Jon Sienkiewicz Blog

In addition to the usual suspects, we've rounded up a couple lesser-known options. It's time to get those images off your phone and out into the world for others to enjoy.

A few years back, while waiting for a beautiful but thoroughly flakey model in the parking lot of a restaurant near Liberty State Park, my boredom was interrupted by a black Lincoln Town Car that slipped suspiciously past me and parked a few spaces away. After several minutes, two men exited the sedan. They were wearing tuxedos and looked rather serious. The trunk lid popped open. Ignoring me completely, they rummaged through the trunk. One of the men removed his tux jacket and strapped on a large black holster. A moment later, the other did the same. I slid down in my seat, wondering if I was about to witness some weird reenactment of High Noon, right there in Jersey City.

See a spot of color you like? Scan it with this $59 doodad and instantly your smartphone shows the RGB values – and a lot of other stuff, including what brands and shades of paint to buy to match that color accurately. The Datacolor ColorReader EZ DC10-3 even suggests a full palette of other colors that complement the sample scanned. For photographers it’s a chance to objectively identify colors numerically and replicate them in Photoshop.

Don’t gamble with your image files. If you’re serious about the pictures you take, be serious about the memory cards you use to store them. There is a handful of reliable, consistently dependable brands available, and one of the most popular with advanced photographers is the Delkin Black lineup. Let’s zero in on their latest SD card and find out why.

A reader asks how to restore color in selected areas of an image that has been converted to monochrome. Photoshop users can follow these steps.

Freezing rain is falling, your tomcat is suing you for royalties from the YouTube videos he starred in, and every bird in the city boycotts your feeder because of your snoopy telephoto lens. Cheer up! We all have those days when we feel like f/16 in an f/1.4 world. But there’s always something to take pictures of—and it often can be found as close as our own kitchen.

The photo backpack is the best innovation since dry dog food, so when an iconic camera bag brand like Domke produces their version, people expect to see lightning in a jar. Does the Domke Everyday Backpack deliver? Or is it just another bowlful of puppy kibbles?