Layering photos

I'm glad that I invested ($60 sale price) in Joel Sartore's photography course at Great Courses. Sartore, who shoots for National Geographic, offers an immense amount of insight to aspiring photographers. He stresses that his course is not about buying lots of expensive equipment (though he certainly demonstrates what one can do with tripods, flashes and various types of lenses), but rather how to see, how to work a scene and how to cull through one's images for the ones that are really worth sharing. He does this in 24 30-minute lectures, most of which I have already watched, and I consider his course to be an excellent investment, at least at the sale price that was offered a few weeks ago. [More . . . ]

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Earth as Art

NASA has put together an extraordinary new booklet: Earth as Art. Here is an excerpt from the Introduction:

This book celebrates Earth’s aesthetic beauty in the patterns, shapes, colors, and textures of the land, oceans, ice, and atmosphere. Earth-observing environmental satellites can measure outside the visible range of light, so these images show more than what is visible to the naked eye. The beauty of Earth is clear, and the artistry ranges from the surreal to the sublime. Truly, by escaping Earth’s gravity we discovered its attraction.
Let this booklet load up and enjoy the show. Earth as you've never seen it before, from satellites.

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Having more fun with photos using Lightroom 4

Yesterday, my 14 year old daughter JuJu and I spent the entire day at Studio 314 in Midtown St. Louis learning Adobe Lightroom 4. I'd been using Picasa for organizing my photos, and Picasa/Photoshop for processing. Lightroom is an incredible package --it allows you to quickly sort through your photos and also to "develop" them using sophisticated controls that allow for individual tweaks and batch processing. It's a professional tool, and even after a day of studying it and most of a day (today) continuing to study it and use it on my own, I only think I've tapped into 50% of what the program can do. Not that knowing the controls is being proficient at using the program either. I'm sure that I'll be picking up lots of tips and efficiencies over the next six months or so (there are tons of Youtubes and other videos offering instruction in Lightroom). What I've already noticed is that I'm turned some mediocre shots into decent shots and I've turned many decent shots into impressive images. Lightroom offers far more flexibility than the free photo organizing and processing programs out there, such as Picasa and iPhoto. Lightroom 4 is only about $100, so it's well in range of amateur photographers like me. Today I spent a couple hours at the St. Louis Zoo capturing images, so that I could have something interesting to process in Lightroom 4. I'll paste a couple of my photos below, but also offer a gallery (you can get to the gallery by clicking on the title of this post if you don't see it). I invite you to click on the photos below to see them in much better detail. So far, so good. I'm definitely going to incorporate Lightroom into my workflow. [These images were taken a Canon S95 and a Sony HX10V, two modest priced cameras, nothing fancy].

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Compact super-zoom cameras

There's a new generation of little cameras out there, and I took the plunge. I've been looking for a powerful zoom, but I didn't want to lug a big camera around. Then I noticed that several camera makers have come out with some extraordinarily small cameras with big zooms. I went to a couple of areas stores and looked at several of them, including the Canon SX260 and the Panasonic Lumix ZS20. They were both impressive looking, but I eventually went to Costco where I purchased the Sony HX10V for $260. It looks like a run-of-the-mill compact camera until you turn it on and use the 16x optical zoom. I don't quite understand how the engineers figured out how to get the 2" of zoom lens to protrude from a 1" camera body. It's quite an impressive work of engineering. How well does the zoom work? I've tested it out at the Forest Park Grand Basin. The first photo is looking toward the St. Louis Art Museum without any zoom. The second photo, shot while standing in the same spot, is with full zoom. Click on the photos for more detail (these are lo-res versions of the images--the camera max is 18.2 mega-pixels). This is going to be fun for shooting wildlife and many other types of shots where you don't want to distract the subjects. And the camera easily fits in a pocket, and it's loaded with many features above and beyond its magical zoom lens.

No Zoom

Full Zoom

Sony touts this camera's ability to take low light shots with good reason. This final image was a hand held shot of my street taken at midnight. I'm really impressed that the camera took a sharp photo in this very low light. I took this shot on full automatic--the camera recognized this to be a low light shot and automatically compensated.

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