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Coming… ehh… eventually:

I spent some time playing with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom yesterday and found that I liked a lot of the things it did, but for me, Aperture beats it in a few key areas. The cross-platform nature, Adobe's Camera Raw platform (which isn't tied to the OS and which, by most accounts, beats Apple's in terms […]

About a week ago I told Josh about a Korean website that was doing some interesting things with bokeh. Josh and I talked on AIM one day and devised a simple way to build your own "shapertures" ((Full credit for the creative name belongs to Josh.)) and he took some test shots and published his […]

All Erie has in the way of camera stores is Van Tuil, a store that appears to cater to people wishing to have their photographs developed more than anything. They carry very little stock, charge a good bit more than B&H, and aren't even terribly helpful half the time. So, I'm looking for a big […]

The "Sunny 16" Rule says that: in sunny light and with an aperture of f/16, if you use a shutter speed of 1/x (where x = your ISO), you should get a reasonable exposure. I recently (re-)discovered the Radiant Vista site, and the thing I like most about it is the Daily Critique. I cannot […]

I've begun using Aperture for anything that goes beyond the "point and shoot" variety of pictures, and I find myself annoyed with a few things that aren't a matter of my ignorance (as are most of my annoyances with the application). Both of these annoyances have to do with the list smart searches you see […]

I was bored, so I spent 30 minutes tonight setting up a little shot I've seen done a few different times. It's the old "drop something in a wine glass" shot. I chose a cherry in a glass filled with green dyed water (no sense wasting actual mint liqueur). Shot was taken with the Canon […]

Today I added the strobe lights to my small little soft box setup. The results I got before weren't very good. These results were much better, even though the old ones look just fine after trips through Aperture and Photoshop. Today I added the strobes to the setup. I had pretty long exposure times last […]

Last night I took what I would consider my first attempts at semi-decent planned photos. I took photographs of some golf shoes in the smaller soft box I'd constructed. There were several problems with the actual shoot: Three 60W bulbs - and a flash - are apparently not quite enough light, somehow. I suspect my […]

I spent some time at Lowe's today, and I've built the frameworks for two "do-it-yerself" soft boxes. I got some five-foot lengths of half-inch PVC pipe for a whopping cost of $0.97 apiece, some three-way and 90° elbow joints for about $3 per ten, and eight round butt caps for $0.24 apiece. Total cost: under […]

Modern aperture settings are marked in the following sequence: f1, 1.4, 2, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11, 16, 22, 32, 45, and 64 etc. While the numbers may seem random, the fact is that each step is 1.414 times the previous step (1.414 is the square root of two). Each f-stop represents a doubling or […]

A day or two ago I put together my studio package. I still may have a few pieces left to go (including an upgrade from the Canon DR XT to the XTi), but the main parts are in place. They include: The DigiBee setup from Alien Bees. This includes two B400 strobes, two umbrellas, two […]

Ron and I ventured to Dobbins Landing tonight at about 7:15 to shoot the holiday lighting the city of Erie puts on the tower there. It was a good use of my evening, and I learned a fair amount. These photos are untouched except some moderate angle adjustments, cropping, and resizing. EXIF data follows each […]

I'm looking to put together a mini home photograhy studio in a corner of my basement. I'm imagining some cloths (white, black, and a dark green perhaps to start) that I can mount or drape over a 6-foot frame (three sides of a cube). I can construct a few soft lighting boxes pretty easily and […]

Merry Christmas!