PhotoFAVS Wednesday: Ed Pierce's Mini Target

Good Morning Everybody,

WOW!  Today is the BIG day - my largest webinar ever!!!  We have photographers attending from around the world - New Zealand, Russia, Italy, Canada, Mexico, Brussels - the list goes on and on.  Thanks to all who registered.

Remember, there is seating for the first 1000 people that log in.  2:30 p.m. will be the official time folks can start logging in.

The ways things shaped up these last 48 hours has really caught us by surprise.  I even called the "GoToWebinar" tech support team 5 times over the last 3 days asking why registration didn't cut off at 1000. I never got a satisfying answer from them, but they plan to address the issue in an upcoming release.  That doesn't help us today though.

That said, if you can't log on because of our huge crowd, we have scheduled a  "LIVE Encore Performance" again two weeks from now on March 17, 2010 at 4:00p.m. Yep, I'll give the program again. The slightly later start time may even work better for many people.

We will email everyone who wasn't able to attend today the details about how to sign up for our "Encore Performance"  on March 17, 2010.

I've planned a short PhotoFAVS Wednesday today, so let's get right to it.

PhotoFAVS Wednesday: Ed Pierce's 14’ Pocket Target

Exposure is critical when shooting digital, even if you are shooting RAW and even more so if you're shooting JPEG mode.

I regularly use the "Highlight Alert" function enabled on my cameras. That basically means that if I'm over-exposing diffuse whites, for example, a bride's wedding gown, the viewfinder will "blink" back at me.  I need to make an adjustment to the exposure to make the "blinking" go away to be sure I'm not "blowing out the whites" and jamming the histogram up against the right most axis.

OK, what do I do if I don't have a "diffuse white" tonality in the scene?  I simply add one. You can use anything that's white - I've even used a piece of notebook paper in the past. But notebook paper is not all that professional so I picked up my buddy, Ed Pierce's mini target [link]. It's small, light, and really inexpensive. Ed is even running a sale on them right now so check the pocket target out here.  He even has a video to show you how it works.

Ed invented his target years ago and just recently was awarded a patent on his design.  The pocket target collapses to about 6 inches when closed and opens to about 14 inches - large enough for me to easily include in my pre-shooting set up.

With the pocket target, I can quickly check for my "blinkies" with my "Highlight Alert" function on my camera and be super accurate on my exposure in no time.

That's why it is this week's PhotoFAV.

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Hey gang, that's it for me today.  I'm going to tweak my presentation a bit more and then I'm catching up with Nicholas, my Ace#1 assistant for a Web-Cast run through.  I'll see ya' on the air in a few hours.  Remember, If you can't log in we are re-broadcasting the event "LIVE" in two weeks so everyone will have a chance to hear the program, today or on March 17th.

Have a great one and I'll see ya' soon,  -David