There is a 24-hour-only sale at B&H on the following products:
You can now pre-order the new version of Adobe CS6. I haven’t tried the demo myself, but I’m hearing good things about it and intend to upgrade shortly
It happens to (almost) everyone. The pendulum sometimes swings towards enthusiasm, inspiration, and creative work that almost seems to flow all by itself. But pendulums swing both directions, and one of the prices we pay for doing creative work is having to cope with the inevitable dry periods when enthusiasm, inspiration, and creativity are nowhere to be found, periods when you can find yourself questioning your talent and abilities. (I think that one characteristic of “mature” artists is that they understand this cycle and are less likely to be undone by it – both because they are familiar with its existence and because they have learned ways to deal with it.)
I don’t claim to be the definitive expert on this issue, but I have some experience with it in both photography and music. There is much more to be said about this than I have space for here, but I thought I’d share a reply I wrote in a forum where a poster posed the following: Continue reading When Inspiration Takes a Vacation
Over the past few weeks I have had the chance to go through Michael Frye’s new ebook, “Light and Land: Landscapes in the Digital Darkroom.” Many are no doubt already aware of Michael’s reputation from his photography, his workshops, and his other publications including his “Photographer’s Guide to Yosemite” and “Digital Landscape Photography: In The Footsteps of Ansel Adams and the Masters.” I have the .pdf version of “Light and Land”, and I understand that an iPad app version may also be available.
It is typical for photographic “how to” books to focus on specific techniques, and to be organized around a presentation of these techniques – perhaps with a section on curves, a section on black and white conversion, and so forth. This approach has its place, especially for certain types of learners and at certain points in the learning process. It is important to understand the basic techniques and operations that are available in the “digital darkroom” of such programs as Photoshop, Lightroom and so forth. That said, the bigger and more important issue is how to call upon these techniques creatively and effectively and appropriately in order to make photographs. Not all “how to” books do an effective job of illustrating this.
Michael’s “Light & Land” takes a different approach, and one that more accurately and realistically reflects the thought process of a photographer who is calling upon this arsenal of techniques in the service of creating beautiful photographs. He writes:
“The digital darkroom gives us tremendous control over our images. We can make them lighter, darker, add contrast, change the color balance, increase saturation, turn a color photograph into black and white, remove telephone poles, blend exposures with HDR, combine ten images to capture infinite depth of field, or put a winged elephant in the sky.
But what do we do with these choices?” Continue reading Review: “Light & Land” by Michael Frye