At the end of June this year, the full moon rose in the eastern sky at about sunset (although by July 2 after dark). This cosmologic timing gave me the chance to consider extravagant dynamic range. In other words, what can you do with captures in which the dynamic range is simply too great to process for both bright areas...
I've relaunched my Digital Night website. It's greatly expanded, with tips, techniques, and geographic sections. This site is an archive of my stories about photographing the landscapes of the night. The geographic sections are for Point Reyes, Yosemite, San Francisco, and Marin Headlands. Check it out: www.digitalnight.us. View this image larger. Read the back story featuring this image....
Mark and I went back out to Arch Rock last night. It was a little earlier than my last hike out there, so I was able to work my way down the little canyon and across a couple of rock faces to the beach, where I photographed the arch in Arch Rock in the gathering dusk. Of course, I also...
My Dad says he told a group of his friends that he just bought a $25,000 computer. Understand that these friends were a bunch of computer scientists. Everyone thought my father had bought some really macho heavy digital iron. Completing the punch line, my dear father said, describing his Toyota Prius, "and it even came with a steering wheel and...
If you grant my premise that digital photography is an entirely new medium of expression, then you have to wonder about the prevalence of metaphors that use the techniques of analog photography. In Photoshop, we use the Dodge and Burn tools. We "cross process" using Nik's excellent library of Photoshop filters (among other digital "cross processing" techniques). We produce versions...
With the release of its CS3 products, Adobe has once again ever so slightly shifted its official marketing and documentation language. The newest casualty? Palettes. Palettes no longer exist. The word "palettes" has been struck from the Adobe lexicon. Those things that were palettes are now "panels." I probably shouldn't care. But after 20 years of writing, I've come to...
It all started when I pointed my digital camera into the void of night and was surprised by the results. In apparent darkness, there's plenty of "light" we cannot see that is picked up by digital sensors. The digital night landscape is very colorful indeed. Since this discovery, I have haunted dark and wild landscapes at night...[Read more]. My new...
Ethan Salwen talks about about photo capture-sharpening practices in AfterCapture and features O'Reilly author Mikkel Aaland. "There are compelling reasons to apply capture sharpening during the RAW conversion process," explains Mikkel Aaland, a San Francisco-based photographer and digital-imaging expert. "And there are compelling reasons to turn off a converter's sharpening function and wait until the file is in Photoshop." In...
The term bokeh is used to refer to blurring in a photograph. Good bokeh is smooth and pleasing, whereas bad bokeh produces a jagged and discordant effect. This may sound subjective, but pretty quickly you can get to recognize excellent bokeh when you see it in a photo. And the effort of doing so will help you improve your photography....
How about a California seaside photo workshop taught by the award-winning author of Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography? Details here....
