By Peter Phun, on August 6th, 2010%
Where the heck is that picture?
Exquisite image–A green turtle photographed by my old buddy Stephen Yeow off the waters of the island of Sipadan earlier this year.
My first Mac laptop, a G3 Powerbook, had 6GB of hard drive storage.
At that time my largest Compact Flash card had a 128 MB capacity.
Today, about a dozen years later, just one of my Secure Digital cards alone easily holds more data than that hard drive.
You don’t have to be a long time digital photographer like me to see that as long as you own a digital camera, you’re headed down the same path as me–just a little later.
So you better get organized and develop some sort of workflow–fancy word for a system of messing with your digital images.
If you don’t, good luck finding your pictures when you want them.
In fact, if you don’t practice safe computing like making frequent redundant backups, you might one day lose everything.
I’m a Mac users but I often teach on Windows so I won’t be dragged into which platform is superior.
Repeat after me, “Nikon or Canon, Mac or Windows, neither blows especially when your work flows.”
Continue reading Managing digital images
By Peter Phun, on July 28th, 2010%
Two posts back, I mentioned Eye-Fi as a possible solution for digital photographers who have a “wait problem.”
It is inevitable, we get so used to the immediate nature of digital photography.
I’m sure I’m not alone.
As soon as we are done taking pictures, we’d like for those images to get to our computers ready to edit by the time we sit down.
Not everyone using a digital camera wants to edit their pictures.
Some may just want to shoot, upload to an online sharing website.
And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
Continue reading Eye-Fi Review
By Peter Phun, on July 25th, 2010%
Dino in HDR—While inside San Diego Natural History Museum, I bracketed as I captured about 7 images to create this totally unrealistic image using Photomatix Pro. See the scene captured normally by my Canon 40D with 17-35 f2.8 L lens. ISO 400 f6.3 shutter speed between 1/10 sec and 0.3 seconds.
It’s nice to get away for a few days especially when it’s an easy 2 hour drive to San Diego.
You can always count on the numerous museums at Balboa Park to have exhibits that provide hours of amusement.
Actually, with so many other museums to choose from, it’s actually tough to decide.
We opted for the San Diego Natural History Museum.
“Dinosaurs” and “All That Glitters” are currently on exhibit. Continue reading Summertime at San Diego Natural History Museum
By Peter Phun, on May 31st, 2010%
There is a time and a place for photoshop.
Just bear in mind, my background in photojournalism allowed very little use of Photoshop except for cloning out dust spots, dodging and burning.
My use of Photoshop was limited to what we used to do when we were making BW prints in the darkroom.
That said, there are times when photoshop can actually give me a better way to make a good picture.
The one that comes to mind most is Photoshop’s Photomerge feature.
As a finale for my class, I taught my students how a little thinking out of the box can give you a better quality image.
Rather than using a wide angle to include everyone but at a price of throwing away pixels, I showed them, in my mind, a better approach.
Recent Comments