Many photographers travel for both work and pleasure.
Much of the time the travel is temporary. A week, or so of vacation. A few days, or a week traveling on an assignment. Managing images in these situations isn’t usually that difficult. You take along a laptop, perhaps an external hard drive, or two. Generally editing is kept to a minimum until back home.
Continue reading →Go grab some snacks and your preferred beverage because this one will be somewhat lengthy.
In the digital era of photography, interest in astrophotography has really gone <ahem> sky high. The relative ease of capturing and processing hundreds of photos to create compelling star trail images and dynamic shots of the Milky Way has helped propel interest in the genre. Nightscapes are very popular and are beautiful to look at. Darkness only exists in our minds. There is plenty of light at night and lots of great photos to be made.
In this article, I’m going to concentrate specifically on the Moon.
The discussion of editing has been left till now because it is, to me, of lesser importance than the rest. But it is also logically what follows what has come before it. Only after we have been out taking pictures do we begin the work of editing. It is for that reason, as well, that the next section on telling stories through a body of work comes after this one. It is only after we have culled and edited that we can begin to curate the finished photos into a coherent story, ready to show to others. Continue reading →
Photography, perhaps more than any other endeavour is replete with the equivalent of ‘get rich quick’ schemes. There are any number of software companies and individual photographers hawking ‘one click fix’ solutions. From snapshot to amazing shot-type books and tutorials. Action sets that will set your heart a flutter at the ease with which a couple mouse clicks will make your photo a masterpiece. Continue reading →
If you read the musings here you’ll know that I like to co-opt song titles and lyrics. So, with a nod to Edwin Starr we’re going to talk about the idea of ‘workflow’.
What is workflow? It’s a term used a lot in photography but is it a term that people generally know what it means? Continue reading →
There are several articles and videos on the interwebs about the Fuji X-T1, Fuji’s new flagship in its wonderful X-Trans sensor line of cameras. This isn’t going to be a hardcore, pixel-peeping, measurbating, test-bench jockey review like some of the others. I will go through some of the performance aspects of the camera but I’m also going to discuss some of the user-related aspects. I’m more concerned with how the camera operates in actual shooting conditions. At 16 megapixels, the pixel pitch, or size, is the same as on the full-frame Nikon D800.
Continue reading →
I’ve been seeing a number of articles recently dealing with settings for Adobe Lightroom and backing up of the Lightroom catalogue. There are certainly a wide variety of opinions about how to go about these tasks. I’m going to give you my solution for backing up the Lightroom catalogue. It works for me, it may or may not work for you. I’ll also provide my thoughts on some alternatives with respect to using the cloud for back up.
Do you want your whites their whitest? Use Tidy Det…. no, wait, wrong commercial. Do you want your whites their whitest? Use White Balance. That’s better. OK, I’ll stop with the bad humour now.
In this instalment of the ongoing Photo Basics series, we’re going to look at a camera control that can be confusing but really shouldn’t be: White Balance. In very simple terms, white balance is used to keep white things white. Or grey things grey. And all other colours their ‘proper’ colour too. Note that I’ve highlighted the word ‘proper’. We’ll come back to that later in the article. Essentially white balance is used to maintain a ‘neutral’ colour balance. Continue reading →
I wrote a couple articles back in 2010 about geocoding (or geotagging) photos using an app for Blackberry phones. Having recently switched to the Android platform, I was looking to do the same thing with the new Android phone.
There are a number of apps that come up when searching the Android Market for geotagging or gps tracking. The one I’ve started with is GPSLogger. I chose it because (a) it’s free and (b) because it natively creates track logs in the .gpx format which is what the syncing software GPicSync uses. Continue reading →
When the Apple iPhone came out with, about, the third iteration it had a reasonably decent camera and sparked a whole sub-genre of photography called iPhoneography. Some big name photographers started taking, displaying and selling iPhone images. A whole host of apps were created to complement iPhoneography. As surprising as it sounds, not everyone has an iPhone nor does everyone want an iPhone. But for those who aren’t ‘Apple people’ you can get in on the game too. Android smartphones have cameras as well (so do Blackberry phones but in my experience, RIM’s implementation of cameras is pretty weak) and some are as good or better than what’s in the iPhone. I’m going to take a look a a new one on the market, the Samsung Galaxy SII. Continue reading →
There are many ways to go about sharpening digital images. Some very simple, others very complex. Some better than others. One of my personal favourites is the High Pass method which I wrote about in an earlier tutorial.
Something that seems nearly universal is the desire for ‘editable’ sharpening. That is, being able to go back and change it in the future if desired. The simple, straightforward methods like Unsharp Mask or Smart Sharpen don’t allow this. There are several ways to have adjustable sharpening; however, and we’ll talk briefly about a few of them and in more detail on one in particular. Continue reading →
In the last instalment, we looked at a millenia-old compositional tool called the Golden Mean. This time we’re going to look at one that’s popular more in photography and also can be a bit controversial. It’s called The Rule of Thirds. I know, there’s that nasty “rule” word. Despite the name, again, think of it as a guideline rather than a hard and fast rule. The reason it’s one of the most basic is because it’s so simple to implement. The reason it’s so controversial is because some treat it like a dogmatic edict from the Mount Olympus of Photographic Art and think every image must adhere to it without wavering in the slightest. The simple part is true. The dogmatic edict part is pure codswallop. Or as some of my UK friends would say, bollocks. Continue reading →
Readers of this little piece of the web will know that I don’t typically write about my own projects. But for this one, I think I’m going to make an exception.
For a while I’ve been wanting to do a timelapse video of a hockey game. I wanted to see how it might come out. If it worked, the possibilities for combining timelapse, regular video and stills into a multimedia highlight package might be interesting. Continue reading →
There are countless articles available extolling the virtues of RAW capture. Despite that, one more can’t hurt.
All DSLR cameras are able to capture in a RAW format. Many advanced compact digital cameras can as well. More basic point & shoot style compacts only allow for creating images in JPEG format. Continue reading →
We’ve talked about how various colours convert to different shades of grey in earlier instalments of this article series. We’ve also talked about the importance of certain colours in greyscale and about the different components that make up colour – and thus grey – in the third part of the series.
In this part of the series, we’re going to take a look at something more subtle but nonetheless relevant. That’s white balance. Can the choice of white balance affect a conversion from colour to black & white? It definitely can. This is something that film shooters have known for years, that the colour of the light in the scene would have an impact on the effect of colour contrast filters used on the lens and rendered on the film. Intuitively it makes sense. Continue reading →
In the first part of this series, I wrote about training the eye to ‘see’ in greyscale tones by converting colour into shades of grey. In this part of the series, we’ll break that down a little further.
In that first part of the series, we looked at how colours can translate into the same or similar shades of grey. We also talked about the use of colour contrast filters with black & white film to block or pass certain wavelengths (colours) of light to expose the film differently and create tonal contrast. We also looked at how this can be mimiced in the digital darkroom with the available tools. Continue reading →
This is a follow up to the article from last week on seeing in black and white for those who might struggle a bit with creating black and white imagery in a colour world.
In that article, we looked at some of the basics of colour conversion to greyscale and some of the difficulties in creating the desired separation of grey tones and contrast. We also started to look at some of the ways in which we need to manipulate one colour (e.g., yellow) to affect another (e.g., green). Continue reading →
With all due respect to the great songwriter Paul Simon, everything doesn’t look worse in black and white.
So what do I mean by ‘seeing in black and white’? Well, black and white photography is different from colour photography. Some might say, ‘Well, duh!’ But it is. It requires a different way of seeing and viewing. I’ve heard some people say they just can’t get black and white down. Everything just looks muddled. Why is that? It’s because in the technicolour world we live in colour provides visual interest and contrast. In black & white, or rather shades of grey, there is no direct colour to provide that contrast. In most cases, the contrast has to be created. This requires time to learn and requires a different way of seeing. Continue reading →
This is a follow up to my original Power of Lightroom article from just about a year ago. Lightroom has been improved with each new version and while the black and white capability and the Adjustment Brush capability have been in place before v3, I thought I’d take the opportunity to toss in a new article on Lightroom for black and white. Probably 80% of what I do with editing photos, I do now with Lightroom. There are still some things I use Photoshop for and I’d never give up Photoshop but Lightroom is a wonderful piece of software. Continue reading →
I had several questions during the workshop I taught last fall about organising photos. Not surprisingly, some of the attendees were having trouble finding particular images or in developing a good organisational structure for their photos. Some who’d been shooting only in low rez JPEG at the time had never moved their images off the memory card. They had literally hundreds of images sitting on the card. Continue reading →
