Imre Z. Balint, BSc, MPM, MBA

In this supplemental post I'll be discussing photography using telescopes, in contrast to  part "A" of this two part text that is focused on photographing the night sky without one. A Little about Telescopes and Eyepieces Before getting into the photography side of this topic, let's first take a quick look at the three families of telescopes that I mentioned in the episode . I've only written fairly quick summaries below with the intention of providing you with some overall information. If you are interested in finding out more (and believe me there is a lot to learn about scopes), check out the Web resources section. Refractors:  Refractors are basically your classic telescope style; a tube with an objective at the front and eyepiece at the back. The objective is usually comprised of two or three optical elements, the former design generally referred to as achromatic and the latter as apochromatic. Both designs reduce the effects of spherical and chromatic

In the past few days, including most of today, I have been busily reviewing and editing some of my old digital photographs; some dating back seven or eight years. Only a couple of hours ago did I finally upload just over 100 photos, but I still have thousands of shots to go through, literally. If you check out my Flickr Photostream , you can peruse through these images. For interest, keep your eye on the camera I used for each pic; you'll see images from the now quite old Fujifilm FinePix 40i , the Sony DSC-S60 and the classic Olympus C5050Z . But anyway, that's not the purpose of this post. Instead, it is about the image that you see below and I recommend you take a quick peek at the full size version; at least you can see some of the fainter stars. This photo brought back some fun memories for me. Succinctly, when I was attending university for my BSc in Computer Information Systems degree, I was told about a programming competition held at the University of Saskachewan an

The world of astrophotography is not only an enormous topic, but a fascinating one too. Episode 32 of my photography series gave a very brief overview, but in this supplemental post I endeavor to provide much more detail. In future episodes relating to astrophotography, I'll be examining specific topics in more detail such as photographing auroras, planets and processing such images. Shooting the Celestial Wonders Without a Telescope I have a feeling that if you asked some people to describe astrophotography they would likely include the word "telescope" in their sentence. Yet, a telescope is by no means required to take some amazing photos of the night sky or even in daytime for solar photographers... here comes the warning. Warning: Seriously said, viewing the Sun, whether with the naked eye, through a camera, telescope or some other means, can be very dangerous and can result in serious eye damage or even permanent blindness. Simply said, take extreme care when

After a few solid days of work, the introduction to astrophotography video is finally done! I will have a lot more to write about in the supplemental post and to provide a little teaser I'll be including additional details in regard to telescopes, calculating magnification and other tidbits about astrophotography that I couldn't reasonably get into this episode.

I thought I would take a quick moment and answer a question that was posted to my YouTube profile in regard to whether the foreground can be blurred when one is taking a photo. The answer is yes the foreground can be blurred and in fact is almost always blurry in almost every photograph taken. This may not be very apparent in many cases though, because quite a few scenes do not have anything present in the foreground; more specifically, there is nothing to see between the subject (that is in focus) and the camera lens, except for mostly invisible air. In addition, if you're using auto-focus as many of us do, very commonly the camera system will focus on the thing nearest to the lens. This is of course assuming a general setting where multiple points throughout the frame are used to determine focus. But there are a few different ways around this so you can get that blurred foreground and I'll present a couple of ideas here. To begin with, even if you're using auto-focus, s

First, I want to wish everyone a Happy and Prosperous New Year! Second, I recently got an email from an individual who wants to purchase a dSLR, but asked for my thoughts on whether a full frame or cropped sensor type camera should be chosen --especially since this would be the person's first dSLR. I have to say that I thought this was an excellent question and it really had me considering both the technical and personal usage sides of this query; in fact, it was the latter that I hadn't really pondered in the past. From a technical standpoint, full frame dSLRs generally have the upper hand over their cropped brethren primarily in regard to producing higher quality images (e.g. less noise at higher sensitivity settings) and shallower depth of field versus cropped sensors (great if you're doing portraitures). In addition, many full frame cameras have higher-end features like weather sealing, more durable build quality and shutter mechanisms, along with faster sequential