Jon Sienkiewicz Blog

These projects are affordable or FREE and will keep you occupied for days – weeks, even. They require no special skills and comply with social distancing safety and common sense. Think of them as sort of blind dates. You may want to spend an afternoon with them, or maybe a few months, or perhaps even the rest of your life.

Did you just get a new camera? Or maybe you’re getting reacquainted with a camera that’s been on the shelf for awhile? Getting good pictures consistently – the ultimate goal of all photographers – is easier than you think. Here are 10 tips that I share with all photographers regardless of skill level.

If 2020 taught us nothing else, we collectively learned that things can go wrong. Terribly wrong. If your photos and video footage are important to you (and, as a photographer, they should be), then you need to buy a trusty storage or backup device pronto.

Humans learn to speak correctly by repeating what they hear, and during the process they automatically and unconsciously develop “an ear for correct grammar” naturally. I’ll bet you don’t leave many dangling participles, even though only a few English majors know exactly what that means. I propose that composition, particularly composition in photography, is learned the same way.

Just introduced, the compact Tamron 70-300mm f/4.5-6.3 Di III RXD zoom for Sony full-frame mirrorless cameras has an affordable ($549) price tag. It’s eighth in the series of Tamron lenses made specifically for Sony E-Mount cameras, and it’s the world's smallest and lightest telezoom in its class.

Time to test your camera name recall powers. Take a look at the list of model numbers below and identify the camera each represents. Hint: none are digital. Scroll down to read the answers and a little bit of history. No cheating! Like my junior high school shop teacher, Three-Fingers Clark, used to say, “When you cheat you only hurt yourself, but when you mess up with a table saw you get a nickname.”

See a spot of color you like? Scan it with this $59 doodad and instantly your smartphone shows the RGB values – and a lot of other stuff, including what brands and shades of paint to buy to match that color accurately. The Datacolor ColorReader EZ DC10-3 even suggests a full palette of other colors that complement the sample scanned. For photographers it’s a chance to objectively identify colors numerically and replicate them in Photoshop.