A camera can be a huge investment, costing hundreds or even thousands of dollars, depending on the level of photography that you will be involved in. Because the camera is such an investment, you need to ensure that you protect it as well as possible when it is not in use. Camera bags are better than ever, as they are developed with protection and portability in mind.

If you are in the market for a new camera bag, you should know that there are a lot of different options to choose from. When shopping you may have a hard time deciding which bag is just right for you. Many photographers find that they actually need two different bags: one bag for when they will be out and about and need many lenses and a smaller bag when they will just be shooting for fun and won’t need to carry as many lenses with them.

When you are shopping you need to consider how easily you can access your camera at any one time. If you are on the go and you need to be able to grab your camera with ease, you should look into a shoulder bag. A shoulder bag will give you the fast access that you need. If you don’t need to access the camera quickly and you don’t want to deal with a bag that swings to and fro when you walk, you may want to consider a backpack.

A backpack is a great option because it is on your back, will protect and transport, but will not get in the way of you walking and will not swing around. Many people feel that this is simply a much more comfortable way to carry their camera and other items because it is accessible but very stable.

If you know which style of bag appeals to you the most, you also need to consider how much storage space the bag has. If you will be carrying many lenses with you, you need to consider if the bag will be able to house your lenses, as well. Another important consideration should be if the bag can house extra memory, batteries, flashes and the like. A bag is only as good as its ability to hold all of the items that you need to be the best photographer that you can possibly be.

If the bag cannot house all of your lenses, you may want to look into lens bags. These are bags that are meant just to transport and store your lenses. Lenses are very costly, so you shouldn’t force them to fit into a camera bag if they cannot fit the way they should. It would be better to simply purchase another bag meant specifically for your lenses. Read the rest of this entry »

The built-in light meters in modern cameras are incredibly accurate. The matrix, or evaluative method which measures the whole frame and averages the bright and dark zones to come up with what it thinks is the right exposure. There is also a centre weighted and spot metering modes, which calculate light measurements in similar fashion, but sample smaller portion of the frame. In case of centre weighted, about 20% around the centre of the screen is used to average the light intensity, and in case of spot metering, only about 5% is used.

The camera’s light meter is capable of quite accurate measurements, but there is a problem. Averaging the meter reading works great if the light is evenly distributed in the frame. It doesn’t work as well if you are shooting object positioned against large dark or bright backgrounds.

It’s not hard to understand why a person standing in front of a very bright background, like the midday sky, would be severely underexposed. Engineers who designed those sophisticated camera light meters had to make sure that the camera will produce acceptable images in most light conditions. They were perfectly correct in about 90% of cases, which is quite remarkable. Unfortunately, some of the most beautiful images would be captured when the light conditions fall in those last 10%.

Imagine shooting a winter Olympics skier in a down-hill race. The camera sensor sees a perfectly white image with a tiny patch of colour somewhere in the middle (the skier). Naturally it will decide for us that the image is severely overexposed and will dim it down (reduce shutter speed to average it down). Yes, we will get an image from this shot, but it will not be snow we’ll be seeing, but some grey, ugly mass; and the skier will come out almost completely black.

In those situations it is the photographer’s job to override the camera’s settings to produce correctly exposed picture. How do they do it? Well, I’m assuming they are shooting in AV (aperture priority) mode, which means they set the aperture and the camera light meter decides on the shutter speed. Then, they use exposure compensation.

They must tell the camera that the background IS in fact that white and should be shot as white, and not averaged down to a grey colour. By adjusting the EV compensation plus 1.5-2 stops will produce snow that is white, and will also expose the skier correctly.

Similarly, if you shoot someone standing in front of a very large dark area, like some dark trees or a barn, the camera will measure for the large dark patch and in effect over-expose the person standing in front of it. Read the rest of this entry »