I received an email a while back asking if I cleaned the CMOS sensors on DSLR cameras. In an email exchange I told him I do not, but I pointed him in the right direction. He was new to photography and had a bit of an accident when he tried to blow dust off his sensor, but ended up spitting on it instead. I have made my share of mistakes and I am not one to point and laugh.
I have over 35,000 images, occupying 1.3 terabytes of space on my hard drive. Let me back up for a moment and correct that statement. I have 1.3 terabytes of images mirrored on four different hard drives, two separate computers, one in house shared hard drive, an offsite hard drive and a cloud-based storage server. I am very serious about not losing my images.
Auto focus is something I have come to rely on, as my eyesight has never been the sharpest. It’s a hard thing for a photographer to admit. When I started doing photography back in the 1970’s, I chose a camera that had a split micro prism in the viewfinder, indicating when the image was in proper focus. Now I rely on my auto focus for making sure my images are sharp and crisp.
Adobe RGB or sRGB? Which to choose…
Some time ago, I was looking at the settings for my Nikon and took note of the two options I was offered in the color space menu. Checking the camera manual, there was really no information about the benefits of one or the other, so I went on a hunt for information about “color space” in general and these two settings specifically. I am all about trying to get the best image for my dollar and the cameras’ manual was very non-judgmental about these two options. So it was up to me.
When I first jumped on the digital photography bandwagon, it was with a bridge style Nikon Coolpix camera. I’m not even sure it was capable of shooting in RAW format, not that I would have understood what it was in the first place. With my first DSLR, I saw this format and thought, considering the money I had laid down, I’d better find out more about this image option. It took a bit of lurking around on the Internet until I found many describing it as a digital negative. Many years later, I think that is over simplistic.
Continue reading Understanding and Shooting Images in RAW Format
It was a big mistake to take this photo. Koreans are very suspicious of having their photo taken; candid moments are included. She heard the shutter noise and let loose a stream of what I image was some serious Korean profanity, chasing me off the street and into another part of town. Continue reading Pusan South Korea, 1983. Scanning and Restoring a Negative
Printing photos is one of those things that everyone does eventually, but relatively few people do right. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. If you are one of the millions who purchased that Kodak all-in-one color printer at the local Best Buy and are reasonably happy with the quality of your prints, more power to you.
But I do want to let you know that it could be a lot better. Continue reading The Trouble With Printing
I did this as a test. I was calibrating my monitor and developing ICM profiles for my Mac and my printing system. Getting your camera, computer, GPU, monitor and printer to come to some agreement on what the final hard copy image is going to be takes a bit of reading. Continue reading A Study in Color
I think I made an impression with my neighbors when they came home and found me siting in the bushes with a large camera, photographing ants. Fortunately for me, they didn’t call the police and I found pretty much the ragged edge of my macro lens’ capabilities. The larger ant measures about 1/4 an inch in length and the bud was around a half an inch in size. The smaller one is about 1/8 of an inch if I had to guess. Continue reading The Extreme Edge of Consumer Macro Photography
The Digital Lens 