Accidents will happen

Working on an image I’d taken of some trees, I imported two slightly different Lightroom treatments of that image into Photoshop. My thinking was I might blend them to get something between the two treatments. On a whim I started playing with some different blend combinations and saw one I really liked (a subtractive blend). … Read more

Four ways of looking at a building

When you look at these images of a building, each taken at a different time of day, notice the different quality of light. How does our mind see times of day out of shades of light? Early morning: Mid day: Sundown: Twilight: . You may have guessed the reveal even without the couple in the … Read more

Forget the rule of thirds…

“To consult the rules of composition before making a picture is a little like consulting the law of gravitation before going for a walk.” – Edward Weston The rule of thirds suggests that a well-composed photograph has a key point of interest at one intersection of an imaginary tic-tac-toe grid superimposed on our image. The … Read more

Small, lightweight, strong tripod…

(AND YOU WON’T BELIEVE THE PRICE) You’re heading on a random shoot and you want to travel light. So you take just your camera and kit zoom. But it’s close to dusk – will you want a tripod? What a pain. It’s heavy. You might not even need it. What if you could carry a … Read more

Lightroom Tools

WordPress/Lightroom integration WP/LR Sync – for syncing Lightroom to WordPress Lightroom hardware MIDI2LR: An Open Source App That Lets You Use Any MIDI Controller in Lightroom https://rsjaffe.github.io/MIDI2LR/ There’s really no way to describe the feeling of freedom and lightness you get from using a midi device of knobs or sliders tomake LR adjustments

Ansel Adams and Lightroom

Ansel Adams developed the Zone System as a tool to help film photographers adjust the tonality and dynamics “seen” by the camera (and envisioned by the photographer) to the “light-space” of the finished photograph. By adjusting the negative’s exposure and development time, he could compress or expand the dynamic range of the scene to “fit” … Read more

Lightroom Vibrance

Anyone who’s spent a little time with Vibrance in Adobe Lightroom’s Development module knows what a great tool it is. It is “smart saturation”; which is to say it saturates unevenly,  raising the saturation levels of the desaturated colors in the image so as to even out overall color saturation. Taking the slider negative desaturates … Read more

“Sharpness is a bourgeois concept.”

“He had his little Leica,” [fashion photographer Helmut] Newton remembers, “and he simply would point and shoot.” Since Cartier-Bresson’s hand isn’t as steady as it used to be, some of the pictures were a bit fuzzy. “Sharpness,” he told Newton, “is a bourgeois concept.” Newton sits back and laughs: “I thought that was just divine.” … Read more

Camera Tricks are magic!

In the YouTube video Camera Tricks are not Magic, magician Penn Jilette aims a broadside at fake magicians who substitute camera trickery for skilled slight-of-hand. That question, what is magic? dovetails with an oft-quoted dictum of science-fiction writer/futurist Arthur C. Clarke. His “Third Law“ regarding the future of scientific development states: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is … Read more