With Father's Day approaching, Gear Daddy brings you some great ideas for Father's Day Gifts for the dad photographers in your family. Daddy Troy recommends a number of digital camera accessories for your digital camera, cell phone camera, and SLR camera. Check out the demonstration of some photography iphone apps including the Autostitch and Best Camera apps. Other gift ideas include the Eyefi wireless SD card, a camera extender, a DiCAPac waterproof camera case, polarizing filter, camera strap and more. Visit DadLabs.com, check out the photography area of our forums and share your thoughts on digital photography. DadLabs Ep. 642 is brought to you by BabyBjorn.

Daddy Troy: Welcome back to Gear Daddy, I’m your host Daddy Troy.  Today’s topic father’s day gifts for the photographer dad, speaking of photography, check out the front of this Baby Bjorn box.  It’s got a photograph of a dad on it.  Thanks, Baby Bjorn.  So, we are going to talk about three types of camera’s today and gifts associated with them.  First of all the phone camera, next we are going to talk about little point and shoot camera’s and finally gifts for the dad who shoots on an SLR.  Our first gift is an iPhone app.  It’s called Autostich.  The camera on the iPhone only has a certain amount of angle to it and therefore you want to take a giant panorama of say mountains and you want to get the whole thing into perspective you can use Ausostich to do that.  It’s a real easy to program to use.  You simply take some photos with your phone, go the program; it calls up your photo library.  You drag the photos into a special area of the screen and you simply press go or stitch and voila.  You have a panoramic shot that you can either leave has it is or crop.  Save it and then have it has a high-resolution photo.   Our second gift is another iPone app, its called Best Camera.  It’s from a photographer, whose name is Chris Jarvis.   What’s really neat about him is that he’s a professional photographer but his whole deal is that the best camera is the one you have with you.  Which is exactly what happened to me recently on a trip to the country with my kids.  Where at a dance hall, it was four in the afternoon when I took this photo and the photo is severely backlit.   It’s kind of washed out.  So best camera allows me to put a filter on this.  First thing I’m going to do is de-saturate the shot.  It’s going to go black and white and then I’m going to warm it a bit which gives it a bit of a sepia feel.  I can than save that photo back to my iPhone with all the filters applied or I can share it via Facebook or Twitter.   And I can also share it with the Best Camera community, which also uses this particular app.   Which then allows others to learn what filters I used as well as me to learn what filters they are using.  It’s a great learning opportunity for me as a photographer.    Next, is a wireless SD card.  This will transmit pictures wirelessly from your camera to your computer and if there’s a wireless network present where you took the picture it will also, geo-tag or geo-locate your picture s, so later on you knew where the picture was taken.  Really handy, these are between  $40 and $100, depending on the functionality of the card.  There called iFi.  This is a camera extender and this model is called the xShot.  It’s a telescoping rod that goes from 9 inches to 37 inches and allows you take pictures of yourself and other people as well as some scenery in the background.   You can use it to take pictures above crowds and it costs $30.  Well it is Father’s Day which means summers here so what not go the pool and take some pictures of kids underwater with this Dicapack waterproof camera case.    It’s a soft-shell case although it has a hard attachment, which allows the zoom lens on your camera to go in and out as you use it.  These cost between and $20 and $50 and our a great deal.  For all you SLR dad’s out their single lens reflex dad’s you might to think about or asking your family to help you think about getting a polarizing filter.   It really will help you step up your game in terms of photography.    A polarizing filter will eliminate reflected light and it will also make skies really a deep blue.  In order to buy one you will need to know the thread size on the lens of your camera and these will cost you between about $30 for an off brand, all the way up to $50 for a name brand such as Tiffen or Hoya.  This is called a light scoop and it’s for SLR cameras.   SLR cameras have a little popup flash on them.  Usually it creates a lot of shadows, it’s not a really great flash and if you don’t want to shell out the bucks for a high-end flash to go in your hot shoe instead you can buy for 30 bucks the light scoop.  You can see it’s a mirrored surface right there.  It goes onto the hot shoe in your camera although it does not receive any power from it.  And you’ll notice what happens when I press the button to take a picture.  The flash pops up inside of the light scoop.  It hits the mirrored surface and goes off onto the ceiling and then fills the room full of light.  You can see from these images right here that these one image has a lot of shadows and this other image has no shadows at all.  And finally for SLR dads it the black rapid camera strap.  It’s totally reinvented the camera strap.  Rather than attaching the camera strap to the side of the body he has attached it to the tripod screw on the bottom of the body of the camera.   And the attachment point actually swivels which allows you to pull the camera up quickly and have it to position and rather than moving the whole strap the camera slides along the strap therefore you don’t get choked, the camera strap does not slide off your body, and well worth it if dad’s going to be shooting in the field for a prolonged length of time.   Well that’s all this week for Gear Daddy.   A big thanks to our sponsor, Baby Bjorn.   Hey, gave you been to DadLabs.com?  We have a photography forum their.  You should check it out.  We’ll see you next week.