Digital Photo Gallery of Ted Szukalski
Fine art digital photography, photographic news, reviews, articles and resources.

Drewent ARTISTS colour pencils

Recently I had a brief discussion with a friend of mine, who has a strong conviction that photography should ALWAYS reflect what he sees. This in particular applies, in his opinion, to the fidelity of colours, tones and light intensity. He is deferring the move to to digital camera as he does not feel they offer that ability to capture what he sees.

Well Chris, I am not going to shoot a colour chart, as I find the colours in these charts rarely relate to anything I can recognise. However, I have at home Drewent ARTISTS colour pencil set, which is probably one of the most recognised and popular sets used anywhere int he western world. The colours here, as I see them are very, very close to the original colours on the pencils and yet this photo was not taken in a controlled environment. I did not use temperature stable light, gray card or any other “gizmo” aiding the exposure. In fact the white balance here was left in Automatic mode too.

Perhaps some people are a lot more sensitive to colour variations than I am but to me the result is more then satisfactory.

News stand at night

In traditional film based photography once you’ve loaded the film into the camera you were stuck with all the parameters of that film until the roll was filled with photographs. This meant that if you had a day film (ISO 100 or 200) your night shots required long exposure time or use of flash, which sometimes is not desired at all.

With the emergence of digital photography we can now vary the sensitivity for each frame. This photographs for example of a Asian man in his news stand taken at Sydney Circular Quay was taken at ISO 800. This allowed for quite brisk exposure time and no need for flash. Canon’s sensors (in my case Canon EOS 30D) in particular have a very clean high ISO results and there is no visible noise in the photograph at this setting.

Seems everyone wants a piece of the pie called digital photography. Today's turn belongs to Microsoft, which has purchased iView Multimedia. The product was initially offered on Apple platform and since it was made available on Windows too. According to the current FAQ existing customers will enjoy continuity of support however this is hard to see, once the product get integrated fully into Microsoft's application suite.

What is iView?

MediaPro is a digital asset and cataloging management solution for photographers and various other imaging professionals. It allows photographers to create a customised, searchable repository for high volume digital storage. MediaPro supports most known multimedia file formats including raw formats from most popular camera makers.