technical stuff

When shopping for a decent light stand bag, you might find that most stand bags are too small, don’t have wheels or are very expensive.

If you carry just a couple of stands and umbrellas, this may not be an issue for you. But if you need to carry a trunkful of stands, an armful of softboxes or umbrellas, a few rolls of 52″ background paper and more, there is a solution.

Go to a golf store or sporting goods store and check out golf travel bags. These bags are designed to transport a golf bag full of clubs and, in some cases, even a small golf cart. They often have big outside pockets to hold various golf accessories.
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It’s common to shoot business portraits against seamless background paper. It’s also common practice for a photographer to create a tonal gradient on that background rather than having a flat tone. A gradient adds a bit of depth to the photo by separating the subject from the background.

The problem with a tonal gradient is that when the finished photo is saved as a jpeg, the file compression can cause the gradient to posterize. The amount of posterization also depends on how “steep” the gradient is.

A small amount of posterization won’t be noticed by most customers nor will it be visible in print or online. But many photographers want to deliver the best possible image to the customer.
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There are several web sites that show how to replace the battery cells inside a Quantum Battery, (note: in contrast to what some sites say, there’s no need to break the case or any rivets). Over the past 12 years, I’ve replaced the cells in my Quantum Battery 1 and Quantum Turbo a few times with no problems whatsoever. I have no experience with any other model of Quantum Battery.

Replacing the cells takes about 15 minutes and requires only a Phillips screwdriver. Having the cells replaced by the Canadian distributor takes a week and costs three or four times more. To be fair, the factory technicians check and repair/replace other parts, if required.

For Canadian photographers looking for replacement cells, BBM Battery sells, (you guessed it), all types of batteries.
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Many photographer web sites tend to be black, white or grey. For those who want to add some colour to their site’s design, the usual go-to sites for colour inspiration are Colour Lovers and Color Combinations.

A site that makes colour swatches almost fun is Color.Hailpixel.

To help you understand colour harmony for web sites, photo shoots and portrait photography, there are two similar sites: Color Calculator and Adobe’s Color Wheel.

Since Firewire 800 card readers are no longer sold by Sandisk or Lexar, even though many photographers still use FW800, it may be difficult to find a suitable speedy card reader. Apple’s painfully slow rollout of USB 3 also doesn’t help.

For photographers who need a FW800 card reader, there’s good news and bad news:

The good news is that there’s one company which still sells a FW800 card reader. The card reader, which is sold in Canada, is small, reasonably priced and, when in stock, delivered quickly by Canada Post.

The bad news is that the card reader works only with UDMA compact flash cards. However, it won’t work with first-generation UDMA cards such as the Sandisk Extreme III (30MB/s). So if a photographer uses older compact flash cards or other formats such as SD cards, it will still be necessary to carry another card reader.