I'm a little late this week with the photographer interview, I didn't get it up for Wednesday so I'm just going to call it the weekly interview from now on. It's a good one today though, the artist this week is Tom Arbour from Tom Arbour Photography. Information about purchasing prints is available here.
A: My main camera is the Canon digital rebel XTi. I like that is it is small, lightweight, and easy for me to take most places. And I can pop pretty much any EOS lens that Canon makes on to it and get great images with it. I have sold many photos taken with the "entry level" XTi via microstock sites like Istockphoto and shutterstock. I recently needed a pocket camera, and I went with the Panasonic LZ8. It is small, lightweight, black in color which I think looks cool, and best of all, it was under 100 bucks. I also use my wife's Kodak p850 zoom, which I have taken some great pictures with. Everyone should have a superzoom if interested in nature photography. I carry it when I don't want to lug around by shoulder bag of SLR equiptment and I can get some great shots.
Q: If you could only choose one lens, which one would it be?
A: If I could choose one lens in my bag that I own now, it would be the Canon EFS 60mm F2.8 macro. It is the best lens that I own, optically speaking. I find macro photography addictive, plus it is great focal length for portraits. It works well for isolated portions of a distant landscape.
Q: What is your favorite non-camera accessory?
A: My favorite non-camera accessory? I like my Wolverine MVP. It is a sixty gigabyte hardrive/memory card reader./ sound recorder/ mp3 player. I use it to store and view images while I'm on vacation and don't want to take a laptop.
Q: What piece of equipment do you wish you had.
A: If I could pick one piece of photo equiptment to own, I'd choose the Canon 10-22 efs lens. I've rented this piece of glass from lensrentals.com, and I was blown away with the creative possibilities it afforded me.
Q: What photo editing software do you use?
A: I process my RAW images using Canon's Digital Photo Professional. I recently upgraded the software and found many new features available from the version that came with my camera. Several of these new features are available "in camera" on Canon's new cameras, and this software gives me lots of power to adjust contrast, play with the tone curves, increase saturation, clone out dust, and fix distortion. It is a great piece of software, it is free, and I think it is a great reason to go with Canon if you are just starting out in the digital SLR world. For other adjustments that DPP can't do, I use the freeware Paint.net.
Image by Tom Arbour
