The maximum of the partial eclipse was at 3:32 PM, April 8, 2024 in the Washington DC metro area. I took pictures of the partial eclipse, carefully choosing an exposure such that sun spots were also visible. I also took some fun pictures of a colander acting as many pinhole cameras projecting the eclipse.
Read MoreThe usual way to grab the code for a particular color in a region in your image is to use the eye-dropper tool in Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator, etc. In Lightroom, you can find them perhaps more easily.
Read MoreBecome familiar with the Red-Yellow-Blue (RYB) and Red-Green-Blue )RGB) color wheels and the various color harmonies by analyzing famous logos, paintings, and photographs.
This blog post uses an app that was introduced in the previous post “Explore the Color Wheel and Color Harmonies of your Image”. Don’t guess at which hues dominate in the image - use this app to show you.
Read MoreLightroom’s Color Grading panel is sadly neglected. It complements but does in any way not duplicate the Color Mixing panel and White Balance. It can be used to produce monochrome, sepia, duotones and even trio-tones from grayscale images. In color images, it casts different colors for the shadows, midtones, and highlights, kind of like a souped-up White Balance for each! It can evoke a particular mood. So it is certainly a great technique that photographers can use to expand their repertoire. For comparison’s sake, we discuss white balance as a preface.
Read MoreEvoke Depth with Vanishing Point Perspective; Plus Seven Other Techniques.
Evoking the sense of depth and volume in two dimensional images is one of the important aspects of successful photography. Constructing or highlighting one, two or three point perspective is very helpful. Other techniques include overlapping objects, diminishing object perspective, the use of light and shadow, atmospheric perspective, and the contrast of warm and cool colors. We also speculate on how our physiology and evolution is the bed-stone of some of these effects.
Read MoreI’ll show you some ways to shift the hue, saturation, and brightness of colors to make your images more dramatic.
First, I will show some simple ways to make a dramatic nearly Black-and-white image.
Then I will edit photos with a cinematic color scheme inspired by the movie Asteroid City.
Wes Anderson’s movie Asteroid City debuted in June of 2023. Scenes in the film were often shot mid-day in very harsh lighting. In processing, the contrast was lowered dramatically, leading to a “flat”, soft look, in which the dark shadows almost disappear. The colors were manipulated by hue shifts that moved reds to an orangish red and blues moved towards teal, producing dramatic teal skies over a warm desert. Please watch the movie’s trailer to see the style.
Read MoreAre the colors in your image harmonious? Find out!
This web app loads an image and then creates two color wheels, one based on the modern Red-Green-Blue (RBG) system and the other on the traditional Red-Yellow-Blue (RYB) system.
Some diagrams of common "color harmonies" are along the right-hand edge, for the purposes of comparison with the color wheels. Don't guess colors when assigning the color harmony!
Read MoreTone curves are available in most advanced photo editing programs. They pre-date the use of basic sliders. Hopefully, this talk has made some basic Lightroom sliders less mysterious by showing the analogous use of the Tone Curve module. Curves can provide finer control than sliders.
Read MoreOne day in June 2021, it popped into my head: what if I rotated my iPhone the wrong way when taking a panorama? This was the start of a fun, hit-or-miss exploration with my iPhone SE 2nd generation. The results are very dependent on the phone’s stitching algorithm, so surprises abound.
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Cicada brood X inspired cookie recipe.
Read MoreLet’s hear a kingfisher’s bird call.
Kingfisher
Perched, looking for a fish.
“ Where the river winds through its green retreat,
Smiling, rejoicing on its way,
Whose ripples and rifles ever beat
The old tree-roots and boulders gray;
Where o’er the sedges’ shallows and sands
The cat-tail tufts and river reeds,
At whose edge the patient angler stands,
The kingfisher flies and feeds.
Perch’d on a bending, wither’d spray
That leans o’er the water’s flow,
He watches intently for the prey
That swims in the stream below.”
Bugzilla says “Looks like A. nerii, which do a "collective twitching and kicking response" (see paper, which says the dance deters a parasitic wasp if they all work together, but not if they dance alone). This species colonizes Honey-vine climbing milkweed, Cynanchum laeve (observation by riset is here)”
Asian Ladybirds mating on October 5, 2020.
The following PDF contains most of the slides of a talk I gave to the Silver Spring Camera Club in September, 2020 about the free, open source program darktable, which is an alternative to Light Room. I’m just a beginner with darktable, so I’ve taken the approach of first finding the modules and the portions of modules which are equivalent to common things one does in Light Room. darktable offers many more options than Light Room, which makes it both harder to learn at first and more powerful.
Get Started with darktable PDFHope you enjoyed the talk’s slides!
iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature.
Read MoreWe can control the lighting on our near subject with just the flash and expose far away backgrounds with the exposure trio of exposure time, aperture and ISO. They are independent when the distance to the background is very far away, since the Inverse-Square law indicates that a negligible amount of flash light gets there.
Read MoreThis blog entry is about achieving straight lines in architecture photos, despite the divergent or convergent lines and barrel shaped distortion produced by a wide or super wide angle lens.
Read MoreGetting the exposure right while juggling the three camera controls ISO, aperture and exposure time can be tricky. Calling it the exposure triangle is not very helpful because it doesn't tell you how to trade one off the other. In this double sized extended cheatsheet, a scale full of three kinds of tuna (representing ISO, aperture and exposure time) shows various combos can give the same weight (representing exposure).
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