Hi Folks:
I was at an informal gathering of photographers recently where we were sharing and discussing our work. I displayed a sunset image that I had made (this one)
Category Archives: Photography
Cell Phone Cameras
Hi Folks:
One of the gifts Mrs. Claus gave me for Christmas was a Samsung Galaxy S Vibrant GT-i9000M Android-enabled cell phone. The name is actually longer than the phone itself; I’m not sure who comes up with this stuff! The GPS feature combined with Google Maps makes navigating the sleigh a lot simpler, but that’s another story. The phone also has a 5MP digital camera, and that’s the topic for today’s blog post. BTW, I checked the Apple Canada site and the iPhone 4 also has a 5MP camera, so I’m assuming they’re in the same ball park as far as comparisons go.
The reasons for this post are two-fold. For one, up until now I’ve never really had the chance to experience making photographs with a cell phone camera. For the second, there have been a couple of posts on Mike Johnston’s ‘The Online Photographer‘ blog recently that say that the sales of ‘point and shoot’ cameras have been steadily falling. His suggestion is that point and shoot cameras are single-use devices while cell phones with cameras are multifunctional… so more people are simply using their cell phone cameras rather than purchasing a separate camera as well. Continue Reading →
Photo of the Month – Winter Storm
Hi Folks:
Today is the last day of December, and that means it’s time for the ‘Photo of the Month’ post. Being December 31, it’s also the last day of 2010. There’s an old story about spring coming in like a lamb or a lion, and if that also applies to winter, this one could be interesting!
I was walking back from the grocery store on December 20, and when I got to Dallas Road the wind was just howling and the waves were crashing into the beach. Despite this, the sun was still shining. I later discovered this is known as a ‘King Tide‘ event, a biannual event caused by the alignment of the sun and moon that creates extremely high tides. All I knew at the time was, “I’ve got to shoot this!” Continue Reading →
2011 Photo Calendars
Hi Folks:
Update: If you’re looking for 2014 calendars, please click here.
As one year closes and another begins, a popular present this time of year is a calendar for the coming year. One of the things on my ‘to do’ list this year was to create a set of background calendar templates that I could use with Lightroom to create a 2011 calendar. Before I could get to them, however, John Murray was kind enough to create a set of .png files of his own and to make them available for download: 2011 calendar templates. Thanks, John! On his website, John suggests using the .png files with Lightroom’s ‘watermark’ feature in the Print module; I’ve always used them as a graphical identity plate, but either way works.
That done, I got to thinking about people who don’t have (gasp!) Lightroom or Photoshop or another equivalent software package, and that got me thinking about Microsoft Word. I started with a letter-sized (8½” x 11″) page and set the margins to ½”, then created a table with 10 rows and 8 columns and added in the dates, like this (the outlines are there only to show the borders in this example):
Should I Get Lightroom or Photoshop or…?
Hi Folks:
One question I see a lot on Twitter is, “Should I get Lightroom or Photoshop?” It seems to me that people who ask that question aren’t familiar with the limits, features or capabilities of either program so I thought I’d do a quick post on that. Now, there are entire libraries of books, tutorials and instructional videos available on using these programs, so this blog post couldn’t hope to compete with them. This post is not intended to be a series of instructions on how to use these programs, but an introduction to a few of the ways in which they differ and how they can be used together. Continue Reading →
Photographing Moving Water
Hi Folks:
As a landscape photographer, I’ve always been captivated by images of moving water. By varying the shutter speed one can create many different effects. A very high shutter speed can ‘freeze’ the moment…
Photo of the Month
Hi Folks:
In our last ‘He Says, She Says…‘ post I mentioned that we’re currently house sitting for a friend, and that our new (if temporary) home is only six houses away from the ocean. Therefore, it only seemed fitting to make November’s ‘Photo of the Month’ an image of the mountains in Washington across the Juan de Fuca Strait. I was walking by there yesterday and the light was so incredible I had to stop and make a few images. This one is combined from 7 images using Autopano Pro, and finished in Lightroom.
I think this image turned out pretty well. I’ll definitely be back.
Now go out and make some photographs!
Mike.
Mirror Images in Lightroom
Hi Folks:
Let me preface this by saying that yes, the following can be done easier and faster in Photoshop. However, I wanted to try it in Lightroom for two reasons. The first is that not everyone owns, understands or can afford Photoshop, and the second is that I’m always interested in pushing to see what I can accomplish with a given piece of software, so sometimes on weekends I like to play around in Lightroom, experiment a little. Sometimes those experiments work out, and sometimes they don’t, but it’s nothing too serious either way. Continue Reading →
Photo of the Month – Triptychs and Lightroom
Hi Folks:
It’s Hallowe’en, but I don’t have any really good pumpkin images to share this month… In going through my images for this past month I was drawn to an image I made of an old bicycle down in the Rockland area of Victoria, in part because it reminded me of an other bike I’d shot in Oak Bay back in August and one I’d shot in Kelowna a couple of years ago. Rather than profiling this one as a single image I decided to combine the three bikes together into one ‘triptych’ image. Basically a diptych or triptych is a process of combining two or three images into one image collage. The images can be complementary or in stark contrast, they can highlight a theme or one subject. One can even make a triptych from only one image, but I’ll get to that in a bit. There are several good tutorials on how to make diptychs/ triptychs in Lightroom 3; I’d suggest beginning with two videos on this from Adobe evangelist Julieanne Kost. You can see them here: Part 1 / Part 2. The first video mostly covers how to choose images for your diptych/ triptych, and the second video offers some useful tips and ideas on how to use Lightroom’s tools to prepare the images you’re going to be using for your diptych/triptych to make them more consistent. For making the triptych in Lightroom 3, one of the best tutorials I’ve found is by Helen Bradley over on the Digital Photography School site. Continue Reading →
Match Total Exposures in Lightroom
Hi Folks:
There was a video tutorial recently on The Digital Photography Connection on using the Match Total Exposures tool in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. It’s something I’d not used before, and if you haven’t either, I’d suggest you begin by watching their tutorial. I’ll wait…
Okay, welcome back.
Now, after seeing this video one question I had and one I also saw on Twitter was, “How is this different from the ‘Sync’ button in Lightroom?” If you’re new to Lightroom, one of the software’s features is the ability to batch process images by ‘developing’ one image and then transferring all or some of those settings to the other images in the batch of those selected. For more on using Lightroom, I suggest checking out the tips, tutorials and videos here. Continue Reading →