Gear & Reviews

“We recognized that there was a demand for an easier way to upload high-quality video,” said John Homlish, a Casio Vice President.

Locus 1.0 could be useful to a landscape photographer or to those who want to know the specifics of Circle of Confusion and all its calculations. But, to use it on the job, you would need access to a computer in the field. There are many advanced concepts at work, which could make it a good learning tool for beginning photographers. The price is not unreasonable for someone who really wants the mathematical information (licenses are available beginning at $30, direct).

The Shutter Life Expectancy Database includes an exhaustive list of hundreds of point-and-shoot and DSLRs. When you click on a camera name, the database displays the “average number of actuations after which shutter is still alive” and the “average number of actuations after which shutter died” followed by individual users’ reports. Since the site’s content is completely user-generated, though, take the findings with a grain of salt.

Big sensor, tiny cameras

REALVIZ announced a bundle of programs June 22 that should ease the processing of High Dynamic Range (HDR) images. REALVIZ HDR Imaging Studio is now offering three programs together, REALVIZ’s Stitcher 5.6, and VTour 1.2 along with Photomatix Pro from HDR Soft.

See more of Neal’s Olympus underwater shots after the jump.

White light is fine and dandy, but when you're looking for a little pizazz in an image there's nothing like a little color in your background or warming on your subject to pop it a bit. The practice of covering studio strobes or lights with translucent gels in order to change the color of the light coming out of them has grown with the recent resurgence of the portable strobe as light source for weddings, location shoots, industrial photography and pretty much anything else that requires externa

Serif has released Vista certified AlbumPlus X2 ($50, street). This program is very simple but effective and has a pretty straight forward layout. It’s a straightforward organization program, that’s easy to use.

—The Editors

A user friendly and cost efficient approach is Camera Bit’s Photo Mechanic software ($150). As a browser, it isn’t for editing your images but for sorting and organizing them—you can tag them, color code them or rate them and can add metadata to each file. You can sort by a variety of ways and rename the files. Everyone has their own work flow but the key is you can sort through the images quickly, easily and organize them in an orderly way.