Any Secret Santas Reading?

Just in case Santa is reading my blog, here's my wish list for this Christmas.

Wacom Cintiq 12WX

The Cintiq 12WX is a new offering from Wacom that would be a perfect "stocking stuffer". Ok, it's more of a "laptop case" stuffer. It's basically a 12" widescreen LCD monitor with a pen tablet interface over the top. Wacom has has the Cintiq 21UW for a while, and that would be a lovely addition, but the 12WX is much more portable and practical. I lug around a Wacom Intuos 3 pen tablet between home and work right now and most of my digital editing is done on that. The Cintiq line allows you to edit directly on the screen, which would be a very nice improvement. The price is just under $1,000

Canon 1Ds Mark III

21 Mega-pixels of professional camera. I'll make room for it in my camera bag just in case. At a mere $8,000 I'm sure it at the top of the list, but then Santa has the factory at the North Pole right, so it's only materials for him. :)

MP-E 65mm f/2.8 1-5x Macro

This is a cool macro lens from Canon that can shoot at 1:1 or 5:1, which means that a grain of rice would be displayed 5 times larger than life on the camera sensor. Why? It would have come in handy the other day when I had capture vitamin capsules. B&H has the lens listed at $829.95.

If you are going to wish, why not wish big.

Give a Four Year Old a Camera....

My four year old son likes to take pictures.

He was pretty adept at using our Canon PowerShot S410 before it died. He now likes to use our Canon Rebel XT. This is our "family" camera that we use when taking most pictures of the kids around the house. It's small, and with a 50mm lens attached, very light. Not a pocket camera, but it also doesn't suffer the lag that most point-and-shoot models have. When the camera is on full-auto mode it exposes well under most circumstances and is easy to use by the non-camera people in the household.

Every so often my son will pull off a nice shot like the one below.

It just shows you how good digital cameras have gotten. With a quick focus and proper exposure they can produce very nice results (and not a bad composition either). Of course having the right lighting always helps.

That being said digital cameras can also produce not-so-good results. When the lighting isn't right for the exposure setting on the camera, the results can be less than appealing. The trick is in knowing how your camera handles the difficult situations and what to do about them.

Backlighting is always a tough exposure for a camera. Most cameras are going to be left in their default metering mode which usually takes the entire scene into account when trying to determine the proper exposure. With a bright background the camera is going to try to find an exposure that will show the background properly, leaving your foreground subject very dark.

Knowing this you can do one of two things. 1) switch the camera to spot-metering if possible. This will tell the camera to judge proper exposure off of the center of the scene, most likely the subject you want to be exposed properly, and to not worry about the background. 2) Add some fill-flash. If your camera has an on camera flash, make sure it is set to on and take the picture. The camera will use the flash to bring up the light level on the foreground subject to approximately the level of the brighter background.

Most point-and-shoots will not use the flash for a backlit scene, so it is important to know how to set your cameras flash to On rather than Auto. The picture above is a perfect example of a backlit scene. The kids are entirely within the shadow but the fence behind is in direct sunlight. Without the fill-flash the shadowed area would have been very dark.