The June contest came to a close on Sunday, and after looking through all the images after anonymization (a.k.a. my wife downloaded them) and import to Lightroom, the winner has been determined. (Drumroll please…) And the June winner is:
Continue reading “Contests, Contests, and yet more Contests!”
We all get stuck in creative ruts, and are in search of ways to inspire ourselves. Kerry Garrison (form Camera Dojo) and I talked about this last night while we explored the place that smart phones and their cameras have in the photography marketplace. As the conversation went on (and on and on – we tend to digress a lot when we get to talking), we found ourselves talking about 365 projects, or photo-a-day projects, and ways to challenge yourself and come up with new topics to shoot. Continue reading “Picking a Theme”
How do you know it’s time to clean the house? For me it’s usually when i see a thin layer of dust, or when the dirty clothes pile exceeds the clean clothes pile. Another definition would be when you run out of clean dishes (or start buying disposable because all the regular ones are still dirty. We all have benchmarks that we use to decide when it’s time to “tidy things up”. But – what about your photography portfolio? Do you clean it up regularly? Continue reading “Cleaning House – Is Flickr your storage or showcase photos?”
I’ve shared many many stories and images on the blog here to help illustrate the various nuances of things like light, angles, and yes, even color. I’ve talked about complementary colors, and simplicity of colors and I’d like to re-visit that today as we head into the weekend, because it’s not something I see talked about a lot.
The illustration I am trying to make in all of this is that a simplicity of color can be just as powerful as a huge rainbow of colors – and sometimes, even more so. Sometimes, a uniformity of color can have an impact and a power that all the wild variations thrown together cannot induce a positive reaction. As in all things photographic, the best way to demonstrate is through imagery. here are a few examples of the “Power of Color” In the interests of keeping things consistent, I am working hereunder the RGB principle of Red, Green, and Blue as the three primary colors, and will look at these in comparison to a scene of multiple colors. Ready? let’s go! Continue reading “The power of color”
Posting your photos online has become an almost expected step in becoming known as a photographer. People want to see your website. You are judged on not only the quality of the photos but the quality of the website as well. So, when I found a plugin made by a company called Cincopa that lets you insert browse-able galleries into your posts, I was intrigued. I signed up for a free service, and shortly after signing up, ran out of bandwidth. (200MB/month limit). Continue reading “Sharing your photos online”
A lot of photography conversations revolve around the question of how much editing has been done to a picture. Terms like “sooc” (for straight out of camera) or raw, or “minimal editing” are involved. I also have been known to encourage capturing the best pictures you can in camera. But does that mean editing in post process is a bad thing? No, definitely not. For some, it has become a bad thing though, and phrases where “photoshop” has become a verb have been bandied about a lot. I’ve heard everyone from amateurs to pros say things like “We’ll just photoshop that out later” or “Can you photoshop my eyes?”. Continue reading “Photoshop is not a bad word”
With all the hubbub of the release of Lightroom 3 and all the resources that cropped up online in mere minutes of the announcement, we often find ourselves asking more questions once the excitement and energy that surrounds a product release has drained.
I took these questions with me to a conversation with Senior Product Manager Tom Hogarty last week, and got a lot of insights and answers, with both a technical perspective and that of long-term development. I give you this week’s podcast: Continue reading “Lightroom 3 is here – Now What?”
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You’d think with toting camera bags chock full of bodies, lenses, field drives, lighting equipment, filters, tripods, monopods, and batteries would be enough to give anyone a workout who carries it all day. It is a lot of stuff to carry, and you can certainly accredit some cardio to this activity, but there’s other ways to work out as a photographer. Today, I give you:
5 Photography Exercises Continue reading “The Photographer’s Workout”
For those of you coming to the blog via feeds, this is something you’re gonna have to come to the site to see, but the re-launching of the site is ready! After design, development, and testing over the past two months, we are now live and ready to surge forward!
Special thanks and major kudos to Erik Bernskiold of XLD Studios for all his talents and patience with me in both seeing my vision for the blog and website, and for pulling it off almost to a T – and ahead of schedule to boot! For those interested in web design work, I would highly recommend Erik – you can find him over at his XLD Studios web presence here. If you mention my name (CanonBlogger) Erik has also generously offered readers and listeners a 10% discount!
While reading through the foot high stack of magazines in an attempt to whittle it down, I found myself re-reading a Photoshop User magazine from a few months back. I often re-read magazines and find hidden “nuggets” (as I call ’em). These are fodder for blog posts right here, and last night, I came across an oldie but a goodie. It was the April/May issue of this year so not too long ago. Ed Greenburg and Jack Reznicki were talking about this idea that companies will often lowball or no-ball a photographer in an effort to get their pictures.
