Photography and Photoshop » Inside Professional Photography with Terry VanderHeiden

Sometimes a photographer is hard to buy for since most of the things they really want, new lenses, camera bodies, etc. are too expensive. For that reason, I have assembled a few photo related gifts for that photographer on your list this holiday season.  They are in no particular order, hopefully you will find something that will fill that  stocking.

Sensor Cleaner. Every photographer that has more than one lens will need a sensor cleaner.  Dust can get into the camera and end up being specks in every sky shot.  While it is possible to remove those specs in software like Adobe Photoshop, its way faster to eliminate the dust before you take the shot. However, the sensor of a camera can be very temperamental so they need to use caution.   I use a sensor cleaner from a company called Visible Dust.

One of the products from Visible Dust is the Arctic Butterfly.  It’s a sealed brush with a light that can extract dust in one or two swipes of the sensor.  There are videos online to help learn how to do it safely.

Another product from the folks at Visible Dust is the Zeeion Blower. This is also used for sensor cleaning. Instead of using canned air (very dangerous for sensors) use a soft puff of air that is virtually clean. There are special filters inside this blower to not let dust get blown back on your sensor, so you can clean with confidence.

Photo Book

This book, that I have read and enjoyed very much, is the Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes by Joe McNally.  This is a fantastic workbook that shows several set ups with portable flash units. It’s informative and funny – great for the photographer that is using small flashes to create their own lighting.

Next for the iPhone photographer on your list. This is the Glif tripod adapter.  This handy little device mounts right on the 1/4 -20 threaded mount of  a tripod screw and acts as a holder for your iPhone.  You can also use it to hold your iPhone at a slant to use with Face-time or watching videos.  Having your iPhone on a tripod is a wonderful thing.  The increased quality of the iPhone photographs when the camera is on a tripod is amazing. They will already need to have a tripod to use this product. They  will also have to buy an app to Self Timer fire the shutter when they are not touching the iPhone and there are several out there. Lastly this tripod attachment only works with the iPhone that is not in a case.  This part is a little bit of a pain, (take your phone out of its case to use) but perfectly sharp images are worth it.

Get an iTunes card for your photographer.  This will allow them to purchase apps that will make the photographs better. You can buy them online at the Gift Card Mall quickly and safely.

Some of the apps they can get are:

Camera Plus

This is a fantastic app that comes with a great working self-timer.  However the best part of this app is that it allows the iPhone photographer to select a focus point as well as a point where they can choose their exposure meter reading. Often when you are using the iPhone as a camera you focus on your subject matter. However that is not always the best place to have the camera decide what exposure to make.  This app also has many editing features  and makes it my go-to photography app.

Another app for the IPhone photographer is Snapseed.  This app allows some fantastic editing ability to your photographs weather you shoot them on the iPhone or import them to your iPad. This is made by the same company that creates high-end photo editing software like Silver Efex Pro 2 and others, that I use every day, so it works like I would expect it to.  You can create focus ranges with the Tilt-Shift program, adjust portions of the image with the Selective Adjust, convert to Black and White and many other features.  Probably the only iPad or iPhone photo editing app you will need.

Lastly if you can’t find something useful go with funny.  Here is a site that has a few photography related T-shirts. CafePress

Good luck and happy shopping.

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If you are a digital photographer, you need to know about a MUST HAVE software.  No it doesn’t help you with color balance or the focus your images for you but it can save your ass.

Here is the story:

Last month I shot an event and was editing the thousands of images in Lightroom.  I came across a section that seemed to have some images missing. In fact under closer inspection about 140 images were missing.

I went through every card I had to see all the files and everything was uploaded.  Curious, I thought (actually, “curious” was not the word that immediately came to mind).  -  I knew I shot subjects that were not in my collection of images. I started to get desperate.

Most digital photographers will tell you that because of the technology we are quite often paranoid about our images.  Back-ups backing up back-ups, etc. When images that you KNOW you shot don’t appear, it can be quite unsettling.

I downloaded a software from Lexar called: Image Rescue 4 Software and started going through all my cards.  Eventually I found the offending card, that would not even read on my computer – I ran the software on it and there were all my images, plus many more.

I didn’t realize this but when you take digital photographs (on to your media card) and then format the card – they are not gone.  In fact, the images reside on that card until other images cover them up. If you take a card and fill it up with images on one camera, put that same card in a different camera and reformat it, and shoot only 50 images – you will have the fifty new images of course, but you will also have all those old images still there.  These old images can only be accessed by a recovery software like the Lexar version.

I encourage any digital photographer to get the software and know how to use it. It can save you a lot of grief.

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