Buying your first DSLR digital camera can be tricky as you don’t know who’s advice to take. I thought I would share with you my thoughts about camera equipment. The strange thing about camera equipment is you can buy the cheapest DSLR body and lens and get professional results (in the right hands). I recommend Canon not just because I use the cameras, but because they are very easy to use with the minimum number of buttons and dials and have excellent menus. The Canon lenses are also very good and have been around along time now. The camera I recommend for anyone starting out with a DSLR camera is the Canon 1100 D or Canon 1000D. We have used them on our workshops with amazing results with good lenses. 12MP is enough pixels on this size sensor and you will get very good noise at ISO1600 with this camera. It is worth buying the 18-55 IS lens with image stabilisation as this helps keep your images sharp at low shutter speeds. This lens is also great for Macro photography when you add a short extension tube. The 50mm 1.8 lens is a favourite of mine as it is light weight with great quality when set at F2.8 or above, it is also a great portrait lens when used with the Canon 1100D or Canon 1000D. The last lens I would look at is the Canon 55-250 IS lens for zooming in and standing back from your subject, don’t forget to buy the lens hood for this lens at this will allow you to shoot towards the light source without getting flare. The final thing is buy a three year Warranty as this will let you enjoy photography without worrying about your equipment all the time. If you would like to come along on a workshop and try out the Canon camera equipment please give me a call 07941581330. I have put a link below to this package in the shop.

Canon 1100D Beginners Package

If you would like to come and learn about macro photography and photographing flowers, this workshop is for you. I will show you how to use the macro mode on your camera to produce a series of close-up macro images of different flowers and leaves. You can use these images as graphic wall art/canvasses. We will work in black and white and colour. HERE ARE THE NEW DATES

NEW DATES 2 Hour Group Workshop
1:30pm -3:30pm or 4:00pm -6:00pm

Adobe have now released Adobe Lightroom 4 and it’s allot cheaper. I think this is because apple have reduced the price of aperture, and now aperture is very good they now have some real competition. I have always used Adobe Lightroom from the first Beta release, and it has saved me days of work on wedding images. The ability to work manually at a wedding and produce consistent exposures has allowed us to use Adobe Lightroom to synchronise all of our images and cut our edit time down to 3-4 hours for 1000 images. I have been very impressed with the role out of Adobe Lightroom and now lightroom 4 is here I am looking at what they have changed. They have added basic video editing with the ability to change exposure ect – which is great if you are combining stills and video and need a consistent look. You can also take a snapshot at any stage of you video clip to produce a still image – This sounds very interesting as I know that the future of capture for stills could be video based. The ability to do this at a wedding to capture key moments with no shutter sound is very powerfull. I will take a look at this feature of lightroom 4 in future training videos. I also like the introduction of the Book Module and so you can now easily produce a photobook in lightroom 4. I think Adobe realise what we all want is to learn one software package and a simple workflow for video and stills. I will be doing quite a bit of video and time-lapse this year and my whole workflow will constucted in Adobe lightroom 4 and LR timelapse. The ability to use one software package to reduce the time spent behind the screen has always been the aim.

The Adobe lightroom Develop module has changed quite allot with improvements in local corrections using the brush tool. My favourite slider has always been the recovery tool which I use by overexposing the image about 1/3 of a stop and then recover detail in the highlights in the dress in Adobe lightroom 3 – It has now disappeared but I think the new lightroom 4 system will be better. As you can see from the last video Adobe have improved the process version to the new 2012 process – this will mean better shadow and highlight detail from your RAW files.

Here are a few sample videos from the Adobe Lightroom Channel – I will keep you updated

Video courtesy of TheLightroomLab.com

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4 Beta New Process Version Comparison from David Marx on Vimeo.

Canon 5D mk3 COMING SOON

Camera shop Worcester