Saturday, April 14, 2007

Red and Yellow


This week I took some pictures of a beautiful Northern Cardinal and flashy yellow American Goldfinches. You can see all of the images here: Cardinals and Goldfinches I also have some new photos of the Lock and Dam at Columbus and Canada Geese and American Coots.

dpeview.com has posted a review of the Fujifilm FinePix 31fd. It's an update of the previous model 30 with a little better image quality but a minor update. This camera is pretty unique in that it is not competing for higher megapixels but for better image quality with a nice 6 megapixel sensor and 3X zoom. This camera is ideal for low light photography as the high ISO images are very usable up to ISO 800. If you do a lot of indoor photography or want a 2nd inexpensive camera to use indoors, you might consider this model. If you mostly shoot outdoors in good light you'd probably want to skip this one.

Saturday, April 7, 2007

Welcome to My Photo Blog

I created this blog to keep folks updated on my photographic forays and digital photography tech news, software, photo editing, books on photography and photo editing, tips and tutorials of merit. I will try to post at least once a week, so check back often.

My latest photos are of antebellum homes in Columbus, MS which are on tour starting the last of March for 2 weeks. You can see them and the lovely spring flowers and trees (azaleas, camelias, dogwoods and wisteria) and my latest bird photos at http://imageevent.com/jhowle. To find out more about the tours and homes, you can visit http://www.historic-columbus.org/main.html.

On the digital camera front, I was disappointed when I read the review of the new Olympus SP-550 UZ superzoom camera featuring an amazing 28 - 500 mm 18X zoom and 7 megapixels. It sounded great on paper, but the image quality is sadly lacking and some of the advertised gimics for fast shooting didn't pan out as they are only for very low resolution images. You can read the thorough review here:
http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/olympussp550uz/

The new Sony H7 and H9 15X superzoom models are due to ship later this month. Sony already has a proven track record with their current superzoom model, the H5, so I would expect these 2 models to have much better image quality than the Oly 550. They should be very popular among nature photographers. I'll let you know as soon as they are available and when reviews are posted.


Please visit my Camera Store if you are interested in purchasing a new camera as I read professional and user reviews of almost all new cameras and offer only the most highly recommended models to my friends and students.

I recently purchased Adobe Photoshop Lightroom for editing my Raw images and find it faster for editing big photo shoots and I like the results as it has a few more features than the new Adobe Camera Raw 4.0 in Photoshop CS3 beta which I have been using since it became available. I also like the cataloging of images by Collections and the ability to add keywords when importing images into the Library and the ability to search images in the Library by keywords. I have created a web page with links to Lightroom info, tips and tutorials here: Lightroom Resources. I plan to order The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book; the Complete Guide for Photographers by Martin Evening, who has written many excellent Photoshop books. Another excellent book that may be easier for beginners is The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers by Scott Kelby. It is available for pre-order.

As I mentioned, I am using the beta of Photoshop CS3. The new verson (CS3) is supposed to be available for purchase later this month. It has lots of great new features for digital photography and I plan to buy it as soon as it's available. I already have some links for CS3 tutorials on my Photoshop Resources site.

Until next time...

Judy