Tag Archives: tutorial

Snapseed for Cell Phone Photography

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Hi Folks:

There’s a saying among photographers that the best camera is the one you have with you in the moment.  To that end, both Marcia and I prize our Android-based cell phones, and Marcia especially has a certain notoriety among our photo group for her landscape and macro cell phone photography.  We’re not personally fans of the ‘retro’ look offered by programs like Instagram, and although we do use Camera360 Ultimate on both of our phones, most of the time we shoot the images as ‘unprocessed’ as possible and do post-processing work in Lightroom.  There are times, however, when one simply wants to be able to make and share an image without having to run it through a computer first.  Enter ‘Snapseed‘, from Nik Software. Continue Reading →

Learning to See… Again.

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Hi Folks:

This post has been brewing for a while, but for one reason or another I’ve put it off. Yesterday R.C. Concepcion posted a beautiful poem called ‘Every Moment‘ and I thought maybe it was time.

I’ve been a photographer for so long now that it informs how I see the world. I look around me and see my world in frames of images, colours, nuances of light, shapes, textures… this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it can be. Let me explain. Continue Reading →

2013 Photo Calendars

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Hi Folks:

Update: If you’re looking for 2014 calendars, please click here.

If you’re looking for templates for Lightroom/Photoshop, please see the bottom of this post.

As I’ve done for the past two years, I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars.  There are usually a number of people who generate templates for Lightroom/ Photoshop as well, and while I haven’t yet encountered any this year, I’ll add them to this post when I find some.  I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this: Continue Reading →

More on Lightroom and Metadata

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Hi Folks:

Someone on Twitter recently asked about understanding Lightroom’s various metadata fields.  I responded by providing a link to our Lightroom, File Management and Metadata post.  She wrote back and basically said, ‘Thanks for the information, but what I really want to know is what all of those fields are for…”  So I wrote the following.  She seemed to appreciate it, and I thought it might be of use to you as well. Continue Reading →

The ‘Orton Effect’ in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

As with many photographers, almost from the time I started making photographs I also began playing with them.  For negatives this involved darkroom work, with slide film I would try mounting two images in the same frame, but all of this became a lot easier when I got into digital processing.

In Lightroom 2 (I think), Adobe introduced the ‘negative clarity’ slider, and while it was fun to use on its own, one day I wondered what would happen if I made a virtual copy of an image, overexposed both the original and the VC slightly (dual mounting slides in the same frame holder made the overall image darker), and applied negative clarity to one, then combined them using the LR/Enfuse plugin.  The result was this: Continue Reading →

Collections in Lightroom

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Hi Folks:

I’ve done a few tutorials on what I consider to be among the most important of Lightroom’s features – digital asset management (DAM), and how you can use the various options to help you organize your images.  Among the benefits are being able to find ONE image out of 10,000 or 100,000 or… Lightroom allows several different ways of classifying your images – folder structure (on your hard drive), keywords, colour labels, pick flags, metadata (capture date or camera serial number for example) and more, and the filter bar at the top of the Library module allows you to quickly highlight specific images based on these criteria.  However, there are times when one wants to create a, well, a ‘collection’ of images that share some theme or purpose from across different folders, either temporarily or permanently.  This is where Collections come in.  Lightroom works with two types of Collections – Standard Collections and Smart Collections, although the Standard Collections include one special variant called a ‘Quick Collection’ or ‘Target Collection’.  Because this post is going to be long I’ve broken it into three parts. One can read down or click on a specific section. Continue Reading →

Photography Apps for Android

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Hi Folks:

There are probably enough apps in the world today that if one were to compile a list it would rival the average encyclopaedia for size.  You do remember what an encyclopaedia looks like, don’t you?

I honestly have no idea how many Android apps are available for photographers, and I admit to using only a few of them myself, but I thought I’d start with a couple of suggestions and those who are interested can add their own recommendations in the comments.  I  prefer my digital images ‘uncooked’ so to speak so that I can use the processing power of my computer to tweak them rather than the processing power of my camera (or phone).  Even .jpg images can be processed better in Lightroom, so I tend to start with as few processing options in the camera as possible.  Making images with a cell phone camera poses its own challenges, in part because the files tend to be small, flat and low resolution.  Still, it’s the one ‘camera’ I have with me almost all the time, even when my camera is at home.  So, here are a few of the apps I appreciate (all available from the Google Play Store).  Some are free, and some are a few dollars.  Some offer both versions (with and without advertising). Continue Reading →

Minimum Handheld Shutter Speed

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Hi Folks:

A friend recently asked me about the minimum handheld shutter speed for cropped sensor cameras; the old adage for 35mm cameras was known as ‘1/focal length’ and he was wondering if he should apply a 1.6 crop factor for a cropped sensor.  I saved my reply and thought I’d post it here… Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – Fun With Mirrors

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Hi Folks:

This being April 1, I thought the image below would be appropriate for the photo of the month for March.  Back in the film days I used to do things like create photo montages by sandwiching two slides together into a single frame, but when I first got into graphics programs (CorelDraw 3) I started being more creative with a few of my images.  One technique is to take an image, cut it in half either horizontally or vertically, take one half and mirror it, then stick the two halves together again.  The results are always unknown and often unexpected.  I did a blog post a while back on ‘Making Mirror Images With Lightroom‘ that showed one way of making such images while making them look realistic at the same time but ‘realism’ isn’t always a necessary goal. Continue Reading →

Lightroom’s Crop Tool: Aspect Ratio and Image Size

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Hi Folks:

I recently answered a question for someone on Twitter about using the Crop Tool in Lightroom so I thought I’d embellish that a little bit and post it here as well…

There are two related issues here, so let’s forget about computers for a moment and deal with paper. If you have a sheet of paper that 1″x1″, that’s a specific size. A sheet of paper that’s 4″x4″ is also a specific size, but they both have the same aspect ratio (1:1). Similarly, a sheet that’s 4″x5″ and a sheet that’s 8″x10″ have the same aspect ratio but obviously one is four times the size of the other. Now, if you have a print that’s 8″x12″ and you cut two inches off the long edge to create an 8×10 you’ve both created a specific size and cropped it to a specific aspect ratio. Continue Reading →