It’s a brilliant little solution, especially if you shoot with a few bodies or hook up a variety of mass storage devices to your computer. And it’s free!

The stock was revered for it’s color accuracy and archival properties, but it was a difficult stock to develop, so it wasn’t used widely be amateur photographers. Still, if you ever got to shoot with film and had a chance to use Kodachrome stock (in one of it’s many forms) you will undoubtedly appreciate it.

Kodachrome had a good long life. It (and Nikon) were even popularized by Paul Simon in his song “Kodachrome” from his 1973 album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon. However, with the meteoric rise of digital imaging technology, it’s not surprising to see it finally retired. It’s a sad day.

Photographers Matt Kloskowski and Scott Kelby have a new website which will air a weekly show about Nikon gear and Nikon related photography tips. This is a little strange, if only because it seems like one big advertisement for Nikon… and basically, that’s what it is – because the site is in fact sponsored by Nikon. Still, all information is good information, and these guys are giving it away. So what if they make me want to buy that D700 in the process?

While we all love Nikon (except for those who don’t, for some reason) it’s clear that DTOWN will focus mostly on gear, which is fine – as long as you don’t expect too many DIY tips or third party gear tutorials.

What I would love to see is a show like this one, but unsponsored – an independent photography studio just talking about the tricks of the trade. I love studio photography, but have only been exposed to it in school – so that kind of insight would be really welcome. The problem with most photographers these days is that most pro’s don’t like to discuss their tricks, methods, and workflow – because that’s their livelihood, and they would rather keep it to themselves. In my vast exposure to the photography community, if I’ve discovered anything it’s that the photography community is fairly insular. That’s changing though, mostly thanks to the internet and attemps like DTOWN.

We can use that system to our advantage, however, if we take the time to really scrutinize the lighting in our picture. That means looking at shadows, evaluating hotspots, determining the best direction and measure of light, and checking for color casts in the light.

One of the easiest ways to improve the color in your picture is to understand White Balance. Let’s revisit the subject now, and I’ll explain why tinkering with your White Balance is good both in and out of the camera, and why ultimately, you may not want to settle on a “proper” white balance setting. Light comes in a variety of colors. It’s not just “white”. Tungsten light bulbs, for example, are yellow/orange in color. Flourescent bulbs are somewhat green. Daylight is blue. We know this is the case because of how these types of light reflect off a white surface… and we call this color cast the color temperature of the light. The common color temperatures are often listed in a chart, which is shown below. All temperatures are measured in degrees Kelvin. Contrary to what your intuition may tell you, the higher the color temperature, the cooler the color.

Setting Your White Balance

All digital cameras contain a sensor inside which houses not only the recording surface but also a white balance sensor. This sensor attempt to detect the color temperature you’re shooting under, and adjust the White Balance setting in your camera for it. Unfortunately, there are not always ideal circumstances for the sensor to make a good call on the White Balance, especially in situations where the light is constantly changing.

For this reason alone, it’s a good idea to set your own White Balance. Most SLR cameras have a number of pre-defined values in their menu for typical shooting scenarios… like Direct Sunlight, Shade, Incandescent (Tungsten), Flourescent, etc. More modern or advanced cameras will go even further and give you a Preset option, which let’s you measure your own particular color temperature off a neutral white or grey card. This is likely the most effective method for ensuring you get proper color, but you must make sure the card you’re measuring from is neutral in color (or rather, devoid of any color cast whatsoever). Using a regular piece of white copy paper won’t produce the desired results.

By using either a predefined White Balance or by presetting your own White Balance you’re locking your camera to a value that will not change during the course of your shooting. This means you’ll not only get accurate color, but you’ll get consistent color through the shoot. You only need to worry if you relocate to different lighting conditions, at which point you’ll want to re-evaluate your White Balance and possibly change or tweak it.

Using WhiBal Cards

The above is always good advice, but you can even go a step further with White Balance cards. These cards are now offered by a variety of manufacturers, but they are most commonly referred to as WhiBal cards. They are a set of credit-card sized cards on a ring containing neutral white, black, and one or two shades of grey.

The idea is that you or your subject hold or place the cards in the first frame of whatever you’re taking a picture of. This becomes your reference frame. It’s important to remember that this reference frame needs to be shot under the same lighting conditions as you intend to shoot hereafter… so if you’re using a flash, or studio lights, they need to fire for your reference frame.

After you’ve shot your reference frame, remove the cards and continue to shoot normally until, again, you relocate to new lighting – at which time you take a new reference frame. Most post-production photography software (such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Aperture, and higher end manufacturer software) allows you to use a white balance eyedropper tool to find areas of the photo that it can use to measure from and get proper color. Click on the white card, and you should find a neutral, proper white balance – no matter what your camera’s white balance setting was set to. This works best when shooting in RAW. Additionally, you can use the black and grey cards to measure the overall tone of the image.

Satisfying Your Eye

White Balance is subjective – and while the above might get you a technically accurate white balance, it may not be to everyone’s liking. After all, that’s why film stock like Kodachrome and Fuji Velvia sold so well back in the old days… they were oversaturated, warmed up versions of reality – which is what people seem(ed) to like. We tend to remember color much more vividly then the reality of the situation… a phenomenon called memory color. We remember that apple being bright fire-engine red, and the leaves as lime green, even if the reality wasn’t quite that vivid.

If you prefer your images a little cooler, or a little warmer, that’s your artistic choice. The best way to begin, however, is always to bring the picture to it’s most accurate starting point using the above techniques and modify it from there.

Joe McNally is one of my favorite photographers of all time, and he has a slightly different twist to gripping the camera, which is especially useful when taking pictures using a slow shutter speed – allowing you to regain one or possible two stops when shooting.

Even the most modern camera bodies and fastest lenses will experience a lack of light at some point. Perhaps you just want a slow shutter to help create a sense of movement or flow in your shot. Whatever the reason – this is a handy tip. Unfortunately, since Joe is left-eyed, the trick doesn’t work quite as well for right-eyed folks (like me) – but like Joe says, there are elements that even we can take from this.

Well, maybe we all jumped the gun a little with that last post, as it seems like the community surrounding JPG isn’t quite prepared to let it go that easily. As we mentioned in yesterday’s post, JPG has been having financial difficulty and was/is unable to sustain their business model as it’s currently laid out, which isn’t surprising for any dead-tree publishing operation in these harsh economic times — when everyone is staying home and reading the internet. I suspect that even a dead-tree publishing operation as clever as JPG, who takes great advantage of the internet, needs equally as clever a plan to help keep them afloat.

We do really appreciate the suggestions and offers we’ve received via email, JPG messages, Facebook messages, Twitters, blog posts, and savejpg.com– you guys are awesome. If we had known the support would be so strong, we would have reached out earlier. The good news is that this interest has bought us a little more time, so we are now looking to keep the site open at least through next week. We’ll keep you updated when we know more. – Devin Poolman

So they have a little more time to scrape something together, and possibly some prospects as the last two blog posts seem relatively hopeful.

Initially I really enjoyed sitting at my computer clicking through photographs and judging them with a harsh YEA! or NAY! vote… and the inspiration of the JPG photo contest themes was like a school project, taunting you to get involved with the community. For many people it was a reason to get out there and take pictures, in the hopes that it would be chosen for print.

Unfortunately, a few issues dogged JPG from the beginning, not least of which was their website which made it difficult to browse photos and built a community of like-minded photographers. Having said all that, it was still hugely fun.

You will be missed, JPG. The official word is posted for prosperity after the jump.

Today is a particularly sad day for all of us at JPG and 8020 Media.

We’ve spent the last few months trying to make the business behind JPG sustain itself, and we’ve reached the end of the line. We all deeply believe in everything JPG represents, but just weren’t able to raise the money needed to keep JPG alive in these extraordinary economic times. We sought out buyers, spoke with numerous potential investors, and pitched several last-ditch creative efforts, all without success. As a result, jpgmag.com will shut down on Monday, January 5, 2009.

The one thing we’ve been the most proud of: your amazing talent. We feel honored and humbled to have been able to share jpgmag.com with such a dynamic, warm, and wonderful community of nearly 200,000 photographers. The images on the website and in the magazine were adored by many, leaving no doubt that this community created work of the highest caliber. The kindness, generosity, and support shared among members made it a community in the truest sense of the word, and one that we have loved being a part of for these past two years.

Something you should likely do before their site goes down is to head over there and download all the issues in their PDF form, especially if you don’t have any of them in physical form.

You should likely also remember to bookmark their Flickr forum, which will of course remain open.

I hope everyone else had a great time over the holiday and took some beautiful shots. Let’s get hacking.

But perhaps the most major new feature you’re getting… is the ability to take HD movies with the camera. Interested yet?

Because of the way an SLR works, which it’s mirror assembly and shutter mechanism, typically your recording surface (in the digital era, that’s the sensor) is hidden from view until you press the shutter release button, causing all that stuff to flip up and out of the way. This has been a bit of a technical barrier for doing something like Live View or movies.

In the last year or so, however, companies like Nikon have discovered ways around that hurdle. Modern Digital SLR’s are able to preview using the LCD screen and, with the Nikon D90 release… they can now take movies. This is a feature that many photographers, pro and amateur alike, may not immediately find appealing… but it’s huge. You see, not only does the D90 shoot video, but it shoots HD video (720p) and because it can use all the Nikon lenses, your D-Movie video can look better than most expensive camcorders.

Visit the Nikon D-Movie page and watch some of their sample video.

Not too much of this is entirely useful, given that there’s little to no discussion surrounding the hacks themselves, but I thought you may be interested in it. [oobject]

If you don’t have an iPhone, these apps will also work on an iPod Touch updated to 2.x firmware (though some will require you to be located within a WiFi hotspot). If you don’t have an iPhone or an iPod Touch… you’re dead to me already. I’m kidding. But no, seriously, what are you waiting for?

Photography and the iPhone are, in many ways, a match made in heaven. Apple recognized this, and that’s why there’s a whole category in the iTunes App Store called “Photography”. Many of these apps are silly, novelty items – like Talk Bubbles, which adds cartoon-like chat bubbles over peoples heads. Dig deeper, however, and you’ll find some real treasures here.

PhotoCalc is one of them. It’s essentially a calculator and guide for photographers. You can calculate exposure reciprocity, depth-of-field and hyperfocal distance, and it has a flash exposure calculator. These are nice to have, but the real gem is that you can check what time the sun rises or sets. This app would be particularly handy if you tend to shoot with a lot of flash, and even moreso if you tend to shoot that way outdoors.

Speaking of outdoors, the iPhone comes packaged with a nice little Weather app from Apple that’s pretty handy to get a rough sense of the weather in the days ahead, but if you want a little more detail, well – it kind of lacks.

WeatherBug, which has been annoying me for years on the desktop PC, is a free and fantastic way to get that kind of detail on an iPhone, and includes a satellite map. It will also bring up weather cams if any exist for that area, so you can get an idea of the conditions outside on the fly, in case, you know… you don’t feel like going outside to check yourself. All kidding aside, it’s nice to be able to get cam views on areas that may not be local to you, and having the extra detail provided by WeatherBug can be invaluable when you’re trying to decipher which way a storm is headed.

Finally, if you’re concerned about the condition of the skies you’ll be shooting under, a great application is iCSC Clear Sky Chart, which shows you in an easy to read chart form whether you’ll have clear or dark skies overhead.

PhotoCalc, WeatherBug, and iCSC are all available in the iTunes App Store. PhotoCalc costs $2.99, but the other two are completely free.

Photosynth is a product being worked on by Microsoft Live Labs, and about two years ago they unveiled a tech demo upon the world which got everyone excited. In a nutshell, the application gathers photos from a source and using an advanced set of algorithms it creates paths between these photos allowing you to browse around geographically local environments, almost like a 3D virtual world. It was really cool, but now they’ve gone and outdone themselves.

The next generation of Photosynth (which technically really hasn’t had a generation yet since it’s unreleased) employs even more techniques to smooth the transition between photographs, including color correction and steadying effects. Here’s a video of it at work…

Now all they need to do is combine this application with a rich source of photographs, like Flickr or Pbase, and they might really have something. Maybe this is why Microsoft has been so persistent with their desire to acquire Yahoo (owners of Flickr) lately. One thing’s for sure – Microsoft really doesn’t have a great photo service of their own to draw from, at least not yet, but when they do – Photosynth will surely try to take advantage of it.

Well, yes and no. Ideally this would always be the case. In a perfect digital world, the picture would be perfectly sharp, perfectly exposed, and the color levels would all be perfectly recorded by your camera.

Sadly, the world of the digital photographer is often times less than perfect.

The sceince of photography is pretty fluid and the tools are not always calibrated exactly to our liking. Sharpening is almost always applied in-camera. A certain amount is dialed in by the manufacturer in-camera and is performed by the filter overtop of the image sensor. However, camera makers need to find a balance. Too much sharpening can cause moiré with certain subject matter. Too little sharpening will cause customers to complain about soft images.

That’s why most digital cameras have a sharpening control, to allow you to manipulate the amount of sharpening that is applied to the image. Usually the amounts that can be applied are harmless levels of sharpening, and won’t do any damage to the image. Still, the process of software sharpening In-Camera does alter the image in a way that cannot be repaired or altered unless you shoot RAW.

Going beyond that is sharpening done in post-processing. Technically this is the same process, but it’s performed a step later, with the difference being that it gives you a little more control over how the image will end up looking.

So should you use sharpening? Yes. The in-camera sharpening is likely set to a level that won’t harm your picture even if you crank it up and max it out. The post-processing sharpening in most software needs to be used with a bit more care, since too much sharpening can drop vital information and render a picture useless, but it’s also a handy tool when used conservatively.

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 2 is out now, and I’ve had a chance to play with it. It’s got some really nice new features and a few interface changes. You can download the Lightroom 2 Beta yourself, if you want.
• Do you like quick access to your camera? Do you like westerns? If so, you may like the camera holster. If you own a Canon Rebel XTi or a Nikon D40, D40x, D60, D200, or D300 – you’re in luck! Grab your leather camera holster today!
• If you’re still on the fence about whether to keep your photos in their native RAW form or to convert them to DNG files, you may want to inspect this article.
• If you haven’t heard already, Flickr now does video.
• Depth of Field… if you’re like me, you love being able to achieve a narrow depth of field, but it can be tricky with slower lenses, which is why a handy DOF calculator is required. Here’s a good online DOF calc.
• There are 16 days left to contribute to issue 17 of JPG Magazine.

With many higher end cameras, you can now connect a GPS directly to the camera if you have the right equipment. With Nikon cameras like the D200, D300, or D2X, or D3 – a 10-pin port allows you to connect a GPS directly to the unit (provided you have the right cables). The problem is that this can be unwieldy, and it typically requires a high end SLR that not all of us have.

There are two slightly better solutions around this, which we’ll discuss.

Though extra gear is not always the answer, sometimes I like new gadgets. This one was recommended to me by a wildlife photographer I talked to a few weeks ago. It’s a wireless adapter from Red Hen Systems called the BLUE2CAN device, which plugs into most high end Nikon cameras and will pull the GPS data via Bluetooth. I’m not sure if something like this exists for other camera manufacturers, but if it does, let me know in the comments.

The second method, which I like, is through the use of software. It requires no extra gear, because it means only having to record waypoint at a regular interval on your GPS while you take pictures normally. All the legwork of matching those waypoints to your images is done after the fact, by a program.

Mac:

Although Mac users won’t have as many options as PC users for geocoding software, they ultimately have the single best choice with GPSPhotoLinker, which is simple to use, supports most RAW formats, can batch photos easily, and gives you a nice view of the best matching track point as well as the one preceding and following that point.

Windows:

For those who use Windows, the choices are more abundant than for Mac, but they are all slightly less stellar. The best, free solution that I’ve found so far is GPicSync, which is fairly easy to use and will insert all your geocode information into your pictures EXIF header by matching the tracklog date and time with the picture date and time. GPicSync will also support elevation and will create a KML file for Google Earth. It also supports popular RAW files like those from Nikon, Canon, Olympus, and Pentax.

Now, get lost…

Just remember to take lots of pictures.