technical

Jeff Cable

The Do’s and Don’ts of Memory Cards: Tips for Photographers

My name is Jeff Cable, and I'm a photographer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. I previously spent many years of my life as Director of Marketing at Lexar dealing with the ins and outs of the memory card business. And in all that time, I have never written about the do's and don'ts of memory cards. Now that I am not on that side of the business any more, I feel that I can write this objective piece for you without any conflict of interest.

Michael Zhang

Google Explains Why the Pixel Doesn’t Have Optical Image Stabilization

When Google announced its Pixel smartphone last week and boasted about its "best smartphone camera ever," there was one notable thing it lacked compared to the iPhone: optical image stabilization. Instead of physically stabilizing shots, the Pixel uses readings from the phone's built-in gyroscope to compensate for shake.

Yannick Khong

The Problem with Modern Lenses

When talking about the right kind of lenses, there are some characteristics that people should not be buying for most photographic practices. In this post I'll be discussing the problem with modern lenses.

Michael Zhang

A Simple Explanation of How Crop Factor Works

If you're just starting out in photography, you may be confused with the term "crop factor" that's thrown around when talking about cameras and lenses. Here's a 10-minute video in which Mark Ryan Sallee of Michromatic explains the concept in an easy-to-understand way.

Roger Cicala

MTF Charts: The English Translation

This post contains absolutely no mathematics. Explaining MTF without math is sort of like doing a high-wire act without a net. It’s dangerous, but for any number of reasons is more likely to keep the audience interested.

Michael Zhang

What a DSLR’s CMOS Sensor Looks Like Under a Microscope

Jack over at the astrophotography blog The Landingfield has published a series of photographs showing what a digital camera's CMOS sensor looks like when viewed through a microscope. The sensor (seen above) was taken from a broken Nikon D2H -- a DSLR from back in the early 2000s.

Michael Zhang

Wave this Programmable “Light Saber” to Light Paint Words and Images

Gavin of Sydney, Australia created an awesome 2-meter long programmable staff that makes painting giant words and images as easy as waving/walking the staff around during a long-exposure photograph. The staff, which he call the LightScythe (we would have called it the "Lightsaber"), was inspired by the Wi-Fi light painting project we shared here earlier this year.

The hardware is pretty simple. There’s a 2m programmable LED strip inside an acrylic tube, which is controlled from a small receiver and battery pack. A laptop PC with a wireless Xbee link sends the image data to the scythe at a specified time. [#]

Michael Zhang

Lower ISO Doesn’t Always Lead to Higher Quality Images

When learning about ISO, you've probably heard that the lower the number, the lower the noise and the higher the image quality, but did you know that this isn't always the case? The reason is something called the base (or native) ISO of a camera -- the ISO achieved without amplifying the data from the sensor. This is usually somewhere between ISO 100 and ISO 200.

Michael Zhang

Freeze Your Camera for Less Noise

Last Friday an anonymous poster on the photography board of 4chan sparked a discussion that rippled into the blogosphere after freezing their camera to see whether ISO performance improves at lower temperatures.