Manual exposure mode (M) is often perceived as a mode that only most advanced photographers can use. While it is true that manual mode will immediately highlight any exposure errors, which is why it is also often used in photography schools to teach how exposure works, manual mode also provides some advantages when compared to aperture priority (Av) and shutter priority (Tv) modes. Let's take a closer look.

In October of 2009 I picked up a Sigma 18-250 f/6.3 for my 7D for walk-arounds, so I could shoot any scene without having to switch lenses. My choice was between Sigma 18-250 f/6.3 and Tamron 18-270 f/6.3. The latter didn't have an ultrasonic motor at the time and wasn't focusing as fast as I wanted, so I bought the Sigma 18-250 for about $800 CAD.

It has been over a year since I released the last version of Stone Steps Webalizer. The main reason being total lack of time - the other projects I'm involved in keep me busy day-to-day. However, I was not just about to give up on SSW, so a about a month ago I started looking for ways to continue the development. After some thinking, it dawned on me that every day I'm wasting about 40 minutes on the subway and I began looking for a netbook.

My good old film EOS SII has just a single auto-focus (AF) point and can only focus on vertical or diagonal lines because its AF point had only one bar of photosensitive elements. New SLR cameras have cross type AF points that have two lines of photosensitive elements forming a cross, which allows such cameras to focus on vertical or horizontal lines.

A couple of weeks ago MSN Messenger started to crash on start-up on my Windows 7 x64 box. The message indicated an invalid memory access violation in WLDcore.dll. After a bit of searching on the Internet, I found a couple of pages that pointed to this registry value being the problem (the number at the end will be your passport ID):

I was always curious to see how different would be a scene captured on 35mm film and with a digital camera, so I dusted off my good old Canon EOS SII, bought a fresh battery and a few rolls of film. The tests described in this post were captured on FujiFilm ISO 160, color-balanced for daylight, which is the only low-sensitivity film the local photo store had in stock.

Crop factor is a term associated with sensors smaller than the standard 35mm film frame, which is commonly misunderstood, even by people who write for respectable sites, such as Luminous Landscape. Consider the Understanding the DSLR Magnification Factor article written by Nick Rains in 2002. In this article Nick writes:

‘Crop’ is a fairly good term – the imaging area is physically smaller. Less of the image circle projected by the lens is used, therefore it is a crop. The image remains the same size at the film plane for a given lens and subject distance – it is in no way magnified. It does, however, take up a larger proportion of the (smaller) frame and so it is easy to see why some people call it a magnifying effect.

I usually use several applications to edit images. I always start with Canon's Digital Photo Professional (DPP) and then use Noise Ninja, EnfuseGUI and GIMP, when I need to do selective noise reduction, tone mapping and additional editing and scaling. When I learned that DxO Labs, which maintains an awesome database of camera sensor test results, offers DXO Optics Pro v6.1.1 that does it all in one package, I decided to check it out.

Compact cameras are commonly considered as something that is only good for holiday family pictures and party shots. While there are many technical reasons why Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras produce better images, quality compacts pack enough technology to capture great photographs and the attention of your audience.

A few days ago a developer asked me if we intend to replace all archaic printf-style calls within the project with modern, object-oriented string stream equivalents. I heard this sentiment many times over the years, often substantiated by the fact that buffered stream operations are faster than frequent parsing of the format string. Let's test this theory and format a simple string in a loop using both methods.