Your Monitor Lies!!!! Don’t be offended. It’s nothing personal. Mine lies and so does everyone else’s. “Fine,” you may be saying, “But what the heck does this have to do with me and my digital photography?” A lot because what this means is that the image that you see on your monitor may very well not be the exact same image you see when you print it out. I’m not going to get into the technical reasons of why this happens, but will focus only on what this means for us and our efforts to get dazzling digital photographs. Let’s start from the beginning....

Why don’t the pictures of your new living room, basement, kitchen or bedroom look as nice as the pictures in the catalogs? After all the money you spent on furniture, drapes, carpet and accessories, it should look beautiful. The human eye sees an angle of view of almost one hundred eighty degrees and at the same time can resolve sharp detail. In order to come close to this feat of magic, the camera’s abilities must be stretched to the limit. A twenty-four millimeter wide angle lens sees an angle of eighty-four degrees, sufficiently wide for our purposes. A wider angle lens starts...

Anyone with children has been in a situation where you’d love to get some good photos of your little darlings in the school play. Unfortunately, the last time you tried resulted in tiny faces barely recognizable. This was due to the distance and the fact that the flash didn’t carry too well causing a weak, grainy enlargement. Since you have to arrive early anyway, reserve a front row seat with a prepared sign and take a few snaps of your made-up, costumed kids behind the scenes using the props as a background. Snap a few full length photos and some closer up. If you have more than...

As a new employee of a large studio, I was afforded several one time perks. The boss took me out to lunch at a nice restaurant, some of my previous attempts at portrait photography were allowed to occupy a small corner of the display window and I was permitted to print one negative of my own in their custom lab. The picture I chose was a photograph of King Ludwig’s castle I took while on a trip through Austria. This is the famous castle Walt Disney used as a model for his Disneyland Castle. The print came out beautiful and I mounted, textured and sprayed it with clear lacquer. I planned...

Your grandma just left you an oil painting and you need a few copies; one for appraisal purposes and two for your siblings who would love to have a copy, too. A trip to the professional photographer involves a set up fee, print cost, and a negative that is unavailable for sale. The painting is too big for a flat bed scanner so digital copies are not feasible. One solution is to copy it yourself. A good 35mm SLR camera with a normal lens will probably focus to two and one half feet. Even better is a six or eight megapixel DSLR or EVF camera. Use an ISO setting of 100 or slower. Critical...

Canon xl2 digital camcorder and a chance meeting as I was on a lunch break. Did you know that you can get fed & paid to learn about video production? Picture this: Youre down the street at the local shops when you hear a lot of screaming from up a side street. What the heck was that? you think to yourself and make your way around the corner to see what all the commotion is about. To your surprise, you see twenty or thirty people screaming and carrying on as they chase a New York City taxi-cab, only to have it stop after twenty yards and back-up, ready to do it all over again. You hesitate...