PixelatedImage Blog

Monument Valley, 2011

With the advent of digital photography, and even more importantly, the internet, our ability to share and experience photographs has changed dramatically. The wet darkroom, once so necessary for creating prints we could touch and feel, is much less common than it once was, and if I were a betting man I’d wager that the majority of digital photographers out there have never printed their own work, and never had the joy of seeing their work large and framed, never felt the richness of a rag paper with their art on it. That impoverishes all of us. High tech, but low touch.

I have always printed my work, though there have been notable hiatuses in my printing, the last 2 years among them. Sometimes I’ve done it myself, to varying degrees of success, and at other times I’ve had anyone from mPix.com to professional printers do my prints. But no matter what, sharing photographs on paper is a beautiful experience. That alone is why I print, and have returned to printing as a student. But there’s more.

I think photographers, and this is something my girlfriend taught me, need to live with their work. Not just on an iPad or laptop, but printed. Large. You need to feel it. Need to live with the lines and tones and moments. Feel the colours. Doing so reveals the flaws (dust spots on the sensor, anyone?), and the weaknesses. Could those lines be stronger? Could there be more tension? Are the colours right? In short, it can return us to craft. It can focus us on more than the momentary experience of seeing a photograph on Facebook, and give the image the dignity of being created in the real world.

For me, this return to printing has pushed me back from the edge of laziness. To see, in 17×22 inch detail, the flaws in my work, has pushed me to become more diligent. Not because I want perfection, but because my art deserves better than to be treated with the flippancy that digital can encourage me towards. And because, like the rest of this past year, it slows me down. It forces me to pay attention. It opens me to renewed receptivity. And, perhaps this is the real reason, the prints are simply more beautiful in my hands and on walls than they will ever be on my screens.

I encourage you, even if you never print at home, to print your work. The artist’s life is about creating and sharing, not creating and hording. If you don’t have a printer, look into mPix.com or WHCC.com and do some test prints with them, or go to your local Costco and try them out. But print your work. Do one a month and at the year’s end you’ll have 12 beautiful prints. Do two of each and at the year’s end you’ll have 12 to keep and 12 to sign and give away as gifts. The ability to see and experience the world, and express that experience through your work, is a gift; keep it moving.

If you’ve not read it, and printing your work yourself intimidates or frustrates you, take a look at Martin Bailey’s ebook, MAKING THE PRINT. It’s $5 and worth every penny. I wish I’d had it 5 years ago.

I’ve been at this over 25 years now. I love it. But as I’ve not let light through an open darkroom door in 15 years, it’s time to learn to print again. One of my goals for my eventual (and premature) return to Vancouver was to dig into printing, so moving into and setting up my new loft and office seemed as good a time to do that as any.

I still have an aging Epson R2400 kicking around, and the prints that come off that beast are lovely, but as technology changes, and 13×19 is a little small, I felt it was time to get something a step up. After reading some reviews and deciding on a budget, I went with the Epson Stylus Pro 3880. Where the 2400 would do prints up to 13″ wide, the 3880 will do 17″, and there’s about 4 years of technological improvements in between the two. Nothing about this craft is cheap, and that applies as much to printing as anything else. The 3880 cost CAD$1329.99 at a London Drugs in Vancouver (special order item). It’s a 9-ink printer and replacement ink will cost about $60/ea – that’s, God help me, $540 if my ink all runs out at once.

I found the perfect printer station for it at IKEA, where the Swedish Mafia gave me a FLYTTA kitchen cart in exchange for $229 and an hour’s worth of assembly aggravation. The printer fits perfectly, and rolls nicely, on large wheels, when I want it over by my desk. And there’s ample space on the shelves below for papers.

I asked a bunch of people about display calibrators and got some great recommendations for the Color Munki and the Datacolor Spyder3 Elite, or Pro. Prepared to go with either, I got the Spyder3 Elite on sale for CAD$70, and calibrated my primary displays – a 27″ iMac and a 27″ LED Cinema Display.

And then I sat down and worked my way through it all with Martin Bailey’s excellent (hey, I published it, I can toot his horn a little!) eBook, Making The Print, which you can find on the Craft&Vision site for $5. It’s a solid introduction to getting through the frustrations of printer setups. The one thing that made the biggest difference? Turning the display brightness way, way down. No more too-dark prints. I skipped the DIY process of profiling the printer itself, but otherwise found Martin’s teaching really clear and helpful.

I also took Martin Bailey’s recommendation on papers and bought a bunch of Optica One and Vibrance Gloss from Breathing Color, saving $20 thanks to a discount code in the appendix of the eBook. Then I asked some folks on twitter and Hahnemuhle Photo Rag kept coming out on top as the favourite, and as I’m a sucker for the texture of good matte paper, I’ll try that one too. While I waited for the papers to come, I downloaded and installed the ICC profiles. The papers arrived the next day, an hour after my printer arrived. Perfect timing. The first test prints off the printer, even without paper profiles being used, were stunning. STUNNING.

So what does this have to do with you? Well, I’m hoping some of the above is helpful, if only to see how relatively easy this is. Easier than setting up a darkroom and mixing chemicals, that’s for sure. I know people get intimidated by printing, but Martin’s book makes it much closer to painless, and with the discount codes in the back of the book, you can save way more than the price of the book. I think it’s also helpful to see how expensive larger-format printing can be – truthfully, for most people at home who won’t be doing print sales or have a need to learn this part of the craft, it’s much cheaper to pay someone else, who knows his craft, to print your work, and let them absorb the cost of the technology, which as you know, is a losing game. Knowing that before you get your feet wet might help save you from, well, really wet feet. Of course there are much cheaper ways to get into printing, among them much smaller printers. Or if someone gives one to you.

GET A FREE EPSON R2400
Speaking of giving away printers: if you’re in Vancouver and want to take my old R2400 off my hands, and will come pick it up, then it’s yours for free and I might make you a cup of tea when you come. If you want it, please leave a comment here (specifically letting me know you want it), with your name and email address and I’ll touch base. I’ll give it to the first person I can get a hold of. Last time I used it (2 years ago), it worked great. You’ll have to get new inks, and download current drivers, but it’s got a nice cover and it’s all there. I just want it to go to a good home and not to landfill site. *UPDATE – The printer’s now gone to a good home.

WIN A SIGNED PRINT
In addition to that I’ve decided to give away the best of the test prints I am doing. So for the next 5 days I am giving away the first 5 prints off the printer. Signed as an artist’s print, these are one of a kind (because each image will be different) and I want you to have them. They’ll only be 8×10, so don’t expect something massive, but it’ll give me something to do with these prints instead of throwing them out or into the recycle bin. Win/Win. What do you have to do? Just put your name and email into the comments (the form is fine, no need to put it in the actual comment) so I can email you if we draw your name, and I’ll randomly choose one every day for the next 5 days, and I’ll send them to you as a gift and a thanks for being among the readers here at the best photography community on the planet. *Update: Comments are now closed, and all 5 winners have been notified. I’ll put the prints into the post today!

Iceland, 2010

I spent part of today doing a second edit – nearly two years after the first one – on my Iceland 2010 images. These second edits are important to me, for two reasons. First, we miss images on our first edit, and the closer that edit happens to the moments of making the photographs, the more we get seduced by those moments, our expectations, and our disappointments. A little distance, like a few months or years, can help bring some objectivity. Or a broader perspective to our subjectivity. Either way, at least for me, it reveals images I had once passed over.

The second advantage is that while the images may not have changed in two years, our vision has, and so has our technique. Revisiting the images for a second edit can allow us to work on those images more slowly, and with an improvement in our craft that we didn’t have two years ago.

Take some time in the coming days to revisit your libraries and give your images another glance, you might be surprised what you come up with. I discovered a dozen images from Iceland and a whole B&W series that was just waiting to be discovered. These are some of them.

Last night, under cover of darkness, Adobe rolled out Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3. And there was much rejoicing. It was fun to watch people quietly realize it had been released, order it and begin to play with the new features. For the first time in my life I was on the inside of a secret little club, complete with NDAs and letters from lawyers and stuff, so that meant I could finally start talking about it. Phew. I hate keeping secrets.

I’ve been living with Lr3 in its various incarnations for months now because Vision & Voice, Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, the third in the vision trilogy, is based on Lr3. So now is a good time to tell you what Vision & Voice is and is not and how it fits into your learning curve for Lr3.

First, Lr3 isn’t – on the outside – vastly different from Lr2. If you know and love Lr2, Lr3 will be an easy upgrade for you. That doesn’t mean it isn’t better. It is. It’s faster and leaner and the image quality, especially with noise, seems noticeably better to me. Most of the tools are the same, though the Post Crop Vignetting has been ratcheted up a couple notches, there’s Grain, and the new ability to remove lens distortion is going to rock people’s worlds too. Import is noticeably different as well.

So, is Vision & Voice the book you want to learn Lightroom 3?

Well, it is and it isn’t. Vision & Voice was written with Lightroom 3 in mind. The screenshots are all from Lightroom 3. But the purpose of the book was not to completely unpack the software for you. In fact I never once leave the Develop module. So Importing, doing slideshows, printing, and making fancy web galleries – you’re on your own and there are bound to be great books out there that teach you those things better than I could. Vision & Voice was written to discuss the aesthetics possible with Lightroom, to help you find a process that works for you but that begins with discovering and articulating your vision for the image and then using the best tools to get there in your workflow. I call it Vision-Driven Workflow. It’s not a system, just an adaptable process to refine your vision in Lightroom.

Will Vision & Voice work for Photoshop, ACR, or Aperture 3 users?

Well, I’ve never used Aperture 3 but like Nikon and Canon cameras have some differences but are essentially just cameras, so too I think are the leading post-processing programs. Basically it comes down to what they call the slider and how you accomplish one change or another, but if you are willing to do a little translation work in your brain, the principles I explore in the book are absolutely transferable. There’s a large-ish chapter in the middle about the specific tools in Lightroom 3 itself, but again I think you can read that with your preferred software open in front of you and get some good learnin’ in.

What about LR2? Surely you aren’t abandoning the Luddites?

Lr3 and Lr2 aren’t profoundly different in the way you do 98% of your development, and this book is all about development. Don’t sweat it. If you use Lr2 you’ll feel right at home with this book.

But I don’t need all this vision-stuff, I just wanna make my pictures look better, man.

This is where I began with this book. So many of us seem to approach our post-processing with the “just make it look better, man!” mentality. I pushed back and said, until we define what “better” means, I can’t help you and you can’t help you. You have to know what your own intent for the image is before you start heading in that direction. So I discuss that. And then we look at 20 of my own images, work through them together from beginning to end. I’ve provided 20 DNG files that you can download when you get the book and work alongside me from beginning to end.

Will we learn really fancy Dave-Hill techniques and Recipes for Awesomeness and the latest Un-Suck Filters?

No you won’t. Shame on you for asking.

When does the book come out?

It went to press last Friday. Should be in my hands by end of the month or the first few days of July. Then it’ll begin shipping from various retailers. Folks who pre-order through Peachpit’s website will get theirs first. Amazon orders will arrive after that.

What if I want to learn Lightroom 3 right now?

Well, my first stop is always the NAPP and that’s where I’ll send you. No doubt the blogosphere is about to explode with posts about new features and they’ll be great, but my go-to place for learning is Kelby and the gang. Go to the NAPP Lightroom Learning Center.

Reading through Vincent Versace’s book, Welcome To Oz, was both a liberating and educating experience for me. While other voices were telling me that should do things one way, Vincent’s book came along at the right time and told me I was free to do it another way. Of course, that’s not how he put it at all, but he does things in a way that felt intuitive to me, and so gave me permission to do things “my way.” That’s the long way of saying that I like what Vincent teaches and I like how he teaches it. So when I started watching his new DVDs it was a little like coming home. I haven’t watched nearly all of them because Vincent puts a lot on these things, and the stuff he teaches isn’t remedial – it’s solid stuff that takes active learning to absorb and adapt – but I wanted to point you to them before the pre-order pricing of 59.95 per title expires.

So rather than go over the whole thing, I want to point you to Vincent’s DVD’s here. The new ones are Welcome To Oz 2.0, Lesson One and Lesson Four, and you can find them HERE along with pre-order pricing. You also get a free copy of OnOne’s fantastic selective focus plug-in FocalPoint, along with some other plug-ins.

I’ll let you go to Vincent’s site to read the descriptions. What I love about what Vincent teaches is that he takes the notion of serving your vision to the logical extreme. The man is a master craftsman with a profound respect for the print and the techniques that get you there. If you’re looking for a masterclass in post-production work that touches heavily on some of the stuff I talked about in Drawing The Eye, Vincent’s the man. Like I said, it’s not remedial, and it’s not fluffy, but it’s huge bang for the buck in terms of education, and the free software takes it over the top.

While we’re on that subject, OnOne software just announced Plug In Suite 5 which won’t ship until next month but that can – like Vincent’s DVDs – be got on discount if you pre-order. More information is HERE on the OnOne site. I have only recently started using this suite and am loving the possibilities it brings to my work. Even the frames, which I didn’t think I’d have much use for, are truly fantastic, and FocalPoint rocks. Photographers with consumer clients will get tons of bang-for-buck out of Plug In Suite 5, which you can demo or purchase on the OnOne site HERE

DRAWING THE EYE – Creating Stronger Images Through Visual Mass is the third eBook in the series. It’s about understanding and using the ways in which the eye reads a photograph in order to create more powerful images, and it’ll change the way you look at your craft. Broken into 4 parts, Drawing The Eye looks at this concept of visual mass, or visual pull, in concept, in camera, in post-processing, and then through creative exercises related to each of these sections.

Don’t let the egghead title fool you, this is not academia; it’s a real-world discussion about making images that are more powerful because they’re made with a fuller understanding of where the eye moves in an image, and how that understanding can change the way you shoot and process your images.

Like TEN and TEN MORE, DRAWING THE EYE is a 32-page downloadable eBook, in PDF format, and it’s available now for $5. We began selling these for $5 as introductory pricing, and were planning to make the usual pricing $10 but as long as you keep giving me such positive feedback and telling the world about them, I think we’ll just keep them at $5, if that’s cool with you.We’ve switched e-commerce engines too. So many people experienced issues with Lulu that we’re now using the much more reliable E-Junkie, so the whole experience ought to be easy.

You can order it right here, right now with the buttons below, or head over to the bookstore section of the site.

After Friday’s post on how I deal with white balance, I got a nice email from Ryan Marco asking me about how I go about metering. He asked a lot of good questions about how I determine where and how I meter the light in a scene. Many of you might have the same questions. And I’m about to disappoint you with my answer. I just point the thing and shoot.

First some background. When I shot film I got very good at taking readings off anything that was middle grey, or close to it, and then, using the Zone system, making adjustments from there. Those were simple times. I never used a handheld spot meter, never got too bent out of shape about things, and bracketed a stop in either direction when in doubt. It didn’t hurt that I was using mostly negative film with a broad dynamic range.

So when I tell you my approach to metering in digital leans to the side of simple, you know the background. As with white balance issues, life is just too short for neuroses on this matter. I lean towards the artist more that the geek most times anyways.

But here’s the bigger issue; it doesn’t matter. I suspect I’m going to get in trouble for this, so the caveat is that this is what works for me. But the thing is, digital capture is different than film. What matters, assuming you’re going to take the digital negative into the digital darkroom, is getting the best digital negative. The best digital negative is not the one that looks perfect on the LCD screen. It’s not the one where you nail the exposure using a spot meter. It’s the one (wait for it, this is paradigm-shifting stuff, here) that has the most digital information, even if it looks like crap on the LCD.

I cover this in Within The Frame (pg 44-46) but let me take another stab at it here.

The more digital information in that digital negative, the more able you are to create a final print with greater quality, less noise, and more awesomeness. So before I go into this, you need to remember: the image on the LCD will most likely look like crap. That’s OK. Use the LCD to preview composition and focus, and then pay attention to the histogram to determine exposure.

How do you know you have the best possible digital negative with the most digital information? The histogram. Forget studying your metering modes and learning the fancy voodoo light mojo. Learn to read your histogram, that cryptic graph of peaks and valleys on the LCD screen. You might have to consult your manual to find out how to access this. For most Canon DSLRs you just press the preview/play button and then the info button once or twice until your histogram appears.

This is the histogram from Adobe Lightroom, but the one on your LCD will look similar. The histogram above represents a scene captured with no blown highlights – notice the mountains and valleys don’t go off the right-side of the chart – and no plunged shadows – notice the data doesn’t go off the left-side either.

Now, I’m going to assume you know nothing about the histogram. It’s a graph, that’s all it is, and it’s deceptively simple. that graph represents the light values in the scene you’ve just captured at the exposure values you’ve captured it at. On the far left are shadows with no details, totally plunged shadows of darkness. On the far right are highlights with no details, total burned out whiteness. And between those two extremes are all the tonal values from black to white. The height or shapes of the peaks and valleys, for this exercise, don’t matter. Ignore them. You can do something in-camera with where the peaks and valley sit from left to right, but can’t do a thing about their height or shape. That’s the scene. Ignore it.

Why the histogram matters now gets – for a moment – a little more complicated. It’s logical that as long as you get the whole scene into the box of the histogram – neither wildly over nor under-exposed – you can tweak the rest in Lightroom and be done with it. Simple, perfect exposure, right? Wrong. You’ve created a digital negative but not a good one. Why? Because the histogram reflects some quirky math that can only be understood by wizards and occultists, and it doesn’t respond to the logic of mortals like you and I.

Remember I said the best digital negative was the one with the most information? Well the right half of the histogram is capable of storing exponentially more information in it than the left half. WAY more information. And the right quarter of the histogram, WAY more than the other three combined. How much more? Again, I’m simplifying, but if the right quarter of the histogram can hold 2000 levels of information, the quarters to the left of it can hold 1000, 500, and 250 respectively. There isn’t much information at all in the darks. That right quarter of the histogram can hold twice what the rest of the entire histogram can hold.  It’s a WAY bigger bucket, can hold more information. More information means better image quality and more flexibility in the digital darkroom before noise becomes an issue.

So what do you do with this knowledge?

Here’s how I approach exposure. First, I shoot on AV mode or Manual almost 100% of the time. I leave my metering on whatever your camera’s equivalent of centre-weighted average is. Then I take the shot. Click.

Before you look at the images/histograms: I did this in Lightroom as a simulation only and it’s meant to be an illustration, so don’t get hung up on the EXIF displayed on the histogram, it won’t change and will only confuse you. Look at the image relative to the how the information is distributed in the histogram.

I look at the histogram. Way too dark. Barely has any information in the right half, never mind the rightmost quarter. Then I use the EV+/- function on my camera, push the exposure a stop, try again. Click.

Getting better. But while the image LOOKS OK-ish on the LCD screen, the histogram is telling me otherwise. It is still, in terms of a good digital negative, underexposed. So I go back to my EV +/- and bump it another stop. Click.

Much better. Might be a little light for my taste, and where’d my clouds go? Doesn’t matter, I know they are there because none of the scene has disappeared off the edges of the graph. You’ll bring them back in Lightroom or Aperture. Look at the histogram – it’s where it should be, as far over to the right without going off the end. What matters is that now you have LOTS of digital information.

Now I have a digital negative with as much information as possible I can bring the image into the darkroom and adjust it as necessary. In this case I like the luminosity of the boat and the ocean but it was the clouds in the initial scene I loved and have lost. Should have had an ND grad filter in my pocket but didn’t. So in this case I’ll use the gradient filter in LR to darken the sky and punch the clouds – Clarity rocks for this. I’ll make a few more tweaks – including a grad filter along the bottom with Clarity set to -100 to soften foreground waves, and the brush tool with bumped exposure, brightness and clarity to pop the sails.

Here’s the final image (crappy composition and all)

So the name of the game is getting to know your histogram so you can create the best possible digital negative. And the best possible digital negative is what, class? The one with with the most information. There will be times when you have a scene with a larger range of tones than the camera can capture. In this case you have options; several of them. Decrease that range with the use of ND grads to reign in the highlights, or a flash to pop the shadows. Or you might take 3-5 bracketed exposures and bring them together in Photomatix or Photoshop. Or you can just make a choice to create an image with either plunged shadows and/or burned out highlights. (page 45 in Within The Frame has a great example of an image with a histogram that goes wildly off both ends.)

My way isn’t the only way, I’m sure of it. But it’s what works for me. I used to meter then shoot, now I shoot then meter. “Same, same, but different,” as they say in Asia. Does this help? Questions?

If this was helpful and you want more, or if my lunatic ravings didn’t convince you, I urge you to spend $9.95 and download Darwin Wiggett’s article Expose Right. You can find that article HERE on Darwin’s site. Highly recommended.

I traveled once with a photographer obsessed with white balance. He routinely accessed the deeper menus on his Nikon and played with changing the parameters on his white balance, as though he was on a quest to discover the perfect magic setting. He quizzed me about color casts and how I set my white balance, and I think it truly deflated him to discover that not only was I not in possession of Kabbalistic knowledge on white balances, but that I actually didn’t seem to care. When I told him I just set my camera to auto white balance he looked like I’d just kicked his kitten.

Like so much in the photography world we’re very good at getting sidelined by issues counterfeiting as important. Now, there’s some work that’s colour-critical, and for that it’s important to nail your white balance. Get a grey card, do a custom white balance, and do it right. But for the rest of us, it’s a matter of interpretation. And I find it amusing because the same people that want to know “if that image is photoshopped” are the same ones that are prone to making good and sure the image is perfectly colour-balanced. But it’s important to remember that for most of us it’s more critical that the colour balance of the image be an ally in what we’re trying to communicate than to be perfectly accurate. It is, to put it another way, completely subjective. It’s a matter of interpretation.

This post isn’t about white balance. It’s about remembering what matters and focusing on that. I read a pop-theology book several years ago called “Adventures in Missing The Point” and while I’ve mostly forgotten the contents, the title of the book taught me so much. It is still a constant reminder not to get sidelined from the task at hand. That task will be different for all of us, we all photograph for different reasons. What matters is that you keep the main thing the main thing. In the case of white-balance, if your work is colour-critical, then by all means freak out about your white balance either in capture or in post. You have to. But if your work is a matter of interpretation or expression, then the “right” white balance is the one that allows your photograph to best express your vision, and as such I suggest you spend less time getting it “right” and more time playing with it. The same goes for everything. Craft matters, so does technique, but for most of us they serve our vision and are an act of expression. As such, all bets are off.

The image above is essentially the same one, set to different colour temperatures. Which one’s right? Doesn’t matter. What matters is which one most closely aligns the image to how I think and feel about the Paris Metro. Want to know the top-secret way I deal with colour-balance? I set the camera to Auto White Balance. I shoot in RAW. I bring the image into Lightroom and push sliders around until it looks the way I want it to. Not very technical, you say? Life’s too short.

By the way, I love kittens, so please don’t call PETA or send nasty emails. Instead, put that rage to good use and go play with your white balance. Try setting it to something wildly irresponsible and see what happens.

Two questions came out when I posted this month’s wallpaper last week. So it’s a Two-fer this week.

The Big Q
“I like this monochrome look. What was the original color/colors? Do you “see” these monochrome image when you are there shooting? Was this one of those cases where you look at the computer screen and see a grey uninteresting sky and wonder, how can I save this? Just wondering if you had this vision for the picture when shooting, or later.” – Chris

“Love your Wallpaper today.  I’m partial to the blue one, though I like both.  Was wondering how you put the calendar on the image.  Where did you find the calendar template? Or did you create it?” – Lisa

The Big A
Thanks to both of you. This shot was taken first thing in the morning en route to a location. I was truly captivated by Bangladesh. Dawn and dusk were really magical times – the light, the trees, the endless rice patties. Loved it! And as we pulled closer to our location this one morning I saw this and begged the driver to stop. I shot a couple frames with my 70-200/2.8L on my 5D MkII, and then the moment was gone. (EXIF, 200mm, 1/1600 @ f/2.8, ISO 100.)

Chris, you asked about my choices in rendering the tones in these images, so I’ll be straight up with you. The blue was a choice made specifically for this wallpaper. I’d played with it and liked the idea of doing two versions so folks had a choice – blue seemed a natural. And in the end it does echo the peaceful feeling I got from the scene. But my heart is still in the version with the green tones because it’s how I saw the scene. I’m posting the original raw file here so you can see the un-toned image. It’s had contrast added via the tone curve, and I let Lightroom Auto tone it, but other than that, nothing.

But this raw negative doesn’t speak at all to the mood and feel of the place, the greens, the humidity, the back-in-time feel, so I made adjustments to the tone curve, added a couple gradient filters, punch the clarity to boost mid-tone contrasts and then used the Split Toning – blue in the highlights and green in the shadows -  to give it the mood I felt when shooting. I also did some tidying up with the clone tool to get rid of a couple errant branches on the edge of the frame. Here they are side by side:

As you can see there’s nothing wrong with the sky, I could have gone several ways with this image but saw it through, I think, very nostalgic eyes, so wanted to interpret it that way. I don’t ever see it as fixing, but interpretation.

Lisa, you asked about the calendar element. I can’t tell you how much email I get about this. Shocking. It’s a simple Photoshop image with all numbers, etc. on different layers. After I’d done a year of calendars I had versions with all seven variants of which day the month begins on so now it’s as simple as turning on or off the 31st day every now and then. February is a couple extra clicks. Anyways because I like you, I’m going to upload a layered PSD file for all your calendar needs – I’ve changed the fonts to Verdana to be sure you all have the font on your system and to make it a little more generic in an effort to encourage y’all to add your own personality. Click the Calendar thumbnail above – or HERE – to download a zipped PSD file.

Any questions? Class dismissed! Don’t forget that tomorrow the Twitter-view between Peachpit Press and myself, conducted live over the Twittersphere in 140 character bites. More information HERE. It’s a bit of an experiment; should be fun!

On the Artist – Geek continuum I am closer to artisty-fartsy than I am to techno-nerd. My eyes gloss over when things get too technical. As a result, my weakness where this craft is concerned, is keeping my chops up and learning new skills. I’m big on vision and I talk ad nauseum about it, but craft matters and the sharper the tools of my craft the more equipped I am to serve that vision.

So when I saw that the Epson Print Academy was coming to Canada, I signed up for the Pro track and I’m pumped. There are two Canadian dates and they are: Toronto, March 21, so if you want to go, well, ya missed it. Vancouver, May 23rd. If you sign up in Vancouver and you want to get lunch together let me know, if we can get a handful of folks together I’ll reserve a table at Steamworks for lunch. More info – on the Print Academy, not lunch – HERE.

The other thing I’m doing to sharpen my tools is continue my study of light. Last year I really tucked in and began to study how light behaves, how it can be modified, and what that meant in terms of the aesthetics of the image. I made some forays into strobe and flash lighting, began to fiddle with Pocket Wizards more seriously. This year I am finally getting my act together. I’ve assembled a great location lighting kit, at the heart of which are 3 Canon Speedlights, 3 Pocket Wizard Flex TT5s and a MiniTT1. I’m going to be doing a couple little show and tell things in the coming month, but I want to say two things.

First, if you’ve not started to study light, you need to. It’s at the core of what we do and too many people neglect it. Took me 20 years to get to seriously studying it. That’s too long.There are some great books out there. Here’s a couple:

Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting

Minimalist Lighting: Professional Techniques for Location Photography

The Moment It Clicks: Photography secrets from one of the world’s top shooters (Voices That Matter)

The Hot Shoe Diaries: Big Light from Small Flashes (Voices That Matter)

Second, the new Pocket Wizard system rocks. It is awesomeness x 1000 and I’ve double-checked the math on that. I can do wireless highspeed E-TTL flash. No more is the aesthetic of my image determined by the aperture required to get my shutter down under 1/200. And, the things I learn from Joe McNally’s teachings about flash, I can suddenly apply them in a way that makes sense to me. Being able to shoot at 1/6000 and f/1.2 and instantly adjust the flash EV compensation from right on the camera? Absolutely the most awesome thing ever. Some of you are rolling your eyes, but for me this is so awesome it makes me giggle like a schoolgirl and  that ain’t pretty but it should give you some idea how excited I am. When the tools work right and just get out of the way, the work of being creative becomes so much more intuitive and the images get better. I love it when that happens. For more info go straight to the source and look them up HERE.

Two small things, steps to improve my craft in the direction that doesn’t normally come naturally to me. You gotta be proactive about your education in this craft. I suggest making sure you read a couple books, take a workshop, find a mentor. Got a piece of gear you don’t use ’cause it scares the heck out of you? Time to pick it up and play. Have a weakness when it comes to using a particular lens or technique? Time to slay that dragon and get on with making some great images.

What are you doing this year to sharpen the tools? Share it with us, it might just inspire someone to try something they hadn’t considered.

In Vancouver and want to sharpen your tools, leave a comment about that too, I’m thinking about starting a get-together for just such a thing. A loose collective of photographers who get together to play, experiment, sharpen the tools. Whaddya think?