Awesome Photography Trick: Un-erase the Lost

Nothing wrenches the heart like accidentally erasing a memory card full of images.But all is not necessarily lost.

A few years ago, a buddy of mine's mother was approaching her 100th birthday. She didn't get out much anymore, but she'd been to the hairdresser and had her hair Cool Whipped to perfection. She even went to the dry cleaner to get her Queen Bee formal gown pressed.

 

The tiara she always kept gleaming. She enlisted her friend to pick her up at her summer residence to drive her to her son's newly remodeled home. His dinky two-bedroom gardener's shack had been magically rebuilt into a four-bedroom palace with closets the size of shoe stores. And her son even got a haircut. She'd been begging him to do that for 32 years. "Danny, why don't you get a haircut? Take the money from my purse. Go on."

 

I'd recently been out to shoot the new baseball stadium in town, so I brought along the shots on the Compact Flash I'd used. While we were waiting for the Queen Mum, I plugged my digicam into their television and wowed the kids with delusions of a World Series to come.

 

Naturally, I also brought a blank card to shoot the festivities. And, as luck would have it, I got a once-in-a-lifetime shot of mother and son? yep, a rare simultaneous smiling. The next morning, before any cup of anything could clear the cobwebs from my head, I deleted the wrong card. "No," I said. "I didn't." Oh, yeah, I did. But I was confident I could recover the data from the card. I'd done it with floppies, why not with a card? So, I spent the next few weeks trying every trick in the book to undelete the files on the card. But they were lost.

 

I consoled myself with the thought that I'd get that portrait again one day, but the dear matriarch never lived to see her 101st birthday. And her son was so distraught; he let his hair grow out again.

 

It's a sad story. But there's no reason it should ever happen again. These days, even one of the kids could salvage that image while waiting for a World Series. All the little gotchas that defeated me years ago have themselves been defeated by modern utilities designed especially for just this sort of thing.

 

How They Don't Work

 

The first thing to know is that? Whether you are using a Macintosh or a Windows PC? Your storage device is formatted for MS-DOS. Macintoshes have no trouble reading and writing MS-DOS media (and PCs can handle Macintosh media with third-party software). But neither of them is any good at running disk utilities on the other's media. Norton knows your native file system, period. So, recovery of a DOS-formatted card is a generally a Windows task.

 

Unfortunately, Windows might see your card only as a network drive (where, as with floppies, deletions are not safely buffered in the Recycle Bin). And it's rude to reorganize the directories of network drives, so your usually reliable un-erase utility might not go there.

The size of your card is also a factor. The file allocation table for a 16 MB card is not quite the same beast as for a 256 MB card, which is also why some larger-capacity cards don't work in some cameras.

The complications build from there. You might have success using freeware to un-erase your card.

 

Source: O’Reilley | Portfolio Website   | Online Portfolio

Photography tricks: Prevent Red Eye

The plague of point-and-shoot flash photography, red eye, can turn your children into demons and your pets into monsters. Here's how to exorcise this curse from your life.

 

Red eye is caused by one of those laws of physics that's difficult for point-and-shoot cameras to overcome. When the flash is located close to the camera lens and the subject's iris is dilated in low, ambient room light, the flash sends a beam of light into the eye that's reflected off the retina and beamed right back into the camera lens. Presto! You now have red eye.

 

Wedding photographers figured out a long time ago that if you move the flash away from the camera lens, preferably above it, you change the angle of reflection off the retina, so your camera lens doesn't notice it. But adding an external flash isn't always practical for many digicam-toting amateurs. So what are the alternatives?

 

I can tell you what the first alternative isn't: the Red Eye Reduction mode on your camera.

Most of these controls are based on the theory that if they can somehow constrict the irises of the subject's eyes, red eye will be eliminated. As you know from your own experience, this doesn't work very well. And you usually end up annoying your subjects by pelting them with strobes of light before the actual exposure.

 

But the concept of constricting the irises is viable. Instead of using Red Eye Reduction mode, however, try turning up the room lights. Also, if a lamp or other bright source is nearby, have the subject stare at that for a few seconds, then turn back to you for the picture. Both of these methods better achieve what Red Eye Reduction mode is trying to do, and with far less aggravation for everyone concerned.

 

Brightening room lights can help prevent red eye

 

Another trick is to have the subject look off to the side slightly and not gaze directly into the camera lens. This changes the angle of reflection and works most of the time.

If your camera accepts an external flash, then consider getting a dedicated flash cord so that you can raise the flash above the lens. This is far and away the most effective method for preventing red eye. You can simply hold the flash above the camera and shoot, but over the course of the evening, you will be much more comfortable by mounting the flash on a bracket.

 

Hot shoe and dedicated flash cord

 

 

Source: O’Reilley | Portfolio Website for Photographers | Online Portfolio

 

 

 

Photography Tricks: Use Sunglasses as a Polarizing Filter

Chances are, you have a high-quality polarizing filter with you at all times, right under your nose. (Actually, it's sitting on your nose.)

Next to a fully charged battery and a huge memory card, a polarizing filter is the digital photographer's best friend. It reduces unsightly glare, deepens the richness of skies, and improves overall color saturation.The problem for most shooters on the go is that they don't always have their full kit of accessories with them. And many point-and-shoot cameras don't even provide a way to attach an external filter, even if you wanted to.

So what's a photographer to do? Does this mean you'll have to suffer with glare-y subjects and desaturated skies, just because you want to tote a convenient digicam instead of lugging around an albatross of a camera bag? Not at all. Your solution is sitting there right on top of your nose. Your sunglasses! Great lighting usually results in good photographs, with or without filtration, as shown. But sometimes you want to enhance an already good lighting situation. Often, polarization is the perfect solution, as shown . If you don't have a polarizing filter with you, try your sunglasses. You might be surprised by the results.

Without Sunglasses Filter

 

Using a Sunglasses Filter

 

Many quality shades are made out of the same material that camera polarizers are made out of. Simply take off your sunglasses and place one lens as close to your camera's shooting lens as possible. Then, take the shot. If you want to see the difference, take the same.

 

Source: O'Reiley | Online Portfolio Websites for Photographers