Should you be shooting RAW?

manual’ mode.  When people are starting out in digital photography, it can seem like another area full of technical jargon that forms a barrier preventing its uptake.  However, once you have an small understanding of the processes involved and how different settings can impact your results, you will find that letting your camera do the processing can be the limiting factor in achieving your photographic vision.

What is RAW?

A RAW file is an uncompressed image file that records the data from the sensor

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Practical White Balance and Why You Should Learn It!

Kelvin Scale’. The scale itself was discovered using clever physics experiments, which looked at the wavelengths of light produced by heating black objects to different temperatures. Its definitely useful to know that there is a scale for measuring white balance but all you really need to remember is that the lower numbers equal warmer or redder light with higher the numbers relating to cooler or blue light. Importantly you shouldn’t worry about remembering any of this, its useful knowledge to have but to date I have never needed to know the exact white balance setting of my camera so I doubt you will do either.

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What Marissa Mayer Should Do to Make Flickr Awesome (again)

That page linked to the site’s jobs page as well as to its github and code pages.

The pleas from both Flickr’s number one fan and from the Yahoo-owned platform itself won a lot of play on the Web. Mashable wrote about it, as did CNN, and Flickr’s response picked up more than 2,700 tweets. But there was little said about what exactly Flickr (or the Internet) should actually be doing to make the tool as awesome and indispensable as it used to be.

Here are some ideas.

Sort Out the App

There’s no reason that Instagram should exist, let alone have a $1 billion price tag. Flickr should have beaten founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger to the App Store by years and with an inventory of hundreds of millions of photos. It should have allowed photo editing, simple batch uploading from smartphones on the go as well as all the filters that Instagram’s enthusiastic snappers have been using to hide their shots’ weaknesses.

Flickr does have an iPhone app. It was introduced in 2009, a year after the App Store opened, and despite several updates since then is still terrible. Search for

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Should You Consider an IR Remote?

i.e., CLS or E-TTL. But infrared (IR) remotes are another, if much less used, option.

They are compact, cheap and wireless so there's a lot to like. But they also have some weaknesses. Today we'll be taking a look at whether an IR remote may be a good choice for you.
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The IR remote shown above is the Wein Sync-Link. You can get them for about $70. I stuck it on a Fuji X100 for testing, which is very relevant as you'll see in a minute. But first, some basics.

Like all IR remote triggers, the Sync-Link is essentially a small flash with a strong IR filter in front. You see it fire, but really have no sense of how much light is blasting out because you can't see infrared light.

So don't look straight at it when you pop it because that IR blast can definitely fry your eyeba

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