Once the good weather breaks, from the late spring through to the fall, many small towns in Ontario hold festivals. Quite often displays of antique and custom cars are featured at these types of events and represent great opportunities for photographing automotive details. This past weekend the town of Smithville held its annual PoultryFest, which I had the opportunity to attend. The day started out with bright, sun-filled skies…a significant change from the torrential rains that had hit much of Southern Ontario on Friday. The heavy rains caused quite a bit of flooding in the areas north of Toronto and resulted in many owners of custom cars changing their display plans and bringing their vehicles to Smithville instead.
How to Calibrate Dell Wide Gamut Monitors
In the past, hardware calibration feature was limited to premium wide-gamut models from companies like NEC or Eizo. Those models offer wide gamut, great uniformity and advanced calibration features…but at a fairly high price. Affordable wide gamut solutions with hardware calibration started in 2013 with Dell and after that other companies like LG, BenQ and Samsung begun to offer “similar” products with more or less success. It is important to point out that LG and Samsung wide gamut models cannot be properly calibrated internally with the i1Display Pro colorimeter using their software and the same applies to some BenQ models like SW2700PT and its Palette Master Elements software. The main issue with those models is that they bundle an outdated X-Rite SDK (Software Development Kit) in their software without GB-LED support, which is the current main* (see the footnote at the end of the article below) LED wide gamut backlight technology. Hence, their software won’t get accurate readings, which in turn leads to inaccurate calibration. The BenQ PG2401PT and its Palette Master software, on the other hand, come with proper GB-LED support.
New Free Email Subscription Service
We are happy to announce a big change to the way we handle and process email subscriptions for our readers. As of today, we have completely switched to a new system and migrated away from two previous email subscription systems, which will hopefully alleviate all the frustrations our readers have had with our newsletters. While we have been relying on free email delivery services from Google and WordPress for the past few years, they have proven to be very limited in terms of delivery and customization options. One service in particular would send an email as soon as content was posted, so if we posted several articles within a short period of time, it would result in practical spamming of the mailboxes of our readers. Going forward, we will no longer have these issues, as emails will only be delivered once, no matter how many times we post content on a given day. In addition, we have made it easy to both subscribe and unsubscribe from our email newsletter, so we are hoping that you will take a moment to try this new service out.
Photographing Aurora Australis on Stewart Island
It was the last Saturday of May and it was already time to go. After spending more than a week in the Fiordland National Park, walking around this New Zealand’s jewel, and a few days in Invercargill waiting for the weather forecast to get better, it was now or never. The forecast predicted a splendid weather until the following Monday, perfect to finish the 3 days of trekking on the Rakiura Track, one of the 9 Great Walks of New Zealand.
Advanced Sports Photography Tips
This post is the last in a three-part series dedicated to teaching sports photography at all levels of competency. In part one I covered the basics for photographers who are just getting started. Part two was geared towards intermediate amateurs who have mastered the basics and want to gain additional competency to bring their images to the next level. This part is for advanced amateurs looking to enhance their existing skills and create professional-looking images.
Birds-in-Flight Practice Exercise: Find – Frame – Fire!
On Father’s Day morning we had some very unsettled weather move through our area which brought with it some extremely strong winds. I couldn’t help but grab my camera and go out for a birds-in-flight practice session as I knew the very high winds would create ideal conditions for me. So, I headed out to Eastport Drive by Hamilton Harbour with my Nikon 1 V3 and 1 Nikon CX 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 VR zoom lens to capture some practice images of birds-in-flight.
The Most Desired Future Nikon Lenses
One topic that many of us Nikon shooters often discuss between each other in local groups, online forums and various photography clubs, is lenses that we wish Nikon had. Sometimes a desired lens comes from our experience from using a lens from another brand, sometimes it is something that does not exist, but we wish existed to make our photography easier, more fun, etc. While Nikon has been doing a great job filling in the holes during the last several years, there are still plenty of lenses that Nikon should update or have in its arsenal. In this article, I will go over the most desired future Nikon lenses, the ones that have not been released yet, but I really wish to see come to life soon. I guess you can also call the below a “wishlist” of unannounced Nikon lenses.
Is 10 Gbit Ethernet Viable for Photography Needs?
Over the past few months, I have been testing the new generation NAS storage array devices with 10 Gigabit (Gbit) network interfaces to see how they perform when compared to 1 Gbit network. While I am pretty happy with a standard 1 Gbit NAS setup for photo storage, any time I have to deal with stacking large panoramas, saving large TIFF files with several layers in Photoshop or doing any video work, my performance starts to go down the drain due to the 1 Gbit network bottleneck. As a result, whenever I deal with such projects, I have been using my local SSD storage for working on files and after I am done, transferring images and video back to the NAS storage for future access. So when I found out about 10 Gbit options on new storage arrays from QNAP and Synology, I decided to try them out in a productive environment. In this article, I will go over my current 10 Gbit Ethernet setup with a QNAP TVS-882T and compare its throughput to 1 Gbit setup when copying both RAW images and video, then list out the costs associated with implementing 10 Gbit Ethernet to see if is a viable solution for working professionals.
Storage Considerations for Photographers
Many photographers and videographers often rely on using local storage within their computers to store media files. Once their computer drives fill up, they often end up purchasing external hard drives to offload some or all of the data, segregating the data and making it difficult for quick access and backup. Others choose dedicated storage arrays that handle all the data in a single location, albeit at a higher cost and sometimes questionable results. For a person who is not technology-savvy, choosing a proper storage solution can be a difficult task. With so many different DAS (direct-attached storage) and NAS (network-attached storage) solutions on the market, one can get quickly confused, ending up with many storage issues. Since mismanaging storage can potentially lead to data loss and other problems, it is always a good idea to revisit your storage needs and choose the best solution that will not only address the storage requirements you have today, but also help with growing your data in the future. In this article, we will go over different storage solutions in detail, identify pros and cons of each and hopefully help you in selecting the best storage solution for your needs.
What to Photograph in the Yucatan Peninsula
The sweltering January sun offered little respite from the hounding mosquitoes which prowled the ruins of Chichen Itza in the Mexican Yucatan. Known since the early years of the Spanish conquest, the once glorious city had been eroded by centuries of isolation by the time British explorer and archaeologist Alfred Maudslay first set foot there in 1888. While strong willed and greatly experienced by his previous forays in the ancient Mayan cities of Guatemala, Maudslay endured tremendous hardships for his ultimately successful creation of a detailed plan of the extensive ruins of Chichen Itza. He set up camp in one of the chambers found on top of the building known as Las Monjas (“The Nunnery”) which had served as a palace for Mayan royalty over 800 years before. It is from this base camp that Maudslay was able to map out the site with remarkable accuracy and thoroughness, while also capturing a particularly iconic still photo of an overrun Pyramid of El Castillo among many others. In the final days of his expedition, after five months of hard work in the spiteful heat of the Yucatan coupled with a bout of Malaria, Maudslay’s health greatly declined to the point where he had to return home. It took him six months to recover from his ordeal, but his expedition to Chichen Itza would not be the last time he would venture deep into the heart of the Mexican rain forest in the hopes of documenting the lost relics of the Maya. In this article, I will go over some of the best photography locations in the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.