Why Weather Sealing on your Camera is worth it!

This Nikon D3 still works!



And this is exactly why photographers buy cameras with weather sealing. I dropped my Canon 1D Mark II into the Merced River in Yosemite Valley. The only thing that broke was the battery because that's what landed on a rock. Dried it off, replaced the battery and it worked like new ever since. I wouldn't do that on purpose, but accidents happen and sometimes you have to get the shot.

Getting too Close

If you are close enough to a moose to smell it you are too close. I was way too close when taking this photo. Way too close. After this I went out and got a 500mm lens.

Aperture

When Aperture was released I picked up a copy and instantly loved it. I had been wanting something like it for years. After installing Aperture I didn't use Photoshop nearly as much. Everything goes through Aperture first. Now that Aperture is $80 bucks, every purchaser of a new camera should pick up a copy. Head on over to the Mac App Store and pick up your own copy, I highly recommend it.

Backups and Archiving

In the last few days left of 2010 we reviewed the business expenses and what we needed and decided to enhance our back up strategy. The picture above is a photo of four 2TB g-drives we purchased to accomplish part of this. It is always good to review one's backup and archiving strategy and continue to improve upon it.

There are two rules to live by when it comes to backup:

1. The best backup is the one that you do.
2. You don't have a backup strategy if you don't test that it works.

The backup strategy must be simple and easy. RAID is great but it is not a backup.

Our backup solution is pretty simple. We run MacPros with every slot loaded with drives. The main drive is backed up every two weeks to a complete duplicate using Carbon Copy Cloner (we used to use Super Duper but ran into a few problems with it) and automatically with Time Machine. Two more drives store the data and are in a RAID 1, with a Time Machine backup and two of these g-drives are for complete offsite duplication.

Archiving happens in two ways. We make copies of all outgoing disks and two complete copies to external hard drives. One is offsite and one is onsite.

We also use an online service for redundant offsite storage and for delivery.

Extreme Unicycle Photography

I have dabbled in sports photography a few times over the years and have found it can be a lot of fun, if the sport is extreme enough. My latest bit of dabbling has certainly been extreme. Unicycling, extreme unicycling that is. This is my friend Corbin Dunn, World Marathon Unicycle Champion. He rode 26 miles on his unicycle to win that title. He does some amazing things on a unicycle.



The photograph in this post is a composite of four photographs taken at high speed. The trick to making a photograph like this is to use a camera that does high speed and use a tripod. The tripod is key because it reduces the amount of photoshop work later. All photos were processed in Aperture 3.0 and finished up in Photoshop CS 4.

Aperture 3 Review

I've been using Aperture 3 since it came out. Apple sent me a copy to work with and give them feedback. I will have a review up in the next few weeks along with some tips on using it and getting started.

If you want to buy it or upgrade then Amazon has the best price in town so click the link below.

Simple Camera

This photo is currently featured on the Nature Photographer Magazine website. It was taken in Yellowstone on a very beautiful morning with a very simple camera: an old digital 3 mega pixel Canon Elph.

Aperture 3

Apple Releases Aperture 3

New Features Include Faces, Places & Brushes

CUPERTINO, Calif., Feb. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today introduced Aperture™ 3, the next major release of its powerful photo editing and management software, with over 200 new features including Faces, Places and Brushes. Building on the innovative Faces and Places features introduced in iPhoto® '09, Aperture 3 makes it even easier and faster to organize large photo libraries. Aperture 3 introduces new tools to refine your photos including Brushes for painting image adjustments onto parts of your photo, and Adjustment Presets for applying professional photo effects with just one click. Stunning new slideshows let you share your work by weaving together photos, audio, text and HD video.

"Millions of people love using iPhoto to organize, edit and share their digital photos," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Aperture 3 is designed for both professionals who edit and manage massive libraries of photos and iPhoto users who want to take their photos further with easy-to-use tools such as Brushes and Adjustment Presets."

"Aperture 3 gets it right," said National Geographic photographer, Jim Richardson. "The image editing tools are exactly what I have been asking for, they're so easy to use and give me a level of control that I never even thought possible."
"I chose Aperture because it was the most powerful archiving application around, but it's now an unbelievable imaging tool as well," said Bill Frakes, Sports Illustrated staff photographer. "I am beyond impressed with the massive changes made in Aperture 3."

Aperture 3 allows you to organize large photo libraries with even more flexibility using Projects and the new Faces and Places. Faces uses face detection and recognition to find and organize your photos by the people in them. You can view faces across your entire photo library or view just the faces that appear in selected projects. In a new view that speeds up the organization process, Aperture 3 displays faces that have been detected but haven't yet been named. Places lets you explore your photos based on where they were taken, and like in iPhoto, Places automatically reverse geocodes GPS data into user-friendly locations. In Aperture 3, you can assign locations by dragging-and-dropping photos onto a map or by using location information from GPS enabled cameras, tracking devices or your iPhone® photos.

The new Brushes feature allows you to add professional touches to your photos by simply painting effects onto the image. Aperture 3 includes 15 Quick Brushes that perform the most popular tasks like Dodge, Burn, Polarize and Blur, without the complexity of layers or masks. Brushes can automatically detect edges in your images to let you apply or remove effects exactly where you want them. Aperture 3 includes dozens of Adjustment Presets that apply a specific style or look to the entire image with just a click. You can create your own custom presets or explore the techniques of other photographers by importing theirs.

Aperture 3 makes it easy to share your work with stunning slideshows that weave together photos, audio, text and HD video. You can select one of six Apple designed themes or choose your own transitions, background, borders and titles, and even add your own soundtrack. You can export your slideshows directly to iTunes® to take with you on your iPhone or iPod touch®. You can also share photographs as beautiful prints, create custom-designed hardcover books and publish to online photo sharing sites like Facebook and Flickr, right from Aperture 3.

Pricing & Availability

Aperture 3 is available through the Apple Store® (www.apple.com), Apple's retail stores and Apple Authorized Resellers for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) and existing Aperture users can upgrade for a suggested retail price of $99 (US). A downloadable 30-day trial version is available at www.apple.com/aperture/trial. Aperture 3 runs as a 64-bit application on Mac OS® X Snow Leopard® on Macs with Intel Core 2 Duo processors. Full system requirements, online tutorials and more information on Aperture 3 can be found at www.apple.com/aperture.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

© 2010 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Aperture, iPhoto, iPhone, iTunes, iPod touch, Apple Store and Snow Leopard are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Firewire Card Readers under Snow Loepard

I just completed my migration to Snow Loepard and ran into a big problem; Snow Leopard doesn't always recognize firewire 400 card readers. In my case I'm using older microtech firewire 400 card readers but I have verified the same thing occurs with other firewire 400 card readers as well. You can find other occurrences of this at the Apple online forums here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2137004&start=0&tstart=0

The card reader shows up in the System Profiler but not in Disk Utility or Finder. It works sporadically which is the reason I went ahead and upgraded. Sometimes it works but most of the time it is a problem. The work around is to plug the card reader directly into the front or back of the MacPro with the card in (there are more problems when it is plugged into a firewire hub such as the monitor), put the computer to sleep and then wake it up.

I've been meaning to upgrade to firewire 800 card readers for a while and I haven't heard of any complaints with firewire 800 card readers or USB (except one person that claims to have problems plugging in the Canon 5D Mark I camera directly via USB but I did the same thing without any problems). So hopefully Apple or the card reader manufacturers will fix this soon.

Happy New Year

Happy New Year everyone and welcome to 2010! It'll be one heck of a year.

Here is a video of the full moon that I shot a video of last night using the new Canon 5D Mark II's 1080p video capabilities.

Update: I suggest clicking here to play it big and not playing the one below

DSLR Sensor Cleaning

I just updated my two year old post on sensor cleaning with my latest process changes. The biggest change is how I scrub the sensor with swabs and links to the equipment that I use to do it.

Arctic Butterfly Sl 700

Sensor Brushes

Type 1 Sensor Swab

Type 2 Sensor Swab

Type 3 Sensor Swab

Eclipse Cleaning Solution

Loupe


The photo above is from my backpacking trip last October in Sequoia National Park. This photo was taken just after a very large storm at twilight from Crabtree Meadows. Just to the left of that mountain in the center and barely visible is Mt. Whitney. The storm came on suddenly and left a lot of people stranded on Whitney. The next morning we heard and saw a dozen or more helicopters rescuing hikers. Many of them were day hikers that weren't prepared.

Field Guide 101: Landscapes

Mono Lake, California
Copyright © 2009 Chris Bensen. All rights reserved.


One of the most common questions I get and see around the internet is, "what's the most desirable focal length for landscape photography?" If I'm at a show I point out some of my photographs and the focal length that I used showing them that I use all focal lengths and that I tend to use the extremes. I want to get a new perspective to the scene giving the viewer something unique to look at. This does two things, it sets my photography apart from other photographers and it might just give someone a reason to look at my pictures.

Just remember to emphasize what is important about the landscape.


The photo above is stitched from 12 photos at 35mm taken from a very interesting vantage point of Mono Lake in the late fall.

Bird Butt

One of the first things as a beginning wildlife photographer you have to learn is how to avoid getting what I call "Bird Butt". Every animal has it and it is difficult to not get it. Animals move away from the photographer, that is their natural instinct. I'd do the same if I were in their position. There are a few things you can do to reduce the amount of "Bird Butt" moments you capture.

Anticipate. When I first started getting into wildlife photography I traveled to Yellowstone and I ran into a photographer who gave me a tip, "anticipate the animal, learn how they graze, then set yourself up for a great shot that might happen. That way if you get it you will have gotten a great shot and not a dozen mediocre shots."

Patience. When photographing birds they are very skittish. You need to sit in one place and wait a while. Some achieve great levels of success with blinds and other tools, I just simply get them used to me and don't make any suddent moves. Also using a long lens can help but I like to get some of the animals natural habitat.

Shooting RAW + JPEG

I have always shot RAW for the many advantages RAW offers in image quality over JPEG. With the latest release of Aperture 2.0 I have found it very easy to work with large RAW files, but recently I started shooting RAW + JPEG for one simple reason, backup. Now this isn't a great backup mechanism, but any storage device (CD, DVD, Hard Disk or Compact Flash card can fail). This simple stupid backup mechanism should reduce the possibility of completely loosing an image if a sector or two of your Compact Flash (CF) card die. A sector is what holds the data on a storage device. See Wikipedia's defenition of sector for more information here. Dead sectors can occur at any time even with the best memory cards. It does happen less frequently with the best memory cards because only the creme of the crop makes it to be the best memory cards like the Sandisk Extreme IV. I always use the best SanDisk cards I can get, starting with the Ultra II, Extreme III and now the Extreme IV. To date my Extreme IV cards have not had any corrupt sectors but they are also my newest CF cards.

So how does shooting RAW + JPEG avoid loosing an image completely? Well at least in the event of a failure the chances of a failure happening in two sectors is less likely than it happening in one sector. Since the RAW file and the JPEG file are separate files, one sector dieing will not affect the other file.

Of course the best solution is having RAID in the camera like the Nikon D3. The Canon 1D series cameras have a similar two card design but they use a CF card and a SD card requiring the user to have two different types of memory cards in order to utilize both card slots. Lame. I really hope that Canon fixes this in the future.

Nature Photography Magazine

Copyright © 2007 Chris Bensen. All rights reserved.

This photo was just published in the current issue of Nature Photography Magazine. The photo was taken at Wilder State Park in Santa Cruz. In the background you can see across the Monterey Bay. It was a very clear day. No Photoshop here, that bee is real! It took a lot of patience and rolling around in the grass to get that photo but it was well worth it.

Aperture 2.0

I've been using Aperture 2.0 for two weeks now running a few thousand files through it. I'll be writing up my review of it soon, but in general I would recommend existing users of Aperture 1.x to upgrade. The performance is way better and the RAW 2.0 engine has been greatly improved.

You can purchase Aperture 2.0 from Amazon link below to help support this blog. It won't cost you anything and it's cheeper than buying it from the Apple website.

Epson Printer Driver for Leopard

I just noticed today that Epson has released beta Leopard printer drivers for the following printers:

Epson Stylus Pro 3800 Series
Epson Stylus Pro 4800 Series
Epson Stylus Pro 4880 Series
Epson Stylus Pro 7800 Series
Epson Stylus Pro 7880 Series
Epson Stylus Pro 9800 Series
Epson Stylus Pro 9880 Series
Epson Stylus Pro 11880 Series

Click here to download them. Once they are officially released there will be little to hold me back from upgrading to Leopard.

Aperture and Time Machine

With the update to Leopard 10.5.2 now Time Machine works properly with both Aperture 1 and 2 libraries. Apple updated the support article on the issue. Now all I need is the Leopard Epson 4800 printer driver and I'll be all set to upgrade to Leopard.

Aperture 2.0

Apple released Aperture 2.0 today. It requires the latest Tiger or Leopard. The price has come down a bit from Aperture 1.0 to $199 and there is a $99 upgrade. There is also a free trial.

The Aperture page has lots of details and videos to watch. They claim 100 new features. This release they were focused on speed which is a welcome feature.

I've been using Aperture since it came out and even worked with Apple a bit to give them feedback. Over the next few months I'll evaluate Aperture 2.0 to see what it has to offer.

You can purchase Aperture 2.0 from Amazon link below to help support this blog. It won't cost you anything and it's cheeper than buying it from the Apple website.

Review: Klean Kanteen and SIGG Water Bottles

Kleen Kanteen and SIGG water bottles are my first choice water bottles. I used plastic bottles for years but the taste of plastic and reading made me change out my water bottles. Both brands have sizes that fit in most drink holders.

The SIGG bottles are a bit lighter than the Kleen Kanteen bottles since they are enamel coated aluminum but shouldn't be frozen or put into a dish washer. The Kleen Kanteen bottles are stainless steal, toxic free, dishwasher safe and can be used with hot and cold liquids. The Kleen Kanteen bottles are a bit noisy to open since they are stainless cap and a stainless bottle. The SIGG bottles have a plastic top which is much quieter. SIGG bottles have nice pretty designs which appeal to some people. If you like the stainless look then the Kleen Kanteen bottles will appeal to you.

Both water bottles are great bottles. Each has some advantages over the other but both are light and taste free. When backpacking I'd prefer to use SIGG, but day to day I prefer the Kleen Kanteen bottles since they can be cleaned in a dish washer and can handle any liquid you can put in it.