Blogs

My photography story

My passion for photography came from my dad who was a freelance photographer, but it was my mom who helped me get my start. My 1^st photoshoot was with my mom’s point and shoot camera when I was only 5 years old. I took a full roll of pictures of my action figures driving my new Tonka trucks. It had been a particularly awesome Christmas that year and I wanted to capture the moment. Even at such a young age, despite the lack of a digital preview to see if any of my pictures were in focus, I caught the photo bug and understood the magic of photography. A few years later, after many more photos of my toys, my mother protected her camera by buying me a camera of my own. I can remember needing to carefully load the camera by pulling the film a little bit out of the film canister to make sure it correctly loaded in the spindle. A classic old school point and shoot film camera. Today my camera bag includes 2 Nikon DSLR cameras, 4 Nikon lenses, 2 Nikon flashes, a small Canon point and shoot, and a dozen memory cards. Even after all these years, and thousands of pictures later, I still like to take pictures of toys

QVC asked me to write the Camera Guy blog (actually I asked and they said yes!)

My friends and family all think of me as the Camera Guy—that person you can go to when you need a recommendation on photography equipment. They trust me because I have developed a wealth of knowledge over the past 20 years shooting weddings, family portraits, sports photography, and at least a million photos of my own family. So I decided to bring my passion to the office and ask QVC if I could write a Camera Guy blog, and they said yes!

So why read this blog?

As the Camera Guy I hope to make this blog helpful! I want to specifically help all the parents out there who, like my mom, enjoy the various electronic gadgets of this modern world but don’t really have the time (or the interest) to read the manual to truly understand how to use it. I can’t replace the manual, but I can review products for those of you who are probably never going to take the time to read the manual from cover to cover as I have for every camera I have ever purchased. Yes, I am the Camera Guy.

I am constantly learning new things about photography and plan to share these tips and tricks with you. If you don’t have a Camera Guy in your family, be sure to post your equipment or photography questions here and I will do my best to get you an answer.

Each blog post I plan to share my experiences shooting with a different camera that is offered at QVC, in an attempt to help you decide if the camera we are offering is right for you. I am purposefully not reading the manual and using the camera for a week to see how much I am able to achieve without studying the manufacturer’s literature. I call this Mommy Rating—a great method to figure out how complicated any electronic item is to use. The Mommy Rating scale is from 1 to 5, 1 being not so good for Mommies and 5 representing the perfect device for the busy mom.

My week with the Samsung Galaxy Camera

Recently QVC let me take the Samsung Galaxy Camera out for a test drive. Like I mentioned earlier, I wanted to test this camera’s ease of use and see if it would pass my Mommy Rating scale.

All of the details of what you get with this camera are spelled out on this page Samsung Galaxy Camera, but basically this is a 16.3 megapixel camera that of course captures video (1920x1080 HD video to be exact). You can go from very wide photos with the 23mm lens or push the 21X optical zoom to pull in subjects that are far away. The game changer for me was the ability of the camera to connect to the internet so you can share images to your favorite social sites like Instagram or Facebook. This social sharing feature was particularly cool to me since I am on the Social Media team at QVC.

With the really big LCD and cool touchscreen functionality, I found this camera to be a real joy to use. Without reading the manual I was able to easily navigate through the various menus to see the wide range of shooting modes. But to truly understand how all of the special shooting modes work (i.e. night photo mode), I strongly recommend reading the manual. In addition to the shooting modes for every scenario you can think of, Samsung added an expert mode to allow you to change the aperture, shutter, and exposure compensation settings that a pro photographer would want access to.

Below are some of the pictures I captured before I had to return the camera to QVC (it was only a loaner ). To give you a true sample of the images right off the camera, I have not done any photo editing, however I am a really strong believer that if you want really AMAZING pictures you should always do some minor enhancements on your photos before you share them with friends and family. This camera inspired me to take pictures I would not normally take. With the easy to use features, large LCD, and the ability to post to my favorite images and video to my social sites I really could not put this camera down (I actually miss using it).

My Mommy Rating for this unbelievably fun camera is a 3.5 out of 5. While it was super easy to take pictures in a variety of modes without reading the manual, I ran into some confusion when I went to download the pics to my computer. The camera automatically organizes images into folders on the camera based on how the image was treated. For example, my Instagram pics were all in a special folder saved on the camera. It is actually a really nice folder system but navigating will require reading the manual, and in my Mommy Rating scale having to read the manual is a no-no.

My youngest son with the neighbor’s new puppy

Cheesey Q – I used the on camera color saturation tool to make the colors more vivid

My healthy lunch (I took pictures of everything!)

Because this camera was so much fun to use, I found myself taking pictures I would not normally take. I found myself seeing lines and shapes and various patterns even at the grocery store!

My beverage by the pool

Personally I think point and shoot cameras are best for wide shots, but I know many of you probably want to see the zoom capacity so I took a couple of shots where zoom was necessary.

Zoomed into the clouds off in the distance

Now this was a good use of the 21X zoom. Bugs scare me so I was really far away to get this picture. I think this wasp is eating another bug...ewwwww!

In my garden

Random bowl of frozen strawberries

Long exposure test (I kept the shutter open for 1sec @ ISO 1600)

My niece sporting her new shades

My mother-in-law with her grand-kids

My baby boy is an “angel”(soft focus was added in Instagram)

Did I mention this camera comes with a really stylish…purse? #manpurse #selfie

Thanks for reading my blog! Be sure to post comments with questions you may have about this camera or really any photography questions and I will do my best to answer.

CG