My birthday gift from Mother Nature came a couple days early in 2019 as I awoke to the sight of dense fog outside my hotel room in Hochatown, Oklahoma. Wake up call came well before dawn, and only the lights of the parking lot outside gave any indication to the heavy blanket of fog outside the hotel room door. In an instant my original plans for a vivid sunrise vanished, replaced instead with new ideas and new locations that I had scouted on previous visits to the area. Grabbing our …
Lightroom for Landscapes – Controlling Color
Without light, there is no photography. So it’s no wonder that when it comes to editing, most people dive into the light first. However, light and color are tied to the hip when it comes to editing in Lightroom. Where in Photoshop you have different blend modes, such as luminosity, that helps decouple these two elements of the image, in Lightroom where one goes, the other isn’t far behind. So understanding these two parallel concepts on their own as well as how they interact is vital to your ability to create …
Show and Tell – Barn Burner Vertical
As they say, “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” – as so was the 2018 Fall trip to the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and North Carolina. And that enemy in our case was Hurricane Micheal. It’s path up the east coast put it squarely over where my shooting partner and I were planning to be. So a detour into Kentucky was quickly planned on the fly so we would be on the outer edges of it’s influence instead of sitting right under it in a downpour for 2 days. …
Photoshop Fundamentals – Understanding Layers
Making the jump from Lightroom to Photoshop can be an intimidating proposition. Much like that first time you switched the camera from Auto all the way to that frightening ‘M’, suddenly you had more tools to work with than you knew what to do with. No longer was the camera handling everything behind the scenes and making the majority of the decisions for you; now you had to know the correlation between Shutter Speed, Aperture and ISO to make the image you wanted. While Lightroom isn’t exactly the ‘Auto’ of …
Show and Tell: Old Rock Eclipse
St. Olaf’s Kirke, also known as the Old Rock Church in Cranfils Gap, Texas was built in 1886 by Norwegian settlers in the area. Since those days it has become known as one of the most haunted places in the Lone Star State. This reputation however has not kept it from becoming a well known and often visited astrophotography location by area night sky photographers who contact the care takers for permission to shoot on its grounds after dark. As was the case when a friend and fellow photographer friend …
Show and Tell: Red Rock Milky Way
I’m about to break a few hearts, but hopefully also blow a couple minds. This is a composite. Not only is it a composite, the foreground was taken at 5pm, not 5am as it might look. Taking an image that I shot on my way out to Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada on my last day of my 2018 Death Valley trip, and pairing it with a Milky Way exposure I took previously on the trip without a good foreground, I took the best of two photos and …
Dodge/Burn with Photoshop Blend Modes
When most photographers think of Dodging and Burning they immediately think of portrait retouching. Adjusting the contouring of the face and other body features to sculpt the lights and shadows. However, the technique can be used on almost any photo where objects need to take on an increased depth through the addition of contrast. While global and even localized contrast can be used to bring punch and detail, it can not reshape or refocus the light like a little bit of dodging and burning can do. Regardless if it’s a …
Photo Backup – Local Storage Options
Looking to improve your photography storage and backup solution? Start Here – Photo Backup Strategies It only takes one frantic heart stopping moment when your hard drive fails to wish you’d been more prepared. Especially if it’s at 3am after an all night editing blitz to get a client’s set finished for delivery the next day. I’ve heard enough of these horror stories to know it can and will happen – usually at the most inopportune time. Most of the time, a photo can only be captured once. You only have the …
Show & Tell: Creative Canoe
Early this year, at Tyler State Park, I finally found one of those ‘wish list’ locations and opportunities that had lived in the back of my mind for a good long while. A nice stacked line of canoes in the early morning light. Making use of the amazing 70-200’s compression, I took a sequence of photos down the row of canoe bows. Shadows in hues of blue, the morning light in hues of gold. What more could you ask for? How about a little creative editing? Golden light, shallow depth …
Star Trails – Astrophotography in Motion
Photography, as they say, is about capturing a moment in time. Some moments are a fraction of a second, like a batter swinging for the fences, or a Kingfisher as it dives for its breakfast. Other moments might capture a full second of time, such as a waterfall flowing over Niagara Falls. Some moments are longer yet, such as letting light flow through the camera long enough to capture eddies in a river, or soften a raging surf into a misty fog. When you start dragging out the length of …
Show & Tell: Cascading waters in Oklahoma
When most people think of Oklahoma, they do not immediately think of rolling hills, tall trees, and most of all – waterfalls. However, there are pockets of the state that defy the generalizations most people have about Oklahoma. McCurtain County in the south eastern corner of the state is just such a pocket. And at Beavers Bend State Park you can indeed find cascading waterfalls – if the timing is right. Bound and determined to shake the ‘curse’ of my last two trips to Broken Bow and Beavers Bend, …
Exceeding Photoshop’s PSD 2GB File Size Limit
I remember when my family got their first computer. It was an Acer, it was this huge, heavy, dark colored tower case and even heavier 15″ CRT monitor. It was top of the line, Pentium 100 mhz (yes, mhz), and it had a 1 GB hard drive. Our neighbor exclaimed that we’d never possibly fill up a 1 GB hard drive. Six months later my father was none too pleased when I proved the old phrase “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” Somehow, over a 56k modem, I had …
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