Photography

It may be purely coincidental, but over the last few days, I’ve heard a lot of buzz about various products that clip onto the front of your camera to help you white balance your images. The idea is that you place a special lens cap on your camera, snap a photo, and use that color as a reference color when you edit your photographs. The devices come in lots of different types: full-covering caps, dome-shaped caps, home-made versions made out of coffee filters or Pringles caps, or any number of other surfaces. In theory, it’s a great idea, but it has a flaw: A white balancing cap like this measures all light that hits it. Can you spot what the problem might be? Imagine your lighting set-up is like this, for example You are in the sun, but your subjects are in the shade. Your white-balancing cap will measure the light that’s hitting your camera (direct sunlight – or around 5,500 Kelvin or so). However, your subject will be in the shade (around 7,000 Kelvin or thereabouts). The outcome is utterly predictable: Your white balance is going to be miles off. So, what’s the solution? It’s simple: Don’t white-balance where you are taking photos from white balance what you are taking photos of. This article was originally posted at Why white-balance lens caps don’t make sense , on Photocritic. PLEASE NOTE -- The contents of the Photocritic blog is strictly copyrighted, and this feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. The use of this feed on other websites is a copyright infringement, so you should only ever be able to read this text in a feed reader. Digital Fingerprint: d07805f964d211dfdfe227d609f7448f

Two sun bears look like professional wrestlers as they take it in turns to pin each other to the ground.

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Tornadoes can form anytime of year, but occur most frequently in April, May, and June, due to favorable weather conditions. Earlier this week a massive 200-mile-per-hour EF5 tornado hit Moore, Okla., killing some two dozen people, damaging thousands of structures, and causing an estimated $2 billion in damage. This year, twisters have already touched down in Kansas, Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, Missouri, and Alabama. ( 46 photos total)A woman carries a child through a field near the collapsed Plaza Towers Elementary School in Moore, Okla., on May 20. A tornado as much as half a mile wide with winds up to 200 mph roared through the Oklahoma City suburbs Monday, flattening entire neighborhoods, setting buildings on fire and landing a direct blow on an elementary school. (Sue Ogrocki/Associated Press)

NEW: AKG K702 Review. AKG K702.

There’s no question that Lightroom is a powerful piece of photo processing software, but due to that power sometimes it’s not as easy to wrap our heads around everything it has to offer, that’s in part why I started my Let’s Edit YouTube series a weekly segment in which I share my own editing workflow for viewers to learn from. After starting this series one of the most commonly asked questions was to go into more detail on how the sharpening tools in Lightroom work. Sharpening in Lightroom is broken down into four different sliders – Amount, Radius, Detail and Masking – and they each work together to help you achieve the perfect amount of sharpness in your photograph. Today, rather than simply answer this question to the comparatively small group of people over on my site, I thought I’d bring these tips to the dPS community as a whole. I know there are a lot more people out there looking to master the art of sharpening images and I’m happy to help explain them. Before We Get Started There is one thing I’d like to mention before we dive into the tutorial and that is that these tools are designed to help improve an image that is sharp to begin with. They won’t fix camera shake, missed focus points, or poor DOF choices, but rather improve upon an already sharp image. So with that said if you’re struggling to get your image tack sharp you might want to check out this great DPS article on five tips to achieve sharper images first and then head back here to learn how you can make them even better. The Amount Slider As the name implies the amount slider is a broad and general addition or subtraction of the amount sharpening applied to your image. The more you slide to the right the sharper your image will become. It works by increasing the contrast between different pixels in a fairly general way. The next three sliders can help us refine how the amount of sharpening is applied throughout the image. Before we get into those other sliders though I do want to mention that each of these four tools has an extra option attached to it. By using the Alt (windows) or Option (Mac) key on your computer you will be shown an overlay that will help aid you in making better decisions with your sharpening. For the amount slider this option removes the color from the image letting us use a simple gray scale image for sharpening. This is important because some colors can give false sense of sharpness when placed next to each other and can make it difficult to determine the true level of sharpness in the image. The Radius Slider Next in the detail panel is the Radius Slider which lets you control how far away from the center of each pixel the sharpening effect occurs. This is great for determining if you’d prefer a more airy feel (smaller radius) or a more hard edge feel (larger radius). Each photograph is different and often times in portraiture the radius is left rather small, while in architecture or landscape, the radius can be made a bit larger to truly define the edges of your scene. With the radius slider the option key will create an overlay that allows you to see the effect of the edge sharpening in a visual and easy to understand way. The edges that are being effected become clearly defined and the areas of the photograph where this effect is not being applied will be left hidden behind a gray overlay. In the screen-capture above you’ll see with the radius slider maxed out the trees along the horizon are clearly defined in the overly. The Detail Slider I like to think of the detail slider as a fine-tuning slider or even just simply as picking up from where the radius slider left off. Rather than focusing on the hard edges of the image the detail slider is designed more for bringing out the finer textures of the images. It does this by controlling how the high frequency data is displayed. The further you push the detail slider to the right the more high frequency dat

This week's column by Ctein While slaving away in the darkroom to finish the printing for the last, blow-out TOP dye transfer print sale*, I started musing on how many hours I've spent doing dye transfer, total. I can figure that out. By the time I started doing dye transfer printing in 1975, I was doing pretty good record-keeping. (Figuring out how much time I've spent on all photographic printing and film processing would be more difficult, because I put in a lot of time before I started keeping detailed records. A project for another day.) First question for myself: how many photographs have I printed as dye transfers? My own portfolio totals 300. Here's the very first photograph I ever made a dye transfer print of: Off the cuff, I don't have quite as precise a number for the printing I've done for others. I could figure it out by digging through a bunch of disconnected records, but that'd be work. I'm sure it's at least 200 photographs. I'd be awfully surprised if it was 300. So let's call it 250, which means I've printed a total of 550 photographs (+/– 10%). The time it takes to print a photograph as a dye transfer varies a lot. Sometimes it's been as little as four hours of darkroom time until I'm ready to pull a finished print. Sometimes it's been a dozen. 6–7 hours sounds about right, for the average. Give or take, oh say, an hour. Multiplied by the number of photographs, I'm looking at 3,500 hours (+/– 20%) of darkroom time. That's just until I'm ready to make finished prints. Rarely did I make only one print of a photograph, either for myself or for clients. Again, no precise numbers unless I want to dig through too many records. I settled into the habit of making four prints of my photographs (one for the portfolio and three for sale). Clients rarely ordered fewer than two prints. In my early days, I made fewer than four prints; conversely, sometimes clients would want a lot more than two prints. Plus, there are the times when I'd sell all three of my photograph's prints and make more. I'll guess 3.5 finished prints, average, for each photograph I've printed. (That doesn't count the TOP sales; we'll get to those.) Multiplying up, let's call it 1,900 prints. So, once I've got to the point of making those finished prints, how much time do they take? Well, the darkroom time isn't too bad, typically half an hour per print, and that's pretty reliable. Rounded off, I'm up to 4,500 hours of darkroom time. Ah, but, there's the spotting and finishing. As I said in the footnote, those take up a lot more time than printing. This really varies from photograph the photograph; some require essentially none of this and others take all day. On average, it's a solid hour and change, so there's maybe 2,200 hours of non-darkroom time. Now, what about those TOP print sales? They're exceptional. I spend a lot more time getting to the point of being able to make a first print, because I want the printing to be as easy as possible and exactly right, and I also make multiple sets of matrices, for when I screw one set up in the course of printing the run. So, maybe 100 hours of darkroom time. Smaller prints take a lot less time to spot and finish than big ones and Mike and I were careful to choose the prints in our previous sales to be ones that I knew would take very little spotting and finishing time. That's how I could afford to make the prices so low. I know I spent less than 40 minutes printing and finishing each of the 1,000 small dye transfer prints I sold through TOP. Let's call it 500 hours of darkroom time, 200 hours of finishing time. Total so far: 5,000 hours in the darkroom, 2,400 hours out. I've omitted two things—the very end and the very beginning of my dye transfer career. The very end is, of course, the TOP sale I'm currently working on. Like the earlier sales, it's atypical, but in different ways. 150–200 hours of darkroom time (that includes the considerable pre-sale prep) and an equal amo

AWOL: I didn't go fishin' yesterday, but I had to take the day off. Don't know why...other than that now and then you just need a day off. Commentary: Monday didn't set a numerical record for comments on a TOP post, but it might have set a record for the number of substantive comments. Just about 170 as of this writing. Clearly a topic of considerable interest to photographers. Ctein thinks there have been some significant misunderstandings. We will have his take on Photoshop CC a week from today. Where this stuff comes from: Every writer, I suspect, has had the experience of something seeming to "pop" from his or her head, as if unbidden. One of the hardware stores where I shop has a handicapped parking space right in front of the front door, sidewise, meaning the cars park parallel to the storefront and not perpendicular to it. As I was leaving the hardware store yesterday, a big pickup truck screeched into the handicapped parking space and a big, burly guy with hair in some of the wrong places hopped out of it and went striding purposefully into the store. As he passed me, I said, "Funny, you don't look handicapped. Or are you just a moral cripple?" That second sentence came from nowhere. Sent by God. Was not something I was thinking of saying. Just popped out. Fortunately, there was a slight pause between my first and second sentences, and the guy had passed me by the time I said it, so I was no longer facing him. And I don't think he heard me. A good thing, because if it came to blows I don't think I would prove to be the faster runner. Happens sometimes when I write, too. But in that case it's seldom dangerous. Mike Original contents copyright 2013 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. TOP's links! (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)Featured Comments from: No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

It seems as if creating a fuss can sometimes reap rewards. One of my, and just about every other ‘Pro’ user of Flickr’s, concerns regarding the site overhaul and changes to its business model has been clarified. ‘Pro’ members do now have the chance to renew their membership at the existing price (about $25 for a year) and retain its benefits, with no plans to do away with it just yet. You won’t have the luxury of allowing your membership to lapse, however, so if you’re intent on keeping it, best sign up for recurring renewal. You can future-proof your subscription by heading to your Settings. It’s right there under Personal Information. (Headsup to Engadget) This article was originally posted at Flickr confirms: ‘Pro’ memberships can be retained , on Photocritic. PLEASE NOTE -- The contents of the Photocritic blog is strictly copyrighted, and this feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. The use of this feed on other websites is a copyright infringement, so you should only ever be able to read this text in a feed reader. Digital Fingerprint: d07805f964d211dfdfe227d609f7448f

Today we’re launching a new dPS eBook that I suspect is going to give a lot of our readers hours of fun while playing with their digital cameras. It’s called Photo Magic: Special Effects Photography Made Easy – an eBook by Neil Creek. As an Early Bird special you can grab it today at 25% off (just $15 USD). Over the years we’ve published thousands of tutorials here on dPS – many of which are on topics like Portraiture, Landscapes, Macro and Street Photography. However some of our most popular tutorials over the last few years have been when our authors have submitted teaching on how to do ‘trick’ or ‘special effects’ shots. As a result, I’ve long wanted to publish an eBook on Special Effects Photography and recently asked one of our regular authors – Neil Creek – if he’d like to write it. Neil was an obvious choice to author this eBook, he’s a Professional Photographer, experienced photography educator and he’s one of those guys who always seems to be working on a new technique for taking photos with that WOW factor. 11 Fun Special Effects Photography Projects to Master In Photo Magic Neil walks you through 11 photography special effects. In each case he shows you a photo he’s taken and then will walk you through the steps he went through to take the shot. This is the perfect eBook for those weekends when you’re looking for something fun to do. Tackle each technique in turn and over the coming months you’ll have some spectacular images in your portfolio and will also have learned some new skills that you can then build upon to create your own special effects. Here’s just some of the shots Neil will walk you through taking. Get full details on what’s included in this eBook here or order your copy at 25% off by clicking the download button below. // Post originally from: Digital Photography Tips. Check out our more Photography Tips at Photography Tips for Beginners, Portrait Photography Tips and Wedding Photography Tips. Discover the Secrets to These 11 Special Effects Photography Projects: New dPS eBook