On1 Photo Raw is having a 50% off sale ends December 2
Topaz Labs Cyber Monday up to 54% off sale ends December 2
Adorama Black Friday / Cyber Monday sale
Adobe has some Creative Cloud plans starting at 25.99$usd for individuals.
As requirements and needs change over time one accumulates a variety of camera bags and backpacks in the search of that “perfect” one “does it all” bag that does not exist!
I dragged them all out, took a photo of the bag family, and cataloged them all. (Going to have to take a new updated photo some day. Since I made half dozen or so new addition since this one was taken.)
These are the lists of the currently high use bags that head out with me. I have included a list of the entire bag family.
Lowepro seems to be the preferred go-to manufacturer for soft bags. In all my decades of use their products have never let me down!
Though the ThinkTank Retrospective 7 has become a favorite for city wanderings and air travel.
While Pelican (they also make Storm) are my choice for my hard shell cases.
I have replaced both the old LowePro Photo Trekker Classic and Slingshot 300 AW backpacks with a newer design Lowepro Flipside 400 AW backpack. Hoping for lighter weight and less stress on an easy to malfunction shoulder.
The search for a camera bag and backpack that is waterproof, weighs next to nothing, is comfortable and can hold everything including the kitchen sink continues!
Near the end of 2022 we gave away, donated or sold many of the bags we had accumulated. Thus reducing the number to the ones that were actually being used. Somehow even after “the big reduction” there remain a lot of bags that I still a need to find places to store them all.
| Manufacturer | Product | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| ThinkTank | Retrospective 7 | day hiking, city wandering / urban exploration, travel carry-on |
| LowePro | Flipside AW 400 | field kit, day hiking |
| Kata-bags | MarvelX-40DL | small vlogging camera |
| LowePro | S&F Filter Pouch 100 | Filter’s and holder rarely used anymore |
| LowePro | S&F Lens Exchange 200 AW | FlipSide add-on rarely used anymore |
| LowePro | EX 180 | “Strobist” lighting kit |
| Gitzo | GC3100 Series 3 Tripod Bag | vehicle tripod transport |
| Benro | AC1046 Tripod Bag | vehicle tripod transport |
| Pelican | 1520 case | vehicle gear transport |
| LowePro | Stealth reporter D400 AW | events |
| LowePro | Fastpack 200 | wife’s taken it for her kit |
| Manufacturer | Product | Usage |
|---|---|---|
| Benro | AC1046 Tripod Bag | vehicle tripod transport |
| Gitzo | GC3100 Series 3 Tripod Bag | vehicle tripod transport |
| Kata-bags | MarvelX-40DL | Small vlogging camera |
| LowePro | Flipside AW 400 | field kit, day hiking |
| LowePro | S&F Lens Exchange 200 AW | FlipSide add-on rarely used anymore |
| LowePro | S&F Filter pouch 100 | Filter’s and holders rarely used anymore |
| LowePro | Toploader | day trips to big city |
| LowePro | Fastpack 200 | wife’s taken it for her kit |
| LowePro | Stealth reporter D400 AW | events |
| LowePro | EX 180 | “Strobist” lighting kit |
| LowePro | D-pods 30 | point&shoot |
| LowePro | D-Res 20AW | camcorder |
| Pelican | 1520 case | vehicle gear transport |
| Pelican | 1300 case | kayaking – dslr |
| Storm | model 2500 | kayaking – P&S |
| Storm | keycase | kayaking – car keys |
| Sigma | EX 120-300 case | came with lens |
| Sigma | EX 150 macro case | came with lens |
| ThinkTank | Retrospective 7 | day hiking, city wandering / urban exploration, travel carry-on |
These are the new and just updated for 2023 TOP 10 software packages I currently use for my image and video editing. As well as the hardware I use to run them on.
Surprisingly six of the ten programs can be had FREE for non-commercial use!
While three are subscription model products, and one is free but requires custom proprietary hardware.
Links to all the applications both free and paid are at the bottom of page.
| Name | Description |
| Adobe Creative Cloud Lightroom Classic | Image developer and catalog |
| Adobe Creative Cloud Photoshop | Image Editor |
| Picolay | Focus stacker by Heribert Cypionka |
| Name | Description |
| Blackmagic DaVnci Resolve 18 | Insanely powerful video and audio editor |
| OBS Studio | Screen capture and live stream |
| qDslr dashboard | Tethering and time-lapse |
| Handbrake | Video converter |
| Audacity | Audio editor |
Links will open new tabs or windows.
| Name | Description and link | Platform |
| Adobe Photography bundle | includes both Lightroom & Photoshop for $9.99us/month http://bit.ly/2rbDvvF | w m |
| Acronis Cyber Protect Home Office | (search web for discount coupons!) http://bit.ly/Acronispp | w m a i |
The following seven six products I use can all be downloaded and used for free!
| Name | Description and link | Platform |
| BlackMagic DaVinci Resolve 18 | (video/audio editor) http://bit.ly/resolvepp – non commercial use | w m |
| Microsoft ICE | (Panorama stitcher) – no longer available | w |
| Picolay | (Focus stacker, 3d renderer) http://bit.ly/picolay | w |
| Handbrake | (video converter) https://handbrake.fr/ | w m l |
| Audacity | (audio editor) http://bit.ly/audaditypp | w m l |
| qDslr Dashboard | (remote camera control) http://bit.ly/2IVppWf Wired, wireless, timelapse, bramping, focus stacking Free on windows/mac and paid app for android/ios | all wmlair |
| WeMacro controller * * requires wemacro rail | WeMacro Focus stacking rail software https://bit.ly/wemacrosw | w m a i |
To answer that question I took a look into the past. Checking in on the mid level CSC bodies from Canon since the introduction of the venerable 3.1 megapixel D30 way back in 2000. I grouped both DSLRs and mirrorless bodies under the CSC umbrella.
I created a table of a brief history of Canon DSLR & Mirrorless introduction dates and their pricing at the time of introduction.
Not including the top end 1D series and low end Rebel series.
Basically cut the top and bottom off, just looking at the middle so called prosumer level bodies.
The table lists the Canon body “Manufacturer Suggester Retail Prices” in the USA at time of their announcements.
Which surprisingly seems to have remained fairly stable over the years for each series of bodies.
If you factor in the ever rising inflation rate the actual cost of the bodies has in fact been slightly decreasing! Right along with the decreasing buying power of the mighty dollar as the years advance.
| Body | Month | Year | Suggested Price at introduction | Megapixels | Processor | Sensor Size |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| D30 | May | 2000 | MSRP US$3,500 | 03.1mp | – | |
| D60 | February | 2002 | MSRP US$2,199 | 06.3mp | – | |
| 10D | February | 2003 | MSRP US$1,499 | 06.3mp | DIGIC | aps-c |
| 20D | August | 2004 | MSRP US$1,499 | 08.2mp | DIGIC ii | aps-c |
| 30D | February | 2006 | MSRP US$1,399 | 08.2mp | DIGIC ii | aps-c |
| 40D | August | 2007 | MSRP US$1,299 | 10.2mp | DIGIC iii | aps-c |
| 50D | August | 2008 | MSRP US$1,399 | 15.2mp | DIGIC 4 | aps-c |
| 60D | August | 2010 | MSRP US$1,099 | 18.0mp | DIGIC 4 | aps-c |
| 70D | July | 2013 | MSRP US$1,199 | 20.2mp | DIGIC 5+ | aps-c |
| 80D | February | 2016 | MSRP US$1,199 | 24.2mp | DIGIC 6 | aps-c |
| 77D | February | 2017 | MSRP US$0,899 | 24.2mp | DIGIC 7 | aps-c |
| 90D (end of line for xxD) | August | 2019 | MSRP US$1,199 | 32.5mp | DIGIC 8 | aps-c |
| 7D | September | 2009 | MSRP US$1,699 | 18.0mp | dual DIGIC 4 | aps-c |
| 7D mk-ii (end of line for 7D series) | September | 2014 | MSRP US$1,799 | 20.2mp | dual DIGIC 6 | aps-c |
| 5D | August | 2005 | MSRP US$3,299 | 12.8mp | DIGIC ii | FF |
| 5D mk-ii | September | 2008 | MSRP US$2,699 | 21.1mp | DIGIC 4 | FF |
| 5D mk-iii | March | 2012 | MSRP US$3,299 | 22.3mp | DIGIC 5+ | FF |
| 6D | September | 2012 | MSRP US$2,099 | 20.2mp | DIGIC 5+ | FF |
| 5DS | February | 2015 | MSRP US$3,699 | 50.6mp | dual DIGIC 6 | FF |
| 5DSr | February | 2016 | MSRP US$3,899 | 50.6mp | dual DIGIC 6 | FF |
| 5D mk-iv (end of line for 5D series) | August | 2016 | MSRP US$3,499 | 30.1mp | DIGIC 6+ | FF |
| 6D mk-ii (end of line for 6D series) | June | 2017 | MSRP US$1,999 | 26.2mp | DIGIC 7 | FF |
| Mirror less R series All EF series discontinued | ||||||
| R | October | 2018 | MSRP US$2,299 | 30.1mp | DIGIC 8 | FF |
| RP | March | 2019 | MSRP US$1,299 | 26.2mp | DIGIC 8 | FF |
| R5 | July | 2020 | MSRP US$3,899 | 44.8mp | DIGIC X | FF |
| R6 | July | 2020 | MSRP US$2,499 | 20.1mp | DIGIC X | FF |
| R3 | November | 2021 | MSRP US$5,999 | 24.1mp | DIGIC X | FF |
| R5C | March | 2022 | MSRP US$4,799 | 44.8mp | DIGIC X | FF Cinema |
| R7 | June | 2022 | MSRP US$1,499 | 32.5mp | DIGIC X | aps-c |
| R10 | June | 2022 | MSRP US$0,799 | 24.2mp | DIGIC X | aps-c |
| R6-mkii | November | 2022 | MSRP US$2,499 | 24.2mp | DIGIC X | FF |
| R8 | February | 2023 | MSRP US$1.499 | 24.2mp | DIGIC X | FF |
| R50 | February | 2023 | MSRP US$679 | 24.2mp | DIGIC X | aps-c |
I am at the point I don’t know why I am bothering.
It is 2nd quarter 2019 and I have not taken a single image I was actually interested in taking this year so far.
Yes images have been made, but all for others, nothing that I would have dragged out equipment for given a choice.
Maybe it is finally time to hang up the cameras.
Many of the photo cohorts I know have gone a different route.
They run out every now and then to hunt down a few great images, while videoing their trip and process.
Filling up a lot of time with impressive drone shots and b-roll to try to create a compelling video,
then trying to use it to pedal their photo trips and courses.
Basically they have become photo-tour guides who also happen to take images occasionally.
For now it seems to pay well, one of the few remaining areas that still does.
But nothing I currently have interest in doing.
It is said “Never say never”, for me it seems I have reached the end of my interest in the pastime, at least for now.
Who knows maybe I’ll find something to get me going again someday, maybe not.
At the moment I am deciding whether to close out the social media groups, pages and accounts on Facebook/Instagram/twitter.
Many of which seem to have taken rather obnoxious turns, with the slobs hiding behind their keyboards spewing vitriol
at each other in many of what used to be former great groups.
I have already deleted my memberships from the ones that have degenerated the most, now deciding on the rest and the accounts themselves.
New: Vero has launched a desktop app with limited capability, so you can now maintain your id stream from a real computer not just the mobile apps!
Vero is an image sharing social media service similar to Instagram with some MAJOR usage differences!
Vero has (image, video, music, text, several others) post type capability and you can select which you want to see for the people you follow, and you can restrict who can see your post to your connections or followers.
there are NO AD’s to flood your timelines.
and it has a NO algorithm linear timeline, so you see what people are doing as they post the content.
Right now it is experiencing explosive growth. Over the last few days Vero has become adopted by photographers and other creatives who are flocking in droves to set up accounts on the service.
Photographers and creatives who are completely fed up with the crazy things and algorithm scrambled timelines happening over on Instagram.
It’s user base streaked past the 1 million mark to well over 3 million in just the last few days. And its continuing to rapidly grow. This unexpected explosive growth has causing service interruptions as the servers it is on could not handle the new rapid load growth.
Originally the first million users to signup were to have free lifetime access, after which new users would need to pay a small yearly access fee.
However the unintended service interruptions are good news for new people wanting to setup accounts. As they have caused Vero to extended the lifetime free signup access to new users until they get all issues resolved from the high growth rates.
A side benefit of becoming a paid access service might be no or few bots!
After all who is going to want to pay to create automated spam bot accounts?
The app “Vero – True Social” has jumped to #1 in downloads on google store and itume’s. (Currently it is only accessible from a mobile phone platform.)
Will it be successful and knock the ad clogged, scrambled timeline, berzerk rules on who see what post Instagram out?
Only time can tell!
But if Instagram does not wise up and clean up its growing stupidity Vero has a good chance at taking over.
Is it for you? Can’t say. But I grabbed my slot while the getting was good (free) and will see what develops on this new platform.
For more information their website is at https://www.vero.co/
We decided to take a short day trip to go do some photography at the Wild Water Preserve in Minden, on the coldest day of the year so far.
The Minden Wild Water Preserver Harrington Park is a stretch of rapids
that run along a portion of the Gull river between Minden Lake and Horseshoe Lake.
They can be reached by following Horseshoe Lake Road [County Road 20] from Highway 35.
About a 2.5 hrs. drive north east of Toronto on highway 35.
Whitewater Ontario owns and operates the Minden Wild Water Preserve.
The preserve boasts a campground, amenities and hiking trails on the 100 acre parcel of land for members.
The river’s whitewater section is 800 meters long and ranges from Class II to IV rapids with large rocks providing some interesting obstacles.
When kayakers are actively running the rapids, especially in the warmer season, the preserve becomes a very popular and hectic site.
In winter the area is more serene, although the water seems even more wild!
I made of the waters rushing through the Wild Water Preserve during a cold snap (around -25c) of winter.
More information can about Minden Wild Water Preserver Harrington Park can be found here
cloudscapes
Of Interest to photographers are the former Adobe Lightroom CC has been renamed to Lightroom Classic CC
And the new Lighrtoom CC is now cloud based.
Includes the all-new Lightroom CC and 1TB of cloud storage.
US$9.99/mo.
Includes the all-new Lightroom CC, 20GB of cloud storage, Lightroom Classic CC, and Photoshop CC.
US$9.99/mo.
Includes the all-new Lightroom CC, 1TB of cloud storage, Lightroom Classic CC, and Photoshop CC.
US$19.99/mo.
That’s US$10/mo for 980meg of additional storage?
In a year you could by a 4tb drive for the same amount, and handle your own backups.
For now think I will stick to the base photography plan!
Only time will tell how this will work out for them, but working in high end “cloud” systems for years I would not trust my personal important data to any of them.
Hacks, cracks, thefts and redundancy failures oh my.
Now the fun starts checking in on just how well these updates and new programs really work!
Sky Crystals – Unraveling the Mysteries of Snowflakes by Don Komarechka
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Great book! It is a hardcover printed on a heavy stock that showcases the images very well. The book is divided into 3 main sections, with lots of very well reproduced images.
The first section goes into the science and mechanics of how snow crystals are formed.
The second covers the equipment and how-to of shooting your own images of snowflakes.
And the final section covers post processing the many shots in software to arrive at the final image.
Highly recommended read if you are interested in the science, or photography of snowflakes or even just looking at all the pretty pictures of these short lived wonders.
It was a catalyst in rekindling my interest in macro photography!
Very pleased to have purchased it!
View all my reviews on Goodreads
The book can be obtained from http://skycrystals.ca/
Construction equipment
DAM is a pain at best of times.
Trying to hammer out workable, reliable and consistent backup schemes, file naming conventions, image workflow, key wording, meta data is not easy.
And as you keep changing things to hopefully simplify your work, you usually ending up with a lot of inconsistencies in the old image archives.
At least until I attended Gavin Gough’s Photo Workflow seminar at Photoshelter and watched his video on Vimo
The first changes to my workflow include adding a new step to my backup strategy, and completely renaming all my existing image files! Would be a big ouch except it is actually turning out to be a painless process!
Good thing was my existing backup strategy was already good (decades of working as a IT analyst pays off) but even here I added a new step to separately backup all the raw image files automatically as they come in to an external drive using a neat feature of lightroom I did not know even existed!
At the moment all my existing working image files are being renamed to a consistent naming convention (one day at a time, just so I can watch what is happening) and converted to DNG format files.
All being done automatically and being handled by LightRoom itself!
Yes, I did take a full snapshot backup of the entire image library before beginning this process, so reverting in case something “not good” happens would be easy.
This is one eBook package (includes a lot of extra like pre-built Lightroom presets to speed things up) that can really help your workflow especially if you are handling large volumes of image files.
Wish I had found it sooner, going back and converting 10’s of thousands of digital image files to the new consistent workflow format from many years of shooting is going to take a bit of time.
The next step will be to implement the tagging process to keep track of where individual images are within the workflow process.