Monolights & Strobes

Gear options for powerful and fast illumination to capture the action or create amazing effects

By David Willis

Monolights, flashes and strobes are lighting systems capable of timed bursts of light in a rapid sequence. Because the bursts of light are intermittent, they’re much cooler to use instead of most traditional continuous light sources, especially important in closed studio environments. Low-heat continuous LED lights are challenging this advantage,... Read more

May/June 2013

NEW COMPACT FOVEON CAM Last year, Sigma upgraded its DP1 and DP2 APS-C compact cameras with the unique 46-megapixel (three stacked 15.3-megapixel layers) Foveon X3 sensor from their flagship SD1 Merrill DSLR, creating the well-received DP1 and DP2 Merrill (with built-in 19mm ƒ/2.8 wide-angle and 30mm ƒ/2.8 normal lens, respectively, each lens designed specifically for Read more…

By The Editors

Benefits Of Continuous Lighting

Constant light sources are great solutions for both still and video because what you see is what you get

By David Willis

Continuous lighting is always on, and the obvious advantage to working with continuous light sources is that unlike strobes and monolights, which take a great deal of practice to learn before you inherently understand what changes will look like in a shot, what you’re seeing in the real world with continuous lights will closely resemble the image... Read more

March/April 2013

TRAVEL CAMERA Bring the Nikon Coolpix P7700 on your next trip. The point-and-shoot delivers some impressive shooting features in a compact body. A large, 1/1.7-inch, 12.2-megapixel backside-illuminated sensor, fast image processor and 8 fps continuous-shooting capability are some of the key specs. The 7.1x zoom opens up to ƒ/2 and covers a 35mm-equivalent focal-length range Read more…

By The Editors

Instant Portrait Studio

Five essential tools for creating stunning portraits at home

By The Editors

Ever thought of opening your own portrait studio? With a few key pieces of gear and a little space at home, you can start earning extra income photographing friends and neighbors and grow your business with referrals. You may already have a lot of the gear you’ll need. Here are the components for a basic setup. BACKDROP One of the most important... Read more

January/February 2013

STREET SHOOTER Hit the pavement for some candid, on-the-go shooting with the Olympus Stylus XZ-2. The 12-megapixel camera has a 1/1.7-inch backside-illuminated CMOS sensor, a 28-112mm ƒ/1.8-2.5 (35mm equivalent) zoom and ISO sensitivity up to 12,800 for solid performance in low light. The camera has a tilting 3-inch LCD with 920,000-dot resolution and supports touch Read more…

By DPMag

Storage Solutions

A smart photo-backup strategy is one of the best investments you can make.

By Wes Pitts

A smart photo-backup strategy is one of the best investments you can make. We’ve reached a point where big-capacity storage is very affordable—for a few hundred dollars you can virtually guarantee that your image collection will survive disk crashes and other data disasters. Redundancy of data is the key. The more copies of your images you... Read more

Studio Strobes

Monolights for premium studio light

By David Willis

When people refer to a monolight or a strobe, they’re talking about a light that produces a short, but very powerful burst of light for illuminating a scene or a subject and, when used to their maximum abilities, for freezing the actions of a subject or achieving high levels of sharpness in a scene. A monolight will incorporate most of the controls... Read more

Continuous Lights For Still & Video

Constant lighting solutions, from traditional fixtures to new led systems

By David Willis

Continuous lighting solutions have seen a lot more attention over the last few years thanks to the need for a constant light source that will provide illumination for both stills and video. Traditionally based on tungsten, halogen and fluorescent bulbs, the advantage of continuous lights for still shooting is that the effects can be seen in the real... Read more

Tablets

Remember that unwieldy seven-pound laptop you used to haul with you as part of your photo gear?

By Wes Pitts

Remember that unwieldy seven-pound laptop you used to haul with you as part of your photo gear? What? You say you still do? It’s time you considered a tablet! There are a lot of tablet options out there, some more or less adept as a true photographer’s companion—we have limited our selection here to models that have the ability to import... Read more

Flash & Accessories

Extensive lighting possibilities with a single flash

By David Willis

Modern flashes are extremely versatile, thanks to their compact size and relatively low power consumption in comparison to studio lights, alongside amazing features like wireless control over flash functions, a variety of lighting modes for a variety of lighting effects and automatic TTL (through-the-lens) synchronization of exposure even at long distances.... Read more

Desktop Photo Printers

Before you make a printer purchase, here’s what you need to know about the technology that makes beautiful desktop prints a reality.

By William Sawalich

If you’re like a lot of photographers, you have a high-quality DSLR and at least a few great lenses. You’ve spent time and money honing your craft, and you have the skills to produce an outstanding photograph. Maybe you’re even a little bit of a tech geek about megapixels or sensor noise or sharpening; you probably pay attention to... Read more

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