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The last portrait I took of my father before he died was at my niece’s wedding. Louis Ravetta, who always encouraged me with my photography, came along and let me use of one of his Canon EOS 5D cameras. I’ll always appreciate that. That allowed me to take my last portrait of my father before he ended up on his death bed. That picture is memorable and important to me.

Way too shortly after that picture was taken, Karen and Louis both helped me again at my father’s funeral.

I’m related to and quite fond of Karen and Louis Ravetta of Ravetta Photography. They shot my wedding as well as those of many of my family members and did a fine job.

So if you’re in need of a professional photographer in St. Louis, I highly recommend Karen and Lou Ravetta and their daughter Rachel. But again I’m biased.

This post on David Bergman’s blog is pretty cool. He created this photo composite 220 Canon G10 images to make one picture of Barack Obama’s inauguration. He used a gigapan robotic camera mount to create the picture. Scroll in and out of the image and do some panning. See if you can find some dignitaries.

Be sure you visit the gigapan site, it will zoom straight into the snipers on a far rooftop. Cool use of technology.

A relative called about the last blog post and asked about video cameras.

My most recent camera is a Canon HV-20. This has been replaced by the HV-30 and some other models.

The beauty of the HV-20 and HV-30 is that they still use tape. Tape is great because you have a backup mechanism built into the camera. Shoot it, download it to the computer, and pack the tape away. Tape last a long time and it’s good to have backups.

The downfall of tape is that it’s another thing to have around. We’ll see how long cameras are available in this format, though.

A lot of people have switched to cameras with digital storage. But, I like having tape backups. Also, editing support has taken a while to develop for these and compression was bad when I last looked.

DV Camcorders on eBay