Stay Focused is part the arnielee website.
We love taking pictures. You’ll find articles here based on our 60+ years of experience in photography. We’re happy to share our know-how with you hoping you’ll discover new ways to enjoy your picture taking even more.
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Since the 1980’s I’ve been a fairly regular visitor to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) first as an exhibitor and more recently as an industry observer. The show is held in January of each year and as a lifelong geek I enjoy making my way through the many aisles of the convention center to see, touch and talk about some of the upcoming techie gizmos that are or will soon be making their way to the market.
So for these 40+ years CES has kept me accustomed to traveling back and forth to Las Vegas. Typically I will spend a few days at the show with the other 150,000 attendees, 4000 exhibitors traipsing through miles of aisles. Afterward two days I’m ready for a break from all of the people and city traffic.
Luckily there are places close by that I can visit to relax.
One of these places is a short 25 mile drive to Desert National Wildlife Refuge – the largest such refuge outside of Alaska.
Since I didn’t have an AWD vehicle, I stuck to the lower areas of the park to photograph the birds.
Another of my favorite places to visit is Death Valley National Park. Death Valley is about a two hour drive and sits on the Nevada-California border.
Death Valley is the nation’s largest national park in the lower 48 states.
Desert NWR and Death Valley are two of the places that I frequently visit.
There are several other places that I have visited in previous trips to Las Vegas – namely Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon National Park. Each is a few additional hours from Vegas but but January weather in these mountainous areas is too unpredictable. I’ll visit those parks during more temperate months.
Las Vegas remains an exciting place to visit with its amazing architecture, fabulous restaurants, exciting recreation and tempting casino gaming. Keep in mind that there are other close by places that may interest unsuspecting visitors.
These two stickers that show that we’ve recently visited these places and are available at our companion site.
The stickers are available at StickItToYourCar
Written by:
Arnie Lee
I’m guessing that many of the older picture takers among us have a mountain of slides sitting their closet in a proverbial shoebox. Hopefully they’re not collecting dust.
I was introduced to digital images in the late 1990s and since then I’ve been scanning thousands of my slides and transparencies. I started by using a reasonably priced flatbed scanner since I couldn’t justify a more expensive piece of equipment. The flatbed produced quite good results but at the expense of time and patience.
About a year ago I started using a simpler method to digitize the slides. The slides aren’t scanned. Instead I photograph each of them with a cellphone. The results are quite acceptable- image resolution and sharpness – since my goal is to archive all of these “forgotten” photos.
Here’s how I “scanned” a slew of slides in a very short while:
Afterward the cellphone images are transferred to my desktop or laptop. From there I can work with them using my usual editing software.
I’ve digitized hundreds of slides using the cellphone and most of them are more than acceptable for archiving my huge collection of memories and events. As a bonus for my efforts wading through these slides, I was pleasantly surprised to run across people, places and things that I haven’t thought about in many years.
Please keep in mind that if the resulting images using the cellphone do not meet your quality requirements you still can scan the originals using a more traditional scanning method.
Give this technique a try to see if the results meet your requirements.
Written by:
Arnie Lee
For sometime now the cell phone camera has taken over as the prime means of picture taking. The same is true for taking movies. The quality of both still photos and videos are literally amazing considering that they are a secondary feature of the cell phone.
At the recent Consumer Electronics Show I stopped at the booth of Hohem. They are the makers of accessories that are attractive to users who are serious about making quality videos with their cellphone. These accessories are camera gimbals.
Gimbals are not new. A gimbal is a device that keeps the cellphone level as you pan to follow the subject resulting in smooth video. Without the gimbal the resulting video would appear jumpy from the shaking and vibration of your movement. Here’s what I learned about their accessories.
Hohem makes several other models of gimbals including one conventional (large) cameras. For more information please contact Hohem.
Written by:
Arnie Lee
