A crash course in controlling your camera

I've recently begun a writing a short course aimed at people who own a DSLR but have never managed to get out of automatic mode. You can get started by clicking here. It takes a fair bit of work to master your camera but I'd highly encourage all of you to do it, as it's immensely rewarding. As a bit of motivation, here's a giant sunset panorama of Edinburgh :)

Correcting for cheap filters

Just before going travelling, I bought a cheap(ish) 10-stop ND filter and a remote timer with the intention of getting some long-exposure shots whilst abroad. As I have the Canon 24-105mm lens I need a 77mm filter, which is unfortunately rather expensive (Bigger filter = more glass = more monies), so I wasn't expecting much out of one which cost me only £29. Unfortunately, as you can see below, I was right. However, with a little love and attention you can correct pretty much all the faults caused by a cheap filter, and end up getting some really great photographs.

Wimbledon

So I went to wimbledon this year with a few friends. I'll be doing a post on shooting tennis at some point in the not too distant future, but for now here's the shots I took. 

Photographing Judo: Getting the detail in the Gi

As you will be aware from the previous post, I recently photographed some Judo. It's one of the hardest things I've tried to shoot to date - extremely erratic, fast moving subjects, bad lighting and lots of white. As a result, most of the images came out rather flat; this post outlines a few things I did to coax some life back into my shots, which hopefully you'll find useful next time you find yourself photographing martial arts.

Judo

I recently shot a Judo competition. There's a short post on some useful post-production I did in the works, but for now if you'd like to see the images they're here. Enjoy! Benji.

HDR

HDR seems to be a contentious topic; some people really like it, others hate it with a passion. For those who hate it, their reasoning usually comes down to the existence of a seemingly endless amount of really horribly edited photos whose only upside is that they look extremely wacky (see below). However, done well, HDR can be an very useful tool.

SD Cards: Which one is right for you?

I was reading about the 5D Mk III today and came across something interesting from Jeff Cable's (excellent) blog. Apparently Canon didn't make the 5D's SD card slot UHS compatible. (UHS stands for Ultra High Speed - see this for specifics.)
This means if I put my UHS-I 95MB/s SD card in a 5D Mk III, the buffer will clear at 20MB/s. Not great.
However, this is old news - the original post is from June 2012. If you're a 5D Mk III owner and you haven't come across this yet, go buy a CF card :p
However, it did get me thinking. If it's not supported on a pro body like the 5D, it's not going to be supported by my lowly 550D, either. A quick test confirmed this - the buffer cleared in exactly the same time (6s) using a 90MB/s card and a 45MB/s card, meaning the speed limit is somewhere below 45MB/s. I suspect it's 20... :(
So why spend the extra money on fast SD cards? It'll take you less time to back up your photos. Or will it?