My third digital camera, the Canon T2i. The Canon Rebel series has been popular with new photographers for decades.

What Camera Should I Buy to Get Started in Photography?

Daniel Whitten June 30, 2020

Recently, I have been asked by different individuals what camera I would recommend buying to either get started in photography or as an upgrade from their smartphones. I thought I would consolidate my thoughts here for future reference when this question is posed again. Unlike most of my posts, this one is designed to be readable by someone with little to no photography background. I also included a lot of links to explain common “jargon.”

Canon 60mm macro lens that I sold on eBay.

Selling Camera Gear on eBay

Daniel Whitten May 1, 2020

For many photographers, gear is personal and hard to part with. However, selling off gear that’s collecting dust can be a great way to clear up space or buy other products that might get more use. In addition, I like the idea that my old gear is useful or valuable to someone else; some of the products I’ve sold have gone to young kids or budding photographers. You can sell your bodies and lenses to photo stores like BH Photo. However, you typically trade convenience for lower prices. If you want to get the most bang for your buck, selling on eBay is likely the way to go.

Vacuuming my Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 lens.

Grit Under Focus Ring? Try Vacuuming

Daniel Whitten April 18, 2020

My Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 seems prone to collecting grit underneath the manual focus ring. I’ve ignored this problem for years by never using manual focus. However, I recently discovered that the problem could be fixed simply by vacuuming the lens.

Sync Lightroom Smart Collection with Mobile Workaround

Daniel Whitten November 30, 2019

In the current (2019) version of Lightroom Classic, you cannot sync a smart collection with Lightroom Mobile. This is unfortunate because I use many smart collections to organize my photographs. In this post, I present a workaround to help overcome this issue.

Producing a Wraparound Stretched Canvas Without Cropping

Daniel Whitten August 18, 2018

Stretched canvas is a great medium for photographs. I tend to shoot and prefer tightly composed images. When I first started printing stretched canvas, I found this style problematic for ordering wraparound pieces. In order to have enough canvas to wrap around the frame it is necessary to effectively "crop" the image seen on the front. I found this very undesirable.

In this post, I show how you can overcome this limitation by simply mirroring the edges of the image. Although you can do this in any image-editing program, I created and provide a Photoshop action that will do this automatically for any image.