Going on a photographic workshop can be exhausting. You’re up early, you’re out late, you’re constantly exercising the creative muscles in your head in crafting compositions and thinking about exposure. It’s no wonder that at the end of any such trip it’s really easy to put the camera down and not think about photography for a bit. Unfortunately the mindset often sets in before you’ve even left the photography location.

If there is one tool that every digital photographer should know and understand (at least a little) it is the curves dialogue. Concurrently the most asked question I receive when teaching anything to do with post-production is, “what is the curves tool and how do I use it?” To try and simplify this then, here is a very quick and dirty explanation of the curves dialogue that will hopefully clear a path through the murk that is post-production.

Oddly the way a camera feels in the hand is often the last thing that a potential buyer considers when selecting a camera. This is particularly the case now that the internet has become the great big mall in the sky. It's so easy to click on a button and 24 hours later a shiny toy arrives at the gate. Then the buyers remorse sets in as you quickly realize that although said toy looks like the pictures on the websites, it doesn't feel anything like you thought it would.

Right now one of the primary decisions someone is faced with when deciding to buy a camera, is whether to buy a Digital Single Lens Reflex Camera (or DSLR), or a Mirrorless Interchangeable Lens Camera (usually just referred to as a ‘mirrorless’ camera). This series of articles are geared towards someone buying their first camera, but equally many photographers who already have a DSLR are eyeing out the new breed of mirrorless cameras with interest. What follows below is our advice to someone trying to decide between the two.

(scroll to the bottom if you prefer tables to reading)

The original article that I wrote on buying a camera  (see it on Photo Writing) was written seven year’s ago. Surprisingly, and despite the rise of mirrorless cameras, not all that much has changed in the intervening years. My advice then, remains pretty much the same now. Still, seven years in the digital world is a lifetime when it comes to the hardware and software that we use to create images. Due to a recent spate of emails requesting advice on what camera to buy, here is our (the Nature's Light team) ‘updated’ thoughts on buying a camera (particularly as a first time buyer). Below is a brief synopsis in table form. More detail below.

It’s come a long since it was introduced to the Adobe suite (Photoshop 7.0 to be exact) in 2002. At that stage is magically blended your clone spot with the underlying pixels. I say magically, although in comparison to today’s voodoo like blending it was pretty rough. Still, it made the task of dust-spotting and cleaning up images infinitely easier than when we had to rely on careful clone-stamping at various opacity levels.

For those who are unaware of what it is, the healing brush is a specialised tool in Photoshop that, like the clone stamp, takes pixels from one point and overlays them on another point. In this way the photographer can ‘heal’ dust spots and other blemishes.

Amazing landscape images don't happen on their own. They require hard work in order to get to the right location. Sometimes harder work in order to wake up on time and a good deal of luck in order to get the right conditions so that they all fit together. Nature's Light runs workshops in several amazing locations to try and make it that much easier. However, we have a number of photographers who have indicated they would like to join one or more of us on a real adventure in the mountains, the kind we do on our off-time. Read on if you are interested in joining a trek in the Drakensberg Mountains to capture the mountain light.

AS we enter November and mark a world that has been in effective lockdown since March this year, we can start to look ahead and hope that there is some glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel that is Covid-19. Here at Nature's Light we are cautiously optimistic that 6 months from now things will be slowly returning, if not to absolute 'normal', back to some sense of normality. Whether it is from a vaccine, better treatment or just plain hard-headedness by citizens, it is likely that travel and workshops will be happening by mid year 2021.

Deciding whether to travel or not is difficult on a number of counts. From a personal point of view, are you likely to be infected and fall sick in another country. This impacts on medical insurance and whether you are even able to get cover to travel at this time. From a broader point of view, even if you are what is deemed 'asymptomatic', are you further spreading the virus.

With the above in mind, we do feel that by the time our workshops start again (all international workshops were postponed through to 2021) it is likely that both vaccine's and effective treatment will be available (our first cross-border workshop is only in April 2021).

So you have decided that you need a new set of legs and you like what you see in the Leofoto Ranger series of carbon fibre tripod legs (If you want to know more about the Leofoto tripods you can read this primer on understanding what makes them different: https://landscapegear.co.za/blogs/news/introducing-the-ranger). Here comes the crunch then, The LS-324C and the LS-285C are the same price and have very little difference between them on paper. So how do you decide which one to go for? Let’s start by looking at the actual specs between the two sets of legs: