Image Stabilizers - A Great Lens to Add to Your Photography Equipment Collection

By Mikel Freije

Image stabilizers are schemes to compensate for the motion of images due to air turbulence or telescope vibration. The most popular scheme is to use the so-called tip-tilt mirror. Image stabilizers have been around for a while in the home video recorder market, but have only recently has this technology become available to the stills photographer. As with a number of the previous breakthroughs this innovation was introduced by Canon. Image stabilizers work to give you sharper pictures by counteracting camera shake. Image stabilized lenses and cameras use two tiny gyros that precess with camera movement and send a signal via a servomotor to move lens elements, a prism, or the sensor plane in the opposite direction of your camera's movement.

Lens length does not alter during zooming and the front lens element does not rotate during zooming or focusing. The lens employs an almost perfectly circular barrel aperture, helping create attractive, even background blur. Lenses or cameras with image stabilization help, but they're often quite expensive. Surprisingly it's a bolt, washer, and some string.

Shoot Only IS mode is only activated when the shutter button is pressed. When set to Continuous, some blurring may occur depending on the subjects. Shooting in low light situations of course. With latest Image Stabilizer lens, you can handhold up to four stops to get usable picture. Shoot enough and you might get lucky and get a sharp one, even at really long speeds.

Secondly, an optical system increases power drain by roughly 30 percent when used constantly, reducing battery life. Finally, any type of stabilizer can lead to some unsharp images because it's deactivated after a few seconds of nonuse to conserve battery power. Second, high ISO images appeared "soft" because fine details were obscured by digital noise or by excessive (automatic) noise reduction processing.

Canon was able to reduce the overall size and weight of the binoculars by incorporating a new, Tilt Mechanism Image Stabilizer system. Unlike other Canon Image Stabilizer binoculars which use a vari-angle prism composed of two glass elements and a flexible bellows, the 8x25 IS model works by "tilting" a single lens element in the left and right lens barrels to counteract shake. Canon FS 100 Provides spotlight, portrait, nightmode, fire work, sports, snow, beach and sunset shooting modes for better quality. Canon and Panasonic use optical image stabilizer technology in selected cameras of their product ranges. The technology comes with specialized sensors inside the camera that detect a shake or wobble in the lens.

For more information on Image Stabilizers visit our site: All You Need to Know About Canon Image Stabilizers.

The Secret of Digitizing Your Old Photos

By Alex Don

Do you have a large collection of old photographs taken by traditional cameras? It is then really necessary for you to digitally process all these old photographs and import onto your computer. Otherwise all of the old memories collection would be lost in no time.

It is observed that all the photographs imported from a photo scanner come with a very big size image file. The file is a TIFF file supporting very high quality image resolution and color depth. You may find that your photographs are imported with varying sizes as they might have on actual print. Now it is necessary to resize all those photographs to similar sizes for easy storage and maintenance. I generally prefer to use a free online picture resizer to resize my photo collection. These picture resizing tools make it very easy to resize multiple pictures at once.

An online picture resizer is a free web based service on a website, generally offered with some functionality limitations (picture size limit, file size limit etc.). These tools help you to resize pictures online from wherever you are. It is essentially used by people moving around the world or travelers. You don't need to have a photo editor on your computer or laptop to resize your pictures.

Before you resize the photographs, you can adjust the brightness, contrast and other properties for each imported old photograph so that they look consistent when viewed as an album or a slideshow. Don't make pictures too bright or adjust contrast too much otherwise you will lose original picture quality when you resize pictures with an online image resizer.

You should choose the right storage medium for all the imported photographs. I will prefer to store all the photographs on a DVD. This way it becomes portable and durable for longer time. Using portable hard disk is another good way for long term data storage. Hard disks generally require maintenance and protection so choose this option carefully.

Another best way of storing photographs for long term is to use an online storage service provided by websites such as xdrive.com and idrive.com. This service offers more than 2 GB online disk space to store your pictures collection. This kin d of service is useful for periodic backup and long term archival of important data and photographs. Again, please make sure that you have properly resized all of your old picture collection with an online picture resizer tool before uploading it online otherwise it would eat up lot of disk space.

Keeping your old photographs online with a storage services really helps you when you want to share all those good memories with your family members, friends and colleagues located all over the world. You don't need attach that bulky bunch of old photographs to your e-mail and send it to everybody. You can just send the links of those photographs in your e-mail and send it.

All in all, it is necessary to adjust picture properties of your old photographs and resize them with a free online image resizer which is also available on reshade.com before moving them to a permanent digital storage medium.

Alex Don writes about image resizing for the company Reshade . Reshade specializes in image processing offering a freely available online image resizer Additionally it offers a commercial photo enlargement software.

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Digital Photography Tips - The 3 Most Critical Items For Quality Digital Photos

By Steven Wagenheim

I remember the first digital camera that I got many years ago. It was a Mustek and it was a piece of garbage. Of course back then, there wasn't a lot better out. We've come a very long way since the early days of digital photos. Every once in a while, one of my friends, since they all know I'm a photography buff, will ask me what the most important things are about taking quality digital photos. It's a hard question to answer because, quite honestly, there are a number of things that go into taking quality digital photos. However, I've chosen my top three deal breakers, as I call them, and will discuss them in this article.

Believe it or not, unless you've got a real high end camera, the most important thing to taking quality digital photos is lighting. Have you ever taken photos with a fair to poor digital camera and yet had such great lighting that the photos came out great? I have. As a matter of fact, when I had my Mustek, I found that setting up some killer lighting made that camera sing. But take the lighting away and you ended up with the most grainy and color washed out photos you can imagine. Lighting made all the difference. That's why I put that on the top of the list, even above the camera itself. So if you're on a limited budget and can't afford a great camera, make sure you have enough light.

Next to lighting is of course the camera itself. Naturally, the better the camera, the better the quality of the photos. The problem is, how do you know what a great camera is? You can't just go by megapixels because each manufacturer has a different method by which they're represented. So a camera with 8 megapixels may actually not be as good in quality as a camera by another manufacturer with 6 megapixels. So do yourself a favor, read as many unbiased reviews of each camera you're thinking of buying. How can you tell an unbiased review? It's one where there's no affiliate link to the camera itself.

Finally, there is the skill of the photographer. Sadly, this is not something you can buy in a box. It's funny the things that I take for granted now, having taken photographs for so long. Things like centering your subject. I've seen some of my friends take photos where the subject is all the way to the left of the photo. It's almost criminal. Skill is something I picked up over time, however, it is something you can learn.

Below you'll find a review of a great book that will have you taking digital photos of great quality in no time. I wish this book had come out when I first started. It would have saved me a lot of time and effort.

Anyway, these are the three most critical items for quality digital photos.

At least two of them you can actually buy...Wait, make that three.

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Want to turn your digital photos into pure gold? Please check out the review of a great resource at my blog at http://digitalphotographytipsonline.blogspot.com/ where you'll find the answers to all your questions about digital photography that will turn you into a master of the lens in no time.

Photo Repair

By: photorestorationman

Do not try to remove your photographs from the album as this could cause them to be un-repairable. You could tear, rip or bend them trying to un-stick them from the pages. If they are stained by the glue, particularly from the self cling kind of album they may also have a pattern on them. The adhesive from the clear page that lays over the top of the photos, to hold them in place sometimes appears in diagonal lines. A line of glue then a space and this repeats, it is this repeat pattern of glue that ends up stuck to your photographs, staining them and causing damage to the emulsion. It not something that can be easily removed and best not attempted at all. It is best to get a photo repair and have them professionally restored.

Fortunately you do not even have to part with your photos in order to have them repaired. When it comes to photo repairs you can scan in an image from a print, slide or negative and your scanning software probably does it all for you, its simple you just hit the go button and the job is done. However it is best to check to the settings within the software to see how the software is saving your image? or if it gives you any options to alter the way the file is saved or scanned? Saving without compression or little compression is the best way to preserve detail in your image. A JPEG file is a “lossy” format, or a format where data is discarded in order to save space when saving. The higher the compression the more data is thrown away and the less detail there will be in your image.

There is no excuse these days, when hard disks are so very cheap to save your image with any other setting other than the best. It might be worth examining the software the came with your scanner and check that you do have the option to change the way it saves and what format it saves your images in. Phrases to look for in the manual or software settings are, “best photo setting” or the “lowest compression”, “lossless format” or “large file size”. You get the idea but do look for the top setting.

If you use a low setting you will get blocks where the JPEG algorithm splits up the photo into small portions in order to save it, the more data that is thrown away the more blocks there are visible. When this happens across a detailed section of the image the detail is lost, blocks meet and slurring of colours and details occur. This is called JPEG artefacts. It is these artefacts we do not want when our software takes over and saves our images for us.

In order for a restoration or photo repair to be carried out to a high standard then a highly compressed file must be avoided! Once you have a decent scan and a good quality file email to a photo restoration company for a quality photo repair.

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Digital Photography Secrets For Creating Tack Sharp Shots

By: Pat Lyne

There are lots of ingredients to making a spectacular photograph, but the most important is for the picture to be in sharp focus. Even the slightest blur takes away from the picture, no matter how good the subject, lighting and color.

Photographers have somewhat varying opinions on what constitutes a tack sharp picture, but generally, a tack sharp photograph has good, clean lines. The picture has clear definition, instead of a soft blending of lines, or even downright blurry.

There are several things you can do to increase your chances of getting that coveted tack sharp picture.

Hand-Held Digital Photography Tips

If you’re hand-holding your camera, brace your arms against your sides to help steady the camera. If your camera has anti-shake technology such as Vibration Reduction (VR) or Image Stabilization (IS) lens that can be switched on and off, this is the time to have it turned on.

You can also lean against a wall or tree or whatever sturdy object that’s handy, and help keep yourself and your camera steady. Alternatively, lean or lay your camera or lens on some readily available sturdy object to help steady the camera.

Steadying your camera by hooking the strap under your elbow and wrapping the rest around your forearm will also help stabilize the camera and hold it steady in your hand.

Getting those tack sharp photos while hand-holding your camera can be difficult, so to increase your chances of getting that perfect shot, use the burst or continuous shooting mode on your camera to take several shots at once. That increases your chances that at least one of the pictures will be in
sharp focus.

Tripods For Better Focus

There’s no getting around the fact that it’s easier to get a tack sharp photo using a tripod. You just can’t hold the camera as steady as a tripod will. And like most things in life, with a tripod you get what you pay for. A cheap tripod will help, but won’t hold your camera rock steady like a more expensive tripod will. The moral of the story is to buy the best tripod you can reasonably afford.

The more expensive tripods don’t come with the head attached. You have to buy it separately, but that means you get to choose what suits you best. To get a sharp photo, buy a quality ballhead that won’t let your camera slowly slide to one side.

If you’re somewhere that carrying a tripod just won’t work, beanbags make a nice cushion for cameras in these settings. They cushion your camera, helping to steady it and increase your ability to situate the camera to focus on the subject you want.

To improve your chances of a tack sharp photo even more, use a cable release instead of pressing the shutter. It may not seem like much, but the movement from pressing the shutter will make the camera move enough to prevent getting those tack sharp photos.

If you don’t have a cable release, the self timer will also work. It allows you to press the shutter, while giving the camera time to stabilize before it actually takes the picture.

More Advanced Digital Photography Secrets For Sharp Shots

If you have a digital SLR camera, there are even more ways to make sure your camera stays steady while taking pictures.

The first is to use mirror lock-up. This locks your camera’s mirror in the up position so when you take a picture the mirror doesn’t move until after the picture is taken, limiting the movement inside the camera. This means to take a picture, you will have to press the shutter release button twice on
your remote or cable release (you’re not going to all this trouble and pressing the shutter release on the camera are you?). The first press lifts the mirror and the second press actually takes the picture.

The second method is to turn off the Vibration Reduction or Image Stabilization. That may sound counter productive, but when you’ve stabilized your camera with a tripod and other methods, the vibration reduction keeps looking for shakes/movements. If there isn’t any movement, the vibration
reduction actually causes some shaking while looking. A good rule of thumb is to keep these turned off when shooting with a tripod, and only turn them on when you’re hand-holding the camera.

One last way to increase the sharpness of your pictures is to have good glass. The lens you use makes a big difference. A quality lens with good glass is more expensive of course, but it’s another instance of getting what you pay for. Think of it as an investment in great photos.

Use as many methods as you can to steady your camera, and you’ll have a much better chance of getting those lovely tack sharp photographs.

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Creative Business Ideas With Your Camera

By Jonathan Popoola

In today's challenging money-driven world, several business ventures are cropping up like mushrooms. For young enterprising individuals, who would choose to work on their own time, exploring businesses which require a relatively small start up capital and manpower is a very popular option. One such business is home based photo printing and desktop publishing shop.

The requirements for starting up a photo printing and desktop publishing shop can be very minimal. One can begin with the very basic equipment such as a personal computer, a photo printer, scanner, a digital camera, photo papers and ink.

Personal computers for this type of business should at least have a memory and program specifications necessary to run photo editing and lay-outing programs such as photo shop, in design, gimp or Corel. In choosing a printer, find one that is cost efficient.

Printers which may be expensive turn out to be cheaper in the long run when ink costs and printing efficiency is figured in the computation. Choose printers that can give you quality prints on photo and special papers and stickers. Eventually you can expand your business into printing photos on coffee mugs, shirts, pins, bags and tablets!

Some printers also now come with photo copiers and scanners. Determine if this would suit your business needs. Consider that several customers may not have their photos, especially their old baby shots in digital form and may need to be scanned.

Of course, a digital camera, a high pixel capacity compact camera or more preferably a digital SLR would be necessary. Some customers may not have their photos with them or may want to have their photos taken by you. Compared to just being given a photo, be it a digital soft file or an actual hard photo, having you take the photo yourself would allow you to have more leverage in terms of creative space and image control. This way you can control lighting and contrast, angles and focus, right from the very beginning. Of course, such photos are best taken with a digital SLR camera rather than a compact camera. But if your initial start up capital won't cover the costs, then a compact camera will do. This may be a bit limiting but you will eventually be able to make necessary photo adjustments on your computer.

Have lots of fun and interesting backgrounds ready in your computer. They may want to have themselves photographed in front of the Eiffel Tower or the Niagara Falls, or even in the Grand Canyon. Have cartoon backgrounds handy for kids who would like to see themselves beside Mickey Mouse or Bugs Bunny.

More importantly when starting up this business, have lots of fun and is creative. Your business will boom sooner than you think.

For more information on which digital slr to buy or for help in choosing which is the best digital slr camera for your needs. Visit my site for information on compact and slr digital cameras. Including reviews and user reviews