C Archives - Shutter Muse

Cable Release

What Is A Cable Release? A cable release is a shutter button on a hand unit that can be attached to a camera by a short cable. Some manufacturers have a dedicated cable release port on the side of the camera, and some use the USB port to offer the shutter control. Make sure you refer to your camera manual to find out what kind of cable release works with your camera as each manufacturers often has several models that vary depending on the size of the camera. Why Use a Cable Release? There’s several situations where a cable release can …

Canon RF Lens

What is a Canon RF Lens? In 2018 Canon introduced an entirely new mirrorless camera system called EOS R. This new mirrorless system has a new mount, the RF mount, which will gradually take over from the old EF mount in the coming years. Canon RF lenses are specifically designed to work with the RF mount. Due to the shorter flange distance (distance from the mount to the sensor plane) of the RF mount compared with the EF mount, it’s not possible to mount an RF lens on an older EF camera. Adapters are available to mount EF and EF-S …

CFWA

CFWA stands for Close Focus Wide Angle, and it typically used to describe a technique that is popular with underwater photographers. The idea is to use a lens that allows extremely close focusing, but still shoot with a relatively wide angle in order to take in the surrounding underwater landscape. Popular lenses for this technique would be the Canon 8-15 fisheye, the Nikkor 8-15 fisheye or the Tokina 10-17. In the example CFWA photo at the top of the page, you can see from the image’s edge distortion that the photo was taken with a fisheye lens. The central coral …

Chimping

What Is Chimping? Chimping is the act of looking at your camera’s LCD screen as soon as you have taken a photo. The term is jokingly derived from the noises that photographers often make when they see a shot they like on the back of the camera (oooh ohh), followed sometimes by “ape like” hand motions for others to take a look. To Chimp Or Not To Chimp, That Is The Question….. There’s two distinct schools of thought on this. At events, where action is not necessarily predictable, chimping can cause you to miss an important shot. Over the years …

Cinema EOS

What Is Canon’s Cinema EOS line? Canon have always made video cameras, but after the introduction of video recording to the EOS 5D Mark II, the video industry was transformed. The sensor in a DSLR is many times larger then previously typical video cameras and the leap in quality was profound. A few years after the so-called “DSLR revolution” in the video industry, Canon launched Cinema EOS with the introduction of the Canon C300. Cinema EOS is Canon’s lineup of video cameras and lenses that use larger sensor sizes, similar to those found in DSLRs. DSLRs that are primarily designed …

Circular Polarizer

What Is a Circular Polarizer When Talking About Photography? A circular polarizer is kind of filter which can dramatically effect the light entering a camera’s lens. circular polarizers are able to selectively absorb or pass certain wavelengths of circularly polarized light, reducing reflections and glare from non metallic objects such as water or the sky. The correct use of a circular polarizer for can for example transform the surface of water from a seemingly impenetrable reflective barrier to a nearly entirely translucent window into the underwater world. Circular polarizers are widely used in wildlife and landscape photography where the elimination …

CN-E

What Is A Canon CN-E Lens? When Canon launched the Cinema EOS camera line for professional video applications, they needed a lens lineup to compliment the cameras. Cinema lens are designed quite differently to stills camera lenses, so the Canon CN-E lens lineup was born to cater to that market. Canon’s CN-E prime lenses are available with an EF mount, whilst the CN-E zoom lenses are available in either EF or PL mount. The biggest visual difference between EF and CN-E lenses, is that the cinema lenses have gearing around them that allows the focus and aperture to be easily …

COB Light

What is a COB Light? A COB light is a type of LED light, with COB standing for Chip-On-Board. COB lights are essentially an array of LED chips that are tightly packed together and bonded to a substrate such as silicon carbide. In effect this creates one large LED chip that has excellent uniformity of brightness, thus making it ideal for photographers and filmmakers. When most people think of LEDs they probably think of the small singular lights that they experimented with at school when learning about electronics. Those types of singular round LEDs are called DIP LEDs, or Dual …

Color Palette

What is a Color Palette When Talking About Photography and Image Editing? Also referred to as ‘palette’ the term ‘color palette’ describes the entire range of colors that can be rendered by a digital device such as a camera LCD or a computer monitor, or the range of colors contained within a specific image. A computer monitor may have a color palette of 16 million colors, an image on the other hand often contains a much smaller number, often 256. The term is also used to describe a collection of colors, usually displayed graphically in RGB triplets, which a user …

Converter

What Does Converter Mean When Talking About Photography? A converter, also referred to as a tele-converter or extender is a secondary lens which can be mounted between a camera and main lens. The purpose of a converter is to magnify the central portion of a lenses image area, therefore increasing the focal length. Typically converters come in either 1.4 or 2.0 magnification factors. When using an extender the shooter will sacrifice a small amount of lens speed (-1 stop for 1.4 and -2 stops for 2.0) and autofocus performance will also reduce slightly. Extenders also magnify any distortion caused by …