General news on the photography front
Restrictions on the right to protest have gone hand in hand with attacks on those of us who cover protests. In recent months there have been attacks on photographers, people have had equipment seized and access has been denied. Continue reading Press Freedom Protest! New Scotland Yard!
Philip – a monumental, irrepressible
force in photography and in life – and a courageous fighter against the
cancer that finally defeated him – passed away last night. Continue reading Philip Jones Griffiths Dies 1936-2008
Normally on a camera point or shoot or DSLR the using the Auto ISO is a bit of a risk as it has quite a high range and noise might become an issue to your image quality.
The Auto ISO on the G9 limits the ISO to a max of ISO 200 Continue reading Auto ISO on the G9 (quick Tip)
Adobe releases Camera Raw 4.4, Photoshop Lightroom 1.4 Thursday, March 13, 2008 | by Rob Galbraith Adobe has released v4.4 of Camera Raw, its RAW conversion plug-in for Photoshop CS3, as well as Photoshop Lightroom 1.4. New in both is support for the RAW files from nine additional cameras, including the Canon EOS Rebel XSi/450D and Nikon D60 plus a correction for poor results when … Continue reading Adobe releases Camera Raw 4.4, Photoshop Lightroom 1.4
Just found this, a film maker gets some grief on the streets of London from current.com The video covers your rights to take photos in public (UK law) Also check out Photographers under attack and Tash’s (a fellow G9 user) post on how Birmingham police forced a press photographer to delete his images Continue reading You Cant Picture This, Oh yes you can!
I am not endorsing this as a practice, but the following does show how much we love photography and just how easy it is to loose a camera. Get it insured!
Portraits, are a good subject area to learn with your G9 the large LCD screen makes composition a snip, the Live view shows pretty much what you are going to get and hopefully you can have another go if your model is willing or the image is not quite what you wanted.
Portraits are also one of those subject areas news and documentary photographers need to master as looking in the national papers recently, there seems to be a very high percentage of images that are portraits which is strange, considering how much in the world is not getting shown in the way of wars, famine, joys, accidents, climate change… (and I could go on)
The magic of the portrait is the gaze back to the viewer and it has kept many fine art practitioners busy over the centuries, so you will be following in good shoes and for a twist you can also take a look at environmental portraits, macro, abstract, etc.
The grid view on the G9 can either be a hindrance or a blessing as an aid to your work, some people will find that to much information like the grid lines, histogram are in the way and distracting. while others will like the way the grid helps them frame the composition and keeps lines from converging in the background in environmental shots, so try different combinations to see what you prefer. You could even save the settings in the custom control C1 or C2 if you use them a lot (See G9 Resources for some help if you need it)
The thing is there are rules to composition that you can follow, but then you can also break them to make for interesting views, so it’s not a thing you can get wrong; but you will be the judge, if you like it then its good.
Continue reading “Perfect Composition in Portrait Photography with a G9”
This is the sort of view you get when you look through the optical viewfinder on the G9, a simple cross hair type of pattern butt all in black, which is not the easiest colour to see with dark subject tones Continue reading Accuracy in the G9’s Optical Viewfinder
Jack Howard over at PopPhoto.com has had his hands on the long awaited Sigma DP1 which many pro’s (and serious amateurs too) have been waiting for a review before committing to buying the Canon G9.
Now I like the idea of having a point and shoot with a (35 mm equivalent) 28mm lens but at f4; I don’t think I am fussed! I like to use my Canon G9 at its widest part a lot, but I also like the versatility to be able to add a bit of ZOOM, for when I just can’t get close enough….
Last week I covered a student demo on ‘Free Speech’ and decided to try the G9’s video in a very noisy environment. During the demo I was shooting stills with my Nikon DSLR, shooting the odd stills with the G9 but used it more for the alternative medium of video, which I shot on the 1024 size, even though it was going to be published to web so was probably overkill as the quality is greatly reduced when converted by video upload sites. The 3 1/2 minute video kicked out at 115MB
As a Windows user I decided to use Windows Movie Maker (which comes free with Vista and XP) and saved it to PC format. I was in a hurry and wanted something quick and easy as it was going to be uploaded to Google video or You Tube for web viewing so I was not going to get the quality anyway
Now with video there are two components the visual and the audio, unfortunately I had not tweaked the audio settings for the conditions so the wind filter was off (when it was very windy) and the sound levels were on auto (which might have been better on manual due to the high noise levels) but I turned up a little late. Being a small. light camera I also found it quite hard to keep it steady as well, not normally a problem I have with a handy cam, but I dare say I will get better.
I also have on my PC Adobe’s Premier Pro, Flash CS3 pro, Flash Video Encoder and Device Central (the later, formats the flash video for mobile devices) so I have plenty to play with in the future
for the Apple Mac and Windows users (check system requirements) who want more quality and versatility there is QuickTime Pro which allows you to do similar editing and saving the format for iPod and other 3G files in the H.264 format which gives high quality at a low data rate
There is a short piece on The Digital Story on exporting to web using QuickTime Pro which sells for £20 in the UK, $30 in the USA so its not expensive 🙂
LifeSpy 
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