This is another long one, but if you’ve ever struggled to understand Exposure Value Compensation (or never used it), this might help. Put the coffee on and settle in for a bit. Skipping past the inevitable moment when I’m walking around with my 600mm lens and someone asks if I’m compensating for something, the answer is generally yes. I am. But it’s …
One Photograph, Many Choices
Being able to dissect an image is a helpful skill. Looking at a photograph and identifying the various choices that led to the look and feel of that image, even when it’s your own (maybe especially when it’s your own) makes us stronger photographers that are more fluent in the visual language. I’ve been talking a lot lately about the …
Masking and Lightroom Presets
What I’m about to show you is my favourite discovery of the year in terms of my workflow. I tend to do a lot of the same kinds of adjustments to similar photographs, especially when creating a body of work. I might globally add some exposure and contrast, tweak some colours, and then apply a mask to my main subject …
One Decision Away From Stronger Photographs?
Click play to watch this 7-minute video Transcript: I think many photographers put all their creative eggs in too few baskets. They look to the work they do with the camera as job one, which it is. But it’s not the only job. It’s the sexy job, for sure. But it’s insufficient. Some lean heavily on post-processing or development; you …
What Makes the Image Work, Part 2
This past Sunday, I introduced you to a photograph of mine and sent you to my blog to discuss it, asking questions about the decisions I made and the effect of those decisions. I’ll keep this message short because I said most of what I want to say in the video I’m about to show you. But if you missed …
Making the Edit Easier
I came home from my last trip with almost 20,000 photographs, which is, by any standard, a whole lot of photographs. I edited them down to about 30. That’s 19,970 images that didn’t make the cut. If I looked at every one of those photographs for only three seconds, it would take me 1,000 minutes, or almost 16 hours, to …
Starting with Filters
Banff National Park, Canada, 2014. I used both a full and graduated ND for this. When I first started making photographs, optical filters (the ones you put on the front of the lens, as opposed to software filters) were common. You’d screw them to the front of the lens and it was all pretty simple. When I sold most of …
Printing Hokkaido
After narrowing down my Hokkaido work through my edit process, I’m now left with a collection of images to print. Here’s my rough process. 1. Image Prep. I take each image through a final pass in Lightroom’s Develop module. Here are the questions I’m asking myself as I go through the panels. Is my monitor recently calibrated? Am I completely …
Ongeli Elders
On my last day on the field in Northern Kenya, I returned to the village that adopted me two years ago. I brought a bull camel, bags of rice, and assorted goods, and we had a fantastic feast. While the camel was cooking, the elders gathered around me and, with a lot of hand gestures, they re-told the story of …
Back It Up!
Here’s your New Year’s reminder: back your stuff up. Do it redundantly, with extreme paranoia, and do it now. If it helps, I’ll even say “Pretty please.” You put so much time into your work, and harddrives fail all the time. So really, this is not paranoia. It’s wisdom. My preference is that every file, including my Lightroom catalog files, …
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