Cool gear for summer photography
— -- Summer prompts us to go outdoors, bask in the sun, be with friends and create new memories. By the time fall arrives, we want to be able to relive these carefree moments in stunning detail.
Our friends at Reviewed.com often give you the down low on fancy new cameras, but we wanted to showcase some nifty accessories and software to help you along your photo journey.
Flipside Sport great for shooting outdoors
Photographers who are looking for the ideal hiking bag can stop searching.
The Flipside Sport 10L AW is an ultra-compact and lightweight pack, compartmentalized to hold a variety of photo and outdoor gear, including a full-frame SLR camera with additional lenses, a hydration bladder, travel tripod and hiking pole.
Even when fully packed, the Flipside bag by Lowepro isn't overbearing on the shoulders, sporting breathable and comfortable straps. The main compartment opens from the back, unveiling a divider system that can be removed in its entirety. This smart flexible design essentially doubles the bag's functionality, giving it additional utility as a small daypack.
If you're planning on spending some time in the great outdoors this summer — and you should — this bag is a great fit to meld your hobbies. The Flipside Sport 10L AW retails for $124.99.
Control your SLR remotely with ioShutter
For shooting timelapse videos and night photos, a camera remote is a must. One of the most innovative ones on the market is the ioShutter, a remote trigger controlled by your iPhone.
Out of the box, ioShutter includes a 3-foot-long cord and carrying pouch. With a free app, an iOS device becomes an interval timer that can tell the camera to fire in six modes, most of which can be combined: standard trigger, motion trigger, sound trigger, timelapse, timer and bulb. The pro app offers more advanced functionality to these modes, for example, allowing photographers to set the sound trigger's decibel sensitivity. Instead of fumbling with small buttons that you're not entirely sure are the right ones to press, the app features large buttons with easy-to-follow tutorials.
For now, the major drawback is compatibility. IoShutter works with Canon cameras as well as some Samsung, Hasselblad and Pentax models. Nikon compatibility is expected later in the summer. The ioShutter is available from Photojojo for $70.
Easily create timelapse movies with iStopMotion
Compiling timelapse videos requires sifting through hundreds if not thousands of photos. This is quite a laborious process, made better with Boinx's iStopMotion applications for Apple desktops and iPads.
As the name suggests, the software is designed for animation and stop-motion movies. But it can handle timelapses beautifully as well in two ways. There's an option to capture frames as you're using the application. But if you're looking to shoot on location, dragging a laptop around might be too cumbersome, so the software includes an option to import previously taken photos to quickly process and output videos.
The desktop app for iStopMotion begins at $49, and the iPad version, which has more limited functionality, costs $9.99.
Artistic effects without the sticker shock
I hate to say it, but there's a huge barrier to entry with SLR photography. Expanding your skill set often means getting your hands on new glass, and that can easily run you four figures for specialty effects such as tilt shift.
Lensbaby offers a (relatively) affordable alternative with its lens systems. The Portland-based company sells funky lenses with interchangeable optics for SLR and mirrorless cameras. That way, instead of dropping big money on each new piece of glass, photographers can purchase one lens ($150 to $400) and cheap optics ($40 to $300) that produce artistic, dreamy and nostalgic effects. The major downside is that the shooting experience is no longer aided by auto-anything, so you get a very mechanical shooting experience.
My personal favorite is Lensbaby's latest, the Edge 80. This optic is capable of producing a tilt-shift-like selective focus effect and can distort the image to make objects look miniature and toylike. And though it is Lensbaby's most expensive optic, it's nowhere near as pricey as the $2,000 Canon tilt-shift lens I have my eye on. Lensbaby's products are compatible with Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax and other cameras.
Share photos on the Web with SmugMug
If you take a photo and nobody sees it, does it exist?
The answer is yes. But my point here is that photos are meant to be shared and seen, not trapped in a hard drive. SmugMug is a fantastic photo-hosting website that's built with photographers in mind. The site handles the buying and selling of images, overlays watermarks to prevent unauthorized lifting of images and offers advanced customization options to display stunning photo and video portfolios. Furthermore, sophisticated controls let users decide which images and galleries to display to the Web, with the ability to add different levels of privacy protection. Plug-ins make uploading images from photo libraries such as Aperture or Adobe Lightroom a breeze, and it's also easy to share from SmugMug to other social networks, blogs and websites.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based startup also touts a top-notch support team made up of photographers, endearingly referred to as heroes. If you have a question about SmugMug, photography or anything else — one customer reportedly turned to a hero to find out the meaning of life — the team will get back to you within an hour. A basic subscription to SmugMug, which includes unlimited photo uploads, begins at $5 a month.
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E-mail Alice Truong at techcomments@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter: @alicetruong.