Here’s one of my favourite images from the trip up to the arctic last month, and a quick walk-through on the post-processing. In Vision & Voice I explain what I call the vision-driven workflow, and there are 4 steps: Identify Intent, Minimize Distractions, Maximize Mood, and Direct the Eye. Identifying the intent here was simply a matter of asking myself …
Cape Kiwanda Post-Production
On Wednesday I was digging around the archives, looking for something new for this month’s desktop wallpaper when I found an image I forgot I had. This is Cape Kiwanda, near Pacific City, Oregon. I did about 10 minutes of post-production on it in Lightroom 3 as one last hurrah before moving to Lightroom 4. Here are some of the …
Why I Print
Monument Valley, 2011 With the advent of digital photography, and even more importantly, the internet, our ability to share and experience photographs has changed dramatically. The wet darkroom, once so necessary for creating prints we could touch and feel, is much less common than it once was, and if I were a betting man I’d wager that the majority of …
Polarized Postcard from Cape Breton, NS
Cabot Trail, 2012. No Polarizer. Cabot Trail, 2012. Singh Ray Warming Polarizer. I put a note out on Twitter last night that I loved my Singh Ray warming polarizer so much I might never take it off my lens. I was asked some questions, so I thought I’d drop a line at the same time. Our time on the Cabot …
Shooting Wet
Me. Shooting in the driving rain in Iceland. Cold. Wet. Deliriously happy. I’ve never shot in the rain, drizzle, dew, fog, and general “water coming out of the sky in every possible form” as much as I did in Iceland the last couple weeks. There were days my boots were so wet I thought they’d never recover – they were …
Filters & The Creative Process
Good news for all my friends and students who have been eagerly chomping at the bit to get their hands on the Singh-Ray Gold-N-Blue Polarizing filter: they’re back in stock. Now I know y’all don’t like these things, and I’m as guilty as anyone of struggling to learn to use this filter a little more judiciously. I also know not …
Isolated by Light
Genoa, Italy. I took a spot reading off the pavement in the beam of light. It happens to be pretty close to 18% grey, so I exposed manually at those settings, prefocused on the spot, and waited until someone came. It’s usually worth the wait. We talk a lot about isolating elements within the frame. We do it with our …
What’s With The ISO?
Every week, without fail, I get an email from an inquisitive mind about the EXIF data in Within The Frame, specifically the question goes like this, and I quote from yesterday morning’s email on the matter: I noticed that in quite a lot of your photos you use high ISO even though there seems no reason to do so, for …
On Smiling.
When I wrote the first two eBooks – TEN and TEN MORE – the subtitles suggested that they were ways to improve your photography without buying gear. I’ve been amused, to say the least, to see the reaction to this by several others (including the prolific Scott Bourne, who’s written two posts inspired by the concept – HERE and HERE) …
Digital Exposure: A gross (but helpful?) oversimplification
In a desperate bid to give you some content before I fly to India and Nepal and leave you orphans for a month, I have been posting a little more than usual. For some of you this means four weeks of reading the back-log. Which is good – that’s how long I will be gone. As I reflected on the …