Monday, January 10, 2011

Photokit Sharpener 2.0

I tried out this newly updated software and really liked it. It’s easy to use, has many sophisticated features beneath the hood of an uncomplicated GUI, and I was able to get some very satisfying results with a few steps.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

Alhambra touched by first light


Another reprocessed HDR sequence using HDR Efex Pro and various tweaks in Photoshop and Lightroom.

The Alhambra is an amazing piece of social and architectural history. Amidst this historic splendor, the only permanent residents now are cats.


Monday, January 3, 2011

Nikon School

So Nikon School came to Syracuse last October, and I’d always wanted to go, so I signed up for their more advanced seminar. It wasn’t cheap, but I figured there wouldn’t be lots of other opportunities to do this in my home town, without adding in additional travel expenses and so on.

It was a day-long seminar, hosted in tag-team fashion by a couple of well-known professional photographers - Reed Hoffman and Michael Schwarz. As you would expect, their presentations were polished and entertaining, and they covered a very broad range of digital-photography related topics, but none of them in as great a depth as I might have liked. I did learn a couple of things, but mostly it was a refresher on a lot of stuff I had learned already by reading books and frequenting online photo forums, etc. I don’t regret going at all, but I think it would have been more useful earlier on my learning curve. For someone relatively new to digital photography, it would have been a gold mine of information.

The audience was disproportionately white guys in late middle age with a pretty good spread going and a peculiar “business casual” kind of fashion sense. A bit odd to see myself among that kind of peer group (“are these my homies now?”). But it was entertaining, and nice to spend a day thinking about nothing but photography.

Beautiful, terrible, and astonishing images from 2010

Big Pictures of 2010

between mountain and sky: David Kaplan’s amazing HDR panoramas of the swiss alps at night

David Kaplan’s Flickr page