360Photography

I’ve mentioned before that I’m often inspired by this blog and yesterday’s post was a TTV photo, which inspired me to tell you, dear Photodoto readers, how to create TTV photos. Luckily for you it’s very simple, in principle.

TTV stands for “Through the Viewfinder” and to create one of these photos you need two cameras. Basically you set up your digital camera to shoot through the viewfinder of another camera. It sounds simple but requires quite a bit of patience to get it set up correctly. The best advice is to give it a try and practice until you get the hang of it. Also, try placing something dark coloured around the gap between the two lenses to keep out extra light.

Oh, and check out the Through the Viewfinder group on Flickr for some more TTV inspiration.

Photo credit:

Photodoto

This guest post was written by Sherry Osborne. Sherry is unable to leave home without at least one camera hanging off her shoulder. She posts photography tips geared to beginners several times a week at photoblog.net. Contact me if you are interested in guest writing for Photodoto. -John

I don’t know if this has ever happened to you but one of the worst feelings in the world (photography-wise at least!) is discovering that your memory card has become corrupted and you’ve now lost all the photos you recently took. It happened to me on my old point and shoot card but I was really lucky in that there were only about five or six photos on the card and they weren’t particularly important to me.

It can, however, be a disaster to lose your photos before you can remove them from the card. While you can’t prevent all problems, here are some memory card tips to avoid as many issues as possible.

1. Enjoy sales on memory cards but avoid cheap. When you’re shopping for a card buy the big name brands when a store is having a good sale. No matter how tempting it is, don’t pick up a card with a name brand you’ve never heard of and say, “Huh, only five bucks! I’ll get this one.” Sometimes price and brand really do matter and while even the popular brands can occasionally produce a defective card, you’re less likely to find yourself asking where all your photos went if you don’t buy a cheap card.

2. Do not leave your card in a card reader, even if you don’t think it’s doing anything. This is one of the tips that is hardest for me to follow. I have a tendency to take an average of 100+ photos on any given outing so I’ll often put the card in my reader, let it start, and then I’ll wander off to do other things. Then I realize, hours later, that the card is still sitting there. It seems like no big deal but as long as something is in the reader the computer will keep interacting with it. Don’t use it if it doesn’t actually need to be used.

3. Format your card each time you finish removing photos. Even if you delete the photos from the card, some data is still embedded in the card. When you load it back in your camera, take a moment to go into your menu and format the card each time.

4. Avoid extremes. Cards don’t like a lot of intense cold or high humidity. Keep it away from a lot of dust, and magnets. Be careful with it. They may look all sturdy and compact but they’re very sensitive.

5. Don’t use your card as a storage unit. This is such a common mistake and it’s so easily avoided. My parents travelled out East for my sister’s wedding back in September and my father took hundreds of photos while out there. I visited my parents at Christmas time and was utterly appalled that my father had never dumped his photos onto his computer. It was over three months after the fact and he had simply left the pictures on his card, continuing to take more on a fairly regular basis. He’s extremely lucky that his card didn’t become corrupted because he would have lost hundreds of pictures of his youngest daughter getting married, not to mention all the travel photos he took during his week-long visit. Just because your card can hold hundreds or even thousands of photos doesn’t mean that you should. Dump them and back them up often.

6. Consider more than one card. If you can buy two it’s a good idea to do so because then you have a back up. Change out your cards partway through the day. If you lose photos on one card, at least you’ll still have some on the other.

7. Don’t remove your card from the reader while it’s accessing the photos, don’t remove it from your camera while it’s turned on, and don’t insert it when the camera is on. All of these things can potentially corrupt your card, causing you to lose some or all of your images.

Do you have any memory card tips that work for you? Share them in the comments!

Photodoto