Category Archives: composition
Five Ways to Deal with Harsh/Low Lighting
A common question I get here is how to deal with harsh or low light situations. This is a great question, and for event photographers, it’s simply part of the job to recognize various lighting conditions and address them accordingly. Today, I’d like to share Five Ways to Deal with Harsh/Low Lighting: 1. Cranking the ISO and hoping to fix in post With advancements in technology, noise handling both in camera and in post production has resulted in some astonishing results that in previous years would have been literally unrecoverable. While we should always endeavor to make our images shine … Continue reading
Cultures Colliding – a Podcast with Martin Bailey!
On this week’s show, we’ve got a lot to talk about including a couple of particular news stories to note, with a little insight from the crew, we’ll be taking your questions and answers on the show and the special guest of the week for this show is none other than the well-reknowned Martin Bailey! Photo News 1. 3rd Annual Worldwide Photo Walk has been announced by Scott Kelby, and details are here. 2. Lightroom 3 was announced last week Monday – and is available to purchase and download…you can also download a 30 day trial for free from Adobe … Continue reading
Five Tips to Better Photos
With the sudden surge and swell in the blogosphere, Twittersphere and Photosphere over Lightroom 3 hitting the streets (and a nice combo discount is available in the sidebar by the way), let’s not forget that this software is all meant to be doing one thing – letting us get back to the business of taking photos instead of spending our time in our computer. With that in mind, I’m bringing back a popular concept of “Top Tips”. Today, I give you…(drum roll please): “Five Tips to Better Photos” Be Ware of Exposure Values – No matter how good your camera … Continue reading
Beautiful Bokeh
Over the weekend, I was taking some time to review some new hardware (not done testing yet, so gotta wait there) and I was testing in various types of lighting conditions, and at various burst rates. During the course of the testing, I remembered how beautiful the bokeh is on the Sigma 70mm Macro lens.
Hardware Review: Sigma 4.5mm Fisheye (Circular)
As things start to settle down again, I’ve got a pile of reviews pending work, so this past weekend, while in bachelor status temporarily, I really knocked out a few projects, including getting caught up on some overdue reviews and blog writing. Today, the first of these projects is the Sigma 4.5mm fisheye lens review. This is a super cool lens, and has a lot of opportunities for creative exploration. I took the typical test shots indoors to get a feel for where it’s strengths and weaknesses are, how it focuses, and then took to the streets.
Creating a Monthly Desktop Calendar
I alluded to it yesterday, and have already had several people inquire about the procedure to create this desktop calendar. It’s really quite clever, and kudos go out to Jeffrey Friedl over on his site for the script: http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/calendar He does a decent job at the basic explanation, but since we are a visual world, here are some step-by-step instructions on how to run things from beginning to end! Fair warning – this does require Photoshop as the script (I don’t believe anyway) will run in Lightroom because it uses layers… 1. Download the script from the link above (I … Continue reading
CHDK is Cool!
So, while debating the intervalometer cost implications for my SLR – I decided to give the Canon CHDK a run for its money. After downloading the CHDK for the A590 and making sure it didn’t break the camera I went out in search of an intervalometer script. I think it’s a VB script, but can’t be sure…nevertheless the results were kind of fun! I tried to include as much info in the teaser as possible, but if anyone has questions on how I did all this, feel free to share your questions (or feedback if you prefer) in the comments … Continue reading
White Pocket, AZ
Many of you have written in, asking when I am going to post some of the photos taken from the Arizona trip over last weekend. Wait no longer, for here are some from the trip! Several of these are potential “portfolio” shots…still debating which ones to include and which ones to leave off. I’ve posted them to Flickr and to NAPP with some pretty positive feedback thus far, but here’s your chance to sound off on which ones to include in the newest updates. Let me know what you think: #1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #6 #7 #8 #9 So, … Continue reading
Early to bed, Early to Rise
Makes for a great opportunity to shoot sunrises in Rocky Mountain National Park! And that’s where the Denver Photo Walk Meetup group is headed again tomorrow. You’ve seen the video here on the blog for a few months now and for those of you that have watched it, you know the light wasn’t as good as we had hoped. Tomorrow morning, we’re hoping for a different set of lighting conditions. About 14 of us have made the commitment (so we’re committed!), so it should be a pretty good sized group. Sunrise is predicted for around 6am, which means about a … Continue reading
Talk about cool!
I had the unique pleasure of connecting with none other than Nicole Young (Nicolesy) from TWIP fame recently. We chatted things up quite a bit on Skype, and as luck would have it, the recording was running! So, for LDP episode #41, please welcome Nicole to the show by stopping over and giving her a big thanks. The show notes follow below. Learning Digital Photography: Episode #41 Stock Photography – Taking the Plunge! News – Trevor Current – Thanks to Trevor for helping out with the news – check out his site at www.currentphotographer.com and don’t forget to follow him … Continue reading
What is it about Windows?
No, I am not talking about Operating Systems, rather I am talking about a follow-up to yesterday’s photo post with the theme of “Water”. You see, another recurring theme for me is windows of buildings. Taken from various angles and in various lighting conditions, and all over the place, ranging from South Carolina, to Colorado, Mexico, and various points in between, here’s a random sampling of windows I’ve captured in camera: There you have it – just a random sampling of “Windows” as I’ve seen them over the last 5 years. Got your own archives of thematic images? Anything that … Continue reading
Hardware Review: Rapid R Strap
I can’t believe I’ve waited this long to talk about my Rapid R Strap. This is a very cool camera strap developed by the folks over at Black Rapid. I had been wanting one for a while, and made it known to everyone prior to the holidays over a year ago (think pre-Christmas 2008). Thankfully, my wife saw the writing on the wall, and I ended up with one on Christmas Day! So, let me tell you what makes this camera strap unique. First off, it’s unique design has a built in “stop” so that you just let your camera … Continue reading
Composition and the Angle of View
We’ve talked a lot about various rules of composition – what they are (Rule of Thirds, Golden Mean, etc) and when to adhere versus eschew them to create dramatic effect. One thing we’ve not talked much about is the idea of changing your angle of view. We have mentioned the concept in the past, suggesting that to get a good perspective to look up, look down, look behind you, and in new directions to get a unique view on things. While this is always a good practice to remind yourself that there are other perspectives, it’s never really been discussed … Continue reading
5 Tips to Better Landscapes
The most common questions I get here on the blog center around the idea of how to take better pictures. Whether those “better pictures” are better landscapes, or portraits, wildlife or events, everyone wants suggestions on how to approach the practice of taking pictures better. Esoteric and creative considerations aside, there are some fundamental “tricks of the trade” that, by and large, will almost always improve your craft in pretty much any genre. So, today, I thought I would take a moment to share 5 “tricks” I’ve learned that always lead to better landscapes:
Against my better judgement…
For those of you that have been following the blog for a long time (and let me know who you are, because I want to ask why!), you may recall that I used to put out video tutorials on how to do various things inside of Photoshop. After plodding around with that for a while, I came across the gurus of NAPP and realized that several were already doing it, and doing it much better than I ever could. So, rather than re-inventing the wheel, I abandoned the video tutorials in favor of just sharing my “wisdom” in the form … Continue reading
Portrait or Landscape
One of the more common questions when it comes to composing images is whether to shoot with the camera oriented in the landscape or the portrait position (horizontal or vertical). As always, the answer is usually along the lines of “it depends…” There are some instances though when a portrait orientation is more conducive and others where a landscape is equally superior. For instance – if you want to have your images published in magazines, portrait mode might work better primarily because that is how magazines are typically laid out. Calendars, on the other hand, because of the opposing orientation, … Continue reading
The value of a sunset (or sunrise)…
We all see them every day – the sun rises and the sun sets. Most of the time, it’s nothing too spectacular, perhaps some pretty colors are cast with various hues of orange and blue, or red and purple hazes…it’s all well and good. We may even see some spectacular ones…a crimson or scarlett red, or fire-y orange ones. They may also have an added impact if they are reflected in a lake, the ocean, or dramatized by their surroundings – palm trees, mountains, boats, or whatever happens to be there. The spectacular ones are typically the ones we see … Continue reading
How To Make Your Pictures Sing!
While recently listening to This Week in Tech (a great podcast, and I highly recommend it), the show host, Leo Laporte, made an interesting observation about the advancement of technology. He was musing about the changes that have happened in audio consumption. We listen to much of our music in iPods and portable music players, when not too long ago, we were confined to a certain space. To that end, he noted that the technology of audio in those days revolved around things like the number of amps, tweeters and woofers, quadraphonics, decibels, and much of that technical information. We … Continue reading
The Beauty of Bokeh Revisited
I know – the blog has not gotten much attention lately. My apologies – but after the job loss, and pounding the pavement, my schedule has tightened up considerably, so the “planned posts” have pretty much been exhausted as I let myself get behind. The good news is that with several opportunities on the horizon, I am a little less stressed about “real world” economics, and can dedicate some time back to the blog. A few items of note: #1 – The Year End Blowout Bash is underway – and LDP/Canon Blogger is giving away a ton of goodies. I … Continue reading
Software Review: Apple iPhoto
As much as we glow and sing the praises of Photoshop and Lightroom, native photo editors that are included in Operating Systems are often overlooked as alternatives for photo editing and management. This is primarily because… well, let’s face it, because they are not very good at photo editing…or management. But think about what we are comparing them to…comparing Windows Picture and Fax viewer to Photoshop Lightroom? Is that really fair? What about comparing Photoshop Creative Suite 4 to iPhoto? Is that a good apples to apples comparison? If you think about it – not really. We’re talking full-fledged dedicated programs that … Continue reading
Let Me Light the Way
It’s kind of funny how things go in circles. As a regular reader of the Strobist website (as I am sure many of you are), I found it interesting that David was covering the RayFlash from ExpoImaging and comparing it to other styles of ringflahses over the last couple of days. The reason for my interest – today I am actually going to share with you some thoughts on the RayFlash specifically.
Don’t Touch that Dial
This week we take a look at the dial on your DSLR – what do they do and is it worth it taking it off the Auto Mode? Or even putting it into the auto mode? What are the benefits? Pros? Cons? There’s thoughts both ways and I’ll look into each and give a few answers on this weeks show. Also on this weeks show, I had the opportunity to talk with Matthew Bamberg, a well-known and respected photographer and author of digital photography books. We had a great chat that you definitely are going to want to tune in … Continue reading
Framing your work
Framing your work can be an expensive proposition. Once you get an archival mat, conservation glass, and a custom frame created for your print – you can start spending upwards of $100 for something as small as an 8×10 print. Depending on what it is you want to accomplish though, you could easily be spending as little as $10 per print to mat and frame. Here’s a few things to consider, and some explanations why: Classics are called classics for a reason – they work! I like classic looks, and the museum style frame suits that look – a thin … Continue reading
