Photo of the Day

'm finally starting to edit some of my Germany photos. The first batch that I'm going through I shot with HDR in mind.

I took this inside a moderately small church in Heidelberg. I was fond of the peach hue as the afternoon light came in. I used a Sony NEX-7 for most of the trip. I'm a little upset at some of the ghosting I missed in the painting in the ceiling but live and learn.

Once I was done I used a new piece of software called Snapheal, more on that in another post. But it was great, it managed to remove two women who were meandering through my shot. It took roughly two clicks to do it. Again, more on that later.

hat do you think of the church?

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A church in Heidelberg, German

Photo Fix of the Day

How would you fix this photo? I took this a few days ago on an apple picking adventure with my family. My son was having a blast running around the pumpkin patch. I was trying to keep up with him so I cranked up the ISO just a bit so as to reduce some blurring. I cropped this photo a bit to make sure his face was centered. I was a little disappointed at some of the pumpkins n the foreground in my photo. Anyway, how would you fix this?

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Mirrorless Cameras Upending DSLR's

I'd been using the hulking Canon D Mark II for last the year or so until I met my new love the Sony NEX-7. Yes the lenses aren't as plentiful but the versatility is more bountiful. Today The Verge put forth the hypothesis I've been seeing for the past few months that mirrorles cameras are the future of digital photography.

Olympus, Sony, and Panasonic have proved that the best way to take on the mirrorless market is to start from scratch. Olympus joined forces with Panasonic to create Micro Four Thirds, which carries some DNA from the old Four Thirds system but is basically an entirely new standard with newer, smaller lenses to match. The result has been innovative and diminutive cameras like the OM-D E-M5 and Lumix GH2. Sony went a similar route by creating a new system with the same sensor size as its Alpha SLRs, and while its NEX series doesn't quite have the lens support yet, the cameras have an unbeatable combination of image quality and design. In fact, Sony's camera division is arguably the only part of the company that's operating at anywhere near the level of its former glories, which certainly isn't a prediction anyone would have made five years ago.

 

Understanding Depth of Field

I've been playing with varying degrees of depth of field while using and testing different lenses and it can be a tricky thing. We all want those great 50mm portrait shots of our kids where the back is all blurry and their eyes twinkle. Those seem easy compared to trying to get a street sign in focus from 30 feet away while other objects are out of focus.

Matt Brandon over at Digital Trekker did a great field test to demonstrate:

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took my Canon 5D MKIII and  my 70-200 mm f/2.8 lens, set the aperture to f/4 and focused on a street sign. I chose a sign that had several other signs behind it as a way show off the depth of field. After taking a photo at 200 mm I then switched lenses to my 17-40mm f/4 lens. Keeping the aperture at f/4 I tried to “zoom” the 17-40mm to 18mm–I ended up shooting at 19mm. And, wait for it–here is the important part, I physically moved the camera to the point where at 19mm focal length the sign was at the same magnification. In other words, I had the sign fill the same exact proportions of the viewfinder at 19 mm as it did at 200 mm.

Always a great idea to physically move your body to get a better shot. It's remarkable how composition can change when you move just a few feet.

Photo Fix of the Day

​Here's a photo I took at a local farm this past week. The skies were dramatic all day and at one point I spun around to see these intense rays of sunlight pouring through the clouds. When I first processed the photo the juvenile apple trees in the foreground were very dark so I brought up their exposure quite a bit. I added some clarity to the clouds but other than that I didn't do much. 

How would you improve this photo? I thought maybe some cropping would have been in order but I opted not to. What do you think?​

I shot this with a Sony NEX-7 using the kit lens at 21mm, f/8, ISO 100.​

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Lightroom Digital Workflow

Keeping track of photo files is a pain in the ass. But now with my new digital workflow I'm breathing a little easier.

I knew that if I wanted to get serious about photography this year I'd need to get disciplined about keeping all these files in order. ​RAW photos are massive files and storing them on my Retina Macbook Pro is a non starter given the small size of the hard drive. Not to mention just keeping all these files in some searchable order. So I came up with a system that's not perfect but it does have chunks of help from my friend Trey Ratcliff. He had some great suggestions about keeping family photos separate from my art photos.

To start I created some collections in Lightroom. ​

• processing now
• unprocessed art
• ​unprocessed family
• art keepers​
• family keepers​

And I created a few Smart Collections​

• ​5 Stars
• 1 Star​
• picked complete photos​

Once I had my collections complete I was able to begin importing the photos. During the import process I let the default settings automatically create sub folders based on the dates the photos were taken. This is really handy. 

In these dated subfolders it's not important that there are a few non-birthday pictures in a folder filled with those soccer photos because we're going to go through those folders anyway.​

Here's where the hard work comes into play. Next I go through each photo in the folder and rate them one at a time using the starring system. Either I give the photo 5 stars for processing later or I leave it blank to sit on my hard drive for future use.  I'm not worried about storage since I'm keeping every photo backed up on my Drobo anyway  By tagging a photo with 5 stars I'm saying to myself, "Self, you like this photo enough to process it soon". 

Once I've starred a bunch of photos I hit shift-click to select all the 5 starred photos and move them to either 'unprocessed family' or 'unprocessed art' depending on the content. ​Then when I find photos I'd like to process I'll take those photos and drag them to 'processing now'. Then I'll delete them from 'unprocessed' folder because I'm now 'working' on them.

Once I've processed a photo I'll delete it from my 'processing now' folder and export it to a bunch of places. I export it to iPhoto where I keep my family folders and my folder of completed Lightroom edits. I also send my photos to a networked Drobo FS​ where my wife and I share family photo folders. So all the apple picking photos I shot this weekend are now sitting in our shared 'Family 2012' folder with a sub-folder called 'Apple Picking'.

​I know this seems like a lot but it really isn't once you get the hang of it. It's much better than having no system at all!