Hi Everyone! Hope you had a great week! This week I want to talk about the modern Photographer and how the role of Photographer has changed. Not too long ago if you wanted Pretty Pictures you called a Photographer to come and take them. You were assured that these photographs were well exposed and looked like the people or places you wanted represented. Pretty Pictures. If you lived in a small town like I did as a teenager (back in the 70's ) with the population of only 5000 there were only a few people that had SLR cameras and knew how to take Pretty Pictures with them.  So photography wise you were a Big Fish in a small town. And it was that way for decades before and after when I was a teenager. But then digital came about.  Smart Point and Shoot cameras and then smart phones, iPads, camera's everywhere in your computer even in your car when you back up. And they can all take Pretty Pictures and even video.  Everyone reading this has a smart phone in their possession that can take Pretty Pictures and do what it took hours of work to do for a Photographer in my day in seconds.  A perfectly exposed Light House Stairs photograph can be taken by anyone by pulling a smart phone out of their back pocket and "Click" boom there it is. Smart phones have come to the point where they can be used for professional work. For quick snapshots for the local paper, to real-estate Photography. The smart phone and point and shoots have changed the meaning of Photographer as we used to know it. So why do we as Photographer's keep buying big fancy camera's and lenses? We can take "Pretty Pictures" with our cell phones? Because there is more to Photography than just taking Pretty Pictures!

Goldsboro Fire House One reason is the joy of the experience of taking a photograph. If you take a long road trip its not really just the destination its the journey. To me photography is like that. I love the process of photography. Making a composition then deciding what aperture to put the camera at. What about shutter speed on moving subjects. Do I need a tripod for a longer exposure? I love this process even more than the final result. Its all the stops you make along the way (the journey) of taking the photograph. The act of not letting the algorithm of a smart phone decide for me what all of the settings should be and what the photograph should look like.

Another reason is taking photographs that aren't Pretty Pictures. Using your camera to take abstract art or light that you can't even see like infra The MetroCommuters waiting for the Metro in Washington DC. red photography. Super long exposures of scenes that remove all of the people because they were walking by. Blurry photographs to show an emotion of a scene. These are all things that you can't do with your smart phone.

As you can see Photography is more than the end result. It is much more than how many likes you can get. Its more than the pretty sunset or sunrise or that beautiful waterfall. Its about experiencing the people and the places you go and how you got there or met them. Photography to me is a way to get out into the world and experience new things. Bringing a camera has gotten me out of the house and let me see things through a new Dice window. It has been a my Passport to the world.  It has led me to new friends and experiences that a smart phone would never do. It has changed me from a "living to work" mentality to "working to shoot or working to live" way of life. Photography, especially in recent years has shown me new places and things that I would have never got to do or see through my lens if I didn't have the fancy camera. 

Oops, I've gotten on a tangent again and started talking about me again. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you just want Pretty Pictures use your smart phone.  You will get a perfectly exposed photograph. But if you want to live the life of a Photographer don't take Pretty Pictures and get yourself one of those fancy camera's and start the journey of a lifetime of photography. Photography is one of the hobbies that you can do your whole life.  They can wheel you Wine glass Splash outside while your at the rest home while you're clutching your camera and you can look up and take photos of the clouds. Being a Photographer is a life long journey.  So until next week get outside and shoot!
 

  DCIM\101GOPRO Hey Everyone! Hope you had a great week! This week I want to talk about Mistakes we all have made in photography. Now I'm not talking about when your learning the exposure triangle but after your a pretty good photographer but still beginning.  Some of these mistakes have thrown me for a loop for hours of me trying to find out what in the world is going on.  Trying to blame on my camera when it was just me and something I have done or  not done. Hopefully after reading this if you do the dumb thing that I've done you'll recognize it quicker than I did. So here we go with the list of 5 mistakes.

1. Everything is blurry when I look through the camera. Have you ever been shooting and while your looking through the camera every thing looks a bit blurry but when you preview on the back of the camera or use Live View everything looks ok? Well this happens to me quite a bit and its easy to fix.  What has happened is that you have bumped your diopter adjustment on your camera.  It's the little wheel that is just beside the eyepiece of your viewfinder. It is used to make corrections for folks that use glasses if they aren't using them. It only effects the view finder of your camera. Simply look through the viewfinder and look at the settings on the screen if they are blurry simply move this dial until they are sharp and now everything will be sharp when you look through the view finder.

2.  I press the shutter but nothing happens. This happened to me when I first got a new camera.  I went to a festival and was going to shoot all of the interesting things happening there with my new camera.  When I first went into the festival and took that first shot and nothing happened. I turned on and off the camera to see if that would fix it but nothing.  I tried and tried and nothing. What had happened is I had accidentally pushed the button or dial in my case and put the shutter to a 30 second time delay. So when I pushed the shutter nothing happened.  It took me quite a while sitting on a bleacher at the festival trying to figure out the menu of my new camera to figure out what had happened.

3. I take the shot and it seems brighter or darker than usual. This one has happened to me and it actually has a few causes that will make your camera do this.

- The first one is that you accidentally hit the ISO button and put your ISO way too high causing the sensor to be way too sensitive to light than it needs to be and the photo or photo's turn out too bright. Yep I've done it shooting along at 400 ISO and all of the sudden I'm at 25000. I had hit the button on the back of the camera, I had to reassign that button because I did it so much. 

- The second reason is that I had accidentally put my camera in manual bracket mode.  In this mode your camera at each touch of the shutter makes one dark one light and one just right exposure. Usually when I shoot in bracket mode I have it on continuously make the brackets with one touch of the button. But in Manual it does one at a time.  I have shot like this for hours before I figured out what was happening. I eventually  looked at the back of my screen and made it where I could view a lot of the photo's at one time and I saw the pattern . One Dark, One just right, and one Bright.  Thats when I had figured out what I had done. Luckily it was only set to half a stop of light so I could recover my photo's in post.

-The third one is that I accidentally hit the exposure compensation one way or the other .  I usually figure this one out pretty much because I tend to use the exposure compensation quite a bit but it can happen.

4. Dead Battery or SD card full.  I have seen people do this quite a bit. Especially in the DSLR days when batteries lasted quite a while. You show up at the site and bam battery dead. Whats even worse is if you have a back up battery and haven't charged it you're really dead in the water. The best way to avoid this or a full SD card is preparation before you go to the shoot . Always make sure your batteries are charged and you have a fresh card in your camera. And always carry extra's with you.

5. Spots on your images. When you get home after a longs day shoot you're excited to get your images loaded onto your computer to view.  When you get there you notice that there are spots or a spot on your photo's.  Especially when  your stopped down to F11 or greater.  The sky has spots all in it. You need to clean your sensor! You have dust on it!  Keeping your equipment clean is something we must all do to keep our images clean. It is a simple as wiping down your equipment .  If your sensor is dirty you can clean it but if your too scared too ,take it to someone that you trust to do it like a camera shop.  With mirrorless cameras dust and dirt are more a problem than with old DSLR cameras because the sensor is right there when you change lenses.

So there you go 5 mistakes that we make while shooting.  They can all be avoided if we take the time to learn our camera's and keep them serviced  well. So until next week keep shooting and get outside!

Hey Everyone! I hope everyone had a great week! This week I want to talk about my ever evolving workflow. This year I have been traveling a lot (for me) and trying to incorporate an iPad instead of a laptop into my workflow. My old work flow was Backup SD cards to a mobile SSD Drive, edit some if I'm on the road on a laptop, and wait until I got home to import the majority of my photo's onto Lightroom Classic on my Mac at home then final edits and go to Photoshop if I need to. It has modified here and there but basically has stayed the same. This year I brought a iPad mini into the mix in place of the laptop and the Adobe Cloud.  Still the same workflow until this last trip to Boston where I used my iPad as the main editing tool. So basically here is the new flow. Backup SD cards to a Mobile SSD drive, import to iPad , the iPad syncs these photo's to a SSD drive on my Mac at home and into Lightroom Classic, when I get home turn on my computer the photo's sync from the Adobe cloud.  All the edits that I made from my iPad go to my main computer at home so I'm not wasting time re-doing edits from Lightroom to Lightroom Classic. This has been a game changer for me. I now have all of my photo's on my phone , iPad and Mac and even my Laptop that I really don't use that much anymore. I can edit anywhere with my iPad or even my phone if I wanted too. I don't.  Let me go into a little more detail.

SD card Backup. If i'm on the road backing up my SD card is the same process. I use the RavPower file hub and copy all the info off of the SD card to a mobile SSD external drive. With the speeds of the new iPads using the M1 or the M2 chip and the thunderbolt connection I could use a wired file hub and do the same thing using the files app on the iPad. So that's one copy SD card to the Mobile SSD. Then I will upload files from the SD card into Lightroom (mobile) with the iPad. I import these files into a Album. I use one for the year or create a special one if it's a special trip like Boston was. This will put the files into Adobe Cloud. When the files are in the Cloud I can access them with any of my mobile devices they are also Synced to Lightroom Classic on my Home Desktop Mac to an SSD drive I have connected to the computer. These files will have all of the edits that I make while on the iPad .  SD card to the Adobe Cloud. Two Copies. And last but not least the SD card itself is the Third Copy.  I'll put a new card in if I am traveling and save this one until I am home. If I am home I'll disregard the backing up of the SD card with the RavPower file hub and go strait to the iPad and Adobe Cloud.

After I have the files on the Adobe Cloud then its time for editing. Using Lightroom (mobile edition) I can go through and cull of of my photo's. I do this with placing 1 star on the photo's that I think I want to process. Then I start editing. Using the iPad and Lightroom (mobile) as my main editor I can edit anywhere without having to be chained to a desk. I can edit on the couch or in an airport.  I use the apple pencil to help with these edits and it works great. All of my edits are synced to the SSD drive on my home computer where if I need to take these photo's to Photoshop or say a plugin like NIK tools I can do so for heaver edits. I usually don't do heavy edits so this will only be a couple of photo's out of a shoot.  This was the process when I went to Boston a few weeks ago and it worked great. The majority of my edits were done by the time I got home. I didn't have to get home upload my photo's and start from scratch. After these photo's are done with I let them sit a month or so on my SSD drive that is connected to my computer then I transfer them to an Archive Hard drive I have hooked to my MAC desk top and they are automatically synced to a Back Blaze Cloud service I have. Thats about it. 

What do you need to do this workflow? Well you'll need an iPad with the Lightroom (mobile) app installed. If you are already a subscriber to the photographers special from Adobe (which you should be) you already have all you need. I think you get 20 gigabytes of storage in the Adobe Cloud with this package and the latest and greatest in Lightroom Classic, Lightroom (mobile) and Photoshop. You will just have to go through the setup process to get everything synced. I have all of my winner shots from all of my years of digital synced to the Cloud and onto my mobile devices from Lightroom Classic and now I am syncing all of my photo's I take now to the cloud. There will have to be some sort of cleanup process so I don't use up all of my cloud storage. I haven't quite figured out all of the details on that yet. I'll let you know when I do. It might be as simple as deleting them from the cloud and putting all of my winners back into the syncing collection that goes to the cloud. That way I'm only saving the winners on the cloud. I'll have to figure that out. Using the iPad and the pencil makes editing very easy and convenient. Now I have been using an iPad mini and not the newest version to do these edits and have not had a problem at all with speed or editing. I do plan to upgrade this year to an iPad pro which will have the new "M" chip in it which is suppose to be even faster than my Mac at home. The reason that I'm upgrading is really for the size. This iPad will replace my MacBook air that I have and I will no longer be using Laptops for anything and this MacBook will slowly fade into the sunset and my editing devices will be my iPad and my Mac Desktop at home.  I'm cutting out the laptops altogether in my workflow and everyday computing also. I don't have anything against Laptops especially if that's your main computer and you don't have a desktop version. For me using the iPad has become much more enjoyable.  I have tried this with the big Boston Experiment and the last couple of local shoots I've gone on and it has worked great!  Is this for everyone?  Maybe , Maybe not .  Thats for you to decide but for me having a small mobile device that I can do edits on and it sync to my home computer is a game changer. 

Until Next week keep exploring and trying new things and get outside and Shoot!  Just a update all of the references to the iPad mini I do with the iPad Pro with the M1 chip in it and its fantastic.  But the iPad mini still works and well. Happy Shooting! 

Here’s a little update . I have purchased an iPad Pro 11 inch and am using it I on our annual fall colors trip to the mountains and it is working great! And I have figured out the deal with the Adobe cloud.  You get 20 gig of storage with the Adobe subscription.  So after I get back home and all of my photos are on my main computer I then erase the photo’s off of the Adobe cloud.  Then I get my winners from Lightroom classic and add them to a collection that automatically syncs with Lightroom and doesn’t use hardly any storage and it goes to all of my devices and my Adobe storage shrinks after the erasing of photos ready for the next shoot. So until next week!