Photographs, Photographers and Photography

A handy tool.
One of the less well publicized aspects of many Canon lenses (and probably equally applicable to those from the competition - I have no axe to grind for Canon) is the Full Time Manual Focus function.
Canon describes it well:

Because the center focus point in the 5D (the most sensitive one) I use is […]

To Photoshop, that is.
While the slightly up-tilted camera distortion is not that bad here, a quick round trip (Command-E on a Mac) from Lightroom to Photoshop CS2 and a few seconds with the ImageAlign plug-in sets things dead straight. Command-S in CS2 saves the corrected version as a TIFF file in Lightroom. ImageAlign is […]

Two stops under does the trick.
Because very high dynamic range pictures will result in burned out highlights, notwithstanding the fine CMOS sensor in the Canon 5D, I underexposed this one two stops (spot metered on the sky) then brought the detail in the foreground back with the processing controls in Lightroom. Here’s the Before […]

A little glow can make the day
My piece on some of Irving Penn’s early work with a small negative got me thinking about how to emulate the effect using an all digital approach.
Aperture does not have the horespower to do these things, as we forever wait for plug-ins that do more than import and export […]

…. out of Catholicism ….
… but you cannot take the Catholic out of the boy.
Here’s our annual Christmas picture for 2007 - following the dictates of the Christmas Snap as set forth in this link.

Olympus 5050 digital, Vivitar 283 flashgun with Sto-Fen diffuser, Olympus IR remote, SHQ 3:2 setting at ISO 100
Agreed. Those are […]

Can you say ISO 3200?

5D, 200mm, ISO 1600, 1/60, f/4, -1 ev
One stop of underexposure and ISO 1600 - the sort of thing that would have film in tears. Par for the course with the low noise 5D’s sensor. I do wish the 200mm L lens had IS (1/60 is really slow with […]