5 Micro SOP Best Practices
Micro stock picture taking best practices should point you in the right direction on your next open air foray into pictures. The best practices will save you considerable time expense and lost pictures if you follow at least one or two of them.
1. Know Your Camera’s Battery Life.
The battery life inside a camera is very changeable. At low temperature your camera’s computer brain may not work or render a readable LCD message. The memory stick reader may flub its job. The lens assembly may be sluggish, taxing even more battery power to get it working right. A lot of sludgy cold weather shots come from grudging assembly workings.
How your camera works on two high power super charged double AA or Lithium ion+ at hot temperatures fully juiced is a far cry from the cold snap of dying copper tops languishing in twenty five degree cold with a wind chill factor next to gray water. Rubbing up some frictional heat into those jobbies won’t be fun because your hands will be icy stumps at that point. Make sure you know your camera’s “misbehavior” under stress.
2. Keep New/Formatted Memory Cards on Hand
A memory card is vulnerable to the elements and can be reduced to a fraction of its natural life due to cold or poor battery unit connectors. Springs and snap in parts can erode and waste battery energy and then the photo scoops come at a reduced rate of quality. Carry a working spare tested in your computer memory stick bay.
3. Upload When Possible
Organize a Fotolia or Kodak Easyshare account and while on photograb walkabout at the first whisper of bandwidth or Wi-Fi upload and clean your memory stick off. Make sure the take of what you shot is fully saved, then move on.
The capacity for video opens up exponentially when you don’t prudently have to save room for images. Nature video and landscapes make excellent video micro stock submission, but you need to be able to afford the luxury of expending big chunks of your stick memory to grab them. Learn to capture video without sound for smaller format storage and roomier saves.
4. Keep Fresh Batteries/Recharge be charged.
Photography in the Digital era has one Golden Rule, ” Let thy batteries be charged”. Invest in solar rechargers, lithium ion rechargeables, and go with the disposables when you have to. Batteries exhausted in deep cold may yet have life in them in plus fifty degree weather.
Keep pocket warmers cozy in the sides of your favorite parka pockets or sweatshirt sleeves rolled up. Stuff batteries in there as they get exhausted and pull them back out for last life picture taking. if you invest in plane fare, get up before 5 am to make the mountain crest, don’t lose ideal shots because the copper tops died out.
5. Carry a White Balance
That burnt tan blush that pervades the first dozen of your primary shots? It could have been corrected with a white balance. Micro photogs quick off the draw with the smart lens setting may not realize that while detail is crisp and resolution deep into the pixels, the light has a weird cast that bounces the light funny. Tilt the camera on an axis to find the right shift of light and focus.
You’ll be taking these shots over, I promise. Bring a white balance or other deep color item whose image onscreen will tell you when tones and light are off. In recent shots I actually used a fuschia metallic purple set of gift wrapped candles. When the tone of the fuschia foil went dim or the blue tones took way to much precedence, I knew some lens shifting was in play.
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