Category Archives: Photography

Posts regarding photography and related topics.

My Favourite Image of the Year

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Hi Folks:

At the end of every year it’s become more and more common for photographers to go back through the images they made over that year and choose what they feel is their best work.  This can be an immensely challenging and yet creative project, because what one feels is one’s best work is often not the work most popular with others.  Marcia and I do something similar, choosing one image from each month to use in our annual photo calendar.

However, I know without hesitation what will be my favourite image of the year, and I don’t have to wait to find it – it’s made on New Year’s Day.  Every New Year we head to Government House to participate in the Lieutenant Governor’s levée … we have the opportunity to meet the Lieutenant Governor in office (and his or her spouse), share in some coffee and treats, listen to the speech and the bagpipes, and at some point we wander out to the balcony at the back.  There’s a great view of Juan de Fuca Strait and the Olympic Mountains in Washington from there, and I use my cell phone to capture an image (okay, several) of Marcia at the rail.  Being New Year’s Day it gives me an opportunity to marvel at all that this amazing woman gives to me every day, and an opportunity to look forward to another year of adventure with her.  Without a doubt, it’s my favourite image of the year.

Marcia on New Year's Day, 2014

Marcia on New Year’s Day, 2014

From Marcia and me, we wish you a new year filled with as much happiness, health, prosperity, excitement, love, peace and adventure as you can handle!

Okay, that’s it.  Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. Santa Claus brought us both new cell phone (cameras) this year.  Who knows where that may lead!

2014 Photo Calendars

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Update: If you’re looking for our 2016 calendar templates, please click here!

Hi Folks:

This is the fourth year now that we’ve made our MS Word photo calendar templates available, and as with last year, we’ve also created a series of templates and calendar images you can use with Lightroom or other graphics software.  I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the Lightroom stuff is at the bottom of this post.  I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:
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Correcting Portrait ‘Shine’ in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

I’m primarily a landscape photographer, and as such I don’t often shoot images of people. However, I’ve seen this question come up a few times and thought I’d take a minute or two to address it.

In any form of photography the best time to get the exposure correct is at the moment of image capture.  However, for varying reasons sometimes that isn’t possible.  The image below is a case in point: Continue Reading →

Batch Processing in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

I wrote this out the other day in answer to a question on Twitter (thank you, Twitlonger!) and since my answer was over 3000 characters I thought I’d add it in here as well.

Batch processing in Lightroom can be done in a few different ways:

1) In the Library module you can use Quick Develop to make basic adjustments to one or multiple images. It’s important to understand one difference between Quick Develop and the Develop module, which is that Quick Develop makes relative adjustments and Develop makes absolute adjustments. What does that mean? Let’s say you forgot that you had set your camera’s light meter EV reading to -1, and made a series of images that are all one stop underexposed. What you want to do is increase the exposure of each image by one stop – no matter what the exposure was for each image – rather than setting the exposure for all of the images to a value of +1 EV. To make a relative adjustment like this you would use Quick Develop.

Quick Develop

In Contrast, if you made multiple exposures of the same scene at different exposures and you want to give them all approximately the same exposure values, you would select the images you want, go to the Develop module and go to Settings/ Match Total Exposures. For more on that, see our Match Total Exposures in Lightroom post.

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Making Sharp Images

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Hi Folks:

I was out with a group of people on a photo walk the other day and one of those present – relatively new to digital photography – asked me what exposure settings to use for the location where we were standing. I gave a too short and relatively useless reply, so I thought to follow it up with an e-mail. When the e-mail reached 2000 words I thought maybe I should post it here instead:

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Basic File/Folder Structure in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

I originally wrote this for something else, but thought I’d add it in here as well.  As with many of our tutorial posts, this one’s targeted toward beginners but I thought it might be of use to some…

Part of the challenge of Lightroom file management is understanding that Lightroom is working with your operating system folder structure, so basically Lightroom is showing you a subset of the folders you have on your hard drive – those that you have associated with Lightroom.  Now, Lightroom serves many purposes but it is essentially a database program, and a database is an ‘organized system of information’.  If you have an address book with people’s names, addresses and phone numbers in it on your desk or in your pocket, that’s a database.  So is a phone book, a postal code directory or a library coding system for books. 

The term ‘folder’ goes back to the days of filing cabinets where we had physical cabinets and each cabinet had drawers and each drawer had file folders, and each file folder held various pieces of paper.  You would think of the folder as being within the drawer and the drawer as being within the cabinet, so if you were to write those out with some sort of hierarchy it might look like this: Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month… August

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Hi Folks:

In a fit of madness a couple of weeks ago, Marcia and I made a last minute decision to run away to Tofino for the weekend.  We wrote more about that journey here: Eating Our Way Through… Tofino!  We had a lovely, relaxing weekend with a lot of walking and more than a few images.  I haven’t yet looked at all of the images I made that weekend, but Marcia and I narrowed the ones I had processed down to six, then three.  Of those, I selected this one because it sums up most completely the feeling we had of being there, walking the beaches, rising and ebbing with the tides…  This is a 3-image HDR composite, joined together using Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 and finished off in Lightroom 5.

Chesterman Beach, Bull Kelp

Chesterman Beach, Bull Kelp

Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

Essentials of Digital Photography

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Hi Folks:

A little while back I was asked to give a talk to our local Photography Meetup Group on Lightroom, and so before the talk I asked people to submit questions.  My thought was that I could just stand up there for an hour or so and answer questions from people.  However, the only question I was asked (by several people) was, “What is Lightroom and why would I want to use it, anyway?”  So much for that idea…  Since it seemed I was going to have to create an actual presentation, my next thought was that before I could talk about Lightroom I needed to cover some of the basics of digital photography just so everyone was in the same place.  I created the presentation using PowerPoint, and today I created what amounts to a video version of that presentation.  Clicking on the image below will take you to the video.  It’s about 1/2 hour long, but if you’re a photographer I trust you’ll gain something from it.  This post is complementary to but different from our ‘Photography and Colour Management‘ post.

 

Essentials of Digital Photography

Essentials of Digital Photography

Hugs,
M&M

P.S. There’s some debate about the truth of ‘ETTR’ or Expose to the Right in digital photography. On one side we have people like George Jardine, Michael Reichmann (Optimize Exposure) and Bob DiNatale (The Optimum Digital Exposure) and on the other side is Michael L. Baird (Histogram Myth explicated). These people know much more than I do, so I’ll leave you to decide. For me, I expose as much to the right as possible, without clipping the highlights and work out the rest in Lightroom. Michael Reichmann’s first ETTR post was written in 2003, and camera technology has changed a lot since then. Whereas with film we could get maybe 5 or stops of dynamic range, with some digital cameras we now get 12-15 stops. This also begs questions surrounding the need for HDR, but that’s another issue.

P.S. II, the sequel You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

The Photographer’s Assistant

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Hi Folks:

In all of my years of making images I’ve never done a lot of shooting with other people, and I’ve never had an assistant.  However, at the end of July a friend and I went out to make some photographs together and I found out how handy having an assistant can be.  All of a sudden I had someone who could…

Photographer's Assistant

Photographer’s assistant, at the ready

Checking Composition

Double check the composition

Ensure Level

Ensure that the tripod is level and stable

Press Shutter

Press the shutter

I wonder what the day rates are?

Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

Photo of the Month – July

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Hi Folks:

At the end of July a friend of mine and I traveled slightly ‘up-island’ toward Duncan to visit the old stone ‘Butter Church’.  It’s a church with a somewhat colourful history – built in the mid-19th-century by a Catholic priest, using Native workmen for the construction.  The church was built on Native land with a verbal agreement for it to be there.  The priest in charge raised dairy cattle on the land surrounding the church, churned butter from the milk he collected and used the money from the sales of the butter to pay the workers, hence the name.  Services were held in the church for ten years, but the local bishop wasn’t happy with the verbal agreement for the location, ordered a new church built on a different site and the existing one was deconsecrated and abandoned.  A few attempts were made over the years to restore the church, but today it has largely been left to the elements.  The quality of the original stonework is mostly what’s left to be admired.

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