American photographers, note the pronunciation of Nikon…

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Ouch!  I never thought an underwater housing was required camera gear for a wedding photographer.  Poor guy, everyone has a bad day…

Enjoy this while you can, other versions of this video have been yanked for copyright violation.  This video has over 16k views on youtube so far, I’m not sure how many views the original had.  That’s a lot of free social media advertising to give up for a copyright claim.

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Jimbo in the media…, originally uploaded by Christopher [cbpix.com].

Former US Representative James “Jimbo” Traficant signing autographs before delivering the keynote speech at the TEA Party in Canfield, Ohio.

You can read more about Traficant at Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Traficant

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Behold the power of Social Media!

Have a great day,

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One of the first things photographers, both professional and amateur, encounter is a desire to constantly upgrade equipment.  It’s not all the fault of the photographer, however.  Manufacturers these days just love to make brand new cameras and gear obsolete by releasing new and improved versions within a year, or even as little as months.  The common result is for photographers to feel like they must upgrade equipment and take advantage of the new features to improve their photography.  The relatively new “old” equipment then goes the way of eBay or Craigslist and the like.

First of all, this is a terrible idea.  It’s great that when a photographer is ready to upgrade, there is always new equipment available.  But there is no reason to upgrade just because there is new equipment available!  I may write more about this later, but today I want to talk about tripods.

Many people will start out with a standard, inexpensive tripod with a pan and tilt type head and locking legs.  They then quickly discover the limitations to such a tripod and start looking for one with a ball type head and independent leg movement.  There is a world of difference in the capabilities of these two different types, and for still photography the latter can be so much more flexible and easy to use.

But photographers should not get rid of that old tripod just yet.  While the new tripod can make someone head straight for eBay to auction off that old one, it would be premature for a couple of important reasons that usually don’t immediately come to mind:  Panoramic photographs and video.  Panoramic photographs are made by taking several photographs of a scene and moving the camera slightly across the horizontal for each photo.  The photos are then stitched together using software to produce a panorama.  While doing this on the old pan and tilt head tripod is a breeze, the same cannot be said of the ball head.  And for the same reason, shooting video and getting a smooth, sweeping pan motion is extremely easy on the pan and tilt head, it is extremely difficult on the ball head.  This is particularly important since almost all point and shoot digital cameras and more and more SLR cameras have video capability.

So, in the case of tripods, don’t get rid of that old equipment just yet!

Have a great weekend,

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