Tutoring

     In the very near future, I will be offering to tutor Lightroom, Affinity Photo, Aurora HDR 2019, and Luminar 3.
     These are all amazing programs that no photographer should do without. I recently switched to Sylum software's digital editing programs and I couldn't be happier.

     Affinity Photo is an amazingly full-featured competitor to Photoshop and it's only $50.00
     Lightroom is an old standby.
     Luminar 3 is wonderful editing program that has recently added libraries making it a strong competitor to Lightroom.
     Aurora HDR 2019 is the new standard-bearer in HDR Processing

Tripods 1

      For all the years that I used film SLR’s and the early years of digital SLR’s I religiously used a tripod. The bulkiness of SLR’s and the slapping mirror I wouldn’t have thought about doing things any differently. I also used a wired remote to avoid shake.

     In 2013 I bought my first ILC mirrorless camera. It was so much smaller and lighter, I stopped using a tripod and shot handheld most of the time. For the next two years, I didn’t use a tripod unless I was shooting a scene that required me to blur the water in the image.

     In early 2016 I had a major problem with several of my drives. While I was working on retrieving the images, I realized just how noisy some of the images were. Most of the noise was coming from bracketing 3 images and merging them together, but most of the images that were noisy were ones that had been handheld.

     Moral of the story, I use a tripod when I need the latitude to keep the image as noise free as possible. 

Sparks Lake in the Oregon Cascades

it is a 12" x 18" ceramic tile mural with a satin finish.

A few posts earlier  I posted a similar image, but nothing substitutes for the real thing. 

Mirror Pond in Downtown Bend, Oregon
it is a 12" x 18" ceramic tile mural with a satin finish.

Composition – The Rule of Thirds

          The rule of thirds has at its roots a standard for which the great painters relied upon to build their masterpieces. It is the most basic and the most useful rule for composition. You get the best results when the subject is centered over one of the four inner points.

          When I took photography in High School there were other composition rules. The one I remember most was the S curve. The S curve is useful from my point of view when you are breaking the depth of the photo into thirds, that being a foreground, middle ground, and background. I’m guessing that when I’ve used the S Curve, I’m betting that the rule thirds mostly applied anyway.

          In time I stopped consciously following the rules and I just framed the subject in a way that was aesthetically pleasing to my eye. Over time I have realized that most of my compositions adhere to the rule of thirds conventions with one exception when I photograph a body of water with reflections I tend to place my horizon very close to the center of the image in order to accentuate the visual impact.

So, you have just bought a new camera and you want to get more out of it than just shooting in P (program) mode.

The best place to start is in A (aperture priority) mode, (AV) on Canon cameras.

When I was first interested in photography there was no aperture priority mode or any of the other modes for that matter, you had to set your lenses opening (aperture), shutter speed, and focus manually, ISO/ASA was set by the film you put in your camera.

So the next time you go out and shoot, set your ISO for the lowest setting, set your shooting mode to A and get out and practice moving your f/stop around and experimenting with the results of changing the lens opening discovering the different results you get from doing so. That’s the thing that is nice about digital, you can always erase the results you don’t like.

Above shot is an example of using Aperture Priority mode to slow the shutter speed to the point of blurring the moving water.

Winter Weather

Just thought I would post a winter pic from last year as I'm kind of stranded at home for a while.

Ceramic Tile Murals

For many years I've wanted to do ceramic tile murals. Finally after many years I will be offering them. This is a dream come true.
The murals are durable enough they can be used in a kitchen back splash, shower or bath wall installation

The first Mural is a photograph I took of Mirror Pond in Bend, Oregon

it is a 12" x 18" mural with a satin finish.

The second Mural is a photograph I took of Sparks Lake in the Oregon Cascades

it is a 12" x 18" mural with a satin finish.