My five-year-old son Nicky likes to ask me, "When is a door not a door?" Before I can answer, he tells me, "When it's a jar," and cackles wildly. In the same general spirit, I'd like to ask, when is a photograph not a photograph? My answer, and imagine me cackling wildly, is that a photograph is not just a...
Why should you take a photography workshop? One answer is that you'll learn something specific. For example, if you take my workshop Digital Workflow: From the Field to Flickr (I'll be giving it next at the Santa Fe Workshops from July 7-14) you'll learn a great deal about shooting digital under field conditions, and come away from my workshop with...
Just wanted y'all to know: In addition to this here HTML version of dekeBytes, there's a new video version of dekeBytes as well. One's up now, and another goes up tomorrow. The movies are short, between 3 and 5 minutes, so the learning-to-time ratio is up there in the stratosphere. And my pals at lynda.com have added zooms, which let...
Why am I so interested in photographing water drops? What are the special challenges and techniques associated with photographing water drops? Do different water drops have different characteristics (in other words, is there a taxonomy of water drops from a photographer's perspective)? Orchid Water Drop, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger. Read more about this image. Leaving the...
Want to set up a small photo studio in the garage or spare room, but don't want to spend thousands of dollars on lighting equipment? A trip to the hardware store can provide you with most of the items you need to set up a studio for portraits and inanimate objects. Basic tungsten shop lights with reflectors and clamps can...
I've been away from the blog for a while due to many different factors in my life ... but I'm back now and I bring you a great deal on namebrand compact flash. J&R Photo World is offering the Sandisk 16GB Extreme III Compact Flash card for $289.99 with a $130.00 Sandisk rebate making it only $159.99 Offer expires May...
Wilder Shore, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Read more about this image. OK, let's start with two questions. Would you think the photo above was taken into almost complete night? And why would someone go to a great deal of trouble to hike out into the wilds somewhere, mount their camera on a tripod, and take...
This new feature in Photoshop CS3 allows you to automatically align multiple images captured from a single vantage point, even if you shot them without a tripod. For instance, let's say we have these pictures of me and my wife, Elizabeth, from the balcony of our stateroom on the Photoshop Fling cruise, a week-long Geek Cruises event held every February....
Get the most out of your Sony Alpha DSLR A100 with this essential manual designed for shooters of every skill level. Sony Alpha DSLR A100: A Better Manual is a PDF so you can read it on your computer or PDA. It is laid out on an 8.5 x 11-inch "page" so if you want to print it, you won't...
Last week, I showed you how to use Smart Filters, a new feature in Photoshop CS3, to apply non-destructive filter effects to an image. Well, just as you can use layer masks with adjustment layers, you can apply masks to your smart filter effects. I'll show you what I mean as we apply a Radial Blur effect to last...
