Hi Folks:
There’s an old adage that says ‘A picture is worth a thousand words’, and since we’re both writers and we’re both photographers, in a given month we can collect a lot of ‘words’. In June we shot nearly 600 images between the two of us, and choosing one image is never an easy task. That’s my excuse for choosing two images for June. 🙂 These two images were chosen both because they’re good images in their own way and because of the stories they have to tell… Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
Things have been quiet around here of late; we’ll have to see what we can do about that!
Our photo of the month for May is a tribute to Marcia’s dad’s sweet partner, Joyce. She slipped away quietly on Friday, May 30. In her own way she was the perfect blossom of his life.
For Joyce
Okay, that’s it for now. Go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M
Hi Folks:
One of the (many) benefits of living in Victoria is that we have the beauty of Beacon Hill Park to enjoy year round. In addition to the many wildflowers, the wildlife, natural landscapes and gardens populated by flowers, shrubs and trees from around the world, the park is also home to about three dozen peafowl. The vivid displays of the peacocks are very popular with tourists and locals alike (not to mention, hopefully, the peahens), but many people are surprised to discover that peafowl can fly.
The image of the month for April is one Marcia captured with her new pocket camera. We trust you’ll enjoy it!
Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
Marcia and Mike.
Hi Folks:
Solarization or the Sabatier Effect is a technique that goes back to the 19th century. While it was likely first discovered accidentally, it came to be used for creative purpose. Solarization is a technique of grossly overexposing a negative so that some or all of the image becomes reversed – the brightest become darkest and vice versa. This was sometimes seen even in early Daguerrotypes and was later adapted to printing as well.
Fast forward a couple of centuries, and overexposing your sensor simply gets you a histogram with no highlight detail… not nearly as exciting.
While it’s possible to create this kind of effect in Photoshop using layers and blend modes, as I’ve mentioned in earlier posts I like to play around to see what I can create in Lightroom. Now, since Lightroom doesn’t work natively with layers, it’s really impossible to do this with just Lightroom, so I turned to the LR/Enfuse plugin from Timothy Armes instead. Originally created for merging HDR exposures, the LR/Enfuse plugin can be used creatively in other ways as explained here: Using the LR/Enfuse plugin for Lightroom. LR/Enfuse is donationware, and well worth whatever you can afford to pay for it.
Creating this effect in Lightroom is actually quite simple. Essentially one begins with an image, converts it to monochrome (B&W), duplicates it and creates a negative version of that. Then the two are joined together using LR/Enfuse. We’ll go into that in a little more detail. Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
It’s been a challenge to select a Photo of the Month for March… partly because together we made over 1500 images in March (admittedly many are for composites), but also because, in addition to Victoria’s colourful beauty this time of year (with the explosions of blossoms all over the city) we also made a trip to Tofino for a little beach walking and storm watching time. The weather while we were there was blessedly cooperative for a pair of photographers! We also made a stop in Coombs at the the Butterfly World and Gardens on our return trip. How to pick one image to represent all that?
Finally decided on this one as it sums up the best of everything from the past month. The beach sand and the shell remind us of our walks on both Chesterman Beach and Tonquin Beach in Tofino and our own Dallas Road shoreline here in Victoria, the shape pulls up memories of the butterflies in Coombs, and the butterfly also brings us to the many wonderful flowers we experience every day in our walks around our Pacific island paradise. Might also be a nod to the invisible ‘angels’ who seem to guide serendipitous events around us… 🙂
Angel Wings
Original image made by Marcia on her Samsung Galaxy S4, pushed around some in Lightroom. Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M
Hi Folks:
Well, one of the (many) benefits of living on our Pacific island paradise is that spring comes earlier here than it does to the rest of Canada. As a promise of something yet to come for friends and relatives back east, in February we went out one day with cell phones in hand and captured images of the various flowers we found in bloom in and around our neighbourhood. We then put them into a photo-mosaic using Lightroom’s Print module. We offer it here for you to share in as well!
Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M
Hi Folks: This post also started life as a response to a question asked by a friend, and when it got to a couple of thousand characters I thought I should add some images and post it here. This topic has been covered before by others and to some extent by us. As a prerequisite to this, if you don’t understand what parametric editing is I encourage you to read this first: Lightroom History, Snapshots and Virtual Copies. The basic Lightroom workflow is to import images (associate the image file locations with Lightroom), change the images (by adding metadata, raw conversion, post processing, etc.) and then export the images. Exporting can be done via prints (either to paper or to print as jpg), books, slideshows, web galleries, uploading to publish services (Flickr, Smugmug and the like) or by saving the image(s) as new files. Each of those is worth a blog post in itself; this one is focused on exporting images from Lightroom as files using the Export window. One of the advantages of Lightroom is that multiple images can be exported in one batch, although if one is exporting a lot of images it’s best to break the export process into two halves; this uses Lightroom’s memory allocation more efficiently.
Continue Reading →
Hi Folks:
I was thinking I should subtitle this post, “Where is the Save button in Lightroom?” because I see that question pop up on social media from time to time and that’s really the basis for this post. The short answer is: There isn’t one. A slightly longer answer is: There isn’t one because Lightroom doesn’t need one. Basically, when you open a file in most computer programs – whether it be MS Word, Photoshop or TurboTax for your income tax – and you make a change, you’re altering the file you have open. In order to keep those changes, you need to save the file by either overwriting the original file or creating a second copy (Save As…) Now Lightroom is essentially a database program, so when you import an image into Lightroom what you’re doing is referencing wherever the image is stored on your hard drive or other device. Lightroom creates a line in its database that says, “This image is located here.” From that reference Lightroom creates its own preview images and works with those previews. When you export an image from Lightroom what it does is to take the information from the originally referenced image file, optimize and add in the changes that you’ve made in Lightroom and create a new image file based on the original image, the changes you’ve made and the export parameters you’ve set. If you’re working with a rendered image file (.jpg, .tif, .psd, etc.) technically you can export an image to the same folder as the original referenced image and tell Lightroom to overwrite the original image, but that’s rather missing the point of the entire ‘non-destructive’ pipeline. There are pros and cons to both pixel editing and parametric (non-destructive) editing and a place for each, but this isn’t the place for that discussion. Continue Reading →
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
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!
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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