Nikon D90 Bracketing

Learn all about Bracketing on your Nikon D90. www.elitevideo.com

SnapChick Weekly Wrap Up #2

www.snapchick.com SnapChick wraps up the week by talking about photography news, SnapChick happenings and future challenges!

Taking Sport Photographs - Digital Camera Tips

Taking sport photographs is not difficult at all and can make for some really nice pictures. If you are really into sports and highly enjoy watching the games or even participating in them it can be very fun and rewarding to take sports photos.

First off, taking sport photos isn't the same as the way that enthusiastic parent is taking pictures of his or her kids. Sport photos that look good are not simply pointed at the action and taken. If you take a look at most, you'll see how they end up very different looking from most sport photos regular point and shooters take.

Sports photography can be somewhat difficult especially if you don't know how to do it or have a slow eye. Most sports are very fast and have lots of movement. This, nevertheless, is easy to overcome and take really great photos. If you can learn how to flawlessly capture movement with your digital camera then you can take really great sports pictures.

When it comes to taking fast action photographs, whether they are sports photos or bird photos, there are some common tips to follow. These tips are NOT just for sports photos. You can use these tips for taking action photos of birds, lions, planes, etc.

One of the most important aspects of sports photos is the settings on your camera. If you've ever taken sports photos with a fully automatic camera you probably ended up deleting nearly half the photos. Shutter speed is a setting that is usually much manipulated with action sport photos. Another setting that is manipulated often with sports is the ISO setting.

Shutter Speed Manipulation

When you take pictures of any object in motion, the need to freeze the object or blur the object is fully made through the shutter speed. If you're taking speed motion pictures of sports you'll want to stop the motion and not have blurred subjects. This means you'll want a fast shutter speed. The shutter speed should be faster than the subjects motion. If you're taking a shot of a very fast object you'll need a much faster shutter speed than a slow moving object like a turtle.

ISO Settings

What happens when you use a faster shutter speed is that less light is let into the camera. This can be fine for somewhat faster shutter speeds, but faster speeds require some change in the ISO to allow more light exposure.

Taking sports photos indoors can provide many more challenges. Because the light is mostly artificial it'll be much harder to properly expose when manipulating shutter speeds. When taking sports photos at or above around four hundred ISO setting can be fine. Be careful when using ISO because using a very high number can make your image very noisy. Some noise is alright as you can easily remove a little noise in photo editing programs.

Besides the settings, equipment is also used for sports photos. Unless you're allowed to be on the field with the players and get close ups of them, you'll most likely be very far from the action. To get up close you'll need a high quality telephoto lens. The telephoto lens is what all professional sport photographers use and gets you to get really close and get great shots of the action.

What happens with such long telephoto lenses is that the background will get out of focus. A shallow depth of field is very common with sports pictures and even sports on television. If you watch the closer shots of individual players you'll notice how the background is very blurred.

Al Sanez has a great program that teaches you how to take better photos He also teaches people how to sell photos online.

SMART Board - Pros and Cons of Using a Digital, Interactive Whiteboard (In the Classroom)

We used a smart board to teach with in the computer lab at school. Essentially, a SMART board turns your digital projector / LCD Projector image into an interactive whiteboard that you can write on.

The SMART Board itself is a touch-sensitive giant screen that is connected to your computer. You use your digital projector to display your computer screen onto the SMART board and the software allows you to touch and interact with your computer.
As more and more school boards and teachers are investing in data projectors, it begs the question whether SMART Boards are a good investment. After all, an intuitive touch interface plus the ability to write on digital documents (with digital ink) would help us to move beyond blackboards, flip chart paper, and overhead projectors.

Pros

With the SMART Board, you can control any application through the touch board. So instead of working from behind the computer keyboard, you (or your students) can be at the front of the classroom physically interacting with the display. You can use any of the 4 colours of markers or the eraser to write in digital ink over applications, web pages, or moving video. The SMART board still works if you lose the pens. (There are 4 coloured pen holders and one eraser. When you lift the pen out of the slot, it selects the colour or the eraser. When you touch the screen, it uses the selected color or the eraser.) Like other digital ink software applications, you can save your work into a notebook file, and you can convert handwriting into text.

Cons

Hard to write. The biggest disappointment with the digital ink comes from the fact that a SMART Board is a front-mounted projection screen. This means that your data projector is set up in front of the screen (like an overhead projector). Which means that when you stand in between the projector and the screen, you cast a shadow on the screen... right where you are trying to write. Sure, it was cool to interact with programs by touching the screen, but, it was hard to write notes because you were constantly blocking the image. Hard to write neatly. To be perfectly honest, it was a little disappointing how our handwriting turned out on the SMART Board. Better than our experiences with the other digital pens (i.e. the i-pen), but the handwriting was still large, blocky, and messy. One of the things you have to train yourself to do is to not lean up against the SMART Board. When you write on a blackboard or white board, you typically rest the edge of your palm on the board. If you do that on a touch screen, the cursor jumps to your palm and it doesn't work out. You have to train yourself to just write using the tip of the pen. The marker worked fine if we wanted to underline or circle key ideas, but if you wanted to edit or revise a 12 point, double-spaced Word Document, you'd have a hard time getting the control required. You still have to move back and forth from the keyboard to the screen. We could start up our web browser by touching the SMART board, but when it came time to enter in the website address, we had to go back to the desk to type in the URL. Expensive. The Total Cost of Ownership of a SMART Board can be prohibitive for the classroom teacher. Retail cost of a 77? (195.6cm) front-projection SMART Board Interactive whiteboard is $1399 (USD) with a grant from the SMARTer Kids Foundation of Canada. (www.SmarterKids.org) You need to supply your own data projector. A new, decent projector will cost around $500 - $1000. The SMART Board is just a giant touch pad. Your need to provide your own projector to display the image onto the smart board. (Software, connection cables, and stand are included.) You may want to upgrade to a wireless connection ($199 USD) to eliminate the cables and the tripping hazards in the classroom. The screen image and the SMART Board touch screen may get knocked out of alignment. This means that when you try to click a button, the mouse pointer appears a few inches to the side. You'll have to realign your hardware which would interrupt the lesson.

If you're ready to start blogging in the classroom, we're here to help at http://blog.classroomteacher.ca where you'll find this information and more detailed information about technology in the classroom from digital projectors to SMART Boards.