Have Camera Will Travel - Reviews & Tips
David Coleman Photography
Tips, tricks, and reviews related to all aspects of digital photography workflow, from shooting photos to processing to backing up to sharing.
There are only a few options for compressing RAW image files. Rawsie is a new app that uses sophisticated algorithms to drastically reduce the size of those thousands of RAW files taking up space on your hard drives.
Jerky video footage isn’t fun for anyone. The Zhiyun SMOOTH-XS is a smartphone gimbal that smooths out video footage, provides convenient external controls, and also works as a stand for selfie shots.
Here’s a rundown of the various features and modes of the Nikon D3400 for shooting video.
Here’s a rundown of the various features and modes of the Nikon D3500 for shooting video.
The Nikon D3500 doesn’t offer the option to choose a different aspect ratio when taking photos, but here’s a partial workaround that works for small numbers of images at a time.
You can use a Nikon D3300 as a webcam or for real-time capture to a computer. Here’s how to do it and what you’ll need to make it work.
You can use a Nikon D5300 as a webcam or for real-time capture to a computer. But it’s not quite as simple as just plugging your camera in with a USB cable. Here’s how to do it and what you’ll need to make it work.
It is possible to use a Nikon D5600 as a webcam or for real-time capture to a computer. But it’s not quite as simple as just plugging your camera in with a USB cable. Here’s a guide on how to do it and what you’ll need to make it work.
By default, the Nikon D5600’s Live View will turn itself off after 10 minutes. You can bump that up to a maximum of 30 minutes.
It is possible to use a Nikon D3500 as a webcam or for real-time capture to a computer. But you’ll have to manually reset the Live View every 30 minutes. And it’s not quite as simple as just plugging your camera in with a USB cable.
You can use a Nikon D3400 as a webcam or livestream to a computer. But it’s not quite as simple as just plugging your camera in with a USB cable. Here’s a guide on how to do it.
Here’s a rundown of how to use Disk Drill to scan and recover photos and videos that have been accidentally deleted from your memory card.
Facebook.com is rolling out a new look. They’re calling the old version Classic Facebook and the updated version New Facebook. Here’s how to switch between them.
If you need to unpublish a page to revise or publish a new one, here’s how to publish and unpublish pages in New Facebook and Classic Facebook.
Ever tried using photos and images on your Facebook page? It can be frustrating. So here’s an up-to-date guide explaining what’s what, what’s where, and how big.
A guide to size and dimensions of the Facebook Profile Picture.
Here’s a quick guide to using the free Hugin panorama stitching software to create a basic high-resolution panorama from a sequence of individual images.
Here are three quick and free options for taking a still from a video on Mac.
One free, simple option for grabbing a single frame from a video and saving it as a JPG is to use VLC. Here’s a quick guide on how to do it.
A guide to creating custom YouTube thumbnails for your videos using Canva’s free account.
A up-to-date guide to the best YouTube thumbnail size, how to enable and upload custom thumbnails, and best practices.
Is your website suddenly covered in Adsense ads that you didn’t put there? It might be because Auto Ads has been rolled out automatically on your site.
Just like old-school film cameras, the Nikon D3400 has options for imprinting date and time information in the bottom corner of the photo. Here’s how it works.
Remember those time and date stamps that you used to be able to get embedded in the bottom corner of your prints? The Nikon D3500 can do that too. Here’s how it works.
The Sony a7R IV gives you several options when it comes to choosing which file image file format to use and how to work them into your workflow. Here’s a rundown.
The virtual horizon (or virtual level) tool is one of the most useful overlays for composing your shots. Here’s how it works on the Sony a7R IV.
The Sony a7R IV gives you some control over customizing what types of information you can see on the back screen and through the viewfinder. Here’s how to set it.
This is a step-by-step guide on how to format memory cards in the Sony a7R IV mirrorless camera.
If you’re running into an error when Slot 1 SD card is full on the Sony a7R IV, here’s how to make it roll over to Slot 2 automatically.
Color spaces and color profiles can get complicated and technical fast. But here are some simple, practical recommendations on which color space to use when shooting and sharing photos.
In addition to handling the high-power fast-charging needs of today’s devices, the RAVPower 6-Port USB Charger FIleHub has a neat party trick up its sleeve.
External SSDs have been getting smaller, with higher capacities, and cheaper. The new RAVPower Portable SSD is the smallest and most portable I’ve used yet.
The RAVPower FileHub is like a digital Swiss Army Knife, solving several connection and networking issues that you commonly run into when travelling.
You can now use a video as your Facebook cover instead of a photo. Here’s a rundown of the requirements and options to make it work.
Wondering how to format SD cards on Mac? Here’s a step-by-step guide for formatting both SD and microSD cards.
Here’s a guide to using the SD Association’s official SD Card Formatter for preparing your SD and microSD cards for use.
There are two methods for exporting an individual frame from a Premiere Pro project. One is quick and simple but doesn’t give you much control. The other involves more steps but gives you more control over things like size and compression amount.
Instagram has some useful built-in location features, but there are some quirks to how to use them and how they reliable are. Here’s a rundown.
The recent files list in VLC is designed to provide convenient shortcuts to the audio files you recently listened to or the videos you recently viewed. But if you want to prevent VLC from adding files to the Open Recent menu item, you can. Here’s how.
Twitter has a built-in way to make your photos accessible to visually impaired users by adding image descriptions. Here’s how to enable and use the feature.
If you’re looking to extract the JPG preview that’s embedded in a RAW image file, here are two free apps that can help.
Need to stream some live video but don’t want to mess with the complications or expense that usually comes with doing that? The Mevo Plus is like having a basic TV studio in your pocket.
Here’s a rundown of the various video modes available on the VIRB Ultra 30.
Some examples of what the new Accent AI filter in Luminar 2018 does.
If you’re looking to export a single frame from Final Cut Pro X as a JPG, there’s a built-in function to that. Here’s how to do it.
Sometimes you want an app that can accomplish basic image workflow tasks like resizing and watermarking simply, quickly, and with minimal fuss. That’s where apps like PhotoBulk come in.
I’ve been testing out the Xcellon DRD-401 Four-Bay hard drive enclosure as a large local storage for backing up photos. Here’s my hands-on review.
Instagram is designed for mobile devices. But that doesn’t work for everyone. So here are some options for posting to Instagram from your computer without using the mobile app.
The Nikon D3400 doesn’t offer the option to choose a different aspect ratio when taking photos, but here’s a partial workaround that works for small numbers of images at a time.
Nearly 1 in 10 people who look at your photos are likely to perceive colors differently because of some form of colorblindness. Here’s a way to use Photoshop to simulate how your photos will look to someone who is colorblind.
By default, Wordpress compresses the versions of images it creates at a JPG quality setting of 82 percent. Here’s how you can change it.
There are several different apps that can automate and schedule backups of photo archives to different cloud storage providers. CloudBerry is one of the simplest, and it works with a wide range of cloud services.
Whether you’re moving from HTTP to HTTPS, moving a site to a new domain, or updating links, there are times you might need site-wide search and replace to speed things up. Here are some options for Wordpress.
Instagram doesn’t offer any built-in way to schedule posts, and it even discourages automated scheduling, but it can be done. Some options play by the rules better than others. Here’s a rundown of the options.
Instagram has a new feature to archive posts. It makes them private, so only you can see them, without deleting the post and losing the comments and likes.
Here’s a method for posting to Instagram from a desktop or laptop that doesn’t involve any third-party apps or installing plugins. It uses a feature built into several modern web browsers.
Gramblr is a free app and web service that lets you post photos to Instagram from a desktop or laptop. Here’s how it works.
Uplet is a simple Mac app that let’s you upload photos and videos from your desktop or laptop directly to Instagram.
A practical guide on how to change ISO on a Nikon D3400, including manual and Auto ISO options.
There’s a new and better way to share panoramas on Instagram. Here’s how to do it and some ways to prep the tiled images.
Instagram has added a new feature that lets you share up to 10 photos or videos in one post. Here’s how it works.
An updated roundup of some of the best photo stitching apps for making panoramas, from free and simple to paid and powerful.
Facebook has a new feature that gives you more control over the image thumbnails for shared links. Here’s how it works.
The Easy Panorama mode that was in its predecessor has gone. Here’s a guide to shooting panoramas with the Nikon D3400.
If you’re trying to post example shortcodes in your post but finding that the shortcode is getting processed, here’s how to escape it and present the shortcode as plain text.
This simple little hack is a way to change the “Filed under” and “Tagged with” labels from post metadata if you’re using the Genesis Framework in Wordpress.
Ever tried using photos and images on your Facebook page? It can be frustrating. So here’s an up-to-date guide explaining what’s what, what’s where, and how big.
The Nikon D3400 DSLR has two color space options in its settings. Here’s an explanation of which to use when.
So you’ve shot some cool new 360 degree photos. How do you share them so other people can see them? Here are some places to start.
If you have a lot of photos in your Wordpress Media Library and are looking for a better way to organize them, the WP Media Folder plugin provides a way to create virtual collections without messing up your underlying filesystem.
If your animated GIFs aren’t animated when you embed them in a Wordpress post, there’s a simple fix.
This plugin does two things: scans your Wordpress media library for unused images and scans your uploads folder for images that aren’t in the media library.
Livestream have put out a new live-action, real-time editing camera, the Mevo. Here’s my hands-on review.
The new NextoDI NVS2801 memory card backup device will especially be of interest to photographers shooting with CFAST 2.0 or XQD memory cards.
Sometimes it’s easier to visualize the contents of a video file with a sequence of thumbnails or still images. Here’s a quick, easy, and free way to extract JPGs at intervals from a video file.
JPEGmini Pro promises that their proprietary algorithm can dramatically reduce the size of JPGs with no discernible loss in quality. So I put their secret sauce to the test.
I recently moved some of my sites from regular HTTP to HTTPS with SSL. Here’s are some things I learned along the way.
ImageRecycle is a cloud-based image optimization service that can shrink the size of your image files. Here’s another in my series of reviews of image optimization tools for WordPress.
Youtube is one of the few big players that support 360° video so far. Here’s how to upload and share the video footage you’ve shot with a Ricoh Theta S on the service.
So far there are only a few options for sharing the 360° videos you’ve shot with your Ricoh Theta S. Here’s how to upload and share them with Facebook.
Lexar has come up with a new way to streamline the chore of downloading photos from your memory cards to your computer: the Lexar Professional Workflow system.
The Spyder5ELITE is the top model in the Spyder5 display color calibration range. Here’s how it compares to the Spyder5PRO.
My hands-on review of the new ColorSpace UDMA3 portable memory card backup device.
Stacking Font Awesome icons does work in Wordpress, but it needs a simple tweak to work around one of Wordpress’s editing quirks.
Hard drive docks for naked hard drives have been available with USB interfaces for several years. Now there’s a new dock with a Thunderbolt interface that promises up to double the speed. But it’s not going to be a good fit for everyone.
A correctly calibrated display helps in your photo processing workflow and ensures better end results. Here’s how the i1 Display Pro performs.
Using a color calibrated monitor can save a lot of time, aggravation, and ink, and helps ensure that your images look their best when viewed elsewhere. Here’s my hands-on review of the Spyder5PRO from Datacolor.
WP Smush Pro builds on the oldest of the cloud image optimization services. Here’s how the reborn version stacks up.
There are several cloud-based image optimization services available for Wordpress. I put ShortPixel through its paces to see how to stacks up to the competition.
Whether you’re trying to make it for magic hour, line up the sun or moon with a landmark, or just want to make sure your subject is shown in the best natural light, smartphone apps that calculate the location of the sun and moon for any location on earth for any date and time can come in very handy.
The MOVO MTP-10 is one of several devices for adding rotation and panning to timelapse captures. It’s a significant step up in both features and price than some alternatives. Here’s my hands-on review.
If you’re looking for a way to spice up your timelapse captures, adding some rotation can be a good start. Here’s my hands-on review of the Camalapse 4 360-Degree Panning Timelapse Base.
Recent versions of macOS want to launch the new Photos app automatically every time you insert a memory card or connect a device. Here’s how to stop it.
Kraken.io is a Wordpress plugin and cloud service combination that aims to reduce to file size of your images in order to speed up your site. Here’s how it works in practice.
WebP is an emerging image format that is designed to create images that are visually indistinguishable from JPGs (or PNGs) but with much smaller file sizes. That in turn makes for a faster website.
Optimus is a plugin and cloud service combination that promises to dramatically reduce the filesize of your images and speed up your Wordpress site. Here’s my hands-on review.
The Digital Foci Picture Porter Advanced is feature-packed. Here’s how it stacks up in real-world use for backing up photos without a computer while traveling.
If you’re looking to make the most of your YouTube channel art, here’s a rundown of the sizes and layout.
If you want your photos to look their best on new high pixel density Retina displays, here’s a Wordpress plugin to help.
The WD MyPassport Wireless is a portable hard drive that can be used to stream media to mobile devices like iPhones and iPads. But it’s also a cost-effective option for backing up your photos while traveling.
Syncovery is a program that offers extreme flexibility in where, what, how, and when to back up photos to the cloud, local hard drives, or network drives.
Memory card backup devices combine a battery-powered hard drive with a memory card reader so you can back up your photos and videos without a computer. Here’s my hands-on review of the ColorSpace UDMA2.
Here’s a roundup of software that will take your photos and a GPS tracklog and marry them together to geotag your photos.
Garmin’s new Fenix 3 sports watch isn’t aimed at photographers, but it makes for a surprisingly useful tool for travel photography.
For travel photography, location matters. Whether you’re trying to track your adventures on a map or enter caption information in the image metadata, it helps to know exactly where a photo was taken.
A hands-on review of the NextoDI ND2901 portable memory card backup device for backing up photos and videos from memory cards to a hard drive without using a computer.
If you’re moving your Wordpress site or changing its structure, here are some handy tools that help with some aspects of the migration.
A roundup of some of the best options for small, reliable external hard drives that are perfect for backing up your images while traveling.
If you’re posting images to Instagram, whether from a phone or computer, here’s my unofficial guide to photo and picture sizes for Instagram posts.
Thumbnails come in handy in all sorts of places in Wordpress. Here’s a guide to the various ways to crop an image within Wordpress.
If you change your Wordpress theme or even just tweak the layout of your existing theme, you might need to change the size of your thumbnails. Here’s how to do it.
Lightroom is the most popular one-stop image management and image processing app, but it’s not the only option. Here are some apps worth looking at if you’re after an alternative to Lightroom.
Wordpress is a great platform out of the box. Here are some plugins that make it even better for photographers’ websites.
If you’re scanning film, slides, or prints, you’re almost certainly going to run into the problem of dust and scratches. Here’s a handy technique for removing them that works particularly well with black and white images.
If you find your Wordpress site is getting overweight with oversized original photos, the Imsanity plugin can trim them down to more sensible sizes.
If you use a lot of images on your WordPress site and are serious about speeding it up, image optimization is a great place to start and can give some really impressive gains for very little work or expense.
Need to scan something that’s larger than your scanner’s window? Here’s how to do it with any flatbed scanner and panorama stitching software.
Using bare hard drives can be a cheaper and less cluttered way of making external hard drives. Here’s an option for turning any hard drive into an external hard drive.
Dropbox is primarily designed for backing up and syncing files. But it’s also a very handy way to share photos quickly and easily.
If you’re looking to share a single keyboard and mouse between two Macs, there’s a new option on the block: Sharemouse.
TurboCollage for Mac is a great option for creating photo collages, whether it’s for a photo book, a print, or your Facebook Cover Photo.
If you’ve got current and older versions of your Adobe Creative Cloud apps installed, here’s how to remove the unwanted versions.
If your kids’ grandparents are all over Facebook, more power to them. If they’re not, here are some ideas for sharing baby photos with the grandparents in ways that provide a lasting memory they can hold in their hands.
Storing and backing up your photos in the cloud is now a viable option. But not every cloud storage service is a good fit for serious photographers. Here’s a rundown of some of the best options.
Most of the time, you’ll never see your image ALT tags. But they matter.
A step-by-step guide to compiling time-lapse video footage from a sequence of time-lapse photos in Apple’s Quicktime 7 Pro.
You want your site to look good. You want it to have some personality. And you want it to be easy to read. Web fonts can help with all three.
If you’re posting images on the web there are very good reasons to keep the files as small as possible. ImageOptim makes images smaller without sacrificing quality.
Sometimes you need to choose which of several similar search terms to emphasize for SEO. Rather than relying just on your gut instinct, here’s how to use actual data with Google Trends.
Here’s a way to set your Mac to copy and paste unformatted text by default rather than preserving unwanted formatting.
There are various places you can use images on Twitter, including the header photo, your profile picture, and on your timeline or feed. Here’s a rundown of the various sizes of each.
A step-by-step guide to using Time Lapse Assembler to create timelapse video footage from a sequence of timelapse photos.
Getting fuzzy images, text, or logos on your Facebook images? Facebook has closed some of the old loopholes, but here’s a tip worth trying.
There might be times you want to insert the content of one post in another post. Here’s a Wordpress plugin that does just that.
If you’re looking for the perfect domain name for your photography website, you now have some new options. There are new top level domains available related to photography, such as .photography, .camera, and .lighting.
The subtitle of this book is “150 Ideas for Cutting Costs and Boosting Profits.” And that really sums up the book. Its goal is to help you think differently about what you’re already doing.
When you convert color profiles in Photoshop, it will flatten all the layers by default. If you don’t want the layers flattened, here’s the simple fix.
Timelapse Calculator for iPhone is a simple yet effective app for calculating shoot durations, frame rates, and clip lengths for creating time-lapse video.
If you’re using an Amazon S3 bucket to share files, you’ll first need to make those files public. If you don’t, when your users try to access the URL they’ll get an Access Denied error. Here’s how to fix it.
A guide to using ZIP and LZW compression for TIFF images, along with real-world examples.
One of my few complaints about the Panasonic Lumix GF1 is that it doesn’t have a built-in intervalometer to take time lapse shots. But for about $50-$70 you can get a third party timer cable release that does the job quite nicely.
A step-by-step guide for making a custom collage for your Facebook Cover Photo with Lightroom Classic
Dust bunnies, which leave ugly dark spots and marks on your images, are one of the annoyances of digital photography. If you’re changing lenses on the go there are some tricks to minimize them.
What if you want to be sure to get a shot of the sunset over a mountain range or the full moon with the Eiffel Tower? The Photographer’s Ephemeris helps with that.
I take photos. I travel. I do it for a living. Seven continents. Dozens of countries. Up mountains. Under water. And a bunch of places in between.
