Imre Z. Balint, BSc, MPM, MBA

Now that's the way the episode on aperture should have been done the first time! I'm definitely happy with this show; properly scripted and plenty of diagrams and graphics to clearly illustrate the topic. Plus, I included a much better and detailed explanation of it too! As usual, there are some links below if you'd like to find out a little more about the topic. Some of these sites (even Wiki, although I'm not a huge fan of it as more or less anyone can edit the articles) go into a fair bit of detail, but that of course that doesn't mean you need to know everything about f-numbers and entrance pupils to be a good photographer. As long as you have a strong grasp of the fundamentals, you'll be able to relate and manipulate settings with ease and most importantly, come away with the results you expected. And speaking of relating... I did want to give a few more examples of how aperture, shutter speed, and sensitivity (ISO) interact. Below are some exposure se...

Hoot and holla! I finally finished Aperture Revisited ! I am pooped as I've been working all day long on this video, along with having to fix the black hole shielding on my space craft. You can get a glimpse of it, in addition to some bloopers, in the video. As for the actual supplemental post, I should have that finished in a few days, so do keep checking back. L8r!

Here's an interesting relic from the mid 90's... 1996 if my memory serves me right. I decommissioned an ancient computer system I began using as a dust collection apparatus many years ago, which will soon be happily recycled into whatever old computer systems are recycled into, and still adhered to the hard drive was this sticker (see image below). Yes, you see that right. It's the price tag for an incredibly spacious and very speedy 2.1GB Ultra-Wide SCSI hard drive. Back then, the drive this sticker belonged to was state of the art. And who could really argue with that price? $1,430? Sold! I don't think I've seen hard drives this expensive these days, excluding some of'em fancy solid states ones. And in case you're wondering what I was doing with such a super-duper crazy fast drive, the answer is video and 3D animation. Back in the good old days, when the World Wide Web had 12 sites, three with photos and not just text, you had little choice but to get on...

Before I get into the supplemental post, I just want to say that I've been getting some great feedback for Episode 20 and I'm always happy to get comments - thank you all! Now something I did not mention in the video relates to where this effect is and could be used. Funny thing is as I was running through my video before uploading it, my father walked in the room with a pamphlet. He opened up the leaflet and to my surprise there was a photo of a couple of people riding on a motor-scooter, with a similar zoom effect I showed off in the video. Neato! Indeed this effect is not one that I believe would work in many places, but it's a clever way to illustrate or add movement to a photograph, as well as to convey mood in some cases. Aside from two wheeled vehicles, I've also seen such shots with cars and aircraft, along with zoomed shots through  sunlit forests . Flickr is a great site to conduct some searches to see what photographers are coming up with. Another point I...

Late night has crept upon me again, but that didn't stop me from uploading the 20th episode in my photography series! I'm still working out the details on the aperture remake, but bare with and eventually you shall see that one appear from the mist. Anyway... hope you enjoy this quick trick shot video and the official supplemental post will come tomorrow. L8r!

Well I think it's about time that I finished writing the supplemental post to RAW vs. JPEG Part 2 ! First up, during the JPEG cons segment I talked about how there is no going back to an original image state per se. In a way this is only partially true. As long as you keep a copy of the original JPEG file that came out of the camera, then you can always open it up time and time again and save it as a different file (e.g. Photoshop format) to edit it further; so you can in fact return to an "original image state" if need be. But, if you save the original JPEG file over and over again under the same filename, keep in mind that the quality will degrade; in a remote way, this is somewhat similar to making a copy of a copy, then a copy of that copy, etc. Each time you save the file, it is compressed again and again, and each time a little bit more of the image quality is lost (in all fairness though, there is a lossless JPEG type ). On the other hand, working with a RAW fi...