The Lowepro Urban Photo Sling 250 and The Chicago Air & Water Show

The Chicago Air & Water Show is something that I was looking forward to since the weather became warmer - you see, I have had a great fascination about airplanes since I was young. I believe that this has even propelled me, pardon the pun, to take up physics for my undergrad.

I would have wanted to catch most of the show: the sky divers, the helicopter demos; the wife and I were only able to catch the last 15 minutes of the show...

These are my photos:

Normally, I use either a Lowepro Versapack 200AW or a Lowepro Urban Photo Sling 150 but for this adventure, I chose to bring the Lowepro Urban Photo Sling 250. I used this bag instead because I had the Canon 70-300 attached to the camera while the Canon 24-105 and a Canon speedlite are parked inside.

The wife, herself, was able to get some spectacular shots. She even got some spectacular photos of me while photographing the event. The following are her shots:

These are her photos of me while I was taking the shots. I absolutely love that I can easily blend in with the crowd, some 1 million of them, with this photo sling bag.

It was a lovely day and, despite having only a few minutes, I was able to enjoy the entire 15 minutes of it.

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Shots made with a Canon 7D and a Canon EF 70-300 f/4-5.6 IS lens.

The wife's photos made with a Canon Powershot.

Review of the Joby GorillaPod Focus

Want a way to stabilize your photos yet do not want to be burdened by a 5-pound tripod? Then look no further: The Joby Gorillapod Focus is the way to go.

The GorillaPod Focus is light - you actually will forget that you have a tripod with you, yet it can hold up to 11 pounds worth of camera gear.

The main difference with my other GorillaPod, the SLR Zoom and the Focus? The zoom can hold up to 6.6 pounds only.

However, there is another major difference between the two: The Focus has a more massive ballhead.

The tripod's carrying capacity will be useless if the ballhead is "light-weight", but the Ballhead X lives up to what the legs can do.

So what can you do with a much bigger head? Not only can you put more load on it...

... you will also be able to put the camera on a portrait orientation (as point of reference, if I do the same thing with my SLR Zoom, the camera will tend to tilt downward).

But, how is the tripod in action? I have nothing but positive things to say regarding this gadget.

First off, the tripod is really light that you can just stick it to your camera bag and forget about it:

Or, you can just put it in one of your pockets and not be inconvenienced by it:

Or, as I am wont to do, I just hold on to it and, when it's time to get my shot, I put it on the ground:

A little more adventurous way of holding it is to wrap the tripod around a bodily part - in my case my arm...

Just make sure that it isn't too tight, or else you will lose blood circulation in that appendage...

But when the time comes that you want to use the tripod...

So, you want to stabilize your shots without lugging a 5-pound tripod? Want to really nail that HDR shot? Get your Joby GorillaPod Focus here!

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Shots made with a Canon 5D Mark II, a Canon 100mm f/2.8L Macro, and a Canon Powershot.

Linear, Curved - It Is Just A Matter of Perspective

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Shots made with a Canon 7D and a Canon EF 24-105 f/4L IS USM lens. Want the best backpack for your DSLR? Check out my review of my favorite, the Lowepro Versapack 200AW, here and here.

Lightroom 4's Clarity Adjustment is Brilliant!

Photoshop CS6's HDR Pro is fantastic, as I show here. However, Lightroom 4's clarity adjustment can't be far behind.

Consider the photo below:

There really is nothing to write home about with this photo.

But, in the Develop Module, under Basic, I changed the "Clarity" level all the way to 100 and I got this:

I was able to pull a lot of details out of both the underexposed building and the overexposed sky. Really, Adobe has made a near-miraculous software out of Lightroom 4.

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Shot made with a Canon 7D and a Canon EF 24-105 f/4L IS USM lens. Want the best backpack for your DSLR? Check out my review of my favorite, the Lowepro Versapack 200AW, here and here.

Photoshop's "Photo Merge" is Not Only for Landscapes

More often than not, a panorama is made when a wide-angle lens is simply not enough. And, more often than not, the subject of such panoramas are landscapes or man-made structures, like bridges and landscapes.

However, another power of photoshop is in combining photos of people and making a "panorama" from several shots.

Consider the photos below:

The wife and I had dinner with some old and new friends and, as often happens in such happenings, photography is almost always involved. However, there was not enough space for me to back into so I decided to take two photos of the group. (Also, if ever there is enough space to back up to, if ever I did that, then there would be a huge empty space at the top and at the bottom of the photo. Oh, and I told the group of my intention to shoot two photographs so that their attention will not waver away from me after I took the first shot and so that their positions would still be relatively the same.)

I combined the two photos into one panorama shot and what I got was this:

I am very happy with this shot (and more so since I only used a Canon Powershot to take these). The power of combining the photos into one photo panorama came from photoshop. I love it.

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Shot of the Art Institute of Chicago taken with a Canon 7D and a Canon 24-105 f/4L lens. Shots of our friends taken with a Canon Powershot. Post-processing done using Photoshop.

Photoshop CS6's HDR Tool is Fantastic!

Photoshop has had HDR since CS4, but with Photoshop CS6, HDR has been mind-blowing!

Consider these three shots, taken at -2, 0 and +2 Exposure Values.

I then combine them at PS CS6 via File > Automate > Merge to HDR Pro...

And, with some minor adjustments, this was what I got:

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Shots made with a Canon 5D Mark II, a Canon EF 24-105 f/4L IS USM lens and a Joby Gorillapod Focus. Want the best backpack for your DSLR? Check out my review of my favorite, the Lowepro Versapack 200AW, here and here.