Fisheye, the widest lens choice, offers a tremendous creative potential.

Find out what you can do and what you need to know about fisheye lenses.

I am addicted to wide-angle photography, its creative challenges and opportunities. Wide-angle lenses require rethinking your composition constantly. Eliminating clutter with a normal lens usually entails leaving it out of your frame, thus simplifying your composition. This is rarely possible with wide-angle lenses. Instead, you take advantage of their perspective, making distant objects very small. Eliminating clutter thus, requires moving around and changing your composition continually. 

I like this kind of photography. It forces me to reconsider all my compositions and puts me on a much steeper learning curve. I also love the resulting pictures, since they differ so much from the way we see the world with our own eyes. 

Telephoto lenses are creativity inhibitors. Photographers at sports events never move. They “only” have to frame and shoot. Everyone can get the same shot, even when they stand a few feet apart. Creativity then boils down to the right moment and the right subject. 

… Or how I traded wits with the Nigerian Mafia.

Unused, Unsold and Unwanted

In the past, I have disposed of my used equipment on eBay. Writing the perfect sales copy, creating images and positioning myself against other sellers in the hope to fetch a fair price took too much of my valuable time, hence I didn’t bother going through the motions and left much of my equipment unused, unsold and unwanted.

I found a better way to back up my photographs in the field.

Since laptops are too heavy to carry around all day, I used to rely on image tanks for backup outdoors. That strategy works very well for me, but it did lack the capability of viewing images. That is where expensive image tanks with RAW viewer such as the Epson P6000 come in. Since the P6000 costs about $600 at the time of this writing and this photographer is always looking for better deals, I never bought one.

I ended up carrying my laptop on many trips so that I could connect to the internet and manage my websites. Outside, I simply swapped flash memory cards and back in the hotel room, I ran backups to my laptop and my image tank. I carry the image tank into the field, in case I run out of memory.

Learn how we will appreciate photos in the future.

How I got into HiperSpace and how it looks there.

Update :

I got the pictures from San Diego and since their display is still a bit larger, I decided to update this article.

Hector send me a nice email. It turns out that the photographer had screwed up and forgot to notify Hector, so it wasn't his fault.

So here is how my San Francisco Panorama looks on the Hiperspace Display:

This is how I should display all my Panoramas.

Joby flamboyantly markets the Gorillapod SLR Zoom to “serious photographers”.  Will it hold up to the promise of freeing us from our tripods or is it just another useless gadget cluttering our bag?

Let me give you the answer right now. The Gorillapod SLR Zoom is not stiff enough and therefore, sags a bit, making very long exposures difficult, if not impossible.

…are the best value for your money.

The 190XPROB Tripod legs together with any Bogen Manfrotto Tripod Head are an affordable, versatile and easy to use combination. It is my tripod of choice for all my needs.

I like this Tripod so much, that we upgraded Dani to the same one for our last Christmas trip. It makes a big difference to have a professional tripod that just works the way you would expect it to.

Learn what you need to know about Tripods.

Here is me posing with tripods and below are the tripod articles.

• Review of Tripod Heads
• My Tripod Legs
• Gorillapod

Learn how to avoid data loss and how to shop smart.

Nothing can be more frustrating than losing pictures due to memory card problems. I shot some nice pictures at the end of a strenuous hike to a waterfall. As Murphy wants it, those images were lost, not the ones easier to take again.

As a semiconductor professional, I have some insight into Flash technology. Some of it translates into easy to follow guidelines to avoid data corruption. I put technical background information in italics, making it easier for you to skip over these sections.