Julian Sanders from London Drugs talks about tablets, netbooks, Bluetooth, Logiix, LiveScribe smartpens, cleaning your tablet
Birds Fly South: Your Photo Checklist
For bird enthusiasts, autumn is a fascinating time of year. As the days get shorter and the weather becomes cooler, hundreds of species make their way south from their summer feeding grounds in the Canadian north. During these few short weeks, Western Canada is the rest stop for some of North America’s most beautiful birds.
Photographing birds in the autumn is truly a labour of love. With a little research and some key pieces of gear, you can capture beautiful images of your most exciting bird sightings.
- A good field guide: Smart phone technology is wonderful for on-the-go research. App versions of the Peterson, Sibley, Audobon, and National Geographic guides are all available through Apple’s App Store, each providing searchable databases, photographs and drawings, maps, and bird sounds.
- Your longest lens: A telephoto lens is a key piece of gear, one that is worth the investment. You will need the power to zoom in on individual birds and capture the exquisite details of their plumage.
- A polarizing filter: Migrating birds tend to flock near a water source, and the reflections can cause haze or glare that will ruin otherwise fantastic images. A polarizing filter is an inexpensive item that will also protect the surface of your long lens.
- Waterproof memory card holders: Raindrops, splashes, and spills can be deadly to an SD card full of images. Waterproof cases for memory cards are an essential for wilderness photography.
- Binoculars or scopes: Using your long lens to spot and identify birds can be unwieldy—many avid birdwatchers prefer binoculars or a tripod-mounted scope to make initial sightings.
- Quick release tripod: The benefits of a sturdy tripod are many—crisp, focused shots, a stable resting spot for heavy, fragile lenses, and precise planning for framing and camera settings. We recommend a tripod with a quick release, so you can easily remove your scope and secure your camera, or release your camera for a spontaneous, hand-held shot.
- A Thermos of hot coffee: Bird photography involves early mornings in chilly weather. Make sure to dress for the elements, and be prepared to wait for the perfect shot.
Customized greeting cards are a wonderful way to share your best bird photos.Upload your file to London Drugs Photolab and we will print your customized cards using the same attention to detail we give all of our prints.
Exploring Fall Through a Filter
Autumn is a fantastic season for photographers, with bold natural colours, dynamic storms, and spectacular migrating birds and wildlife. With the natural world on dramatic display, this is the perfect time to experiment with filters.
Filters are a simple, inexpensive way to add punch to your photography. Fitting right over your favourite lens, filters change the way the light hits your image sensor.
Lovely landscapes
Imagine a gorgeous autumn vista, with rolling hills ablaze in red, orange, and gold. The sky is a clear bright blue dotted with puffy clouds. The challenge with this landscape—and most landscapes—is that the land and the sky require different exposures to capture them at their best.
Graduated filters will transform the way you shoot landscapes. The filter blocks out more light rays in the top half, and fewer toward the bottom. Your landscape will be bright and bold, with a crisp and detailed sky.
Cool Days, Warm Skin Tones
Red-cheeked kids in the pumpkin patch, a family game of touch football, or an autumn hike in the woods: the colours of the Canadian autumn form a brilliant backdrop for your family photos. When you are photographing people outdoors, consider using a sky filter. This filter has a pink tint that will add lovely warmth to your photos, enhancing the fiery fall colours and brightening skin tones.
Filter Over Troubled Water
Water in the autumn can be breathtakingly beautiful, with flat lakes reflecting bright foliage, a stormy ocean, or a tumbling river. Photographing bodies of water, particularly on bright days, can cause haze or glare. A polarizing filter blocks out errant light rays, resulting in clear, crisp shots. Many photographers leave a polarizing filter on their cameras all the time.
Beautiful Blur
A neutral density filter doesn’t look like much—just a plain, grey filter that blocks out light rays evenly. But lowering the amount of light that hits the sensor allows you to slow the shutter speed and achieve an artistic blur of movement. Streams and waterfalls are wonderful test subjects: with the filter in place, you can get a perfectly exposed shot of the rushing water.
Your London Drugs Camera Department carries a variety of filters for different makes and models of cameras. Bring your camera in and we can help you choose the perfect filter to take gorgeous autumn shots.
Home Studio Essentials: Preparing for a Portrait Photo Shoot
Studio portraits capture people at their very best—bright eyes, luminous skin, and gorgeous details that bring out the unique personality of each person. Professional photography studios carefully control their lighting using a few basic principles. With a little planning and some strategic purchases, you can quickly set up your own temporary studio and take gorgeous portraits of your loved ones.
Studio Lighting Basics
When you look beyond the high tech equipment, a professional photography studio is simply a space with well-controlled lighting. Each lighting element has a specific purpose.
The main light
Placed above the subject and at an angle, the main light is the primary source of illumination. These lights often have an umbrella behind them to help direct the beams at the subject.
Your ideal main light will be strong, yet diffuse, the indoor equivalent of a cloudy daytime shot. You may have a room with a lot of natural light, or you can use an artificial light like a very bright lamp or a studio lighting kit. Quick to set up and simple to use, a studio light can give you the freedom to photograph in any room, at any time of day.
The fill light
A strong main light will create harsh shadows on the face, so studios will use a soft fill light to illuminate the dark side of the face. There are some tricks you can use at home to get the same effect.
Try using a soft box on your main light. A soft box diffuses the light rays through a large, softening surface area. There will be fewer harsh shadows on your subject’s face, reducing the need for a fill light.
Instead of a fill light, use a reflector. A reflector can be any flat, white surface that is angled to bounce the main light onto the shadow side of the face. You can use a large piece of white cardboard or foam core. Professional reflectors are collapsible and come with different surfaces that will subtly change the colour tones of the reflected light.
The back light
Shadows on the backdrop will distract from the portrait, so studios illuminate the backdrop as well. You can do this with small lights angled upward against the backdrop, or you can move your subject away from the backdrop. This larger distance will cast the shadows out of the frame. Take some test shots to find the perfect set up.
Tips and Tricks
Focus on the eye—Always focus on the pupil of the eye. This is the sharpest feature on the face, and will ensure a clear, bright-eyed portrait.
Shoot with a wide aperture—A wide aperture gives you a shallow depth of field. This means your subject will be in focus, with the background pleasantly blurred.
Use a tripod—For clear, sharp portraits, a tripod is essential. Knowing the location of your camera will allow you to precisely control lighting and other visual elements. You will also eliminate handshake, which happens to the surest of photographers.
Consider your backdrop—There are very few places in a home that have both an attractive, distraction-free backdrop and perfect lighting. We recommend finding your best lighting conditions, and adding a simple backdrop that will not compete with the portrait. This can be as simple as a smooth white sheet hanging against the wall. You can also purchase a portable backdrop frame that can expand to 9’ wide by 12’ high, perfect for group portraits. Use your own fabric or paper backdrop, or purchase them ready-made.
Shoot in RAW—Portraits are perfect for shooting in RAW. You can carefully manage white balance and exposure on your computer. Since your lighting conditions will be exactly the same in any given photo shoot, you will be able to correct the white balance for all your shots in one batch.
London Drugs can help you find the best home studio products for your needs. Drop by our Camera Department and our LDExperts can help you out.
Picture Perfect: Decorating with Photos
Looking for personal, dramatic artwork to decorate your home? Think pictures: vibrant botanicals, sweeping landscapes, artful black and whites of your family. Photographs are the perfect medium—you can get exactly the shot you want, adjust the colours, and print the precise size to fit your space. Enlargements won’t break the bank, either: if you enlarge photos to a standard size and purchase a ready-made frame and matte, you can produce a gorgeous piece of artwork for a fraction of the price of a well-made professional print.
Before your photo shoot
Set your camera to FINE: For enlargements, you will need a very fine image—go for the highest resolution your camera will allow.
Consider shooting in RAW: Many cameras allow you to photograph in RAW format, which is the digital equivalent of a film negative. These files will be large, but they will allow for precise colour correcting afterwards, either by you or the print technician.
During your photo shoot
Think light: Most photographs look best in natural light, and natural light looks best in the early and late hours of the day. Take note of where the light is hitting, and experiment with angles to catch your subject in an unexpected way.
Think of your room: Pictures are about more than colour and light—they are about mood. A dappled, daytime forest photo looks different than a sunset shot, with looming shadows and deep contrast. Dramatic rooms like dining rooms and living rooms showcase different types of shots than a family room or kitchen.
Get close up: Macro shots—extremely close-up photos—are a simple way to get a dramatic shot. Even the most basic point-and-shoot camera can focus at a remarkably short distance.
Experiment with monochromatic: Does your room have a strong colour scheme? Try photographing objects that are within the colour palette: think green botanicals in a moss-coloured bathroom, or a brilliant sky filled with balloons in a blue child’s room. Monochromatic artwork helps unify a space.
Consider contrast: If you’re looking for pop, think about the colour wheel. If your room is a cool blue, consider a fiery red and orange photo of tulips. If your room is neutrals, look for brilliant purples, rusts, or blues, highly saturated colours that will draw the eye. Contrast colours will form a focal point in the room, adding drama and interest.
Black and white: If your walls are painted a gorgeous, saturated colour, consider black and white shots. Surrounded by a black gallery frame and a crisp white matte, your vivid walls will allow the photos to pop.
After your shoot
Play with your pictures: The most basic photo retouching programs will allow you to adjust contrast and colour. Try adding effects that make your photo look like a painting, or adjust the colours to neon intensity. Play with your images and find something that works. If you are unsure about the effect, a standard size print costs a few cents and will let you see how your computer retouching translates into print.
Leave it to the experts: London Drugs’ print technicians hand-inspect every image. If you are unsure about colour balance and other technical components of your picture, you can trust that we will print at optimal settings.
Enlarge to a gallery print: For a designer look, have us create a gallery print. We print your image on canvas and stretch it around a wooden frame. Your gallery print is ready to hang on the wall—no additional frame or matte required.
For all of your photography and enlargement questions, drop by the London Drugs Photolab. We would love to show you samples of our enlargements, give you technical specifications, and help you create the perfect piece of photographic artwork.
Shooting in RAW: An introduction to the ‘Digital Negative’
Give your photos the professional treatment
Each month, we delve into the world of your camera’s menu—those cryptic settings beyond AUTO mode that can change the way you take pictures. This month, we’re tackling RAW, a method of creating images that are precisely corrected for white balance, tint, contrast, and other elements.
Professional photographers often shoot in RAW because they can make the lighting, exposure, and colour balance perfect afterwards. Today, good quality photo editing software is readily available, which means anyone with a dSLR can shoot images in RAW and give them the professional treatment before printing.
What is RAW?
Your camera gives you the option of saving your images in several formats. Most of us save in jpeg, but dSLR cameras also allow you to save in RAW. And if you’ve ventured into unknown territory and taken shots in RAW, you were likely blown away by two things: the massive size of the image, which can easily run 8 to 10 MB, and the dull, flat image quality.
To understand RAW images, let’s first think about how a camera saves a jpeg image.
- The sensor picks up an enormous amount of information when you press the shutter—an 8 megapixel camera will capture about 8 MB of information.
- The camera’s internal software calculates white balance, looks for redundant information, sharpens the image, corrects the lighting, adjusts the tint.
- The camera deletes unnecessary pixels, saving a fraction of the visual information.
- The resulting jpeg is relatively small, already processed, and ready to print.
A RAW file stops your camera from making visual decisions about your image. The result is all of the information, unprocessed, in one big file. RAW files are big because they contain all the bits the camera deletes out of a jpeg image; they seem flat and dull because they are unprocessed. But contained in that big file are all the tools to create a gorgeous, perfectly balanced photo.
What do you do with RAW files?
To handle your RAW files, you will need photo editing software. To start out, you may wish to download free photo editing software—a quick internet search will generate dozens of basic programs that can handle RAW files.
Each of these programs can auto correct your images. You can also tweak the different elements yourself, like sharpness, contrast, saturation, and tint. Let your creativity flow—the mood and feel of your photos can be enhanced in post production, bringing drama to already fantastic images.
When you are done experimenting with your RAW files, upload them to the London Drugs site and print out tests. This will give you a good idea about how your on-screen changes translate into print. London Drugs also provides our specific printer profiles so you can calibrate the colour on your screen to our machines. These are called “ICC Profiles”.
Intimidated about RAW? We’ll do it for you!
Our photolab accepts your unprocessed RAW files. We will analyze and correct your images for you, hand-inspecting each one to make sure it’s perfect. The result is truly gorgeous photos, perfected and printed by professionals.
For all of your photo questions, drop by the London Drugs Photolab. Our Camera Department, Computer Department, and Photolab work closely together to help you go from snapshot, to hard drive, to print, easily and effortlessly.
ESRB Ratings
ESRB ratings overview
The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) ratings are designed to provide information about video and computer game content, so you can make informed purchase decisions. ESRB ratings have two parts: rating symbols suggest age appropriateness for the game, and content descriptors indicate elements in a game that may have triggered a particular rating and/or may be of interest or concern.
To take full advantage of the ESRB rating system, it’s important to check both the rating symbol (on the front of the game box) and the content descriptors (on the back of the game box).
ESRB Rating Search Widget
Search ESRB’s data base of 20,000 games and read the rating summaries (for titles that have them) by using the rating search widget.
ESRB Rating Symbols
Early Childhood
Titles rated EC – Early Childhood have content that may be suitable for ages 3 and older. Contains no material that parents would find inappropriate.
Everyone
Titles rated E (Everyone) have content that may be suitable for ages 6 and older. Titles in this category may contain minimal cartoon, fantasy or mild violence and/or infrequent use of mild language.
Everyone 10+
Titles rated E10+ (Everyone 10 and older) have content that may be suitable for ages 10 and older. Titles in this category may contain more cartoon, fantasy or mild violence, mild language, and/or minimal suggestive themes.
Teen
Titles rated T (Teen) have content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older. Titles in this category may contain violence, suggestive themes, crude humour, minimal blood, simulated gambling, and/or infrequent use of strong language.
Mature
Titles rated M (Mature) have content that may be suitable for persons ages 17 and older. Titles in this category may contain intense violence, blood and gore, sexual content and/or strong language.
Adults Only
Titles rated AO (Adults Only) have content that should only be played by persons 18 years and older. Titles in this category may include prolonged scenes of intense violence and/or graphic sexual content and nudity.
Rating Pending
Titles listed as RP (Rating Pending) – have been submitted to the ESRB and are awaiting final rating. (This symbol appears only in advertising prior to a game’s release)
ESRB Content Descriptors
- Alcohol Reference – Reference to and/or images of alcoholic beverages
- Animated Blood – Discolored and/or unrealistic depictions of blood
- Blood – Depictions of blood
- Blood and Gore – Depictions of blood or the mutilation of body parts
- Cartoon Violence – Violent actions involving cartoon-like situations and characters. May include violence where a character is unharmed after the action has been inflicted
- Comic Mischief – Depictions or dialogue involving slapstick or suggestive humor
- Crude Humor – Depictions or dialogue involving vulgar antics, including “bathroom” humor
- Drug Reference – Reference to and/or images of illegal drugs
- Fantasy Violence – Violent actions of a fantasy nature, involving human or non-human characters in situations easily distinguishable from real life
- Intense Violence – Graphic and realistic-looking depictions of physical conflict. May involve extreme and/or realistic blood, gore, weapons and depictions of human injury and death
- Language – Mild to moderate use of profanity
- Lyrics – Mild references to profanity, sexuality, violence, alcohol or drug use in music
- Mature Humor – Depictions or dialogue involving “adult” humor, including sexual references
- Nudity – Graphic or prolonged depictions of nudity
- Partial Nudity – Brief and/or mild depictions of nudity
- Real Gambling – Player can gamble, including betting or wagering real cash or currency
- Sexual Content – Non-explicit depictions of sexual behavior, possibly including partial nudity
- Sexual Themes – References to sex or sexuality
- Sexual Violence – Depictions of rape or other violent sexual acts
- Simulated Gambling – Player can gamble without betting or wagering real cash or currency
- Strong Language – Explicit and/or frequent use of profanity
- Strong Lyrics – Explicit and/or frequent references to profanity, sex, violence, alcohol or drug use in music
- Strong Sexual Content – Explicit and/or frequent depictions of sexual behavior, possibly including nudity
- Suggestive Themes – Mild provocative references or materials
- Tobacco Reference – Reference to and/or images of tobacco products
- Use of Drugs – The consumption or use of illegal drugs
- Use of Alcohol – The consumption of alcoholic beverages
- Use of Tobacco – The consumption of tobacco products
- Violence – Scenes involving aggressive conflict. May contain bloodless dismemberment
- Violent References – References to violent acts
**When a content descriptor is preceded by the term Mild, it conveys low frequency, intensity or severity of the content it modifies.
Rating Summaries
Rating summaries are a supplementary source of information which explain in objective terms the context and relevant content that factored into a game’s ESRB rating assignment. Although rating summaries don’t appear on game packages, they are available via the rating search on ESRB’s website, the rating search widget, ESRB’s mobile website at m.esrb.org, and rating search apps for iPhone, Android and Window Phone 7 (available in July 2011).
Online Rating Notice
Online-enabled games carry the notice Online Interactions Not Rated by the ESRB. This notice warns those who intend to play the game online about possible exposure to chat (text, audio, video) or other types of content created by other players (e.g., maps, skins) that have not been considered in the ESRB rating assignment. For the most up to date list of content descriptors and definitions, go to http://www.esrb.org
About Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) The ESRB is a non-profit, self-regulatory body that independently assigns ratings, enforces advertising guidelines, and helps ensure responsible online privacy practices for the interactive entertainment software industry.
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