Negative Clarity
In my last post about clarity, I’d get back to “negative clarity”. Now, despite the firm protests of my students on the last Oregon photo workshop I gave, negative clarity does not require the use of fine California vintages. Instead it’s a feature, introduced by Adobe in Lightroom 2 and Adobe Camera Raw, that allows the strength of the clarity effect to be negative as well as positive, and the visual effect of negative clarity is both interesting and occasionally quite useful. In this post, I’ll talk a bit more about it but also suggest an interesting application or two. (more…)
The importance of discipline
One of the greatest things about being a full time photographer who owns the business is the flexibility it offers in scheduling. Case in point – last week. My kids were out of school for spring break and even though it’s a busy season for me, I was able to move things around on the schedule and spend some good time with them. Of course, like most things there are trade offs that come with this flexibility. The biggest is lack of security. Another is the constant need for self discipline when it comes to non assignment shooting and other internal tasks. (more…)
Some Clarity about Clarity
In teaching Lightroom workshops, I’ve found that one of the most difficult controls to explain to photographers is the clarity slider. It’s fairly easy to demonstrate, and people pick up what it does fairly intuitively with a little practice, but I’m going to try in this post to explain what’s going on with clarity with a goal of helping you understand how to use this very useful control (and it’s local adjustment brethern) more effectively. (more…)
Review: The Lightning Trigger
In my last installment, I discussed some of the joys and challenges of photographing lightning. One of the tools I use to capture images of lightning is Stepping Stone Products’ Lightning Trigger which is particularly valuable for daylight lightning captures. (more…)
Photo labs
My how times have changed. I remember spending long nights in my darkroom processing black and white film and prints. I also remember making last minute runs to the color labs to drop off my E-6 and C-41, then patiently waiting to run back to pick-up my order, most times ripping open the boxes of slides or prints and looking through them right there as the cashier was running my credit card. Yeah – times have really changed. It’s amazing that not that long ago, we actually had patience. (more…)
Lightning on the Landscape
As I’ve said before, I’m an enormous fan of photographing in bad weather, stormy weather often creates dramatic conditions, and lightning can be an incredible element in such scenes-if you can capture it-lightning is incredibly difficult to capture, even more so to capture well. (more…)
Larger To Sell
Since I started The Travel Photographer blog, I’ve come across a lot of photographers’ web sites, and found some that are excellent; some are sort of good, while others are, frankly, just hideous.
We all know that the main objective of a website for most photographers is to promote themselves, to sell and expand the reach of their photography to new clients, and certainly to internationalize their work. However, too many photographers forget that simplicity is always best in creating websites. Whether photo editors or just casual viewers, simple websites with killer images are those that work. (more…)
Backups: In Praise of Paranoia
Recently I had a disk drive failure, but I didn’t lose any data at all. In part that’s because that disk was “mirrored” to another disk using “RAID 1” or “mirroring”. In mirroring, software or hardware keeps two identical copies of a disk up-to-date as you go about your work, if one goes, you can replace the failed disk and (within a few hours) you can rebuild the mirror. It’s a good technology,and it allows you to continue to work when failure happens. Even so, I moved quickly to replace the disk and restore the mirror, despite having additional backups. (more…)
Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S DX Nikkor Review Round-Up
If you own or have used this lens, let us know what you think! Leave your comments and thoughts below. Get information and user reviews for this lens at Amazon: Nikon 17-55mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S DX Nikkor Zoom Lens
PhotoZone
The Nikkor AF-S 17-55mm f/2.8G IF-ED DX is a professional grade lens and it certainly shows up regarding its exceptionally high build quality as well as very fast AF speed. Optically it is, without doubt, a very good lens but it has a few issues. The center performance is nothing short of stellar but the borders are a little worse than desirable at 24mm @ f/2.8 and at 55mm (for such a lens). The level of CAs, distortions as well as vignetting is quite typical for a lens in this class but then thing aren’t substantially better either. So all-in-all there may be a few question marks regarding the price/performance ratio of this lens. It simply lacks the greatness suggested by its price tag. READ FULL REVIEW