I have never really had great success with night photography. Often my images are comprised excessively of bright lights and blown out detail. Nothing I was really ready to write home about. It was on a lark I thought about capturing a series of images to create an HDR image and see where that would take me.
A long weekend in New York City and first stop is the Observation Deck at Rockefeller Center. I indulge my affinity for panoramas as a afterthought, I took a set of four images to photo merge a set laterally rather than the usual side too side.
This one had been picking at me for a while, and only recently have I found the direction I wanted for this to turnout. Taken with a Nikon D7000 and edited in Lightroom CC.
What is the difference between saturation, vibrance and luminance? I found myself in the midst of a class on advanced tools and techniques for Photoshop and I watched a young man go screaming for the saturation slider and just shredding what should have been a reasonable correction. I was not sure he was going to get much out of the class as many of the concepts to be covered required a foundational knowledge of Photoshop to get through.
Continue reading Photoshop CC: Saturation, Vibrance and Luminance Mask
Panorama of Midtown Manhattan taken from the observation deck of 30 Rockefeller Center. Continue reading Nikon D850 on Manhattan Island, NYC
I have covered Alien Skin and its offering of Exposure 7 in an earlier post, but when I found the need for an additional license, I purchased Alien Skin’s bundle of Exposure X2, Snap Art 4 and Alien Skin Blow Up 3. Total cost was $138, more or less. Continue reading Photoshop CC Plugin: Alien Skin Exposure X2
While researching for a blog post on mobile photography and editing software, I came across this image from a few years back. My phone is clogged with images from scouting sites for my Nikon, and this little one was captured on a day trip long ago. I dumped it on my Mac, and in Lightroom I shifted the perspective down a bit. In Photoshop, I played around in Alien Skin’s Exposure 7. I used a preset for vintage film where colors were subdued and grain was added. A light vignette and it’s good enough for paper.
Have a great day.
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.
2016 was a bit of a tempest for my family and many things had to be pushed to the back burner. Only recently have I been able to return to my various hobbies and writing. This proved to be more of a trial, made evident when I happened to hit the wrong button and deleted many of the images from this site. This turned out to be fortuitous as I had to go through various backup drives and SD chips, searching for images to restore my site and, in the process, found many other images waiting to be edited and posted. Continue reading The Thames River: Photography at Night.
I have previously posted about focus stacking in regards to macro photography and studio photography in general, but I left off a small part that can be of considerable help to people doing photography in ‘the wild’. Continue reading Focus Stacking in the Wild
Focus Stacking is very popular with people who specialize in macro photography. The simple reason being the knife edge depth of the field on many macro lenses. A 105mm macro lens with an f-stop of 40 might have a depth of field of 0.25 inches. That is under ideal conditions. This makes for some serious problems when you are taking an image of an object of irregular shape or much larger size. Continue reading Focus Stacking, Inside and Outside of Macro Photography
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.
On a week long trip to Los Angeles, I had a chance to visit some of my old haunts and reconnect with my brother and his family. I happened to mention how I missed going to Tower Records and the recent documentary on Tower Records rise and demise. My newfound best LA friend and sister-in-law decided I needed a big surprise. Continue reading Los Angeles in Music, 2016
Judging from the inscription on the back of this photo, it was taken in 1974 as what I assume was part of a wedding album. This still very young lady is the wife of an old friend, tough mentor and shipmate from my earlier life as a fleet sailor.
His request was simple and welcome. His still remarkable and beautiful wife was retiring and he needed me to restore and enlarge a portrait of her for a surprise party honoring and celebrating her transition from hard working spouse to retired and, most likely, hard working spouse.
White balance is hard to explain to someone. It is even worse to explain when something goes wrong and it has to be fixed in post processing. I guess the most simple way of putting it is: you have to let your camera know what white is in an image. Once your system knows what white is, the other colors fall into place.
Continue reading White Balance in Lightroom and Photoshop CC
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.
On 13 October, 2015, the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG), which is the standards authority for the popular digital image JPG format, met to discuss the future of the prevalent file extension. Their meeting was to determine the necessity of Digital Rights Management or DRM in digital images. Continue reading DRM in a JPEG Image?
How do I copyright a photograph?
I get this question about once a month. That one is pretty easy and straightforward. When you focus your camera, set the exposure and depress the shutter release, you own that photograph. That’s the general rule; copyright begins at the time of creation. If someone wants to use your photo, technically, they have to secure your permission before using it. This has been the case internationally since the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works and the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC) of 1955.
Sounds great doesn’t it? I wish it worked.
There are any number of reasons for the longevity of black and white images in this new age of digital photography. Artistically speaking, some moments lend themselves to monochrome more than they would in color. Commercial printing costs can be a factor. Sometimes even the weather can make a photoshoot go in a direction you did not intend. For me, it is a case of my early exposure to black and white film photography in the late 1970’s. Continue reading Black and White Photography in the Digital Age
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.
The Digital Lens 