Broaden your technical and creative skills. Unleash the artist within you.
Capturing the essence of Burney Falls. Turning what the camera saw into what the photographer saw.
“What was he thinking? What kind of picture is that? It’s not very good.”
I had heard about Burney Falls at MacArthur-Burney Falls Memorial State Park for some time. It sounded intriguing. Located in Shasta County in Northern California I wanted to see what Teddy Roosevelt called “the Eighth Wonder of the World.” Continue reading ““What Was He Thinking?””
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Finding the soul of a photograph is a journey that can take many paths.
I often get asked if I manipulate my photographs. My answer is always, “Yes, of course!” But no one has ever asked, “Why?” And I have an answer for that too. “Because my camera doesn’t know what I’m feeling.”
For me, making a photograph is making art. I want to do more than capture where I’ve been and what I’ve seen. I want to share with you what I feel when I’m out there. And that is often more intense than what my eyes see.
I was in Long Valley last summer preparing for a photography class I was teaching for the Mount San Jacinto Natural History Association. It was midday and I was walking around wearing my amber tinted Polaroid sun glasses. Why do I mention my sun glasses? Because I was getting very excited about what I was seeing. And for those of you that know about midday light, it is anything but exciting. But the amber tint of the glasses and the effect of the polarization on the sky and foliage got me excited. Added to that was how good it felt to be back in these mountains after an absence of 15 years.
I want to share what I feel…. And that is often more intense than what my eyes see.
So, I asked myself if it was OK to make photographs that reflected my mental state when it contradicted the physical reality of what my eyes saw.
Continue reading “Finding the Soul of a Photograph”
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Get post processing started by importing your photographs into Lightroom.
An important part of post processing is importing your photographs into Lightroom. The goal is to copy the files from your camera or laptop and store them on your desktop computer. At the same time you also want to make a backup of all of your files.
You might be interested in the configuration of my desktop computer. It has about 5 terabytes of storage. This is where the image files will be stored. I also have several terabytes of external storage – external hard drives. This is where the backup copies go.
In this example I’ll be copying files directly from the camera. The plan is to copy the files as they are to the backup storage. But the files I store on the desktop storage will be converted to DNG format. More on that in another post.
So with the big picture in mind, let’s get into the details.
Continue reading “Lightroom Tutorial – Importing Photographs”
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