Viper 29

Podcasts

I have gotten into the habit of finding good audio material to listen to on my car CD player. Not just music but books on disk and also good podcasts. Podcasts are audio files created by what are essentially audio bloggers and there are thousands of them available. Among all of these podcasts are some very good ones on photography and a few which aren’t very good.

Jeff Curto

Jeff Curto is a professor of photography at the College of DuPage. He actual does two separate podcasts:

The History of Photography is my favorite podcast right now. Curto is broadcasting the class sessions of his History of Photography class which is underway right now. He also has links to class materials. This podcast is a look at the history of photography right back to the beginning and beyond that date. He has an excellent teaching style.

I was surprised to find out that the first manipulated photographs are seen in the 1850’s, twenty five years after the invention of photography. Point that out to the next person who makes a comment about photoshop. He has several interesting discussions about the flow of inspiration going between painters and photographers. It wasn’t all one way, Cubism for example is supposedly derived directly from Muybridge’s work on time lapse photography.

These are long podcasts 90 minutes to over two hours and packed with info so I have to listen to it when I can concentrate on the materiel. They are published as .m4p files and have the images he is talking about in the podcast attached to the files if you have the right viewer. Since I wanted to listen on my .mp3 and car CD player I converted them to .mp3 and lost the images. They are also very large files in the neighborhood of 100 MB.

Curto also does another podcast on his personal photographic experience called Camera Position.  I haven’t listened to this podcast in quite awhile but recall it was also good. They are also in .m4p format. I think Curto runs photo trips to Italy and maybe other areas.

Derrick Story

Derrick Story is doing a podcast called the Digital Story. These are about 30 minute long podcasts on a photographic subjects and I found them to be well thought out and presented. Typical subjects might be Raw Workflow, Getting Photographic Releases or Using Fill Flash. He has a LOT of these podcasts, over a 150 and heading towards 200. Highly recommended. I’d say the teaching level is at about intermediate level but I picked up something on most of these. Story teaches Aperture on Lynda.com and has an active website.

Brooks Jensen

Brooks Jensen the publisher of Lenswork Magazine is doing podcasts. If you are familiar with the magazine you’ll have an idea of what these podcasts are like. Jensen is a highly opinionated (nothing wrong with that) fellow with a certain narrow vision of photography. The magazine is for Black and White shots only and only those which fall into a certain style. The podcasts are short diatribes on his thoughts, only about 5 minutes long. I found no material of any practical use in the ones I listened to. But I have to admit I only lasted thru 3 or so. A longer exploration of the podcasts may find material of more interest. There are roughly 400 of them so he has to be finding something to talk about.

Benjamin and Davidson

Dan Benjamin and James Davidson are doing a podcast called Tack Sharp. Frankly I quickly came to the understanding that these fellows didn’t know what they were talking about and shouldn’t be doing a podcast where they pretend otherwise. I listened to a couple of these with vague disquiet but when I got to the one they did on Bokeh where they insisted that it was pronounced as Boo-kay like a bunch of flowers and that it was an old Japanese term I finally understood how much they didn’t know. They also instructed the audience that Nikon should be pronounced Neee Koon which I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a Nikon user use.

Bokeh for those of you unfamiliar with the term was a word coined by Mike Johnson in 1997 and he is a Japanese speaker and based it on a Japanese word for blur. He says it is pronounced Bow-Kuh. He discusses the term here: Online Photographer.

Five minutes on Google would have revealed all of this to the Tack Sharp guys. They went on to make some other ridiculous claims and that was it for me and Tack Sharp. They only have about 8 of these up but you would be much better off devoting your time to Derrick Story.

Crawford and Hidden

To finish up on a less sour note, Bill Crawford and Ed Hidden do a podcast called Studio Photography podcast. They seem to have a different guest each week, mainly professional photographers. And they do an interview with the guest of the day. Generally good stuff. They do pack in a lot of adverts but they are paying the bills with that and they aren’t too intrusive. There are quite a few of these available, the webpage is something of a hassle to deal with since I could never find a way to easily download a number of these, but the podcasts are worth a bit of trouble to get.

I’m not sure how much info beginning photographers would get from the Studio Photography podcasts.

And that’s all folks for this post.

Greek Shrine

• Link to step one of this set of posts
• And to step 2

Step three: learning to edit.

OK you have been taking lots of photos, you’ve been using jpeg + raw as your file formats. And you have been using the jpeg files to upload and do any printing. You are now ready to move up to some editing on the files. You can start with edits on your jpegs but in some ways that can be more difficult than editing raw files. Jpegs can take light editing, some sharpening and maybe some tonal adjustment. But any serious editing will cause the images to develop very ugly artifacts like banding and posterization. We will get into that when we talk about raw files in another post. Right now lets list some of the available free editing software on the web. So far as I know these editors will only work on non-raw file formats. Jpeg and .tif formats mainly. Some of the best known are:

• Paint.net an excellent light editor for Windows developed by MS but now open source
• Photoscape another pretty good Windows editor
• Serif Photoplus another Windows editor
• Adobe Photoshop Express online editor (this is not Photoshop) but it comes with 2 GB of free storage.
• Picnik a web based editor.

And Mac users have a freebie that is included on their system, iPhoto or some such. Your camera also may have come with free editing software of modest capability. Canon cameras come with DPP and Nikon users can get the pretty good Nikon editor but it isn’t free.

Paint.net is an open source project and it has developed a large community of developers who are supplying a good variety of plugins which have greatly extended the capability of the basic product. This is a good choice for a basic editor.

Adobe Photoshop Express comes with 2 GB of free gallery space, and a free photoshop.com address, and it connects directly with Flickr, Photobucket and some other online galleries. The tools allow you to do basic editing like sharpening, cropping, resizing and other simple tasks. These are implemented with a wizard type interface which is simple and easy to use. If you select one of the tools you will see a string of thumbnails at the bottom of the image showing how different levels of the tool will affect the image. You click on the thumbnail to apply that level of the adjustment.

Editors with raw support.

Sooner or later you will want to move to real editor. And the three best supported editors are:

• Photoshop Elements 7
• Adobe Lightroom 2
• Photoshop CS4

Why Adobe products?

Why do I limit the list above to Adobe products? The primary reason, in my mind, is the fact that there is a vast online support community for these products. You will find literally thousands of online websites, tutorials, podcasts, and video tutorials on these editors. If you participate in online lists almost all the users will be using one or another of these products and you will easily get help when you get stuck. I have never failed to find a number of online tutorials or other help when I use Google to search for a way to do something in one of these apps.

Besides online user help Adobe itself provides a very comprehensive online support capability including forums and user groups and there are literally hundreds of published books available on each of these editors. Amazon shows 183 books for Photoshop CS4 and 202 books available for Photoshop Elements 7. Corel Photo Paint X3 by contrast has 3 books available. GIMP 2.6 has 14 books. Apple Aperture 2 has 26 books.

Elements

PSE 7 is the current version of Photoshop Elements and it will allow you to do raw file conversions and just about all basic editing on your images. PSE has a lot of wizard type interfaces to guide new users. And it comes with a pretty good photo organizer. I think this is the best choice for new users who need raw support or who want better editing capability. If you work at developing your editing skills you will eventually start wanting to do things that cannot be done in PSE and that is the time when you should start thinking about moving up to Photoshop. A good online community for PSE is found at this PSE group.

Some good introductory books:

• The Photoshop Elements 7 Book for Digital Photographers by Kloskowski
• Advanced Photoshop Elements 7 for Digital Photographers by Andrews

Lightroom

Some people find Lightroom to be a middle ground between PSE and Photoshop. But it seems like every Lightroom user I have heard from also owns Photoshop and uses that for the more intense editing procedures. Lightroom is aimed at production photographers, people who need to batch process large numbers of photographs. Perhaps someone who is shooting senior portraits by the hundreds. You can easily apply the same corrections to an entire batch of shots. This is possible in PS but not as easy and I’m not sure how well it would work on large batches. LR also has a very powerful photo archiving ability, it makes it easy to find your photos whether they are on your hard drive or have been moved to an external storage device. LR has the same raw converter as Photoshop: Adobe Camera Raw. Lightroom lacks the ability to select certain parts of the image and apply effects just to the selected area. That is when LR users move over to PS. Glenn Michell has some thoughts on the two.

Online support: Yahoo Lightroom group

Some good introductory books:

• Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers by Kelby
• The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers by Evening

Photoshop

Photoshop is simply the best editor available. Over the years many competitors have attempted to catch up with PS but they never succeed. I think the reason that they fail is this: they usually come up with a fairly good basic product. Maybe something in the PSE range plus a few more features. But to catch up with the vast capabilities of Photoshop they need a large group of programmers and time to write and debug all that code. So they need to sell copies of their first effort to finance the further development and they always seem to run out of money before that happens. Now PS is the best, but it also has a huge user community who has been using it for a decade or more. As new features are added many of those users are used to the arcane and difficult user interface and vociferously resist the least change in the way things work in PS. That means that new features are grafted on to the current user interface making it that much harder to learn. Old features never go away. John Nack has commented on this built in resistance to change from the user community.

Adobe of course has the large developer force, time and money to make sure that they stay far ahead of any competition. They have been steadily adding more power and capability to each new version. And I have yet to feel like a version upgrade is worthless from them. New versions are on a three year schedule lately. So Photoshop is difficult to learn, partly because of all the baggage it is carrying around from the past. It is also darned expensive, about $650 US for a new purchaser. Upgrades are running around $200 every two years.

Also Photoshop has a schizophrenic nature, it is both a graphics editor for graphical artists and it is a photo editor. Photographer may well never use many of the tools in PS since they are targeted at graphic artists. But it can do things that no other editor can do, and it can usually do those things in many different ways. But that will come at a cost to you.

Lynda.com has many online tutorials for PS (as well as many other applications) and they have 30 plus hours of video tutorials just on learning how to use the selection tools in PS. 30 hours for one feature. I watched them and worked thru the examples but still don’t think I understand everything about the tools. So this is why I urge people not to spend that $650 unless you are sure that you are ready to tackle this difficult editor.

A major online community for PS can be found at: listmoms

Good books for CS4

• The Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers by Kelby
• Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers: The Ultimate Workshop by Schewe

Editing webpages

There are some excellent websites that cover editing technique. Like mostsites they are specific to Photoshop but if you know your editor you can probably adapt the techniques to your editor.

Cambridge in Color which is Sean McHugh’s site is one of the best that I know of. It has a slightly technical reading level but has very good coverage of a most basic Photoshop techniques. Be sure to look at Sean’s photo galleries while you are there.

The Light’s Right the site owned by Glenn E Mitchell has a great set of tutorials that probably a bit more advanced than Cambridge. He has a 300 page ebook on sharpening for example. There are also a number of video tutorials. The essential read on this site is the ‘pop’ series of articles but you will want to read more than those. Mitch also has a blog and some excellent photo galleries.

The Luminous-Landscape is owned by Micheal Reichmann and a lot of other writers often contribute including Jeff Schewe. He has a set of video Magazines that can be downloaded (not free) that have some intensive looks at various aspects of photography. He also has the best intoduction to Printing and Color management that I have seen. It’s a 6.5 hour video which he sells on site. This is call From Camera to Print, and it is on the advanced side and probably of little value unless you have Photoshop and a serious printer.

There are many guides and tutorials on this site but they are not as well organized. You have to look for the gems. The trip is well worth the effort. Try the Understanding series.

Commercial Tutorials

Lastly let’s look at the two major commercial tutorial sites.

The first is Lynda.com. They offer a wide variety of video tutorials covering most Adobe and many other software packages. The instructors are excellent on the whole and the price is reasonable: $25/month for full access.  Lynda is mostly limited to software training tho they have a few more general photography sets. You can get a free month of Lynda as a gift when you register CS4. The courses range from the basic to the advanced and can get very advanced.

KelbyTraining is Scott Kelby’s site and I have only used it when they were offering a free look when they started up. At that time I thought it was very limted and Nikon centric, but I hear that they have added many new instructors and have photographic technique as well as software training courses. Cost is $20/month. I’ll give it another whirl sometime soon. Kelby is the author of many very popular photography books and his books often live at the #1 position on Amazon.

And that wraps this post up.

Suwanee Morning Light

New Users Corner

Link to step one:

Step Two

Now you need to learn photographic techniques. The most important part of this is:

• Taking photographs
• Picking out your best of the week
• Getting honest criticism

Taking photographs is the easy part. Get your camera out and shoot. You will take thousands of shots before you really learn your camera and start to feel that you are in control of the process.

Now sort thru your work for the week, and pick out one or two and certainly no more than three of the shots that you feel are your best. Here is the first rule of photography:

Only show other people your best work

Whatever you do don’t go out shoot a hundred shots, post them all on Flickr and then expect others to wade thru them, bad mixed in with the good.

You, or at least I, will always produce a lot of photos that I don’t think are very good and mixed in will be a few shots that are good. If I am having a very good day I might get 50% keepers, more often it could be 25% good to 75% not so good. Be your own worst critic.  Ansel Adams sort of confesses this:

“Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop.” Ansel Adams

In others words he was happy with one good shot a month. We can have lower standards however and try for one or two a week. Edward Weston, another very famous photographer, has a very well known shot, Pepper Number 30. Thirty implies that there were at least 29 other pepper shots that he didn’t show people.

If you are new at this, do not expect to produce masterworks on your first efforts, or even your two thousandth effort. Find your best shots. Don’t look at the work of people who have been doing this for a long time and despair. You will get better as you go but you won’t get better unless you get some idea about what you need to do to improve. So put your work out for critiques even if you don’t think they are very good. After all that is when you can get the most from criticism. A good group of critics will know that you are just starting and will help you in any way that they can.

Find someone who will give you honest criticism. This isn’t your wife, your husband or your mother. All of them are more worried about insulting you than they are about giving good criticism. And of course unless you are lucky enough to have a good photographer in the family they don’t know what a good photograph is, anyway. They think that what they get from their point and shoots are good.

In today’s networked world one of the best places to find good criticism is on the net and in particular Yahoo groups. There are some very good mailing lists which run photo assignments and give excellent criticism. Honest criticism which will tell you what is technically right and wrong with your work. You must approach this with the right attitude; you want them to tell you what is technically and artistically wrong, and hopefully what they like about the image.

Let me climb up on my stump for a paragraph or two:

If you ask for critiques of your best work of the week, and you are given good advice. Do not be defensive. The advice may be good or it may be bad. Always thank the person who gave it to you and either to put it to use or ignore it. If you get into an argument and get the reputation of not taking good advice, people will cut you off. I do when I run into people like that. I add them to my blocked list and never hear from them again. Remember that you may not recognize good advice when you see it.

I also ignore people who post an unending stream of photographs, three or four a day, sometimes more. Who has time for that?

These people are spending their personal time trying to help you. They do not want to be insulted or argued with. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t ask for further information if they haven’t been clear. You should. But do it in a pleasant way.  You will occasionally find jerks who are insulting. Ignore them if possible. Find another list if you cannot. OK enough lecturing on list etiquette.

Some lists that I know of or others have suggested:

Canon: the Digital Rebels

and their photo site

The Rebels do pictures of the week and also have assignments that everyone can contribute to. This is a low conflict group and does not tolerate any sort of harsh behavior.

Nikon: the Nikon D80 group

and the Nikonians which while apparently a good group has started charging $25/year for membership. That includes gallery space. You can join for the first month free. Even at $25 a year it doesn’t seem unreasonable to me, most people on the Digital Rebel list end up joining PBase to get gallery space, and that costs $23/year.

I didn’t get any suggestions for Sony Pentax or Olympus groups but I found these:

• Alphausers
• PentaxKdSLR
• My Olympus
• Olympus E System

A hat tip to Maria, she suggested the two Olympus groups above. I found nothing for Sigma. The Sony and Pentax groups are very small and that may be good or bad depending on how the group functions the Digital Rebels has 2200 members and the Nikon group has 1100 by way of contrast. If anyone knows of other good groups leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list. Without any editorial comment I’ll suggest staying away from the Canon 300D list on Yahoo.

There are a number of general groups that do critiques and are not limited to a particular camera brand. PhotoSig is well known. The people on it have a reputation of being quite sharp with the critical pen.  So judge the thickness of your skin before venturing there. The Photo Critique forum is another and I have heard nothing about it, good or bad. DPReview forums have some critique sections and they also cover a lot of camera brands if you need some camera specific advice.

And by using Google you can probably find a lot of other sites. None of these lists or sites will help you if you never post and become what is known as a lurker. Introduce yourself and ask questions.

Composition

Another thing that will help you develop a good photographer’s eye is learning something about composition and the ‘rules of composition‘. Now the idea of rules really seems to bother some people. These rules or maybe principals is a better term have come down to us mainly from the painting world and have been taught to painters down thru the ages, or at least for hundreds of years. Of course the modern ‘painters’ have little use for these since they are taught that stringing toilet paper across a park is ‘art’ and thus no knowledge of composition is needed.

But I believe that these rules are derived from centuries of study on just what attracts people to a particular work and what they unconsciously look for in the work when they see it. Modern studies have been done on what people look at and they have found that you have less than one second to attract someone’s attention before they lose interest. So use your one second wisely by studying the rules of composition and getting people to spend more of their time on your images.

Once you master composition then you are free to start ignoring the ‘rules’ if you think there is a good reason to do so.

A great aggregation site for composition articles is PhotoInf. Try the Wendy Folse series for a start and just browse thru some of the other articles. This is a good site to return to once in awhile to read a different view of composition.

Books

You will probably acquire a library of photography books as you advance in your study of photography. Bryan Peterson’s books have a wide following and his Understanding Exposure  is especially well known. It is well worth the $17 or so that it costs on Amazon.

Scott Kelby has popular books on Digital Photography: the Digital Photography Book volumes one and two. These are big sellers but I haven’t heard any reports by people who have read them. Kelby can be a very flippant writer and his style is not so popular with a large number of people. I find that his books are packed with information and you can skip the chapter introductions where he packs most of what he considers humor.  I do have some Kelby Photoshop books and thought they were worth the money.

There are literally thousands of other books available but at this stage one or two good ones will be all that you probably need.

A Place to post your work

You will soon need a place that you can post shots so people can see them. Some forums have their own group site. The Digital Rebels, the Nikonians and PhotoSig all do. But sooner or later you will want a place of your own. One place a lot of photographers use is PBase.  It costs $23 a year and comes with a lot of storage, 500MB at this time. Many people like it since it lets you control how your work appears, has easy navigation and has many photographers using it. It does come with warts tho.

Flickr is free but has awful navigation and poor presentation of your work IMO. Many people refuse to look at shots posted on Flickr. It does have very strong internal groups if you get involved with them.

Zenfolio is a newer service that is adding a lot of features. It seems to be reasonably priced at $25-40/year. SmugMug is another service that is a bit more expensive and the site navigation is disliked by some people. Lastly Wikipedia has an article listing many more sites worldwide that you can explore. One thing to be careful of is the sites terms of use, you never want to give up the rights to your work by using one of these sites.  Some notorious rights thieves are Facebook and MySpace.

Summing Up

• So go out:
• Take many photographs
• Find someone to critique them
• Study Composition
• Read a book or two.

Next up learning to edit your shots and using raw.

Big Cypress

New Users Corner

It’s here

Your spiffy new DSLR has arrived and you are wondering, what next? Naturally you will charge up the battery and head out to do some shooting. But if you are new to DSLR cameras the results may be disappointing when compared to your old point and shoot.

Why is that true? Because unlike P&S cameras, DSLR cameras demand that you do a lot of the thinking that the camera did for you when you used the less powerful model. DSLRs are not just bigger and more expensive point and shoot cameras even though camera manufacturers advertise them as if that was the case.

If you feel a burning desire to buy some things for the camera then get a couple of extra batteries, Sterlingtek is a good place to find them at less than a quarter of the cost from your manufacturer. You can find them on Amazon and eBay too but won’t know who you are buying them from.

A couple of extra memory cards is a good idea. 4 GB is a good size to my way of thinking. That will usually hold a day’s casual shooting but it doesn’t hold so many shots that it would be a disaster if something happened to the card. If it gets lost or ruined in some way. NewEgg is a good source as is Amazon.

If you are using the high speed UDMA Flash cards then you will want a fast UDMA Card Reader. Otherwise a slower but cheaper USB2 Card Reader will do. I never have thought it makes much sense to use your $1000 camera to do the job a $18 card reader can do faster.

Getting a Cleaning Kit is also a good idea. I like the Giotto Rocket blower as the first line of defense against dust on your sensor.

I would wait to buy lenses or other major accessories. You of course need to decide what you need and when. But the way you look at these items may change a good deal in the next few months. You could buy something and then come to regret the purchase as you learn more.

The three steps

So to become master of your new camera and to learn good photographic technique you need a plan of action. And I have a three step plan for you:

• Step one–learn how your camera works.
• Step two–learn basic photographic technique.
• Step three–learn post process editing for your files

By taking this process in small bites you can make noticeable progress and see that your photographic skills are improving.

Step One

Learning how your camera works can be a tedious process. The first and really vital step in this process is to do the dreaded: read the manual. Find a quiet place where you can have an hour or so alone and get the manual in your hands and the camera in your lap. Read a section of the manual and then find the things that were mentioned on your camera that you have in your lap. Try the different functions and menu items. Do this a section at a time, it may take several sessions.

Now you will not remember all this stuff. But you will recall that there was a way to do something that you are puzzled about and you will be able to find it in the manual weeks later. I carried the book in my camera bag for the first year after I got my first DSLR. And should still be carrying it since I frequently need to look up items four years later.

I have heard of people photographing the manual and saving it on a memory card so that they can pop the card into the camera and read that section on the LCD. That was a step too far for me.

I actually worked on doing a section a week for months. I’d work on recalling how to set focus points one week, and I’d do white balance the following week. Even tho I had 20 years of using SLR cameras, before I bought my first DSLR, all these complex functions were new to me.

While this is going on, visit your camera manufacturers website. They will have a lot of training material available. Usually in short video clips.

• Canon Digital Learning Center
• Nikon Digital Learning Center
• Sony Tutorials
• Olympus Digital School
• Pentax Pentaxian site

If your manual is just too confusing there are third party books on a lot of camera models. I have not read any of these but I have occasionally heard comments from people who seemed to find them useful.

• Short Courses
• Digital Field Guides
• Magic Lantern Guides

And you can just get on Amazon and search for your camera model in books or videos.

Shoot, shoot and shoot some more

While all this is going on, keep on shooting. The more the better, and look at your work after you have a shooting session. Think about how you could improve your images. Remember once you have a digital camera it costs you nothing to take photos. I estimate that it took me 1500 shots or more before I thought that I had a basic grasp of camera operation.

During this step I think you are better off learning about your camera than you would be trying to learn shooting modes. However using jpeg modes on your camera teaches you nothing. What does the camera do exactly when you put it in night mode or sports mode? Most likely you won’t have any idea, and how can you learn from that?

So I suggest putting your camera in program mode, your camera may call it P mode. That is something for you to check in your manual. The camera will also probably select focus settings for you. Leave the other settings at default settings unless you have a reason to change them.

Set the file size to large jpeg and you may want to think about using the raw+jpeg file option if your camera supports that. This might be especially important if you are shooting some event that is important to you. The camera will then save two copies of each image file. One as a large jpeg and one as a raw file. Don’t worry about the raw files now, but later when you learn how to post process your images, you could go back and reprocess those shots. So just save those files for the time being. For now just use the jpeg files to email or get prints made.

The camera will probably set the metering mode to evaluative which is fine at this stage. Concentrate on learning to frame shots and understanding your camera.

OK are we ready to move on to the next step? That will be in the next post.

Big Sur Naval Station

Buying Compact Flash Cards

Just a short post.

This post will only apply to those of you who use cameras with Compact Flash (CF) cards. Almost all point and shoots have switched over to Secure Digital (SD) type cards but most DSLRs still use the higher quality CF cards. Canon and Nikon have turned to the dark side with their XTi and up Canon models (the xxxD series) and the D80 and up (Dxx series) for Nikon. They use the slower SD cards.

Over the years I have always been of the opinion that people have been wasting their money by buying cards that are too fast. Camera bodies only operate at some maximum speed and buying cards that work at higher speeds is just wasted money. Some people argue that the  higher speeds are useful when downloading the cards from the card reader to the computer. But that is only true if your card reader and computer both support the higher speeds. I just let the download happen in the background while I read email or do something else so I have never been in all that much of a hurry anyway.

In the Canon 30D and Nikon D70 days camera bodies only ran at 8 MB/sec or so and almost any reasonably fast CF card was faster than that. So it made no sense whatsoever to spend 3 times as much on the the Super Ultra Fast version when the plain old fast version was fine. Camera body speeds have crept up until the 40D/D90 are in the 11-13 MB/sec range so buying 133X or 266X cards was justified. Still a lot cheaper than the top level cards which work at 40 MB/sec or faster.

Also buying premium brands never made a lot of sense either. If you go to NewEgg and check out the buyer reviews, and there are a fairly large number of reviews, and those reviews are good then so far as I can see you are safe buying the card. Now does that guarantee that your card will never fail, of course not. But I have heard of all sorts of brands failing including SanDisk and Lexar brands. I have personally bought and still have cards from Transcend, PNY, Kingston and RiData and have never had one card fail. One additional worry you have with buying SanDisk cards is the flood of counterfeit SanDisk cards on the market. They do have a very high failure rate. So only buy SanDisk cards from a major safe vendor.

However with the advent of video capable DSLR cameras manufacturers have really jumped camera write speed up. This can be seen on any of the Canon bodies with the Digic 4 processor ( 5D Mk2 and 50D) and in the Nikon D300/D700 bodies. The write speeds are now in the 30-35 MB/sec range and you are now wise to buy a top grade card. The newest Canon Ti has video capability but uses a SD card which would seem to be problematic. Of course the Nikon D90 does the same.

Ron Gailbraith has updated his database of camera and card speeds and it is well worth browsing through for information about this subject. He has a good write up on CF card technology as well as the difference in CF and SD cards. CF cards have built in electronics to speed up data transfer rates that SD cards lack.

Tom’s Hardware has a recent review of the upper end cards that show that the Transcend cards are just as fast effectively as the pricey SanDisk cards. A SanDisk Extreme III 8GB card is $105 from Amazon while the Transcend TS8GCF300 8GB 300x is a little cheaper at $82. The 266X Transcend TS8GCF266 which is rated at 40GB/sec is only $68 from NewEgg.com. Those prices are only true for the day I post this of course.

This could obviously be a major expense if you are upgrading from one of the older model cameras and have a bag full of older cards like I do. I suspect that you might do just fine with 266X cards unless you are doing video captures. Then you probably do want the max speed.

So if you have a pre-Digic 4 camera from Canon then you should be just fine using 133X cards. Even the speed demon Canon 1Ds MkIII only writes at 20 MB/sec and the 1D MkIII is 15 MB/sec. The same is true for older Nikons the D70 and so on. If you have newer models then you may need to buy at least some faster cards for video capture.

If you want maximum transfer speed from the card reader to the computer then you need to be sure that your card reader is UDMA compliant.