Category Archives: tips and tricks
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
Episode # 49 is in your podcast feed!
As we approach the half century mark in the Learning Digital Photography Podcast series, Erik Bernskiold joins us on the show for another session of doling out some good photo tips – great ways to take and make better pictures and take your photography to the next level. For those that are grabbing from the iTunes feed it should be published shortly… you know the drill! For the rest of the world, here’s a direct link to the show for listening to during the day or your workout/commute/etc. Skype gave us a few issues so there is one point … Continue reading
49 Photo Tips – The Sequel
About eight months ago, I cobbled together a laundry list of almost 50 photo tips and tricks to help with everything from gear to composition, photoshop, and more. Given the penchant for sharing these things online, I decided to launch it as an eBook – but in the interests of keeping it simple, didn’t add much of anything. It was basically a spreadsheet with a category on the left and the tip or trick on the right. Given the minimal overhead I had put into the design, decided on a bargain basement price – $1.99. Half a cup of coffee, … Continue reading
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
Please stand by…optimizing
You know these things, right? The hourglass in Windows, the spinning color wheel on the Mac – all signs that your computer is doing important stuff, right? Well, it happened to me last night in the middle of, well….nothing really, I was just surfing the web, reading some of my daily hits. Whenever I get these kinds of messages, it’s a sign to me that things need to be cleaned up. I’ve installed too many trial programs for testing – my working drive is getting cluttered. I’ve not re-booted in a few days. We all know the drill, and we … Continue reading
Software Review: PrintKey2000
Many times I have been asked what kinds of software I use to do various things for the blog, especially things like videos, screen captures, audio recording, and all that sort of stuff. One thing that I’ve never really talked about is screen captures…not the videos but actual still shots of things as seen directly on my screen. There are many programs available to do this, some paid for, and some open-sourced, with some being Mac or Windows specific, and a few scattering that cross both platforms. Well, today, I am going to give a little nod to a Windows-only … Continue reading
Just under the weekend wire…
As Friday draws to a close, lots is going on here – we’re packing up! That’s right packing things up and rolling on outta here! Naw, not the blog, or the podcast – always here, but with my return to a full time position we realized two things: 1. We were kind of living beyond our means a little, and 2. The current house is pretty far from where work is for both of us. Since Tracy is used to the RTD system now (and gets it free with her job) it just made sense that we consider looking in … 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:
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
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
The Best Lens on the Planet!
Imagine the following lens: Can capture wide angle panoramas Can capture detail as close as one inch away. Can capture detail as far away as 300 feet in most cases. Can adjust to extreme low light scenarios in an instant Can adjust to extreme bright light scenarios in an instant Can capture HDR imagery with no post processing Can capture 3-D in the truest sense of the word Can capture images with no pixelation Can capture the widest tonal range available in the visible light spectrum. How much would you spend on these lenses? How much would you protect, treasure, … Continue reading
49 Photo Tips Cheat Sheet
Ok, so this week the schedule is all off kilter, since there was no hardware review and no software review today, so I give up on that. Instead, today I am sharing (on request) a PDF that I have been been busy compiling of my favorites and some unusual ideas for photography. Ranging in subject matter from how to improve your composition to gear tips, making money, photo walks, and everything in between, here are 49 Photo Tips – all compiled nice, neat and easy as a PDF for easy download and reference (top 50 lists are so cliche! )! … Continue reading
Win, Listen, and Bang!
This week’s show is a doozy – I talk about the latest contest, (#3 for 2009), have a fun conversation with Jason Loucks, then tackle some tips on photography fireworks. Of course the show always takes care of a couple listener questions and answers, so it’s 45 jam-packed minutes of photography fun. Here’s the show notes: The Third Photo Contest, sponsored by OnOne software. Rules and entry information are posted on Tuesday’s blog, and you can enter your photos here. Here’s the sites and twitter folk we talk about during the show: www.freelanceswitch.com www.smashingmagazine.com www.tutsplus.com www.css-tricks.com & Chris Coyer on … Continue reading
Friday Fab Five
For something new here on the blog, I thought it might be fun to share some of my favorite keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop. The idea here is that people will share their top five in the comments area and we can get an idea of many more keyboard shortcuts than we ever could have found out on our own (unless of course you are some Photoshop guru like The Photoshop Guys and the trainers/instructors of the world that do this for a living and already know all the shortcuts.) So, anyway, here’s my Friday Fab Five Photoshop shortcuts and what … Continue reading
The Un-review Software
This week I am going to talk about the lack of software in the weekly software review. That’s right – the lack of it! You may be sitting there wondering which software item I am going to talk about, promote, or diss in some way shape or form, but instead of that, I actually want to talk about the general trending of software, hardware, and system resources. Why? Because we demand a lot from our computers these days. Think about it – we want our computers to do many things from surfing the internet, to designing graphics, office functions, building … Continue reading
A video short on HDR and bracketing
One of the more popular posts here on the blog has been two that consisted of explanations on how to bracket multiple exposures in camera in order to capture a wider range of exposure values than is typically permitted in a single frame. Typically, these various exposures are then seamed together in some editor like Photoshop, Photomatix or other that is available to produce an effect called HDR – high dynamic range. You can get some impressive results with various techniques that appeal to different subjective perspectives. Here at the blog though, rather than take sides on such post processing … Continue reading
Photography Secret #1249871
There are so many tricks and little tips to taking better photos – it often seems like millions, doesn’t it? Well, it does to me. I thought of one last night that thought the listening audience might enjoy. This one is a toughie though (because it’s not that easy to do)…are you ready? here goes: Shoot for fun Yep, that’s it. I say it’s tough because we can often forget about the fun factor. We get caught up in the gear, the software, rules of composition, ISO’s shutters, apertures, marketing, advertising, booking gigs, constantly on the go, and all that … Continue reading
Nine is better than none…
I had been working on a list of some of the more popular listener/reader questions and some answers to share for the podcast this week. Since it is late getting out (notice the lack of a post at all yesterday), I thought it might be helpful to share an abbreviated list of some of the Q&A here… 1. What color space should I shoot in with my camera, Adobe RGB or sRGB? A. Neither, shoot in Raw! Since defining a color space is only applicable if you are shooting in jpg rather than raw, if you shoot in raw, color … Continue reading
Double your laptop storage in ten easy steps!
So, I’ve got the Macbook Pro with the factory default 150GB hard drive. Sounds like a ton of space, right? Well, we all know how quickly that amount of storage can get sucked up these days. So, I considered buying a new laptop drive, buying the latest iteration of the Mac OS and just building one from scratch again. But then I realized, I have lots of storage being eaten up in the drive already by means of exactly that – the OS, the applications, and everything it needs to run. Then it dawned on me – why not just … Continue reading
How do you like to sound?
In preparation for the next podcast, due in no small part to a technical difficulty with Garage Band, I’ve set up a dedicated computer and recording space (call it my dedicated recording studio) and the audio quality is off the charts better than anything I’ve done before. Ironically, the new topic for this weeks podcast is also about sound – the sound of shutters and how they can impact the feel of the camera, and how they can effect a moment is significant enough to warrant consideration. Make sure you tune in for this one from the good folks over … Continue reading
Setting bracketing exposures – shutter priority
As promised yesterday, today I will be talking about bracketing your exposures based on shutter priority. After a couple comments yesterday that it seemed unusual to bracket on aperture rather than shutter speed, I felt that in this companion post I should acknowledge that, it is. The reason for the post? One of the downsides I mentioned is that your depth of field will change considerably from a wide open setting to that of, say, f22. That can also be an upside though because as you merge bracketed exposures into an HDR image, you can also add depth of field … Continue reading
Look out behind you!
We’re always looking forward, upward and downward to find a unique perspective or angle on things – to create something unique and interesting. Well, today, I’ve got an example of how sometimes the interesting shots are behind you! In this particular case, it’s doubly true. This is also from the photo walk out in El Dorado from last weekend, and what makes it doubly true is because we were out looking to capture the beuaty of the mountains, the trees, and the amazing Colorado skies. At one waypoint between hiking trails, we took a rest stop and used some of … Continue reading
What do Photo walks and software cycles have in common?
Tune in to this week’s episode of the Canon Blogger Podcast Series, Episode #58, from either the blog or your feed readers today! I also tackle a few listener questions, and offer up a photo road tip for the listening audience. So, pick up the feed today, or stop in to the blog to not only download the show, but also to see the other content that isn’t in the daily feeds (things like the Online Photography Test, Colors and Textures Galleries, polls and more! As I tinker a little with the audio quality of the show and try to … Continue reading
