Using HDR techniques for vibrant Black-and-White Images.

The High Dynamic Range ("HDR") technique in digital photography has garnered quite a bit of interest in the last year or so.  I am not a great fan of HDR for color images; I have seen too many overdone HDR shots with impossible color and contrast, halos, and exaggerated details.

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First Look at Video from the EOS 5D MkII

I've been shooting with my Canon EOS 5D MKII almost exclusively since the beginning of 2009, and I am extremely pleased with the quality of images from the camera.  I’ve just begun learning what the HD video capability is all about. 

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Cool new Photo app for iPhone and iPod Touch

I've been playing with a great new app for photographers from Adair Systems called PhotoCalc.  This is a very focussed utility app that does on-the-fly calculations of several key photographic measurements.

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Compositional Tools: Have we come full circle?

I've taken a trip back in time as a result of my newest camera.

When I'm out in the field shooting with (usually) one of my 35mm-format digital cameras or (occasionally) our Mamiya 645 medium-formal camera, I like to take along a pocket-sized digital camera as well.

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Timing is Everything…

I sat at dinner in Farmington, New Mexico, with a view to a bluff just a few hundred yards to the south. For three minutes (I timed it), the setting sun lit up that bluff and turned it brilliant shades of gold and ocher. Then the sun dropped just a bit in the western sky, the light changed, and all the color faded away, leaving the bluff just dull brown. It was a stunning example of the fleeting nature of landscape photography, and reminded me of the adage - perfect for those of us who love to capture the beauty and wonder of the natural world - that "timing is everything."

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Telling Stories

In the early 1970s, I was an undergraduate student at Macalester College in St. Paul, majoring in Theatre Arts. My professor for Directing classes was Douglas Hatfield, then the Chair of the Department.

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Exploring the Great Gallery

The Great Gallery is the largest pictographs site in Canyonlands National Park. It sits in a detached portion of the Park known as Horseshoe Canyon. The Gallery is about 200 feet long, 15 feet high, and contains dozens of greater-than life size pictographs. Pictographs are rock paintings, as distinguished from petroglyphs, which are figures etched into rock with a sharp stone.

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"Working the Scene" and avoiding The Obvious Picture

True fans of the CSI television series will recognize the investigator's phrase - "work the scene." While most of us don't photograph crime scenes, Grissom and his crew give us a method for trying to photograph imaginatively.

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Printing and Esthetic Choices

So, you've taken some fantastic shots—now what? The best images in the world are of little value if you can't share them with others. Which means you need to print them out.

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I Love a Good Tool.

If you've read my thoughts about "working the scene", you know I believe in reframing a great shot in the opposite orientation - changing a landscape composition into a portrait composition or vice versa - as you search for the best picture. But the problem in doing that with a normal tripod head (ball or multi-axis) is that the act of rolling the camera over 90 degrees changes the composition you worked so hard to refine. Not only do you re-orient the camera body, you also move the whole camera sideways at the same time. On my Manfrotto 488RC2 ballhead, the center of the lens moves over almost three inches between vertical and horizontal orientation.

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