Stay Away from Western Digital Hard Drives

So this week’s blog post is written to help others, especially photographers, but anyone that owns a computer as well. I have worked in I.T. for almost 30 years now and at one time in American there were several hard drives makers on the market. You had Western Digital, Maxtor, Toshiba, Seagate and a few others. Well as happens in most industries, over time the larger companies buy out the smaller ones, either to eliminate the competition or because they have some innovative tech that the larger company wants. Well at one time, Western Digital and Seagate were the premier …

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Don’t Let Equipment Envy Hold Back Your Photography

                        One of the things I see people ask all the time is “What camera body should I buy?” This questions is subjective as everyone will give you a different answer and usually with some sort of bias. “Oh buy the Canon 5D Mark IV or the Sony A7RIII or Nikon D800” or whatever. The reason why I say the answers you get will be biased is everyone will answer you based on their favorite camera. And they will tell you things like, “You need this camera because it …

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EyeEm, A Great Photography Site

So I know it’s been a while since I have made a new post and I apologize, I have been really slammed with work and school. In today’s post I want to talk about a great photography site for sharing and even selling your photos. The website is http://www.eyeem.com. This site is based in Germany and seems to be a really great place to upload and share your photos and even put them in their marketplace to sell them as well. I have been on EyeEm for about 3 years now and although I am not getting rich, I have sold …

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Light Painting

So I am working on finishing my Bachelors in Digital Photography and for the last 5.5 weeks one of my classes has been Special Topics 1, which has been all about Light Painting. Light Painting is all about doing long exposures at night and then using a light source to “paint” into your photo. Although I love shooting long exposures, I had never tried light painting before this class and you can create some beautiful images with this technique but it takes a LOT of practice especially if you want to write out words in your images. You have to …

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New iPhone 8 Plus Portrait Mode with Lighting

So not too many weeks ago Apple released it’s new iPhone 8 & 8 Plus phones as a replacement for the iPhone 7 & 7 Plus and also announced the iPhone X, which released on November 3rd. You might remember back in my Feb 17, 2017 post. I talked about the new Portrait mode on the iPhone 7 plus, well Apple has stepped up it’s game with the new iPhone 8 Plus. In this new iPhone, Apple enhanced their Shallow Depth of Field algorithm to make your portraits even more amazing considering it’s not a DSLR, but they also added some …

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Canon’s New 6D Mark II

Back in November of 2012 Canon released the original EOS 6D which was a nice 20.2 Megapixel full frame camera with a retail price of around $2,000. I bought the original 6D and loved the camera dearly, even though it was considered an entry level full frame camera body with a plastic upper housing to allow it’s built in WiFi and GPS to function. Even though it was limited to only 11-point autofocus sensors with 1 cross type sensor in center (x-type is sensitive down to −3 EV), I really loved the camera for it’s WiFi and GPS abilities which allowed the …

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Macphun’s Aurora HDR 2017

This week I wanted to write about another of Macphun’s wonderful programs called Aurora HDR 2017. Macphun keeps turning out program after program for photo editing on the Mac platform and Aurora HDR is another home run for people who want to create stunning HDR’s without needing three images of varying exposures. This first image is the starting window when you launch Aurora HDR 2017. When you fire up Aurora HDR you get a small simple window that allows you to drag and drop an image and then click the Create HDR button. Now the software loads it’s entire editing …

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Macphun’s Noiseless

This week I want to continue my blog articles on Macphun’s great photography apps for Mac. This time I am writing about Noiseless, which is an app to remove noise from your images, making them look better. When you are shooting in low light and using high ISO, you will end up with the grainy speckles in the photos known as noise. The reason for this is because your camera is attempting to compensate for the low light. Anytime you bump up your camera’s ISO settings you run the risk of introducing noise, especially anytime you use an ISO above …

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Machphun’s Intensify CK

This week’s blog post is on another of Macphun’s awesome photography apps that is part of their Creative Kit package. This week’s entry is Intensify CK which is an app that allows you to add more “punch” to your images. Intensify will allow you to bring out more details, more vibrant colors and comes with a ton of built in Presets from Architecture to Detail Enhancement as you can see in this screen shot. I have been using Intensify for a while now and I love the various tweaks you can make to your images to make them stand out …

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Macphun’s Tonality CK

This week’s post I want to share with you the reader about Macphun’s Black & White photography app for macOS called Tonality CK. The CK stands for Creative Kit, which is what Macphun now calls all of their combined photography apps for macOS. I have been using Macphun’s fantastic apps for a couple of years now and I was really excited when they started offering all of them in a Creative Kit package. I am planning to write blogs articles about the entire Creative Kit, but by going one app at a time and this week Tonality gets some love. …

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