Canon PowerShot SX40 HS Review

Looking for a great, high megapixel camera that will meet practically all of your everyday photography needs? Well, look no further than the Canon PowerShot SX40 HS. This camera looks great and you could mistake it for a D-SLR camera. What's really incredible about the SX40 HS is its long 35x zoom range, coupled with that 12-megapixel camera resolution. Yes, you read that right - a 35x zoom range - which translates to a very powerful camera with telephoto reach. Read on and find out more about it.

Black and white

Think about Laurel and Hardy for a moment, or Charlie Chaplin, and even Harold Lloyd. All true examples of early cinema genius. Today's DVDs offer the opportunity of not only watching these classics in their pure black and white format but also in the DVD provides a colorized version. Essentially though the colorized version never quite looks right, even though it's meant to look more modern and more realistic to latter day cinema.

The point is this; these films were meant to be black and white because that was the level of technology of its day. But when you stand back and look at these films you can see that because the 'life' colour is stripped away they have in a sense become timeless and when viewed there is always something a bit special and different about them.

The same is true of a black and white painting, poster or photograph. A black and white photograph of an old wrinkly woman sitting by her doorstep is timeless, powerful and extremely though provoking. A picture of an old building or a city view in black and white has the same affect. Without colour you tend to look more closely at the subject and see a level of detail and arguably emotion that you may never spot with full colour. As mentioned before depending on the subject a black and white piece of art is essentially timeless.

Lightroom Tips

I'm going to share with you 5 tips about Lightroom that I feel you must know to improve your image workflow and also your editing capabilities. These are tips that I have accumulated over the couple of years that I have been using Lightroom and they help me tremendously. So, without further delay, let's get to it!

1. Control Your Use of the Clarity Slider

The clarity slider can really make the details in an image stand out and also help out with inherent blur from the camera. What the clarity slider does is look for contrast in the middle of the tonal range and boost the contrast. In images with a lot of detail this can really make a huge difference. I usually set mine to +30 for starters and then gauge it from there. Now, there are times when you will not want to bump the clarity slider up because it can counterproductive. If you are editing a portrait, you will more than likely not want to bump your clarity slider up. As we know, every person has pores and those pores just happen to be in the middle to upper tonal range, which the clarity slider affects. When you are trying to get nice, smooth skin, you should try backing off of the clarity slider and seeing what it does to the skin. I usually start with -15 and make changes from there. The good thing is that you will not lose detail overall in the image, unless you make a dramatic adjustment, but you will start to see the skin smooth out quite nicely. With a few more adjustments, you will have some really smooth skin that look very pleasing. This brings us to our next tip..