Jon Sienkiewicz

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.

Don’t gamble with your image files. If you’re serious about the pictures you take, be serious about the memory cards you use to store them. There is a handful of reliable, consistently dependable brands available, and one of the most popular with advanced photographers is the Delkin Black lineup. Let’s zero in on their latest SD card and find out why.

You don’t have to be planning a trip to Mount Fuji or a hike through the Adirondacks during the Geminids Meteor Shower to have genuine need for a travel tripod. Their defining characteristics—small size, light weight, easy to deploy—make travel tripods perhaps the most versatile tools in your kit.

Polarizing filters make pictures look like they were taken at either the North Pole or the South Pole. Rotating the Polarizing filter shifts the appearance from North Pole to South Pole and back again. They are not always used to photograph Polar Bears; it’s easy to understand the confusion, but there are no Polar Bears at the South Pole. Polarizers are important because our ice masses are disappearing, melting away and raising the sea level around Miami. When the ice caps are gone, the only way we’ll have to recreate them—or Miami, for that matter—is with Photoshop.

Okay, I made some of this up. But I do know how Polarizers work and why you should use one. Please read on…