Chuck Gardner

Composition is very effective. It leads the eye down past the cannons to a natural horizon. The slope of the hill on the left meeting the trees angle of the top of the trees on the right create a nice X symmetry. The fence line on the other side creates a separate path back into the foreground. The interesting path up and back keeps the eye in the center core of the photo. Being lead back to the foreground (vs being stranded in back with no clue where to go next) encourages the viewer to take the trip again... Very well done. You need to clean your sensor, you have accumulated some dust bunnies (blobs in sky). I use a 1/2 nylon artist brush and a can of Dust Off to clean mine. 1) Shoot a piece of white paper at f/22 as reference shot. The more you stop down the lens the sharper the dust appears. This will allow you to see where the dust is on the sensor. 2) Brush needs to be nylon, not natural. First clean the brush and rinse repeatedly in distilled water to remove any sizing. 3) Follow your camera recommendations for exposing the sensor for cleaning (it usually a menu option). I put my camera on a tripod angled down and clean it in a bathroom where there is less dust floating around. 4) Blow the Dust Off (Canned Air) through the bristles of the brush. That creates a static charge on the brush which will attract the dust. Gently brush the tip over the sensor a few times, blowing out the brush away from the camera between strokes. The sensor is covered with a glass filter so there is no risk of scratching it with the soft brush. Do not blow the Dust Off directly into the camera. 5) Re-attach the lens and take a comparison "after" shot at f/22. It should be much clearer. Chuck

Have you done your Christmas card photo yet? Here are a few tips: 1) Shoot it outdoors on an overcast day: The light is better - very diffuse. The sun is behind the clouds to the south, so face that direction so there is nice even light on the faces. Keep the flash on to prevent dark eye sockets. 2) Don't wear distracting clothing: Faces are much smaller that the body and if the clothing contrast more with the background than the faces it will attract more attention and distract from the faces. The ideal situation is a dark background with dark clothing. That will allow the clothing and background to blend together and the faces really contrast. If you must use red clothing then use a red background also. That way the red clothing and background will blend together and frame the contrasting face. The key to seeing the faces well is to make sure they contrast the most. Same principle as camouflage for hunting except the face is the orange hat. 3) Keep the heads together and in the upper 1/3 of the photo: In a tiny photo gaps between heads are magnified. When they get too wide a group photo begins to look like a bunch of individual portraits in the same frame instead of a couple or family. Closeness and even up/down spacing of the heads set the mood for a group shot as the viewer scans from face to face. If you have a small wife put her on a box or some phone books to get her eyes up at least to your mouth level. If you have young kids use a seated pose to keep the heads closer vertically. If standing the youngest kid always winds up falling out the bottom of the photo - like they aren't part of the family or don't want to be. Put the parents in the middle to anchor the family, or on either end to frame it - both are visual metaphors for a family structure - then add the kids. For multi-generational photos pose the oldest generation as the anchors that way, then add the children / grandkids in logical family groups (as you would if just shooting each family) so a stranger can look at it and figure out who is related to who. 4) Keep the camera above the eyes of the tallest person: When the camera lens drops below the eye line the nostrils appear like the beady little eyes of a rodent. They distract from the actual eyes and mouth which is what convey mood and emotion. The nose in the middle is best hidden in plain sight. Just watch out for and avoid a distracting nose shadow (turn the face towards the light and the shadow will disappear) and if you see the nostrils get the camera higher. When shooting portraits I usually stand on a stool. When shooting standing groups I shoot from a ladder to get above the group. 5) Don't get too close: Perspective - how big the nose looks relative to the ears - is a function of camera/subject distance. The further you get away the better people look - that's more true for some more than others So don't use the camera at the widest setting from 6 feet, shoot from 8ft or further for couples and about 12-15ft for groups, when zoom to frame the shot in the camera. That said, here's ours for this year: And how I took it - ladder was about 15 feet away from us: I took a 1x6 board, put a one-inch long 1/4"-20 pitch bolt though it, then attached the ball head from my tripod (they unscrew from the shaft) I then A clamped it to the top of the ladder. I needed the height because we were standing on the porch a couple feet above ground level. The white thing is a reflection-diffuser for the flash, which is on a bracket to raise it above the lens. I added a bit of flash to put light in the eye sockets and a sparkle of catch lights in the eyes. Here's a close-up of the camera attachment: And one I took of my wife Belinda: The real key to making those photos work wasn't the lighting, but rather the fact the clothing and background are darker than the faces, allowing them to contrast. A fancy camera isn't needed, either is a tripod. Just get a ladder and a bag of rice or beans to keep the camera steady. Merry Christmas to all... Chuck Gardner

The Xti is a good camera. I own a 8 MP 20D and bought a 400D (Xti) for the office. If she gets serious over the long haul the investment in lenses will be much greater than cost of the body. The "kit" lenses are OK but not a really match for the clarity of the Canon "L" series. I picked Canon over Nikon -- despite being a longtime Nikon user -- because I felt the Canon sensor technology (CMOS vs CCD) and lenses were better. If she is selling stock photos as a registered business and making any money at it she would be better off tax-wise if she bought it (with your generous investment in her business). But OTHO trying to write off what is more or less a hobby you try to make a buck from is something the IRS frowns on. As for sources, I by most of my stuff on-line from B&H photo in NY. It's not always the cheapest source, but it has a good reputation and return policy.

The wise move would be to ask her what she wants...

Hi Phil, These are a couple of places which pros use for their large format printing: White House Custom Color: http://www.whcc.com/ Elco Color: http://www.elcocolor.com/poster_special.htm White House will first have you send some files for testing as part of setting up an account prior to doing any large printings. They also have very good info on their site. If you have any questions or want help editing the files shoot me an e-mail. Chuck

Neat shot... Here's the last one tweeked in Photoshop...

Here's another less complicated Histogram / Levels example: Here is a photo which is about 1/3 stop underexposed... How do I know its 1/3 stop underexposed? First I used the eyedropper measurement tool to measure the brightest areas in the photo. It is necessary to open the "info" window to see the readings. The brightest spot on the feeder measured 238, 238, 238 (red, green, blue). 255.255.255 is pure white without detail like you might want in the reflection off water or chrome. 238 is about where you'd want to see a textured highlight. Next I opened Levels and saw a gap between the right side of the histogram window and the base of the curve on the right. Anytime there is a gap it means the brightest area in the scene is being reproduced in the photo as darker than pure white. From experince seeing photos which are correctly exposed and those which are 1/3, 2/3, 1 stop under I can tell this is a 1/3 stop gap. Since I wanted the photo to have a bit more contrast and snap I decided to brighten the highlights by moving the levels highlight point to the left. When I did that a second set of number appeared in the info readout. As I moved the slider to the left I watched the #1 reading and stopped when it equalled 255 - pure white. The highlights in the photo were made brighter and the contrast is improved. It's a subtle difference, but one which can be seen in a side-by-side comparison: I also sharpened the "after" photo on the right which also improves the "snap" and sharpness, particularly in detail like the tongue. This is 100% crop (pixel for pixel) which was processed the same way: It really doesn't matter if you are using a $1,000 DSLR or a $300 point and shoot, the approach is the same. Take a shot and set the playback so it displays the histogram. If you see a gap between the curve and the right edge its telling you the photo needs more eposure. Open the exposure compensation (usually a button labeled "+/-" and add 1/3 stop (one-click) plus compensation and check again. If there is still a gap add another click of + EC until the right side base of the histogram curve kisses the right side of the window and looks like the one below: If you see a histogram that is running off the right side with a gap on the left on the shadow side it indicates the photo is overexposed. It's difficult to tell how much it is overexposed just by looking at the histogram, so often the quickest way to a correct exposure is to first cut it in half with a - 1 (minus 1) EC correction and take a second shot to see if it is still over, a bit under, or just right. With a bit of practice you'll be able to look at the histogram and use its right side to see at a glance if the exposure is over / under. Cameras which show a live view in the LCD screen on back will usually also display a "live" histogram so you can see the effect EC adjustments have as you make them. Hope you find this sort of info helpful for taking better shots, regardless of what you shoot with. Chuck Gardner

With John Jackson's permission I'm posting an e-mail exchange about histograms.... On Sep 10, 2007, at 5:38 PM, John Jackson wrote: Chuck, I followed your tutorial on editing with photoshop the different levels. I’m still learning but I do believe some of my pictures are looking better after going through the transformation. Here’s my question. In your tutorial your curve on the levels looks nothing like mine. I’ve attached a screen capture of mine so you can see what I’m talking about. Is this because of the way my camera was set up or is it normal? Hi John, No two histograms look the same. The RGB histogram also really doesn't tell the story of what actually happened during capture in the camera. That's why its important to look at the histogram for each of the channels separately. One way to visualize what a histogram is telling you is to just use a gray scale like this one: If you save that and open it in levels it will look like this: The lines on the histogram correspond to the tones on the scale. They are a bunch of lines instead of a bell curve because there are only a few tones on the scale. All the line are the same height because in terms of surface area covered all the tones cover the same amount. Now go up to Image > Adjustments > Brightness / Contrast and change the contrast to about -30. The shadows go gray and so do the highlights. Thats similar to what happens on an overcast day when there are not any strong shadows and a photo is underexposed -- like my rabbit example. Now open levels and look at the histogram: It has the same number of lines because it has the same number of tones in it, but they have moved in on both sides creating a gap... The gap on the right tells you the highlights are underexposed. The gap on the left tells you there aren't any pure black shadow areas. So you see its the width of the graph and the gaps (or not) on each end that tell you what's happening. Now without exiting Levels, move the sliders in... When you move the sliders in to where the curve ( or lines in this case) start, you will increase the contrast of the image. If you compare it with the orginal grayscale you started with you'll find they look almost the same. Moving the sliders in increases the contrast of the image end to end. If you move the middle slider it affects the "internal" contrast but not the how light/dark the end points are. Now lets consider your photo. It has the opposite problem from the one in my example -- too much contrast! The first problem is that there are blown, overexposed highlights. Not so much in the subject in the foreground (except the arm) but in the sky, water, etc. The problem is that the histogram is showing all the tones and the blown areas are making it run off the side to the right... To get a better idea of what is happening in the important areas of the photo just select a small area and then open Levels. The histogram will only reflect the area that is selected: Do the same thing on your original. Then change channel to Red, Green, and then Blue. See how they are all running off the right side, indicating over exposure? Especially the Red channel. Since all that is selected is a skin tone area its a sure sign the photo is over-exposed. Here's a color scale similar to the colors and contrast in your photo: Here's how it looks in Levels: Open up that color scale in Levels on your machine and look at the individual channels. Much different than the RGB version. So what to do in those situations? #1 - Avoid overexposure when shooting -- adjust exposure compensation (minus) #2 - Keep the flash on - the fill light from the flash helps lower the overall contrast of the scene How to correct this one? The top sliders control the input side. Notice there is another set of sliders below it labeled "Output Levels". Slide those in a bit and watch what happens to the image: The histogram up top doesn't change, but the image appearance in the editing window does. The shadows become more open and the highlights darker. Overall the lighting looks flatter, more like an overcast day. But that makes some parts of the photo better and others, like the fish worse. But you can have it both ways! Cancel out of Levels without changing output. Open the layers window and drag background layer down and duplicate it, like in the second part of the tutorial so you have two copies. Click top copy, open Levels, and adjust the output to make the shadows lighter and highlights darker. Add a black mask to top layer (see below) the erase it in the areas you need less contrast / darker highlights... You can see in the mask icon where I erased the mask to apply the flat copy on top of the contrasty one. But it looked too flat, so I moved the opacity slider back and forth until it looked about right -- 62% It's the same general idea as using a duplicate layer set to screen mode to lighten as in my post processing tutorial. When you duplicate and stack layers with masks in Photoshop you can blend the various layers together seamlessly by simply erasing the mask of the layer you wish to reveal. I find it is much easier to control what is happening to specific areas that way. Here I retained the vivid color and contrast in the fish but made the tone on the face a bit softer. Also FWIW, the photo would be improved by cropping out the distractions when shooting. The fewer distractions you put in the photo the more visual impact what is really important will have. My "acid" test for whether something is a distraction or not is this question -- if it wasn't in the photo would you say, "Heck, where is that car on the shore?" Whenever you have two centers of interest, like the fish and face in this photo, put them close together so the viewer can see both at the same time without ping-ponging between them... Compare this crop edited to hold the fish closer to the face so you can see both together... Better yet get a super wide angle lens and stick the fish out closer than the face - the near / far perspective will increase the apparent size of your catch :-) Chuck...

A digital camera histogram, overexposure warning and LCD playback are all valuable tools for evaluating exposure. Making sense out of them is simply a matter of understanding how they work. A digital sensor is like a bunch of buckets which hold photons instead of water. Some in the brightest highlights get filled up fast like with a fire hose, but at the same time others down in the deep shadows are getting filled with like an eye-dropper. And oh yeah, there's aways dirt on bottom of the bucket -- that rainbow "noise" you see it the dark shadows until the "water level" or brightness is high enough to cover it. Cameras store brightness level information numerically as a value from 0 (no light - black) to 255 (full bucket- white no detail ). Meter sensors in the camera read the light during the exposure and close the shutter when they detect the first bucket fills up completely. The problem is that a 6 megapixel camera has 6 million buckets and the camera can't watch all of them. So some the meter isn't watching can fill to overflowing, "nuking" all the detail out of the highlights. Most digitial camera have some sort of overexposure warning in the playback which will black-out or flash in areas that are overexposed. When that happens on a automatic camera the solution is the use Exposure Compenstation which overrides the default metering. Somewhere on the camera back or menus there a button marked +/- or labeled "EC" or "Exposure Comp". If the playback of the first shot is overexposed then to correct it you'd dial in + compenstation. The most critical area to get correct are highlights with texture, such as a white shirt. When shooting around water the specular reflections can fool the camera metering into thinking the scene is brighter than it actually is. When the camera sees more light it closes the shutter quicker, resulting in underexposure. Situations like backlighting will also fool the meter in the other direction into closing the shutter too soon and underexposing the foreground. The simple solution is to just leave the flash on all the time outdoors, even at high noon. With the flash on most cameras nowadays will do a pretty good job of balancing the strong backlight and flash. If you have a DSLR it will probably have separate compensation adjustments for flash and ambient labeled EC and FEC (Flash Exposure Compenstation). Use EC to make the background lighter / darker and FEC to adjust the flash intensity and foreground lighter / darker. For shots where the subject is too far away for flash to be effective the best solution is to change the camera position so the subject is in the sunlight but the background is dark. That will help the camera meter the scene more accurately and make your subject contrast more. Digital cameras also have a graph called a "histogram" which shows how much of each intensity level of light the camera sees. The horizontal scale represents 255 different levels of light from black ---> white The vertical scale indicates how much of each brightness level there was. You really only need to be concerned with where the right side of the "bell" curve is hitting the baseline. That right part of the curve is telling you how the brightest things in the scene are being recorded by the sensor. If the photo is overexposed the curve will be running off the right side of the histogram window. If the file is underexposed there will be a big gap between the right base of the curve and right side of the histogram. When the exposure is perfect the right base of the curve will just kiss the right side of the histogram window. When shooting portraits I have the subject hold a white textured terry wash cloth. It creates a nice big spike on the histogram that is easy to see. Getting good exposure is then just a matter of adjusting the EC until the spike caused by the wash cloth kisses the right edge. Get the white rag correct and everything else will be too... When in doubt its better to underexpose slightly than overexpose. Its easy to lighten a dark photo but impossible to put detail back into highlights which were blown when captured. CG

To follow up on comments in my photo threads I put together a new tutorial showing how to enhance a digital photo with a few post processing steps in Photoshop. I did it in PDF format so it can be downloaded and printed for reference. It is at http://super.nova.org/DPR/Technique/PostProcessing.pdf Warning: it is a 4.6 MB file I've also got about 40 other photo tutorials at http://super.nova.org/DPR/ Most are written for people seeking to learn studio lighting who use DSLRs and already have a basic understanding of camera operations but there are some on compostion and basic technique such as how digital exposure works, using hot shoe flash and to hold a camera steady. If you are a Canon shooter I've got an entire section on how to use the Canon wireless flash system effectively. I did a brief intro thread, but here is more background... My interest in photography dates back to high school when getting involved in SCUBA diving convinced me to buy a Nikonos II u/w camera to share what I saw -- not too many people did SCUBA in 1969 But I got hooked on photography, sold my dive gear and bought cameras. A few years laterin 1972 I was fortunate to find a job working for a top wedding photographer named Monte Zucker, which is where I learned much of what I know about lighting, posing, etc. I didn't like the wedding business job much and through another quirk of fate got a job at National Geographic in the photo labs making photo compliations for maps and reproducing photos for the magazine and books. From there I got into printing, which uses a lot of photographic technology and went digital long before consumer digital cameras hit the market. For the past 25 years I've managed various parts of the USIA/State Dept. printing operations, spending 11 of those years in the Philippines. There I renewed my interest in diving and underwater photography but didn't do much above water shooting until getting my first digital in 2001 re-kindled my interest which waned in the early 1980s when my overseas move forced me to give up my B&W darkroom I was using for Zone System work. Because I could scan my film on high-end scanners at work I didn't buy my first digital camera until 2001. It was just a Kodak point and shoot. My next one was a Minolta D7Hi. When I moved back to the States for the final time in 2001 I contemplated doing photography again as a post retirement business and bought a set of studio lights and a Canon 20D and lenses to test the water. I started participating of photo forums and writing critiques which morphed into tutorials, which is how my tutorial web site evolved. But after 25 years as a bureaucrat decided I didn't have the desire or motivation to run a photo business and most of the shooting I've done for the past few years has been for our church, neighbors or on trips. In addition to my tutorial site I've got another where I post my photos: http://bossa.nova.org it is mostly a collection of my earlier digital stuff because I haven't found time to update it. I've known the Lilley clan for about 10 years now by virtue of meeting and marrying Belinda, who they sponsored through medical school and informally adopted as a member of their family. That's why I'm happy to contribute here anyway I can be useful. I know squat about fishing - except observing how they behave underwater from my diving experience -- so my only contribution can be here in the photography forum. If you check out my tutorials and find they don't address questions or problems you have feel free to send me an e-mail. I often get questions by e-mail from people who visit the tutorial site and several of the tutorials are actually recycled e-mail exchanges. Chuck Gardner

I've created a new PDF tutorial which shows the basic workflow I use for editing my images in PS 7 using this example shown below in the before and after editing versions: Using individual channels in Levels to correct contrast and white balance at the same time Selective tonal corrections using masked duplicate screen and multiply layers Unsharp RGB masking using the Luminance channel via Fade It's a bit more advanced that you'll find in most how-to books but I illustrate all the steps and it is actually much simpler to do than it is to explain it. It is at http://super.nova.org/DPR/Technique/PostProcessing.pdf Warning: It is an 11 page color PDF which is 4.6 MB in size. I've got other tutorials on how digital exposure and color management work and lots of other stuff on my web site. Just scroll down to the table of contents. http://super.nova.org/DPR/ Chuck

Those were taken with my previous digital camera, a 5MP Minolta D7Hi... The real "secret" is that there's a good deal of post processing in Photoshop in all of those images. Shots straight out a digital camera are generally are unsharp to some degree because of the way the sensor captures and interpolates the image. Also the contast will be flat, especially when the lighting is overcast or indirect so its necessary to manipulate it so what is mose important in the photo jumps out and contrasts with the background. By way of analogy to fly fishing a good deal of the success comes not from knowing how to cast the fly but rather from knowning what fly to tie, when to put it on the line based on an understanding of how a fish thinks. You need two skill sets: The mechanics of being able to cast your fly where the fish is, but more importantly understanding where the fish might be and what he wants to eat far enough in advance that you'd got exactly the right fly tied and in the box. Same with digital photography: You need one skill set to compose and expose the photo, and another to post processs it to look like what to saw in person. The overall sucess depends as much or more on the post processing than the capture, where about the most you can do is get the exposure correct. When I look at a scene I know from experince the how the camera will record things differently than how I see. My tutorials on my web page http://super.nova.org/DPR/ start with a discussion of how what our cameras record is different than what we see in person. The first step in taking better photos is to train your brain to see like a camera will record the scene. Seeing and eliminating distractions is a big part of that. The second part is knowing how you can manipulate what the camera captured - with all its technical limitations - back into the image in your mind's eye that inspired you to take the photo in the first place. The difference between a snapshot and a photo starts by asking yourself these questions: 1) What is most important in the photo? 2) What message / emotional reaction do I want the viewer to have when they see it? When I saw the Heron on the roof above the guy fishing my thought was how they were totally unaware of each other, but united by a common bond, the joy of catching fish. But in the camera capture the tin roof was much brighter to the point it overpowered everything else in the photo. When you looked at it you'd be blinded by the contrast of the big roof and have trouble seeing either the bird or the man. I realized that when I took the shot but also knew I could manipulate it with duplicate layer masks to tone it down the roof and other distractions to the point where you see the guy fishing and the Heron contrast the most with the background and you don't really notice the roof much at all. A big part of how people react to photos is what they see and when they see it when looking at a photo. Photos with a strong center of interest are more effective than those where the viewer is left wandering and wondering which of the 101 things in it is most important. A photo can be planned like a joke, a one-liner with a quick punchline - a single strong focal point in the brightest or most contrasting part of the photo - or one of those long winding yarns where you get surprised at the end with a punchline you aren't expecting. Most photos wind up with predominantly dark backgrounds so what you want to do is first figure out what you think is most important, then figure out how to make it the brightest area in the photo because that's where the viewer's eye will go first - the brightest spot in the photo. But you can also plan and compose a photo so the whole story isn't blurted out all at once but unfolds slowly as the viewer's eye scans the photo. Faces and contrast plays a huge role in what people will notice first and what they will see next. Our brains are hard wired to recognize faces and react emotionally to them. It's why you can spot a familar person in a big crowd quickly or indentify someone at a distance from their shape. The brain matches the patterns its sees to things it knows. So if there is a person in the photo it will attract the most interest and the viewer will try to make eye contact. Next the eye will wander off to whatever contrasts the most with the background. It's pretty much common sense that you'll have a more difficult time seeing a face in a photo if he's wearing an orange hunting cap. But sometimes the difference between a good photo an a distracting one is simply remembering that and saying, "Hey Fred, take off your hat for the picture." The shot of the dock and the spider web is an example of how you can try to predict and control how most people will see and react to a photo based on how it is composed and lit. My intention was for the viewer to first be drawn to the pier area first by its brightness and where it is located in the frame, then notice the spider web over to the side in the darker area. The spider web becomes a secondary "reward" for looking at the photo and a delayed "punchline" for the story the photo is trying to tell; that fishing requires the same kind of diligence and patience as building a spider web. The photo of the outboard motors was similar. You notice them right away but don't see the whole message until you notice the spider webs which provide a clue they have been there for awhiile. Eventually your eye wanders down into the shadows where you see why they have been there for awhile - no prop. So what makes this photo of ordinary objects more interesting isn't so much the lighting, but the fact that the story the photo tells unwinds itself slowly. The eye is lead by contrast and tone from one area of interest that adds to the story to another so the viewer stays engaged and interested and not distracted away. The shot of the Heron on the roof has two equal centers of interest, bird and man, and my intent was for the viewer to ping-pong back and forth between them and not get distracted by anything else. So I contrasted the dark bird against the brighter sky and kept the area around the man bright, toning down everything else so it just faded into the backgound and wasn't noticed. Most of that manipulaition was done in Photoshop. The photos of the flowers are more like the one-line joke; you see the focal point and don't wander off of it because the background foliage is toned down and made less interesting. it's not really that difficult to manipulate the photos the way I do. My usual method is to duplicate the base background layer twice and set one dupe layer to "Screen" and the other to "Multiply" then add black masks to both. I've got a pre-defined "action" in Photoshop which does that part. Then I just erase the mask of the multiply layer to darken areas and erase the mask on the screen layer to lighten areas. When its how I want it to look I flatten the layers. I can illustrate this with some screen shots there are any Photoshop users on the list. Chuck

These are several years old, but are some of my all time favorite shots taken at Lilley's Landing... - - - - - - -

Thanks... The nice thing about squirrels and chipmunks for models is that they work for peanuts I was shooting those with an 8MP Canon 20D with a f/2.8 70-200mm image stabilized lens with a 2x tele-extender. With the 1.6 crop factor of the camera and the extender the equivalent full frame 35mm focal length was 1.6*200*2 = 640mm I was probably 150 - 200 feet away for most of the fishing shots. Here's what that rig looks like... FWIW , that photo was taken by my wife with her Panasonic DMC-FX9 7MP camera that is the size of a deck of playing cards... Like they say, women are smarter... Here are a couple more of Phil taken at Lily Lake at the opposite extreme of the lens spectrum, a 10-22mm wide angle at the 10mm setting with fill flash used lighten the shadows: Cameras have gotten so good and memory so cheap that its a good practice to capture images at the highest resolution the camera has. The advantage of a 8-10MP DSLR like a Rebel Xti vs. an 8 MP point and shoot is that the larger physical size of the sensor of the DSLR allows for larger pixels which in turn produce less noise. You don't see the difference in a shot saved at 800 x 600 pixels for the web, but its apparent in full resolution images and larger prints. The other difference is that the larger sensors produce shallower depth of field which makes it easier to isolate a subject from a distracting background with selective focus. Small sensor camera lens have actual focal lengths which are so short they have nearly unlimited DOF. I shoot in RAW format which results in files which are 8MP per shot, but the RAW format allows correction of color balance, exposure, contrast, sharpness and a variety of user error without affecting image quality. I use the Digital Photo Professional application which came with the camera to open and adjust the RAW files then transfer them to Photoshop for further editing. Picassa, the free editing program from Google for PCs, is also a very nice application for downloading, organizing and editing photos. Belinda uses it on her laptop to edit her shots and e-mail them to friends. Downloading photos from the camera is simpler by using a USB 2.0 or Firewire card read attached to the computer rather that tethering it to the computer. Many portables and desktop computers have card readers built-in. Needless to say a fast computer is a blessing. I just upgraded my circa 2001 Apple G4 400Mhz to one of the new 24" 2.8Mhz DuoCore Intel iMacs. Here they are side-by-side: The new one handles photo processing tasks about 10x faster. BTW - I've got a photo tutorial site with over 40 tutorials if anyone is interested: http://super.nova.org/DPR/ It is mostly oriented towards studio-style lighting and portraiture, but most of the concepts apply to any type of photography: 1) Decide what is most important and what you want the viewer to see as the focal point. 2) Find a way to contrast it with the background 3) Eliminate or minimize any distractions from it. That's why its always a good idea to put the light behind the subjects and get above them for shots like those. The rim light defines the shape of things, including the line in the air because it contrasts with the dark background. Getting above the subjects and shooting down makes the more of the ground behind them the background than the more distacting stuff you'd capture at eye level.

I just joined the forum. My wife and I joined the Lilley's in Colorado last month for a family gathering which of course included a fishing outing in Rocky Mountain National Park where I captured these shots... Link to Google map of location

Abe's of Maine is actually a non-descript storefront in Brooklyn, NY. It and about a dozen others which low-ball prices are all apparently run in boiler room fashion by the same family. It has a terrible reputation on the photo forums for trying to tack on expensive and useless "accessory" packages and generally poor business practices. You can find a review here: http://www.epinions.com/content_3884199809...nkin_id=8003929 The largest on-line retailer for photo gear, and where I buy nearly all of mine is B&H Photo in New York. Adorama is also a very reputable source in NYC. Both clearly indentify if the item is covered by a US Warranty or is "Gray" market, which is important if you need service. They also have very good return policies.

I'm Chuck Gardner from Manassas, VA. I know very little about fishing but Phil thought I might be of some use in the photography forum and invited me join... That's where I'll be hanging out. Emerald Lake - Rocky Mnt. Natioanal Park