Sony has unveiled a new product called the Party-shot™. Basically, it is a motorized digital camera base for Sony cameras that tracks people in a room, looks for faces and if it finds one, snaps a photo.

After I read Sony’s press release at DPReview.com I started thinking: could you make money with four or five of these in your camera bag? Some ideas:

• Put several Party-shots around the room at a wedding reception / class reunion / prom then upload all the images to the web immediately after the event.
• Have an assistant pull the memory cards from the cameras every 20 minutes and add them to a projected slide show happening during the event (people love to look at themselves).
• School photographers who contract to shoot every high-school event could have an assistant set these up at pep-rallies or small events to free the photographer up for other shoots.
• Can you think of any other ideas?

While this will never replace a professional photographer, could it take enough candid shots that a few great ones might pop out that you would have otherwise missed?

All I know is, if the Party-shots is popular this Christmas, every camera manufacturer will have one next year. I want one to experiment with. How about you?

I just found this cool little camera simulator gadget online, and thought you might like to play with it.

Basically, you set the aperture, shutter speed and ISO with sliders, and it shows you in real-time what the final print would look like.

Interestingly enough, although setting the ISO is a a hold-over from film cameras, it still has an impact on your digital shots. Here’s a pretty good explanation from Wikipedia:

For digital photo cameras, an exposure index (EI) rating—commonly called ISO setting—is specified by the manufacturer such that the sRGB image files produced by the camera will have a lightness similar to what would be obtained with film of the same EI rating at the same exposure. The usual design is that the camera’s parameters for interpreting the sensor data values into sRGB values are fixed, and a number of different EI choices are accommodated by varying the sensor’s signal gain in the analog realm, prior to conversion to digital…this variation allows different tradeoffs between the range of highlights that can be captured and the amount of noise introduced into the shadow areas of the photo.

It’s nice to know that everything you learned shooting film still applies to digital.

Matt McGee over at Small Business Search Marketing has a great post on how to implement a new Google gadget on your website. Unlike a simple map, the customer types in their address, and the gadget gives them written directions to your studio.

However, Matt makes a great point about “maps” on your website. A jpeg photo of your street with a little red star does nothing to help promote your business. Instead, make a link to Google maps and/or the Google gadget, then type in directions like this:

JD Photo Imaging is centrally located in Flint, Michigan north of Detroit, Pontiac and Ann Arbor, and south of Saginaw, Bay City and Midland. It is within 3 minutes of the  I-75, US-23 and I-69 interchange. We’re located 3 blocks east of Ballenger Hwy. and half a mile east of the I-75 and Corunna Road interchange on the north side of the road. Our street address is 3018 Corrunna Road, Flint, MI 48503.

The advantage of this is that search engines will more likely find your studio when folks search for your name combined with any local landmarks. For example, after using the text above, I could expect a photographer to find our lab by typing in Google “professional photo lab flint mi.”

It works. Try it.

The sales manager for Photovision stopped by to make sure we were stocking their calibration targets in our showroom. We like the 24″ digital target, and always recommend them to pro photographers.

However, recently we took the time to watch Ed Pierce’s free Instructional DVD that comes with every calibration target. In short, we were amazed. The information on the DVD is worth more than the price of the calibration target – it’s like getting a private training class from Ed for free!

From the DVD you learn – step-by-step – how to insure that you have consistent color and density on every photograph, regardless of camera, lighting conditions, or type of photography.

You can order any of Photovision’s targets online here http://www.photovisionvideo.com/ or you can purchase the popular 24″ target with instructional DVD from our lab. Just call Heidi or Dana at 888-858-8084 and ask them to include one with your next order.

Great Article by the folks at lensrentals.com that talks about the “myth” that some lenses are softer than others. Basically, they argue that although they will replace a lens as a courtesy, there is never anything wrong with them. So why the difference of opinion? Read more…