Month: October 2016

Giveaway Winners Announced + $230,000 Raised for Charity!

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  WOW – what a week it has been! I’m totally blown away by the response that we got this year from the Complete Photography Bundle. Incredibly, we managed to raise $230,000 for the chosen charities in 5 days. Last year the same event raised $210,000, so I’m really pleased that we set a new record! What’s even more staggering is that the size of this contribution actually takes the total 5DayDeal contributions since 2014 up and over the $1million mark! Giveaway Winners As part of the celebrations this week, I teamed up with the Canon Rumors website and we …

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ENDED: Win a Canon EOS M5 Kit and G7X Mark II – 1 DAY ONLY

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CONTEST CLOSED – Winners announced HERE In order to celebrate just how well we’re doing with the Complete Photography Bundle ($150,000 raised for charity so far!), I’m doing something crazy!! In the next 24 hours, I’ll be giving away a Canon EOS M5 mirrorless kit and a Canon G7X Mark II! The contest is open to anyone over the age of 18, anywhere in the world except where prohibited by law. Giveaway Dates The giveaway will run to 12pm (PDT on October 19th. Prizes After the giveaway closes, two random names will be generated from the entry list. 1st prize: Canon …

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Introducing: Photo Mechanic Unlocked

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I’m really excited to unveil a totally new video training series today called Photo Mechanic Unlocked. I’ve been using Photo Mechanic for many years now, and there’s a very good reason whey you’ll see this software running on nearly every computer screen when you walk into the media centre of any major event: SPEED. This amazing piece of software can totally transform your workflow! The one downside of Photo Mechanic, if you can really call it a downside, is that it has so many features, some of them get a bit lost. A lot of photographers don’t unearth all of these …

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The Lens I Wasn’t Sure I Could Love: Canon 11-24mm f/4 L

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I picked up the Canon 11-24mm f/4 L earlier this year, and at the time it was a bit of a rushed decision. Canon was about to implement a significant price increase, and I’d had it in mind that I might buy the lens later in the year anyway. I had two worries about this lens before I bought it. Firstly, I knew it was huge compared to my other small zooms like the 16-35 f/4 L IS, and the 24-70 f/2.8 L II – lenses that are basically always in my bag. Secondly, the bulbous front glass element prevents you

Gear Check: GoPro Hero5 Black

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GoPro recently launched the new Hero5 Black and Hero5 Session, alongside an impressive looking drone called the Karma. I often take a GoPro on photography trips because I like to use them to capture some behind the scenes content, like this aerial timelapse that I posted earlier in the year. Up until now, I’ve been using the Hero4 Black which shot 4k video, but didn’t have an LCD screen. If you wanted the LCD screen, you had to use the Hero4 Silver, but this didn’t shoot 4k. Frankly, GoPro’s product lineup was rather silly up to this point, but now they

Automated Cloud Backup – I’m Testing CrashPlan For Photographers

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I’m forever tweaking my backup routine to suit my evolving business, and refine my workflow. For a long time I have ignored cloud backup services like BackBlaze and CrashPlan because I wasn’t sure if my glacial Canadian upload speeds would work well for something like that. CrashPlan For Photographers Recently I was having a re-think about this though, and since I’ve received so many questions about these kinds of services in the past, I decided to give it a try. Given that a year’s subscription to CrashPlan for unlimited uploads is only $59.99, it’s not the end of the world

I Sold My Sony Cameras – Here’s Why…

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Some of you may remember that last year I purchased both the Sony RX100 IV and the RX10 II. I primarily wanted the smaller RX100 IV as a camera that I would always have in my pocket, and the larger RX10 II was the camera I used in my office to record all my Youtube videos. I recently sold both of these cameras, despite them being critically acclaimed cameras! Here’s why… Both cameras used the same sensor, so there was nothing to choose between them in terms of image quality. For a point and shoot camera, there’s no doubt that

My Site Is in the Top 100 Photography Blogs!

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Throughout my career, I’ve always put a lot of time and effort into maintaining an active blog full of useful information and stories about my work. Time and time again, this has paid dividends in ways I could never imagine when I first started it nearly ten years ago. Recently I learned that my this blog has been featured in the #66 spot in the Feedspot Top 100 Photography Blogs On the Planet. Not bad considering I’m just one man with a camera and a desire to share some fun and knowledge. Of course the other sites in the list,

Canon 600mm f/4 DO on the Way

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Image: pophoto I don’t often post about rumours on my blog, but I’m too excited about this to let it pass, and it’s also not that much of a rumour since since Canon have already shown a working prototype of this lens… the EF 600mm f/4 DO IS. Canon have been working on diffractive optic technology for about 20 years, and it initially received a lukewarm reception when the first lenses were launched. The technology allows a lens to be physically much smaller and lighter than a regular lens, but it used to come at the slight cost of some

Reader Question: Which Kayak Do You Use to Photograph From?

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Photos of my kayak photography setup always draw a lot of attention and result in a lot of questions. In order to answer these definitively, I’ve added a new “Photography from a Kayak” section to my Gear Guide that explains which kayak I use, why I chose it, and what other accessories are needed to complete the whole setup. PS. Did you check out the Photography EDC kit section that I also added recently?

Behind the Shot: Tiny Tree Biker (Photoshop Composite Project)

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This image is a little unusual for me because it involves fairly heavy usage of Photoshop which is not something I typically do. I wanted to improve some of my Photoshop knowledge, and there’s no better way to do that than rolling up your sleeves and jumping right in. In particular, I wanted to experiment with creating a composite image – one which was created by combing two or more photos into a single, final shot. As an avid mountain biker, sometimes I have daydreamed about riding around in the incredible trees that grow in by home province of British

Behind the Shot: Watersprite Lake Panorama

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In this example we’re looking at a 9-shot panoramic photo that was created at an alpine lake in British Columbia. Read on to find out which of the big “rules” I broke when I was shooting this…