Reviews on gear and software

Visiting BH

We’re back home from two very intense weeks.
It all started out at Photoshop World where I taught several demos and seminars and did a lot of demoing for Manfrotto (Elinchrom) and Expo imaging (the flash bender).

After Photoshopworld we travelled to New York where I taught a 2 hour seminar about inspiration, reaction and getting the shot. It was a huge success, the seminar was recorded and will be online in a few weeks.

 

Before the seminar I got a nice “VIP” tour of B&H showing the different departments and explaining the vision and service/products that made B&H the store it is today. In this blogpost my opinions of the tour and B&H.

Read more

ALCE review

During the time we are in the states for Photoshop World and the seminars in New York and Boston I have some guestbloggers that are helping me out in keeping you the readers interested 😀 Today it’s time for Erik Schimmel and he will give a review for a Photoshop plugin called ALCE.

 

After a fair bit of experience with this little known Photoshop plug-in filter, I’d like to share my thoughts. First of all I’m in no way connected to the developer of this software. I have the paid version that anyone can obtain via: http://store.bigano.com/

 

There are many, many ways to enhance an image in software. My preferred method is primarily working in the LAB space in Photoshop. Many years ago I bought Dan Margulis book, Photoshop LAB Color: The Canyon Conundrum and Other Adventures in the Most Powerful Colorspace. Since then I’ve been working more and more in LAB. There are quite a few things one can achieve in LAB that are near impossible in RGB color mode. For anyone who wants to improve their editing and take a new approach to color correction and control, knowledge of the LAB colorspace is a very useful thing to master.

Read more

5D MKIII

There has been a lot of speculations and rumors but yesterday it was finally announced the Canon 5DMKIII.
For me the 5DMKII was a game changer due to the video options, there were a lot of limitations at start but Canon released some firmware fixes and the video rocked, only real problem for me is the fact that when you change to record mode the HDMI output switched to SD output, but I can live with that for now….
Today on the blog the specs and my opinion, it’s just a fun blog post but feel free to add your thoughts.

By the way you can pre-order the camera here : B&H or here (use these links and support the blog)

Read more

SmallHD monitor

Today a review/user opinion for the SmallHD DP4 monitor I’m using for my video work at the moment.

Although I’m mainly a photographer I love video, always have and always will probably.
When I started video it was mainly because I wanted something else than photography, I was raised in a family where photography and video were practice on every possible locations, my memories of my grandfather for example often included a camera (and light meter), but also video, they started using video very early on and so our family was also on of the first with a “real” Betamax recorder for home use.

 

So first of all it was not strange that I started with photography but also video.
When I started with video it was tape based (but already the smaller kind), capturing to the PC was all with FAST AV cards and it was SLOOOOOW, it was normal to render a night for a video to find out you did not like a look and start over again. Although I picked up photography again when digital became affordable (my first digital was a Kodak without memory card and half a megapixel) but I always kept filming.
Read more