Single-Serving Photo

In my instruction I get asked a lot about how the five most fundamentally important settings of the camera work together to achieve the effects you desire. It can be hard to penetrate the curtain of photographic jargon, some of which can seem counterintuitive, so I decided to take a minute to explain all of this stuff at a very high level. If you have specific questions of your own, please leave a comment below and I promise that I will answer them.

The only five settings that you need to know are:

• Shooting mode
• Aperture (or f-stop)
• Shutter speed
• ISO sensitivity
• Exposure value (EV)

After the jump I will explain in detail. (more…)

I’ve read at least one account of how to move photos from one Lightroom catalog to another, which is pretty common if you travel with a laptop and make edits in the field (as I do). It’s a tremendous help to be able to spend hours on the flight home organizing and even editing images, but all of that work would be for naught if there wasn’t a nice, easy way to move those images and their corresponding metadata onto your primary computer.

Fortunately, there is! I will tell you how! (more…)

Our workshop has yet to officially begin, but that doesn’t stop us from getting up well before dawn and catching a taxi down to Navy Pier to get some shooting in. Navy Pier is a “festival marketplace,” to use the term coined by the Rouse Development Company—the same company responsible for designing Quincy Market in Boston and Harborplace in Baltimore—and although it’s overrun with restaurants and eccentric attractions (such as the Amazing Chicago Funhouse & Maze Adventure), there is also a public walkway accessible even when the attractions are closed… Which they are, at 4:45 in the AM.

Here are my favorite shots from this morning. Off to a good start, I would say!

The Ferris wheel at Navy Pier is one of its most remarkable features. Here, it is reflected in the shallow pool surrounding the (currently closed) Wave Swing.

Prints Available—Click to Visit the Gallery

More after the jump! (more…)

This Friday is the first day of our (that is, Art Photo Workshops) Chicago Loop photography workshop. It’s a three-day workshop focusing on the architecture and culture of Chicago for photographers of all skill levels. This is actually our first workshop of 2008, and we have a lot of great stuff planned for later in the year, so keep an eye out.

If you guys have any ideas for workshops you’d be interested in, e.g. places you’d like to go or themes you’d like to see covered, I’m all ears. Leave a comment below or drop me an e-mail (aaron-at-singleservingphoto.com). We are going to be doing some workshops locally here in New England, probably in and around Boston, New York City, Washington D.C., maybe Cape Cod, so if you’re interested in any of those ideas, feel free to drop me a line.

I haven’t posted in quite a while because I’ve been spending all my time working on building the website for Chris Blake’s digital photo printing company, Fine Art Ink. When it launches, you’ll be able to instantly create an account and start uploading images to print, choosing from a whole array of high-quality, archival papers. Every paper on the site will have an ICC profile available for download so that you can soft-proof your images in Photoshop before sending them. Fine Art Ink is outfitted with a cutting-edge wide-format printer capable of printing up to 44 inches wide by 100 inches long!

We love feedback. If anyone has ideas or thoughts about what they’d want to get out of a totally custom photographing printing service, feel free to leave a comment here.

I just watched this entrancing short movie about Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden, known for his up-close and personal imagery from the streets of New York City.

Note how Gilden gets right up to people and even puts an off-camera flash directly in front of their faces. I was amazed at how unabashed he was with his shooting. Gilden is quoted as saying, “I’m known for taking pictures very close, and the older I get, the closer I get.”

I have to admit that photographing people in a street setting actually makes me a little uneasy because I’m always concerned about someone getting angry, but apparently that is not a problem for Gilden.