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Photographers everywhere place the words HDR and the photographer Trey Ratcliff in the same wheelhouse, because Trey's work is synonymous with HDR. Coming November 19, 2015 is a brand new application from the great people at Macphun called Aurora HDR and it was built in conjunction with Mr. HDR himself, Trey Ratcliff.
Read MoreYou want a camera. Or you want to give someone a gift of a camera. The decision is to go with a DSLR and now it's time to shop. Then you go to the big box store, or the dedicated photo shop, or you sit in the kitchen shopping online, but in the end you come away frustrated because there are so many choices and when you find something that looks decent, you immediately find a review from someone who hates the thing. Arrgghhh! I cannot promise that this article will make your life easier, but if you are seeking a DSLR for the starting or growing photographer, you should take a look at the D5500 from Nikon.
Read MoreOne of the banes of digital photographers who have to change lenses in less than ideal field conditions is the potential to collect dust on the sensor. This dust turns to dark spots on your image and if you have a lot of images shot at the same time, you have a lot of spots to deal with.
In this tip, I'm going to show you a tip using a basic Lightroom function to find and clean spots on a single image and then remove the same spots in all the images shot at that event.
Read MoreThe saga of Canon mirrorless interchangeable lens cameras is a sad one. The M1 was not successful. The M2 never came to North America. The M3 made it here after long delays. On October 13th, Canon announced the M10. After looking at the specifications, and Canon's state target market, I really think that they have to stop dropping acid.
Read MoreON1 will ship Photo 10 at the end of October 2015. I'm one of the folks that has been asked for early release reviews and information sharing so this is the first of a series of posts on what you can expect starting with the Browse module
Read MoreI've been an Adobe Lightroom customer since the first release. Every release since then has been evolutionary, some stronger and richer than others but steps forward. Having spent a large part of my professional life in software, I became nervous when Adobe adopted a subscription delivery model, and I fear that very model is what is hurting Lightroom today.
Read MorePhotographers like to be creative. Some of us like to extend our creativity into the digital darkroom. Some of that group have chosen a Macintosh as their platform of choice. For these people, the Macphun Creative Kit is an excellent toolset.
Read MoreMany digital photographers want to add special effects to their images. It would be cool to add flames, superhero powers, lightning, smoke and other effects easily without a lot of pain. That's what Corel's ParticleShop is designed to do.This is the first release of the product and is built using Corel's well respected physics engine.
Read MoreI spent today, September 12th with a group of interested photographers including my friends Isabel, Laurie and Joseph. We had all signed up independently for the Portrait Perfect session put on by Henry's Learning Lab featuring renowned New York City based fashion photographer Lindsay Adler. It was a most informative and interesting day.
Read MoreThe good folks at ON1 have announced the October availability of their new software suite called PHOTO 10. It's an update to the current Perfect Photo Suite 9.5 that boasts much faster performance and increased functionality. You can preorder by clicking on the graphic above or the one in the sidebar. There are some cool bonuses for those who preorder including getting the complete Perfect Photo Suite 9.5 to use while you wait for PHOTO 10.
Read MoreHow many times have you heard that Lightroom is a great tool except that its RAW rendering is glacially slow, and it takes a long time to import files only to go through the culling process and end up discarding the ones you don't like and that didn't work out. For the last few years, I have been using Photo Mechanic to do the fast view and cull process. I'm hardly getting the full benefit of that amazing software but it does this particular job with speed and power. Not everyone is willing to pay the price for Photo Mechanic though and I am asked very frequently for an alternative. I couldn't recommend one until now.
Read MoreA photographer and educator whom I respect and I got into a conversation on the web about the viability of filters on lens for purposes other than creativity. His contention is that a filter for protection is unnecessary and will degrade image quality. I found that I agree. Mostly. Let me explain why.
Read MoreFor many photographers, shooting people is where it's at, or at least where we'd like to be. Even if we prefer nature, or landscapes or wildlife, we all need to be able to make great portraits of people, even if only our friends and family. After all, we do have a really good camera, right?
Read MoreI recently taught an Introductory workshop for Photoshop on Layers and Masks. While most of the attendees found the workshop very useful, the general consensus was that making selections for masking would take a lot of practice and that while Photoshop does a good job, the user interface can be complicated and some of the tools cumbersome. I tend to use a third party tool for this myself and was reminded of its efficacy by a webinar delivered by my fellow educator #BlakeRudis. The tool I advocate is called Remask and until recently was available only as a plugin for editing applications from the folks at Topaz Labs. That changed with the recent update to Remask 5.
Read MoreOver the last couple of years, some peers have started referring to me as the Light Whisperer. I choose to take it as a compliment because I love working with light, be it the big source in the sky, flash or continuous light. I started doing this stuff back when continuous light meant tungsten bulbs that were hot and somewhat unwieldy. Later came fluorescents, either in the form of the big curlicue bulbs such as those used by Westcott in their excellent Spiderlite systems or the non-flickering perfectly balanced tubes in my beloved Kino Flo lights. LED panels were initially super expensive and fairly dim so you needed a lot to get a little. That's changed and a killer offering in the LED space comes from Bowens in the Limelite Mosaic.
Read MoreDespite reasonable arguments to the contrary, there's still a very strong perception that more megapixels are better, even when comparing on the same size sensor. It means that each individual photo receptor is smaller, and that means less light sensitive but the theory is that this is balanced out by increased detail and sharpness. Canon, as of this article, currently rules the megapixel roost in 35mm full frame with the Canon 5Ds and Canon 5Dsr cameras. The questions to ask are what does 50 megapixels bring you, and what do you give up?
Read MoreNo, I'm not kidding, That's the title, or more correctly the first part of the title, "Shooting in Sh*tty Light : The Top Ten Worst Photography Lighting Situations and How to Conquer Them". The book is written by Lindsay Adler and Erik Valind. Both are professional photographers, Lindsay known for fashion and Erik for lifestyle. Both are respected educators and I have taken classes with both of them. Given their expertise, I was curious about what the book would reveal
Read MoreFolks who know me, know that I support my friends. They also know that I don't "spin" stories to suit a desired outcome. Those things clear, I am writing this post to tell you that you WANT and NEED to get my friend Rick Sammon's book called Creative Visualization for Photographers.
Read MoreIt seemed for a while that there was no new glass coming out of Nikon. That's definitely changed this year and today Nikon announced three new lenses. Check them out below.
Read MoreAt some point, all serious and emerging photographers realize the need for a light stand. So we head into our local camera store or go online in search of the one solution to myriad problems. After all, we don't have tons of space to store kit, and we've all been down the road of buying something that looked perfect and actually, wasn't.
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