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Water lilies at the Brooklyn Botanical Garden Orchid Show, April 5, 2014. Taken with the Nikon D610 + AF-S Zoom NIKKOR 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 G ED VR. 1/600 s @ f/5.6 -0.67, ISO 800.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Father’s Day with the Ōlloclip.

The Ōlloclip: Three Lenses in one for the iPhone 4 and 4S.
This ingenious little device combines a fisheye lens, wide-angle lens, and macro lens into a single, compact unit. A great Father’s day give for iPhone toting dads.

Friday, June 8, 2012

Exploring the Infrared World

For the past few days I’ve been working the infrared with a vengeance. Working with both the Nikon D50 and D90, I've been able to develop an image capture and post-processing workflow to accommodate the advantages and disadvantages of both.

JPEGs shot with the D50 have a pleasing aesthetic all by themselves that requires little or no processing, unless creative, false-color images are the goal. Ironically, its raw images are harder to work with due to an Adobe Camera Raw white balance issue, which is easily overcome by using Apple Aperture 3.

For D50 JPEGs and monochrome images, ACR and Aperture work quite well. But for D90 images and some D50 raw images industrial strength L*a*b* processing is needed. And channel swapping in RGB is no slouch either. So I now have two actions, one for RGB and one for L*a*b* which set up every viable adjustment so that all I
have to do is click and slide to tweak. They keep the camera raw image as a Smart Object layer, so it can be edited non-destructively. ACR’s noise reduction alone is instrumental in cleaning up the detritus from the enormous color moves possible in L*a*b*.

So now it's time to go out and do some shooting!


Saturday, June 2, 2012

Which K Are You?

Other than using optical filters, White balance is the primary means of controlling color in a digital camera. Normal, Vivid and Neutral color settings control the saturation level of color, but white balance controls the hue or color cast of the image. Cameras which allow you to set the color temperature by degrees Kelvin and the tint by increments of magenta and green offer the most control. The color model of digital cameras is based on L*a*b* color, which uses two opponent color channels, one corresponding to temperature and the other to tint.