Manfrotto 175F-1 Spring Clamp With Flash Shoe

If you are looking for something that can hold your flash unit anywhere you go, Manfrotto 175F-1 spring clamp could be your best option. This clamp is a great product and should be a part of any strobist's basic lighting kit. It provides a great amount of versatility and can be attached to a light stand or clamped into anything. The ball head socket allows you to position your flash in any position you like, allowing you to create your shot however you envision it. It takes only few seconds to clamp it onto to a piece of furniture without fear of marring a surface due to the small rubber feet built into the clamp.

Manfrotto 175F-1 spring clamp

It is very handy for mounting the flash units like SB-600 or SB-800 in places where you can't use the light stand. It clamps very well and it's secure. The plastic cold shoe fits the strobe nice and sung so that you don't have to worry about the strobe falling out. The clamp end is strong and grips things very well. It also has a standard light stand stud on it and a clamp as well to accept a stud from the light stand. It can hold up to 4.41 lbs and rotates 360 degree. The clamp is made up of aluminum and steel and it weighs about 0.73 lbs.

Manfrotto brand is known for the quality products. I own several products from Manfrotto like 055XPROB pro tripod, spring clamp, 498RC2 ball head. They are excellent quality products and I love them. Their build quality is extremely strong and sturdy. Their products are little expensive than what you get in a regular market (non-brand item) but worth every penny and it will pay you off in the future.

CMOS Sensor Vs CCD Sensor

When you go shopping for a digital camera, you have to deal with lots of technical terminology and the specification about the camera. And most of the times, these terminology and specifications set the price and the quality of the camera. When you are comparing various digital cameras, even within same brand, you will notice some of the features are available in one camera model and not in another one. But before you compare different bodies based on these technical terms, I think it would be better to learn about these terminology first and I am here today to help you understand the differences between CMOS and CCD sensor type used in camera body. Whether it's a digital camera or a conventional film camera, they share same basic principle which is collecting the lights (reflecting from the subject) which travels through the lens and focus them on the digital sensor or film inside the camera body. Only the difference is that the traditional film camera uses light sensitive films to record the image whereas digital camera uses digital sensor. When you are using a film camera, you have to further process the image using chemicals to get the final image but in case of digital camera, when light hits the digital sensor, it will be converted to electrons (photons) and camera software processes them instantly inside the camera and gives the results.

The digital light sensor is divided up into many small arrays of the receptor cells. Every receptor in the array is equivalent to one pixel and it is the pixels that create an image. More pixels we have, better picture quality we get because of the wide spectrum of lights hitting on the entire sensor. One simplified way to think about the sensor used in a digital camera is to think of it as having a 2-D array of thousands or millions of tiny solar cells, each of which transforms the light from one small portion of the image into electrons. Both CMOS and CCD devices perform this task using varieties of technology.

CMOS Vs. CCD

Today, most of the digital cameras use either a CMOS image sensor or a CCD sensor. Both types of sensors accomplish the same task of capturing the light and converting it into an electrical signal.

A CMOS (Complimentary metal-oxide semiconductor) chip is a type of active pixel sensor made using the CMOS semiconductor process. Extra circuitry next to each photo sensor converts the light energy into a voltage. Additional circuitry on the chip may be included to convert the voltage into digital data.

A CCD (Charged-couple device) is an analog device. When light strikes the chip, it is held as a small electrical charge in each photo sensor. The charges are then converted into voltage one pixel at a time as they are read from the chip. Additional circuitry in the camera converts the voltage into digital information.

FOVEON F7 X3 CMOS SENSOR

CMOS sensors are cheaper and easier to manufacture than the CCD chips and have a great battery life. Also, they can be fabricated on just about any standard silicon production line. This is one of the key reasons behind the falling prices of digital cameras recently. Generally speaking, digital cameras that use CMOS chips are usually lighter than their CCD counterparts. However, CMOS chips do have their drawbacks as they are less sensitive to the lights and more susceptible to the digital noise, whereas CCD sensors create high-quality and low-noise images. CMOS sensor traditionally consumes little power whereas CCD sensor uses more power to operate. It consumes as much as 100 times more power than an equivalent CMOS sensor. Once upon a time, digital cameras utilizing CMOS were regarded inferior in terms of the image quality, but today however, many popular digital cameras and video cameras are increasing in popularity as CMOS technology improves. For example, Foveon's new X3 image sensor, a CMOS sensor, which is capable of recording all three colors (red, green and blue) at every cell. CMOS technology allows other circuitry to be incorporated into the same chips, making them useful to a manufacturer for the use in other electronic applications.

Conclusion:  CCD sensors tend to be used in cameras that focus on high-quality images with lots of pixels and excellent light sensitivity. CMOS sensors traditionally have lower image quality, lower resolution and lower sensitivity to the lights but usually they are less expensive and have a great battery life. CMOS sensors are now improving to the point where they can compare with CCD devices in some applications.

How Often Should You Clean Your Lens Or Camera Sensor?

Cleaning your camera and the lens is a very important part to take care of your equipment and it helps to produce a good quality picture consistently. Even small fingerprint on the front glass of the lens can impact on the quality of the photos. How often should you clean your lens and the camera? It all depends on how often you shoot and where do you shoot. For example, if you shoot a lot in a beach area where sands and dusts are present, you may have to clean your lens for every next shot and your camera sensor more often than people who shoot inside the studio. It’s very strange to accept the fact that lots of photographers who own an expensive lenses and camera body never pay an attention on cleaning their tools which help them capturing stunning photographs. If we take good care of equipment, our equipment takes care of us. Personally, I clean up my equipment every time I come back from the shooting and before storing it to dry cabinet. It is also very common for photographers to use an UV filter in front of their lens so that the actual lens won’t get accidental scratch and they don’t have to clean their lens every time and just cleaning an UV filter will do the job.

Lens cleaning kit

You can use a microfiber towel to clean the lens body and the front glass which doesn’t leave a residue on the surface. Don’t try to clean your lens or camera sensor with a rough surface material like normal towel or napkin paper; you may permanently scratch the front glass of the lens if you use hard surface material. I don’t recommend cleaning your sensor unless it is covered with the dusts and you are experiencing a problem with the image quality. Cleaning image sensor by yourself without having proper knowledge may destroy your camera permanently. Some DSLRs (Nikon D90 for example) come with an option that will lock the camera mirror up and allows you to clean the sensor using a blower or other cleaning tool provided by the camera manufacturer or the other individual company who produces quality accessories for DSLR.

If you go to the SETUP MENU by using the MENU button on the back of your D90 or other model DSLR, you will see an option called “Lock mirror up for cleaning” which is specifically designed for the photographers to clean up the sensor if in case there is a dust. You can use this option to raise the mirror up and open the shutter so that you will have access to the sensor for cleaning with a blower, brush, or swab as shown in the picture above. You can find those lens cleaning kit online for $20 or less. Nikon D90 allows you to use this feature only when your camera has a fully charged battery or sufficient battery for the cleanup because you don’t want the camera power to fail while you are still cleaning your sensor.