optimise the strength of your support.

Filters: A small selection of filters is well worth packing when heading off for a trip. They don’t take up too much space and will definitely add a bit of spice to your images. A polarizing filter should be top of the list, while a few Neutral Density filters will certainly help with tough exposures. A 0.3, 0.6 and 0.9 will help with exposure without affecting colour. Read the rest of this entry »

Well we used to all go out and shoot images on our film cameras, run the film to the corner store or kiosk to get it developed and then once the prints were hand we tended to stick them away without much more than a few minutes notice. Those days are no more as digital photography has grabbed hold of the consumer marketplace. Now we have tons of images in our cameras, on our hard disks and the options of what to do with them are growing and growing every year.
Digital photography has now found its way into more than half of the homes in America. However most people still order out to get their images printed. Maybe it is not the corner film kiosk of the old days but there is still a very strong market for image printing. Nowadays you can take your images to Costco, the nearby photo store where they might have a digital printing kiosk in the store, or you can upload them to the various internet sites devoted to printing your images such as Shutterfly, Ofoto, and Snapfish to name a few. Read the rest of this entry »

There are several ways to achieve black and white digital photography. With black and white digital photography, you are bringing the end user back into a period of time when life seemed a lot simpler. Many digital cameras come equipped with a function to take these types of photos. If your digital camera does not support this function, you can still change your photographs into black and white with software programs.

You’ll want your black and white digital photography to look its best when you are finished. A technique that can help you get the best image out of your digital photograph is through image manipulation. You may find it better to convert your eight-bit color images (which are usually jpegs) into 16-bit colors first. This is important because an 8-bit RGB can be the same as a 10-bit grayscale.

You can find information all over on the Internet to help you with your black and white digital photography. These resources can be found in everything from websites to magazines. Colored pictures can look truly beautiful as a black and white display. You will usually have to convert your graphics, because although there are options with digital cameras, there are no true black and white digital cameras. Read the rest of this entry »