TheMadPeacock On Photography

This story touched me, photos affect us, they can change our lives..

How much, I wondered, did that moment — just 1/250th of a second when three lives intersected on a river bank in Iraq — contribute to the burdens he’d brought home with him? If I’d never taken his picture, would he have ended up as he did? Would he still have been a casualty of war?

Ricochet - washingtonpost.com

Mike Cohen has an interesting blog I have just started reading, in a recent post (SmugMug vs. Flickr)he talked about his move to smugmug and that got me thinking about why I use and recommend both smugmug and Flickr..

I have been using Flickr for some years, I was turned on to it after a friends friend got “spotted” by a gallery owner on flickr and sold some prints. So I joined and was surprised at how much I enjoyed sharing my photos with the world… photography had up to then been a private thing for me that most of my friends did not even know I did.

I maintained a web gallery that I programmed in flash myself that had a print purchase systems, framing preview and some other cool features I was proud of but maintaining the development of the site was too much and was not where my real interest was so I switched the site to smugmug.

I have a pro account so I am able to maintain my url of www.imagebysp.com, this was important to me as I have built up a reasonable level of traffic to that URL over the years and I am able to sell my prints. The nice thing is that smugmug looks after all the printing, shipping, cash collection etc. so I don’t need to be involved.

One less thing to worry about!

This made me smile.. its not very highbrow but what you going to do?
The Stunning Camera

Awww.. NYC gets all the fun! If I was anywhere near NYC on the 29th I would definitely go to this. I have a friend who uses one of Fuji’s infrared cameras for landscape photography and the photos he takes with it are amazing.
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Over at Computerdarkroom Ian Lyons does a good job of walking through the process of creating to black and white using the channel mixer and some split toning. This is one if those times when black and white is not black and white.

I like the affect and the split toning could come in useful but I think it’s a bit too much of an old world look for my tastes.

I would be interested to hear your thoughts..

There are as many ways to convert a digital color image too black and white as there are fish in the sea. I want the deep contrast of black and white film but I am a digital boy.. Never have shot film in my life, would not know where to start and I am a computer graphics nerd so film, however alluring, is not a viable option.
I will therefore keep searching; keep growing my collection of black and white conversion techniques because no single technique is going to work on every image. To make the most of your shots you will need choices.

Give this one a try, its very basic, one step up from simply desaturating your image and the results are not that interesting but perhaps these techniques can be applied to a more involved conversion.

Digital Lens Filter from the blog of Some Random Dude

After my last post I started to think about the books I have read that embrace the digital darkroom and the power it represents.

One of the first books that came to mind was Welcome to OZ by Vincent Versace. This is not a book about creating images that are montages of multiple images; there are no pictures of a cityscape in the jungle here.

Rather this is about using your chosen editing tool to enhance your images so that you are able to share a vision.

Photography for me is not about capturing what’s before you but capturing your vision. Over on f/1.4 there is a great post that takes this a bit further than I normally do but the way Seán has realized his vision of middle earth is inspiring and I urge you to take a look.

I often hear people talk about how they don’t like to use Photoshop to enhance their images. These same people don’t however have a problem dodging and burning in or out details they want to emphasize in their shots.
I learnt much of my photo manipulation techniques from reading books by the great printers like Ansel Adams..

I currently use 2 external drives and the Mac software raid system so that they look like one drive and all my photos are safely stored on 2 drives.

This new 1T external RAID box is perfect and if you don’t know why you need to keep your stuff on an external drive read Computer Games on James M. Graham’s blog

They have some great photos over at Perfectly Timed Photos but the image above is the best in my humble opinion. The unaccredited photographer has captured a thought, we all know what the man is thinking, no caption required.