Free Lens Hoods... Part I

Printable PDF documents to make your own lens hoods, Calculate your own hood in the field! & Plastic Bottle hoods too!

Lets face it many of us go without lens hoods when in fact they are one of the most important ways we can go about improving our photographs. The purpose of a lens hood is to prevent flare, which can seriously degrade the image quality of photographic lenses. This being said it is often the case that we do not get a lens hood when we purchase the lens, or often in my particular case, the size of the lens hood means it often gets left at home rather than on the camera.

Part I

Cut along the dotted line...

The folks at www.lenshoods.co.uk have completly and utterly obliterated any more lame excuses why the rest of us don't use a lens hood. First off they offer them for free! You hear that Canon & Nikon, and anyone else who charges upwards of $100 for a piece of round plastic. Second they are made from paper so size is no longer an issue, they will simply fold right up. These guys provide hoods in Adobe PDF files for most major manufactures (Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Pentax) and third party lens companies (Sigma, Tamron, Tokina) too. They also provide a service that lets you design your own. These guys even go farther than your manafactur often does, and offer conventional round hoods as well as tulip petal-shaped lens hoods with curved cutout notches. This tulip petal design maximizes the amount of hood coverage for the minimum amount of weight and hood area. Tulip-shaped hoods cannot be used on lenses with rotating ends though, because perfect hoods must be aligned to the sensor frame dimensions.

RegularJen blogged about how she was able to use the PDF lenshoods as templates to cut ones from black art foam: lens hoods on the cheap with bonus conversation.


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Canon's DPP Updated to 3.0.2

Canon's

Digital Photo Professional (DPP)

Free Software to unleash
the RAW power of the EOS Digital SLR

Canon Inc. has just released the latest update to their free RAW processing and workflow software DPP. Version 3.0.2 replaces 3.0.1.5 and includes a major update for Windows Vista and a couple of minor fixes for Mac and non-Vista users.

I generally shoot in RAW format, and I rely heavily on the DPP program. With the release of Version 3 Canon has given its customers a fantastic tool for free. I can often achieve fantastic results processing my RAW images in DPP and never have to adjust them in PhotoShop.

The ability to shoot RAW images is a feature of higher end cameras and allows for you to have all the raw sensor data from the digital camera without the camera making any automated image enhancements like it would to make a .Jpg image.

This RAW file really is raw data, think of it like a film negative, and must be processed in conversion software and made into a .Jpg or .tiff file.

This conversion software allows me to make decisions on brightness, tone, contrast, color temperature, color saturation, and grain sharpness. By allowing me to make these decisions I can fine tune my pictures, often far better than the logic built into the camera.

Canon in addition to providing the RAW software DPP provides a detailed 106 page user manual, and goes one better providing intensive online tutorials that are easy to understand with video examples by world class photographers and Canon reps.

Unfortunately Canon's Digital Photo Professional will only work with RAW files generated by its EOS line of Digital SLR's. For those with RAW files generated by Canon p&s cameras like the G6 or other manufactures RAW files they will sadly not work with DPP.

Canon's DPP software can be downloaded here:
Digital Photo Professional 3.0.2

The DPP manual (106 pages) is here:
support page

Visit the Online learning center for DPP tutorials and video lessons:
DPP Canon's Digital Photo Professional

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EF Lenswork III The Eyes of EOS

Canon makes a stunning hardcover book showcasing their full line of lenses called "Lenswork"

If you have a Canon EOS system and want to master your camera & lenses you need a copy of this! It has MTF charts for all the current EF lenses, examples of shoots, element diagrams and detailed sections on all of Canon's lens technology.

It also looks back at the history of Canon cameras & lenses, as well as looking into the future of digital with insight into lens and sensor design and theory.

This is THE book for Canon lenses and their performance.

The latest version is available in a beautiful Hardcover, coffee table book, as well as on line in PDF format:

THE EF LENS CONCEPT

CANON'S CHALLENGES

THE EF LENS WORLD (SINGLE FOCAL-LENGTH LENSES)

THE EF LENS WORLD (ZOOM LENSES)

THE EF LENS WORLD (EF-S LENSES)

EF LENS ACCESSORIES & VARIETY IN THE CANON LENS WORLD

THE BASICS OF LENSES & CORRESPONDENCE TO DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY

PHOTO TECHNIQUES

EF LENS TECHNOLOGY

OPTICAL TERMINOLOGY & MTF CHARACTERISTICS

DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS & LENS MAPS

An older version covering Canon's FD camera system -Canon Lenswork 1986- is also available on Christian Rollinger's fine website, The Canon FD documentation project

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Free Pop-Photo Subscription

Freebizmag.com currently offering FREE
Popular Photography Subscriptions

Here is the link: www.freebizmag.com/brpopphoto01welcome.htm

This is not a scam (no money is involved) but you do need to provide freebizmag.com some personal information, which they will no doubt share with marketers likely resulting in increased spam and junk mail. I use a yahoo e-mail account I set up just to give out to potential sources of spam and have not noticed a significant increase.

The blog has no affiliation with freebizmag.com, other than following the procedures to get a free subscription ourselves. We started getting our subscription shortly after filling out our forms. As always when providing personal information over the internet it may be wise to avoid specifics and complete accuracy.

After creating an account and filling out the marketing information forms you will be issued a 1 year subscription to Popular Photography. Other free magazines will be offered to you as well depending upon your answers provided on the survey forms. We choose to receive Flying and Sound & Vision magazine for free as well.

Several on-line magazines were also offered, but although they look interesting we choose to decline all e-mail subscriptions.

If anyone feels like freebizmag.com is not what they seem or have difficulty redeeming the free subscription offer please leave some feedback on this post.

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Photoshop Must Haves...

Photoshop CS2 Quick Reference Guides

Here are a couple of FREE PDF guides you should have handy when you Photoshop

Adobe's Photoshop is a very advanced program. Very advanced. Even with formal schooling most of us are just scratching the surface. luckily Adobe and the internet are replete with tutorials, guides and reference materials.

Here are two references you should have handy any time you venture into the realm of Photoshop:

Photoshop Power Shortcuts is concise 20 page guide with reference to all the tools! With tips and shortcuts for using them and other Photoshop features. You can thank Daniel Brown, Julieanne Kost, & Tim Cole from the website adobeevangelists.com for putting this together for us. You can also find more great reference material on their Tips & Tricks page.

Photoshop Keyboard Shortcuts is a simple 4 page matrix of all the various keyboard shortcuts available in Photoshop CS2. A valuable reference that will save untold amounts of time. The PDF file was created by the helpfull folks over at creativetechs.com. Visit their Quick Tips page for tons of Photoshop guides, ideas, and advice.

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