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.

Alhambra touched by first light

Alhambra touched by first light, originally uploaded by Ralfraz Ruck.

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.

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

Favorite book on photographic composition

Michael Freeman’s The Photographer’s Eye is a beautiful book that I find myself going back to and thinking about much more than other photo books. As someone with no training in art or graphic design, I find this book immensely valuable in helping me think more explicitly and clearly about the art of composing photographs.

Here’s a promotional video that gives some sense of Michael’s approach
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B11r9v6EeYY


Here are some photo galleries on Michael’s web page
http://www.michaelfreemanphoto.com/

Online Photoshop tutorials and digital imaging discussions

I’ve found the following online tutorials enormously useful in learning some of the basics of Photoshop, as well as some more sophisticated techniques:

Adobe TV Learn Photoshop CS5 covers many of the basics
http://tv.adobe.com/show/learn-photoshop-cs5/

Julieanne Kost’s Blog has tons of tips and tricks relating to Photoshop and Lightroom
http://blogs.adobe.com/jkost/

Mark Johnson has an extensive series of free video tutorials on his Photoshop Workbench
http://www.msjphotography.com/index.php/category/photoshop-workbench/

Glenn Mitchell of The Light’s Right has lots of excellent in-depth tutorials available as free PDF downloads, including this superb overview of digital dodging (selective lightening) and burning (selective darkening) techniques:
http://www.thelightsright.com/GetYourDodgingAndBurningUnderControlPDF

Tony Kuyper also has a series of excellent tutorials on more sophisticated Photoshop techniques such as luminance masking (which allows highly selective dodging and burning of particular tonal ranges within an image)
http://goodlight.us/writing/tutorials.html

I have appreciate the accumulated wisdom and experience available in the searchable discussion archive of the Photoshop Users Support Group an Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/groups/photoshopsupport/discuss/

as well as the Digital Photography Review forum on software and retouching
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1006

and PhotoNet’s forum on digital darkroom issues
http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/