Behind the Shot: Diving with Sea Lions
I went diving with sea lions off the coast of Vancouver Island! In this post I’ll tell you everything about how this image was shot, and share some stories from my trip.
Dan Carr
Heading South to Get Wet
Today I’m packing my bags to fly south to Vancouver from the Yukon. I’ll spend a couple of days running some errands around the city and catching up with some friends and then I’m taking a series of three different ferries to end up on Hornby Island where I’ll be freediving with sea lions for a few days. Hornby Island is a small island in the Straight of Georgia, between Vancouver Island and the British Columbian mainland. I have been making regular visits to Vancouver Island for a while now and it’s easily one of my favourite wildlife photography destinations. …
Can You Fly with a Tripod?
I have often wondered what the official stance on this is, but it turns out there’s a simple page on the TSA website that tells you the answer. Clearly it says that monopods and tripod are ok to travel with, as long as they fall within luggage dimensional limits. Of course those vary from airline to airline, but roughly speaking I’d say that it gives you room for a 21″ long tripod, as long as when strapped to the side of your bag it doesn’t then push your other bag dimensions over the limit. Seems reasonable. The CATSA (Canadian version …
Canon’s Missing Fast Prime – The Sigma 28mm f/1.4 is Here
I have always been a fan of the 28mm focal length and long wondered why there was never an EF 28mm f/1.4 L lens in Canon’s otherwise exhaustive lens lineup. Well, today Sigma solved that with the launch of the Sigma 28mm f/1.4 ART. Available now to pre-order from B&H for $1399. Shipping will start on January 25th. Nikon F-mount is also available for pre-order, but it’s not yet clear when the Sony E-mont version will come to market. Later this year we should also see an L-mount version of this lens for Sigma’s upcoming full-frame mirrorless camera, as well …
Adobe Finally Fixes Lightroom Healing Brush?!? It’s FAST now.
For years the healing brush tool in Lightroom (Classic) has been pathetically slow and essentially useless unless you only used it to fix one or two tiny spots on an image. If you added any more than that, Lightroom would slow to a crawl. For the most part it forced me to export the image to Photoshop to use their healing and cloning tools when I needed to fix dust spots or remove small imperfections because it was so much faster. Today I was editing a photo in Lightroom Classic (build 1200465) and I noticed that the healing brush seemed …
Gear Check: Anker PowerPort Cube
Anker make a ton of awesome power accessories and the PowerPort Cube is my new favourite travel power strip. Sometimes you just can’t find enough power sockets in a hotel room so a power strip is a useful travel accessory. The problem is that traditional power strips, with their side-by-side sockets, often make it difficult to plug in multiple battery chargers. The cubic shape of the Anker PowerPort Cube solves this problem entirely, and it even has three USB ports on it too, so you can keep your phone and other smaller devices charged. This thing solves so many charging …
Gear of the Year – 2018
For the past few years I have written a post at the beginning of the year where I discuss some of my favourite and most-used items of the past 12 months. For 2017 I wrote about the Canon 11-24mm f/4L, the RRS TFC-14 tripod, the Drobo 5D3 and a few other bits and bobs. Looking back on 2018, as I’m doing right now, I realize that the content of my gear closet hasn’t changed all that much. I didn’t buy any new DSLRs in 2018, and I didn’t even buy any new lenses – I can’t remember the last time …
Behind the Shot: Dawn in Kluane National Park
Kluane National Park is undoubtedly one of the gems of the Yukon, and on this cold winter morning we were treated to some beautiful calm weather and clear views across Kathleen Lake. After spending a little time photographing some of the hoar frost covered trees that surround the lake, I walked around the corner and was greeted with this wonderfully expansive view. Gear Used for This Shot With the mountains as a strong background element I knew right away that I would need something in the foreground to balance the composition. Without a foreground element, the vastness of the open …
Adapting the Breakthrough Photography x100 for a Single Filter
I have been using the X100 filter holder from Breakthrough Photography recently, but I needed to make a quick mod that you might like to know about.
Cool! DJI Osmo Pocket – Tiny 3-Axis Stabilized Camera
DJI’s latest handheld gimbal, the Osmo Pocket, costs just $349 and shoots 4K 60p video. It has a built-in touchscreen, a battery that lasts for two hours and an incredible variety of modes to shoot stabilized videos, motion timelapses, multi-row panoramic images and much more. You can even connect it to your mobile device and record video direct to the phone, whilst using the screen as a larger monitor. For the bloggers out there, there’s an optional accessory to connect a proper microphone, as well as an underwater housing and an adapter to mount it to your pre-existing collection of …
Behind The Shot: Frozen Forest in the Yukon
It’s definitely winter in Canada now so the BTS posts are likely to be snowy ones for a while! This is a recent shot from a hidden valley near Whitehorse in the Canadian Yukon Territory.
Drobo Launches the 8D. An 8-Bay Thunderbolt 3 Storage Solution
My primary photo storage device is a Drobo 5D3 which is a 5-bay Thunderbolt 3 enabled storage array. I also use a 5N2 NAS to mirror the 5D3 every night, and I keep an older Thunderbolt 2 5D unit at another physical location as a third backup. You could say I’m pretty invested in the Drobo systems, and having owned every version of them since the very first Firewire units nearly a decade ago, I pay close attention to new product launches. Today they launched the Drobo 8D, which is basically the bigger brother to the 5D3 that I’m currently …