Review: Lumapix FotoFusion
This isn’t really a review so much as it’s a giant, stinky, slobbery dog-kiss on the people who make this program. I can’t believe I waited so long to buy it.
Photobooths for Fun and Profit
I photograph a lot of events – weddings, tournaments, parties.
One of my least favorite situations is when a photographer comes around to the table where everybody is eating, and wants to take a picture of the people at the table.
I have several problems with this. (more…)
Negative Clarity
In my last post about clarity, I’d get back to “negative clarity”. Now, despite the firm protests of my students on the last Oregon photo workshop I gave, negative clarity does not require the use of fine California vintages. Instead it’s a feature, introduced by Adobe in Lightroom 2 and Adobe Camera Raw, that allows the strength of the clarity effect to be negative as well as positive, and the visual effect of negative clarity is both interesting and occasionally quite useful. In this post, I’ll talk a bit more about it but also suggest an interesting application or two. (more…)
Some Clarity about Clarity
In teaching Lightroom workshops, I’ve found that one of the most difficult controls to explain to photographers is the clarity slider. It’s fairly easy to demonstrate, and people pick up what it does fairly intuitively with a little practice, but I’m going to try in this post to explain what’s going on with clarity with a goal of helping you understand how to use this very useful control (and it’s local adjustment brethern) more effectively. (more…)
Backups: In Praise of Paranoia
Recently I had a disk drive failure, but I didn’t lose any data at all. In part that’s because that disk was “mirrored” to another disk using “RAID 1” or “mirroring”. In mirroring, software or hardware keeps two identical copies of a disk up-to-date as you go about your work, if one goes, you can replace the failed disk and (within a few hours) you can rebuild the mirror. It’s a good technology,and it allows you to continue to work when failure happens. Even so, I moved quickly to replace the disk and restore the mirror, despite having additional backups. (more…)
Workflow processes and data management
Anyone in this business for a while will have to contend with storage, archiving and workflow of digital images. The system I’ve been using for the past 10 years or so has evolved, and continues to do so. It’s based on invoice numbers. For the past four or so years I’ve been using blinkbid to generate invoices and estimates. I like this particular program because it’s simple and was written specifically for photographers. I know many photographers that use quickbooks, quicken or MS Money. Which business software to use is a decision that you should make individually or perhaps with help from your accountant. (more…)
Book Review: The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book
Every quarter I teach a one-day workshop on optimizing images using ::amazon(“B0018VH8S2”, “Lightroom”):: at the local art league, and in doing so I’m often asked for a good book recommendation on Lighroom, and my usual recommendation is Martin Evening’s book ::amazon(“0321555619″,”The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers”)::. In short, Evening’s book provides a well-written, comprehensive look at using Lightroom, and mostly lives up to its name well. (more…)
Keywording Again: A Quick Look at Image Keyworder
After putting together Keywording for Fun and Profit I started looking around a bit for tools or services that would help me keyword large numbers of images, and came across Image Keyworder, and have been playing with it for the last day or two. This post will reflect my first impressions of the product. (more…)
Keywording for Fun and Profit
One of the markets I’ve only recently started exploring for my own work is the stock photography market. It’s a challenging and arguably declining market, but in these financial types I can’t afford to ignore any way I can supplement my photographic income. One of the most parts of getting work ready for stock is keywording, putting together a list of search terms that potential customers might use to find your work. In this post, I’ll talk about a few things to remember when keywording images for stock sites. (more…)
Is it live or is it Photoshop?
I find myself reading more and more discussions about technical skill vs. Photoshop. There is a certain amount of resentment from photographers who have spent considerable time and effort honing their skills only to see “poor” photographers cutting into their market by fixing their inferior work after-the-fact in Photoshop. (more…)