Shooting Outside Gallery

What sometimes grabs our eye in a photo is the contrast in detail between one or more objects in a photo. This is commonly referred to as bokeh or background or foreground blur. There is that element in photography which we immediately recognize because this is exactly how we tend to see things naturally and when we see this in an image it grabs our attention. But how do we produce this most powerful photographic effect? There are more than one element involved in this. First and most importantly your subject should minimally be a pleasing-to-the-eye subject and better yet a strong one. Here we have a most unusual subject, an old steel wheel off a farm implement no longer used. Rusty, hardly even noticed in a run-down farm field most passers-by would not give it a second glance. It is just another worn down piece of junk from days gone by. But when photographed using bokeh, it commands 1st place attention. The fact that this is in B&W may help a bit more to some, but the primary in

Prior to doing this make sure you have all of your work backed up, preferably on another HDD (Hard Disk Drive)or on DVD. Only then will you feel like soaring. As 2008 runs out of steam, and 2009 is about to emerge, we are faced with some of the same challenges as well as some added ones. In considering these I always look at what I have done to my PC in adding tons of image files. If I had to consider only these images I should be Analyzing & Defragging our HDD's every 30 days. But there is so much more to consider when it comes to how well our PC's work. Consider that every upload, every download, every file added or deleted, every profile change on your pc, every screensaver added or changed or deleted, every email written, received, read & trashed, then dumped, in short, every action a PC takes has potential for losing bits of data, albeit small amounts, but these add up. Now let's add what we do to our images; my workflow includes ingesting the files into my ima

This is a shot of snow falling with the following body & lens settings: F Stop/Aperture Value 4.0, Shutter Speed 1 second ISO 100 Focal Length 24mm (using a 24-105, 4.0L IS USM Canon) Color Space Adobe RGB Layer converted to mono I took this using my outdoor security motion-detected light in it's 40watt lo-beam setting, hand held. Makes for an interesting effect and is a much better capture once converted than in color as the lighting was very low. The only manipulation used after mono was a slight Curve adjustment. A lot more could be done with this but this is according to individual tastes. Anyway I hope everyone is enjoying their Holiday.

OK you can stop Commenting as I have the 3 winners of a 5x7" photo of the image here. Thanks for entering & commenting on posts in my blog. You will receive your prints shortly after Christmas. Congratulations. I've just recently opened a shop and here is one of the images I've been using to prepare gifts for Christmas . If you see anything you'd like me to create just let me know. There is no extra charge for customizing to your needs. But you'd better hurry if you want get this by Christmas. And thanks for linking to my new site. The first 3 to arrive & Contact Me with a message that you have commented on a post or article here, and Pasted the url to your Comment, will receive a free 5x7" print (sure they're small but...they're free) of the above photo. You'll receive this in time for Christmas only if you are a rapid Commenter. I will also need a photo of you to add to my winner's Post on December 27th. Gooooooood Luck. Sorry this o

While shooting from the base of Mt St Helens in Sept of this year I caught a movement to my left, as did it of me. Since the mountain had little snow, I chose this as my subject for the outing. And by the way, don't forget the batteries this Christmas: Batteries.com

Deleting images in camera There has over the years been a lot of discussion about the safety or lack of same as involves deleting images from a memory card, be they Compact Flash, SD or any other format. It has to do with whether file corruption from the deletion can cause the next image to overwrite in a corrupted fashion. And that it is safer to download all images as is, even if you don't like them onto your PC, then deleting them as you view them in your camera's download software application. I have done it both ways and while I cannot find any instances of overwrite corruption in either fashion of deleting images, whether in-camera or in-pc, the common consensus is to finish out a card, then remove & replace with another memory card. There is evidence that deleting & overwriting can occasionally corrupt the next file, and that next file, that next image could have been your best shot of the day. From all I have read though, and from all the photographers I have di