Mangiante Photography is proud to welcome our newest clients!
- Germantown Youth Football League
- The University of Phoenix
The future of our business truly depends upon the satisfaction of our customers, and we are happy you have chosen to become part of our family. We strive to provide all of our customers with fast, efficient service, along with the highest quality products available. If you are interested in our products and services, please contact us for more information!
Still curious who our satisfied clients are? Click here to view our client list.
by Michael Spikes, Operations Manager
I am not sure about you, but I enjoy finding new software and experiementing with it. I thought I would let you know about a program that has been around for a while called Gimp. Gimp is often touted as a free alternative to Photoshop. It does many of the same things that Photoshop does and hey, it’s free. Is it a replacement? Well, for the professional market, not quite (at least not yet). While Photoshop still reigns supreme as the choice for image editing, it is often out of reach financially for the average consumer. This is where the strength of Gimp lies. Gimp is developed by a community of people dedicated to it’s success. As “Open Source” software you can contribute to the project by helping find bugs, writing new plug-ins, or just by using it. To find out more see the links below.
Open Source Definintion
About Gimp
Get Gimp
by Whitney Schuyler Hubbard,
Staff Photographer
The auto focus feature of your camera and lens allows for more consistent, accurate results in your photos, eliminating the need to continually attend to hand focusing on your subject. This feature makes the process much easier for the photographer, especially when faced with the task of following the back and forth of a soccer team across a field, or achieving consistent results while trying to get some casual portraits of friends or family. While most cameras come with auto focus, you may not know that many have different modes of auto focus. When you set your camera to auto focus (or AF), you will have a few options, called AF modes, which control the way your camera chooses the subject on which to focus. They are as follows:
AF-S (single area auto focus or single shot focus). This mode is for great for photographing a still subject. The camera will focus when the shutter button is pressed halfway down. You can lock in the point of focus on an area of a non- moving subject and then compose your shot as you see fit. This is a great way to shoot portraits, because it allows you to focus on the eyes of your subject and then recompose the image.
AF-C (continuous auto focus or servo focus). This mode is used on moving subjects. The camera will focus continually, as long as the shutter button is depressed halfway. With a moving subject, the focus will adjust and continue to follow the subject. Some cameras even try to predict where your subject will be in the frame. This is a great option for sports photography. For example, if you are at a football game and you want to capture some action shots of a running player, continuous focus would allow you to select your subject and keep the focus attached to him like a magnet as he moves.
MF (manual focus). As implied by “manual” this mode you do all the work yourself. This allows you to control the focus by hand on the lens itself. Most lenses also include a switch on the side of the barrel to change between AF and MF. A good time to use MF would be in very low-light situations, when the camera is sometimes unable to automatically detect and focus on a subject, or when trying to select a very specific area of a subject to focus on, as with macro photography.
For more information about AF modes, and additional relevant information about AF area modes (if your camera has those options) check out the focus section in your manual. You can download a copies of your manual from your manufacturer’s website sometimes for free, so you have no excuse not to read it!
