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Cory Photography with Tom and Pat Cory |
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Smoky Mountains, TN , 2009 |
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Newsletter, January 2009 |
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Cory Photography Newsletter 34 January 15, 2009
In this edition you will find:
Fujifilm Camera from Santa Gently Touch the Earth Night Photography Black and White Photography WTCI-TV PBS Program
Hello!
We hope that you had a wonderful holiday season and that your new year will be filled with wonderful images and experiences.
Although we won't be traveling far from home until May, January is proving to be pretty busy. We had a nice time over at Wilderness Wildlife Week in Pigeon Forge, TN. It was good to see so many folks in spite of the gloomy economic news that is everywhere. Thanks to you who attended our programs. We also have a number of short local workshops and programs for camera clubs coming up soon. We were excited to have our day long workshop at the Tennessee Aquarium fill quickly. We hope to schedule another for later in the year to accommodate those on our waiting list and thank those folks for their patience. With the cold weather so many folks are having, it's nice to think about spring coming in a few months and there's no place better to see spring than in the Smokies. See our press release in the March issue of Outdoor Photographer. We'll put the rest of our news down in the body of the newsletter—we have several things that we're excited about to tell you.
Take care and again, Happy New Year!
Best, Tom and Pat
Fujifilm Camera from Santa
Santa brought me (Pat) a Fujifilm Finepix S100 FS camera for Christmas. (Maybe because he brought Tom a Canon 50D before Christmas???) I find it amusing that in two places, in big letters, my new digital camera says Fujifilm. While some people see these self contained cameras as a bit of a compromise compared to the DSLRs, there's no getting around the fact that it's nice not to have to worry about getting gup on your sensor or seemingly always to have the wrong lens on the camera and having a built in macro feature that gets really close is very nice. I personally like a camera like this to compliment my video work and also to carry around when I don't want to deal with a tripod and a bunch of lenses such as when we are wandering around a city or town. So I'm not green with envy over the 50D although that is one sweet camera.
There are some nice things about the camera. The extended Dynamic Range similar to that of negative film helps in high contrast situations. The newly developed stabilized 28-400mm (35mm equivalent) Fujinon lens is optimized for nature photography. There is a large 2/3-inch screen that tilts making low level viewing easy. Inside there is a 11.1 megapixel, Super CCD. Like many newer cameras, ISO 800 actually creates a usable image. The camera will produce JPEG or RAW although I suspect photographers who always want to shoot RAW will prefer a DSLR. The Film Simulation Mode allows you to take photos that reproduce the color tones of Velvia or Provia. Ironically, I came across this quote this morning in the imaginginfo.com newsletter: "Amy Postle, a New York City-based professional photographer, shoots both film and digital, using film about 75 percent of the time… "When I dreamt of being a photographer as a child ... it was to be a photographer, not a digital technician," she said. Photographers now "spend countless hours on the computer making the images look like they were shot on film." (In a way, she's got a point. Isn't this a funny old world?) On the down side, this camera is not your typical point and shoot size that fits in your pocket; on first glance it looks like a DSLR. And while better than some cameras I've seen, it still has that annoying delay when you press the shutter button compared to the DSLRs.
Gently Touch the Earth
Well, it's finally here, our first photo book produced with Blurb. The book contains some of our favorite photographs combined with some of our favorite quotations. If you would like to take a peak at the first few pages click here. These print-on-demand books are a bit pricy, but make printing a book something anyone can do without going to the expense of having to print many copies. You can just order one for yourself or a few for gifts and you also can put them for sale in the Blurb bookstore. There are several different companies who offer this type of service. You might want to consider printing a book with your own images—it's great fun. And you can avoid that look on your friends' faces when you bring out your laptop to show the pictures from your trip. People actually seem to smile and be impressed when you pull out a book of photos instead. |