» Fro Knows Photo Blog
If You’re A Scared Photographer You Should Quit And Sell Your Gear: RANT
I am deciding on gear to take to Israel right now. I am taking my Nikon D4s with the Hebrew Trinity but I am debating wether or not to take a backup in way of the D610 or D800. I honestly think I will opt to not even take a backup to save the space and having to take extra chargers.
I have heard some people saying “don’t risk” your D4s take X because it’s lights. I would never leave my best body at home because “something” could happen. That’s the point of owning pro gear or gear in general. You want to take it with you any where you go.
It’s like when people ask me “what’s the best point and shoot I could buy to take on vacation because I don’t want to take my DSLR”.
I understand some people want to travel light and not have so much gear but if your planning on taking photos why not take them with the gear you spent all this money on. I want to have my best gear with me to hopefully get the best images.
The one other statement that always gets me is “I only shoot RAW when the pictures are important. That makes no sense, every picture I take I consider to be important. You never know when that best shot is going to happen. I don’t care if it’s a job, a family picture, a snap shot, I want the best quality possible every time.
The moral of the story is I answered my own question, I wont be taking a backup with me to Israel. Shoot on the other hand maybe I should……..
5 Min Portrait: YouTube Thumbnail Photo Shoot
I am back with another 5 Minute Portrait and this time around my goal was to capture a YouTube Thumbnail for a fitness video with Maria.
Thumbnails on YouTube are very important and can be the difference between getting people to watch your video or not. But a lot of people tend to try and cheat their thumbnail by selecting it to be something that has nothing to do with the video itself.
In this case my goal was to capture a killer thumbnail for an ab workout video with Maria. Maria is looking to create A Fitness YouTube Channel so I helped out by filming a few videos for her. Since we already had her video shoot in the can it only made sense to take photos in the same situations for the thumbnail.
The photo shoot went pretty smoothly as you will see from the photos in the video and below. But I ran into a major issue when I attempted to import the files from the CF card to the computer. Somehow the card ended up getting corrupted and could not be read by any computer. I would think this was mostly my fault for putting the card in the card reader and removing it a bunch of times without ever actually exporting the photos. I exported the video before but not the photos. And yes if you are wondering I did eject the card before removing it from the card reader.
I was pretty bummed that I lost the files but I figured I would try and recover them like I have heard many people have done. I first attempted using the Pro recovery software from Sandisk and that was not able to recover anything. I than found a different one online which I purchased and it had success in pulling hundred of files.
It found all of the photos from Maria’s photo shoot along with hundreds of other photos going back months. Now it did not find any RAW images but it did find jpegs which is better than nothing. If this was a professional shooting I would not have been totally SOL. Sure the files that it recovered would not be good enough for much more than an 8×10 they were perfectly usable for online use.
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Israel FroKnowsPhoto Meetup At Google HQ: 12 May 9:00am
I am headed to Israel from 5 May to 12 May and will be holding a meetup at Google Headquarters in Tela-Viv at 9am on 12 May Monday.
This is a FREE event open to anyone to come out and have a conversation. All you have to do is e mail officemanager@kinetis.org.il and let them know your name, phone number and how many people will be coming. They will e mail you back on Thursday 8 May with all the information you will need to attend. You will need to e mail them to attend this FREE event.
Feel free to share this information with your local photo clubs or schools.
I look forward to seeing and hanging out with you guys very soon.
Cactus Flashes and Triggers
As you guys may already know, I love off-camera flash. Especially a nice portable system that does just about everything I need. So when the nice folks at Cactus contacted me about sending some of their new flashes and triggers, I was seriously stoked! I received two Cactus WIRELESS FLASH RF60′s and three Cactus WIRELESS FLASH TRANSCEIVER V6′s. To me this is a perfect editorial portrait kit. Two off-camera flashes and 3 triggers to allow for completely hands free, wireless control.
I was immediately impressed with Cactus’ packaging. The boxes look great. Very nice graphic design and labeling. I’m a sucker for graphic design and feel that packaging makes a strong impact. I opened the flash and the build quality is great. Very solid feeling, the seams are tight, the build materials overall solid. I popped in some batteries and really like the backlit LCD display. Big lettering and nice orange backlight make for easy to read controls. The buttons are very well laid out and easy to use. Its great that the flash comes with a PC sync port for either using a pc sync cable or a different radio trigger directly plugged in. I liked that the flash has a USB port for updating firmware and a threaded slot on the side for directly mounting to a stand. Some other nice features are the padded bag it came with and cold shot foot. Overall, it seems really nicely made and feature rich.
The flash goes from 1/128 to 1/1 power in 1/3 stop increments. Very nice. The flash head zooms from 24mm – 105mm, also a very nice touch. It has a flop over fresnel lens and pop up bounce card. All the kinda stuff you find in a high-end branded flash.
On to the flash transceivers. Again, very nice build quality. They come with a cold shoe foot, and are also threaded on the bottom for easy mounting. The buttons are laid out really well and it’s super straight-forward to configure. There are four buttons along the side for Groups A, B, C and D. Just press to activate and they glow orange. Sweet! You just dial in the power for each group on the back, so simple. And you can set the channel very simply as well.
Apparently, these flashes and triggers are compatible with most current camera manufacturers and I’d recommend getting the Cactus set that’s designed for your system. I also see that they are capable of performing HSS (High Speed Sync), that allows you to fire your flashes beyond your camera’s built-in sync speed. I love that feature and can’t wait to check it out!
I’m going to put these things thru their paces and provide a more detailed review with images, but for now, I wanted to share my first impressions from the unboxing and initial thoughts on their ease of use and build quality.
Check out all the detailed specs on Cactus’ site, http://www.cactus-image.com.
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