Transcend 133x 8GB CF記憶卡, originally uploaded by tern.

Hmmm….so recently I decided to take the plunge and move up to a 8GB CF card for my 40D. I have started shooting in RAW+JPG and those files take up some serious space.

I was hesitant because 8GB of images is a lot to lose if a card goes south. But all the cool kids are doing and Dizzle works hard to remain a cool kid (at least to my kids anyway).

I started looking around and reading some threads on different photo forums…I found a ton of folks touting the greatness of the Transcend brand cards. OK, add it to the list.

Well I then found a online shop that sells the Transcend cards for $22.25 with free shipping…kind of hard to pass that up. And I have all these online folks who say the card is great and they swear by it and blah, blah, blah.

So 3 days pass and there in my mailbox is my card…WOOHOO!

Well I go out to shoot my sons football game. Now the 40D is capable of 6FPS, the buffer can hold something like 24 RAW images so I am good to go right? WRONG!

While the camera can do all that and I can hold the shutter down and just let the buffer fill, something was wrong. I was getting horrible pausing in my spray and pray football fun. At first I thought my batteries were low, but I had just charged both of them (I use the grip so I have two batteries at all times).

I continued on and kept experiencing this weird issue. I had not encountered this before and I have used the continuos shooting mode on the camera many times over.

About halftime I decided to change my CF card and went back to my SanDisk Extreme III 4GB card. Odd, second half I did not have any issues with the buffer or pausing.

Yep, that oh so great high speed Transcend card is not so high speed after all. I wasn’t even on high speed mode, just the basic continuos shooting mode.

So while the card did not fail in the sense of me losing photos, it did fail for me in the sense that I missed some shots because of the time it took to write to the card. GRRRR!

I will keep the Transcend card for portraits and what not, the speed should not be an issue there, but I will definitely make note to NOT use it for any type of sports shooting every again.

I will be spending the extra cash to pick up a proven SanDisk card in the next week or so.

As a photographer I am always being told to read this book or check out that book. Usually I will try to pick up whatever is recommended and at least glance at it to see if it’s really THE book that I need to read to become a better photographer.

Since I got back in to serious shooting two books have been mentioned repeatedly, Bryan Peterson’s Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera and most recently The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters by legendary photographer Joe McNally.

The Moment It Clicks is not just a recommended read by me, but a true MUST HAVE!! Every photographer, from the new adopters with a simple point and shoot to the most seasoned pro, should OWN this book. This is not a book you read, this is a book you experience.

I will admit to you, I am writing this review without having actually read the book. Simply, I can’t just sit down and read this…it’s not that kind of book.

Each page contains a tip from Joe, be it something he picked up shooting for National Geographic or something he picked up as a photographer at the New York Daily News or just some simple idea that seems obvious once you read it, but just never really entered your mind. Along with each tip is a quick story and photo with how the photo was taken at the end. But these aren’t your usual stories, many of these are inside industry info that one would get if they were out in the field shooting in, oh let’s say Antartica for a Time magazine feature, and got a request from a photo editor.

In the past two weeks since I bought this book I have found myself just picking it up and opening to a page and starting from there. I have a Post-It pad next to the book so I can sticky those tips that I want to remember…my book is now FULL of sticky notes.

Seriously, this is not a book that I received for review, this is a book that I went out and purchased with my hard-earned money and it was worth every penny. I give this book 4 out of 4 stars…10 out of 10…whatever rating system you want to use, The Moment It Clicks rates tops!

Photography is all about light. Exposing a sensor or strip of film to light is how an image is made. So one can only imagine the number of books written covering this very subject. Add one more to the pile with O’Reilly’s Practical Artistry: Light & Exposure for Digital Photographers (Practical Artistry) by Harold Davis.

This book is specifically geared toward the digital photographer, but almost all the ideas can be used for old school film photogs as well.

The book covers a lot of topics including evaluation of light, aperture and shutter speed and an explanation of ISO. There are also chapters on using a digital darkroom and some post processing tips.

Overall the book does a fine job of explaining the basic techniques of lighting and exposure, but it really does try to cover a bit too much. The book does not go in too much detail on any one aspect which left me wanting a lot more.

Understandably the book is a light read with some amazing images (and each image has a brief explanation of settings used to achieve the image) and a good refresher for someone who already has a grasp of lighting and exposure, but if you are looking for a good starting point on lighting and exposure, this may not be the book for you.

I read a lot. I am one of those types who actually learns from reading…I know, odd in this day in age. Occasionally I will pick up books that seem to offer something for me to learn in their pages, sometimes it’s just because of a recommendation…and other times its on a whim.

I grabbed 100 Ways to Take Better Portrait Photographs on a whim while waiting for a friend to show up at Borders one day a few months back. I figured if nothing else it would be good to have something in the car to read when I had downtime.

Well the book wasn’t as full of learnable (is that a word?) knowledge as I had hoped, but it was full of page after page of inspirational images and techniques. On first glance the book is an easy paced guide to how to make beautiful people more beautiful in photographs. The models on ever page are simply gorgeous…from the women to the men to adorable children. I was very easily drawn in to the images and forgot the words.

But on each page you find an image and a technique that image shows.

I didn’t get a lot of technical know how from this book, but I did get a ton of inspiration from it. I honestly picked up my camera and started shooting anyone who would let me to try out some of the ideas from the book.

I rate this book 3 out of 4 stars, mainly for the inspirational images found inside and many of the clever techniques the book covers.