Light Painting

February 6, 2018

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 …

New iPhone 8 Plus Portrait Mode with Lighting

November 30, 2017

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 …

Canon’s New 6D Mark II

October 19, 2017

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 …

Macphun’s Aurora HDR 2017

July 24, 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 …

Macphun’s Noiseless

June 20, 2017

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 …

Machphun’s Intensify CK

May 8, 2017

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 …

Macphun’s Tonality CK

April 17, 2017

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. …

Environmental Portraits

March 27, 2017

This week I wanted to post about a shooting style that I enjoy, Environmental Portraits. For many professional photographers, portraits are their bread and butter, or how they make most of their money. For myself, I don’t really care for shooting conventional portraits, I like to shoot what I like to shoot and as far as portraits go, I’d rather shoot Environmental instead of traditional portraits. An Environmental Portrait is where you photography a person doing their job or a hobby that is interesting. This first image is of my girlfriend’s son C.J playing his guitar. It doesn’t matter what …

Good Glass is More Important

March 13, 2017

One of the things that new photographers battle with is gear purchasing. Many photographers on a budget, especially while in school have a hard time deciding on how to buy the gear they need. One of the primary things new photographers needs to remember is although it’s nice to have the latest, greatest camera bodies, it’s not as much of a necessity as high quality glass. Whether you are a Canon or Nikon shooter, each company has different varieties of glass with different levels of quality, but this is where you should be spending your money as a new photographer. …

New iPhone 7 Plus Portrait Mode

February 17, 2017

Back in the fall of 2016 when Apple announced the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus they also talked about a new camera mode for the iPhone 7 Plus only, called Depth of Field Portrait Mode. Using this new mode on the 7 Plus’ camera, you can shoot a portrait and have the great “bokeh” effect for the background while the subject is in sharp focus. At the time it was mentioned that the new mode would only work when the iPhone’s camera recognized a face, so it would only be useful for human portraits. I am happy to say that …