Hi ,

 

Despite the fact that it was −6 degrees in Anchorage yesterday morning, Spring is officially here. Along with it a visit from the new gear fairy, who has delivered the Nikon D4, Nikon D800, the Canon 5D Mark III, the Fuji X-Pro 1, the PocketWizard Plus III radio transceivers, and the brand new iPad, all of which are either available now, or will be within days.

 

If any of these items are on your "buy now" list, I realize that nothing I can say will deter you from your impending credit card frenzy. Don’t worry, I’m not the guy to talk you out of buying more gear. Believe me. In fact, I often need help on my end. Gear is good. Say that enough times and you’ll lead yourself into guilt free life and a house full of camera equipment.

 

However, if you find yourself buying more than shooting, or if you aren’t out creating great work because you’re still waiting for the right gear, then you need to shift your thinking. Yes, gear is good, but, ultimately what makes good imagery. You are. Yes, you’ve heard that a thousand times. Probably because there’s something to it. 

 

Heed those words. In fact, the next time you go out shooting, leave some of your really fancy toys behind and see what you come up with. You’ll find that limiting yourself exercises the problem solving part of your brain and actually forces you to open up your creative mind. It forces you to improvise and think of new ways to do things. To see an example of what I’m talking about, check out this post by David Hobby, which could be called Mr. Strobist don’t need no fancy expensive softbox, where he uses a regular old white plastic trash bag as a light modifier. 

 

Leaving certain lenses behind forces you to look for different vantage points, and leaving the tripod behind makes you appreciate the versatility of sticks, backpacks, trekking poles, bicycles and whatever else you can find. 

 

What problem solving creative idea can you come up with?

 

 

 

Now that film has been gone long enough, it’s actually cool now to miss it, and lament how wonderful it was. We go crazy on Instagram and pretend that we’re shooting black and white, Polaroids and cross proccessed EktaChrome. 

 

I think that the reason for our fondness for the imperfections and limitations of film is that when we shot a photograph, we knew that we weren’t creating a perfect copy, we were creating a stylized representation of that subject, based on our own artistic desires. You could even say liken the grain of film to the sparse dotty, impressionistic techniques of painters like Monet. Does grain and a specific color palette take away from a photo, or does it add style.

 

If you miss the magic of film, check out DxO FilmPack 3. It lets you enhance your imagery by recreating some of the most famous film stocks in the history of photography. Remember Kodachrome, Ektachrome, Ilford HP5, Tri-X, T-Max, Veliva, Reala and good old Kodak Gold 200? All of these and many more are included in the FilmPack 3 software, along with a number of toning and cross processing effects, and the ability to adjust the grain, saturation and intensity of any of these films and save your combinations as presets.

 

Even though it has a really easy interface, DxO FilmPack 3 lets you work on and save high resolution Tiff and Jpeg files, and it works in 32 and 64-bit, either as a standalone application or a plug-in with Photoshop, Elements, Lightroom and Aperture. It’s a very powerful program that offers endless creative options, whether you’re processing for fun, or for pro quality work.

 

Usually priced at $79, this week you can get DxO FilmPack 3 for only $39 at Photowhoa. Considering all that's included in the pack, the 39 bucks is pretty reasonable; at least that’s what I thought when I downloaded it yesterday. Give it a try. Have fun. Create art.

 

 

 

Who thinks that the occasional use of Tilt Shift techniques are pretty cool? Me. I do! You too? Ok, now who wants to run out and buy a $1,700 tilt shift lens? Don’t worry, you’re not alone, few of us have thrown up our hands. 

 

Fret not. Here’s a cool technique that you can do in Photoshop to recreate Tilt-Shift effects. I stumbled across this trick awhile back and use it sparingly in my photography. The key word is “sparingly.” Nothing gets old faster than too much Tilt-Shift. Now that I've given you this link, promise me that you won’t overdo it.

 

 

If you haven’t seen this before, here's a funny graphic that shows how photographers actually spend their time, as opposed to how people think we spend our time. Enjoy. Laugh. Of course, this applies to just about every kind of job. People always think things are cool than they really are, right?

 

That’s all for now, have a great weekend with your camera and enjoy the recent posts if you missed them on the blog!

 

Best,

 

Dan

 

 

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