Thank you all for this honor.

Thank you for this honor.  My wife will be pleased to know one of her photos made the cut this week.  Although I'm sure she doesn't remember taking this photo. This was shot back in 2004  a lifetime ago... or rather, 2 kids ago back when we had time to travel and take pictures.

Attached Link: SapUS59's photo

Actually, the odd numbers for exposures and f-stops are simply coming from mathematics.  I had time to kill last week and ran out of reading material and decided to leaf through my flashmeter userguide.  In there, they had a table for equivalent EV values. Now, since I always used my flashmeter in aperture priority, I never bothered figuring out wath the EV mode did, but simply put, the flashmeter can read the light intensity and return an integer EV value. Where EV = AV + TV.  Both AV and TV are integer values.

The relation between AV and your f-stop number is:  f-stop = 2 ^ ( AV / 2 )... So:
     for AV = 0, you get an f-stop of 1,
     for AV = 1, you get an f-stop of 1.414 (square root of 2), shortened by 1.4 on cameras
     for AV = 2, you get an f-stop of 2,
     for AV = 3, you get an f-stop of 2.828 (2.8 on cameras)
and so on and so forth.... recognize the numbers ? 1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, etc.

The relation between TV and your exposure time is: exposure time = (1 / 2) ^ TV
     for TV = 0, you get an exposure time of 1 second,
     for TV = 1, you get an exposure time of 1/2 second,
     for TV = 2, you get an exposure time of 1/4 second,
     for TV = 3, you get an exposure time of 1/8 second,
and so on and so forth.... so you get 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, etc.

As whaleman suggested earlier, why camera makers write 30 seconds instead of 32 is probably due to the fact that humans prefer nice round numbers. The same applies to the factions, it is easier to remember 1/8 and 1/16 to 0.125 and 0.063.

But the rule of thumb is that from one stop to the next, you always double the amount of light so the exposure time scale has to work the same increments.

But in the examples above, where did the 3.2 and 3.5 f-stop go ?  They are respectively 1/3 and 2/3 stop increments between f/2 and f/4.

I know, I'm a geek.

The autofocus works great with studio flash our outdoors during a sunny day, but it is not so good indoors.  I guess the sensor may be a bit tired.

I'm debating having my old Digital Rebel XTi modified at lifepixel but it is still very expensive.

I've become acquainted with I.R. photography a couple years back when a speaker in one of the portrait photography seminar I attended took a coupl sample shots of the model and they looked amazing.  I couldn't believe the effects in the eyes... almost reminded me of all those X-Files episodes with the black oil.

So I started doing I.R. with my old Powershot A80 with a Cokin A007 filter.  I had tried with my Digital Rebel XTi, but the hot filter was better than on the A80 making long shutter speed even longer.

Since then, I have purchased a pre-modded Powershot G5 from Ebay and the rest, as they say, is history.

Here is a shot I took last week during a photoshoot. Note that she's a redhead and that her dress was black with red & green cherries.

Thank you very much for selecting one of my photos.

This is very rewarding. Thank you all very much (again) for this honor and for the kind comments that were already left on the page with the photo.

Hopefully, this isn't the last time. And congratulations to all the other nominees.

My first camera was my dad's 35mm Minolta back in highschool for my first photography class, but I could only use it for class.  Otherwise, I had my sister's instamatic with 110 film.

Then my first very own Kodak disc film. 15 shots worth of film on a rotating piece of plastic. We got that camera when our Kodak brand Polaroid type camera was recalled by Kodak after they lost in court to Polaroid for a patent violation.

Then I had an APS point & shoot but that grew old quick, I can't even remember what brand it was.

Then I moved to digital.

I went through the same thing last January.  I already owned the Canon EF-S 18-55 (non IS that came with my EOS Digital Rebel XTi) and the Canon EF 55-200 USM II.

I was going on a trip to Costa Rica and wanted to have a better telephoto lens and if possible cut down on the equipment by having a single lense.  After getting some advise from other photographers I know, I decided to go with the Canon EF-S 18-200 IS.

Although, to this day, I am still unsure if I made the right choice. This lenses has a very pronounced corner effect even with the correction applied by my T2i casing. Also, the lense is wider with 70mm threads, this means I had to buy new filters and would have to buy a new set of cokin filters to upgrade from the A to the P series.

Looking back, I may simply have been better off getting the EF-S 55-250 IS instead to replace the 55-200 I already owned.

Thank you very much for selecting one of my photos.

This is very rewarding has, even if I have been doing photo for several years, I have only started doing studio work 2 months ago.  Thank you all very much (again) for this honor and for the kind comments that were already left on the page with the photo.  I will relay this to the models (Steph & Mary).

Hopefully, this isn't the last time, but it does make me even more anxious for Tuesday's and Wednesday's planned photo shoots with new models.