Hi ,
I hope you’re enjoying the first few days of 2017! I always liken new years to blank journals, you start them off by staring at a big stack of empty pages and you wonder how you’ll fill them in the coming days, weeks and months.
It’s really exciting to look forward with anticipation and wonder what kinds of photos we’ll take this year, what places we’ll visit and how much we’ll improve as a photographer and an artist/creative/person on this planet.
After all, we only have so many days ahead of us, so it’s important to consider what we’ll do with them. I hope you find some time in the next few weeks to consider what your goals are this year, whether they revolve around the camera or not. How will you spend the hours, days and weeks in your life during the next twelve months? Whatever you do, I wish you the best of luck in 2017 and hope that you’ll keep in touch and share stories and photos of your adventures with me.
I’ve got some exciting things planned for the coming year. I already have my 2017 Midnight Sun Overnight Glacier Photography Workshop on the calendar for June 23-25. This is going be a really fun workshop- we had a blast at last year’s version, and I’m really looking forward to running this again- I hope you can join em. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Next month, I’m scheduled to co-lead a two-day photography workshop with renewed adventure photographer Ace Kvale. I’m super psyched about this because he’s one of my own idols. That’s Feb 17-20 in Valdez, Alaska, during the Ice Festival.
I’m also looking at doing more presentations and mini workshops in other areas around the country. For you Fuji shooters, we’ve got the Fujifilm X Photographers Summits in April 5-9 in the Great Smoky Mountains and September 6-10 in Portland, Oregon. I hope you can make it to one of those. Watch for more dates and announcements in the next few weeks.
And I’ve got a couple of trip ideas on the burner, one of which is the UK. I’ll likely be heading across the pond to do some exploring, bike touring and photographing over there for a few weeks this spring. Stay tuned. I’ll let you know when I have some details fleshed out, as I know that quite a few of you guys live over there. I’ll be excited to come over and meet some of my UK brothers and sisters!
Download My Free eBook - USING LENSES
Last week, one of my readers with the initials MT, emailed me and asked for some creative tips on how to use wide angle lenses. After sending him my answers, I decided to sit down and compile a series of tips of using all kinds of lenses.
The result is USING LENSES: A Guide to Getting the Most From Your Glass. It’s a 32-page eBook full of tips and photo examples that’s designed to help you become more proficient with your lenses. I break them down into four types: wide angle, normal, short telephoto and long telephoto, and I give you specific creative techniques that let you take advantage of the optical characteristics of each type.
I’m offering this book as a free download to my newsletter subscribers, so all you have to do is click this link and you’ll get your copy. It’s another way of saying thank you for all of your continued support. I hope you enjoy the guide and I hope you find it useful.
There’s no reason to pay a web designer these days. An increasing number of photographers today are using Wordpress based websites. Including me- I’ve been using Wordpress for over 10 years and I can attest to the flexibility, ease-of-use, and total customization it allows with the back-end dashboard.
Once you install Wordpress, which is free, into your domain, you then choose a template that controls how your site looks. It’s all very easy and there are many tutorials.
One of the photography themes I highly recommend is Photocrati. It’s a widely popular theme built specifically for photographers and visual artists. It comes with over 60 starting designs, complete with many different, photo galleries, right-click-protection and lightboxes, blogging platforms, SEO, responsive display for mobile devices, ecommerce and a limitless amount of customization.
I’ve someone who’s used Photocrati on my main site, I highly recommend their product. Not only does it let you make an awesome looking site, it’s a great company with excellent customer service, and it’s specifically geared specifically towards photographers, because they’re photographers themselves. Everything they do is to help other shooters present their best work in the best way possible.
They’re running a 33% off special today. The entire Photocrati theme, which includes everything in the package, and a full year of awesome support only costs $67 right now. You don’t even need to renew after the year’s up, and either way, you can still use the theme on your site for as long as you want, forever. It's money well spent- believe me. I've wasted tons of time during my career trying to get my website looking the way I want it to, when all I needed to do was get the right theme. I've learned my lesson...
If you use Wordpress or think you’d like to start using Wordpress and are looking for a killer photography website solution, you should definitely check out Photocrati.
Are you in the market for a new lens, or are thinking about expanding your kit with a new creative tool? Check out this list to see the 10 best selling DSLR lenses. Maybe you want one of these in your arsenal. Or maybe you don’t, maybe you just want to see what everyone else uses so you can steer your own way and get something completely different. In either case, you might find this list useful.
Around The Web
New years are a great time to get your house and life in order. Your photography should follow suit. This excellent article by Rob Zeigler touches on a few important things you can do to get your photographic house in order. As someone who spent all last week keywording, captioning and archiving over 5,000 images I shot last year, I can totally relate.
I know a few of you have tried out the new Luminar photo editing app for mac. (It's coming for Windows in 2017). I’ve been using it quite a bit for the past two months and I’m really excited about the program. As a standalone, I use it as a quick and effective way to tweak photos and give them that little bit of extra magic that helps them pop. If you haven’t tried out the demo, I’d highly encourage you to give it a give it a look. If you do use the program, then check out Dan Carr’s Luminar Keyboard Shortcut Guide.
I LOVE Robert Rodriguez Jr.’s blog posts- he has such wonderful insight about photography and creativity. I try to share something of his in just about every newsletter I write. Check out his post The Creative Habit. It really resonated with me, maybe it will with you too.
Copying vs. Stealing. As artists, we all copy from the people we look up to. We’re all influenced by the masters and by other artists who we might have just met, and it’s perfectly normal to bring some of those ideas into our own creative methods. But where does copying end and stealing begin? This short pice by Alastair Arthur does a good job touching on that.
The world we see is what we think it is, not what it actually is. So true. This amazing piece I found on Nature and Wildlife Photography Blog is definitely worth your time.
As always, thanks for reading and thanks for sharing my newsletter with your own friends and followers. Enjoy everything that January has to offer and be sure to keep in touch.
Sincerely,
Dan
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