The Nisi Long Exposure Set

There is something quite depressing about the sound that optical glass makes when it breaks. The initial crack, and following tinkle, that you know is the sound of something expensive going ‘bye-bye’. As it was when my trusty Lee ‘Little Stopper’ shattered, while in the pouch might I add (although the pouch isn’t designed to be dropped - albeit accidentally - in quite that way). I personally think that the 6 stop neutral density filter, aka the ‘Little Stopper’ is actually more useful than the better known 10 stop ND filter, the ‘Big Stopper’ and use it frequently enough that I would have to find a replacement. So, I cast about thinking how to replace the smashed filter.

Living (and traveling) with an F-Stop

There is no such thing as the perfect camera bag. Photographers have driven themselves broke in the attempt to find one. Unfortunately, the reality is that the active photographer needs a specific bag for a specific purpose. Bad news for photographers, excellent news for bag manufacturers as they have a captive and desperately seeking market. Over the course of my interest in photography I have had the opportunity to own several types of bags from various manufacturers. On starting out in the mid nineties I, like many other South Africans, had limited choice that was essentially constrained to Tamrac, Tenba and Lowe-Pro. As we entered the noughties finally brands like Domke, Billingham, and ThinkTank became more readily available.

The sure fire best way to speed up the editing workflow is to know the most important shortcuts for the given editing app. The Nature's Light team have put together a downloadable cheatsheet. Head over to the Nature's Light website and choose from the Mac OS or Windows PC pdfs that are available.

It’s an Egg?!?! - the Loss of Thinking

So the world’s most liked image is of an egg. Just. An. Egg. Of course the story behind the egg has more to do with the dynamics of social media and Instagram in particular. The point though is that the image, a simple studio lit shot of a brown chicken egg against a white background (with shadow) managed to get more than 18 million people to hit the so-called ‘like’ button (over 50 million likes as of the writing of this article). The image itself was bought off Alamy (a royalty free stock site) and was created by photographer Sergey Platonov. The post was created in order to set a world record, and thereby beat the previous record held by celebrity Kylie Jenner’s image of her new-born daughter. But it’s just an egg. How on earth can a photo of an egg raise so much attention?