Single-Serving Photo

It has been about a month since my last post, but it feels like an eternity. There is so much going on right now and I have a lot of pots on the stove, so this will be the first of a few update posts to bring you all up to speed.

Canada is beautiful. I was able to spend a few days in Algonquin Provincial Park, the first park established in Canada and a sizable (7,000+ square kilometers, which is 1.7 million acres) wildlife sanctuary. The early spring is the best time to get up there because the moose come out of the woods and let me tell you, they are everywhere. My trip happened to coincide with Michael Reichmann’s Moose Workshop 2008, but I swear it was a coincidence.

I’ll have photos of that excursion posted soon.

Chicago is also beautiful, though perhaps in a different way. My Chicago Loop Workshop is coming up next month, it’s just a three-day affair, very informal, and should be a lot of fun. At this very moment, I still have three seats open, so now is a good time to register if you want to join us! The cost is just $449.

I’ll be running this workshop along with Chris Blake from The Curious Lens, though his website is undergoing a complete overhaul right now so there isn’t too much to see. We are going to visit all of the main architectural attractions in Chicago as well as Navy Pier, the “bean” and Millennium Park, and so forth. There will also be time for critique and review, maybe even some Lightroom/Photoshop tutorials if anyone is interested.

Santa Cruz is even more beautiful, especially in the summer! In July, Chris and I will be at Calypso Imaging in gorgeous downtown Santa Cruz, a city of artists and free-thinkers directly on the coast of central California, teaching a three-day digital workflow course, focusing on organizing and processing images using Lightroom and Photoshop CS3. If you keep taking more and more photos every day and want to tighten up your cataloging and processing, register and join us! This course is only $400.

I’ll also be doing a workshop with the inimitable Dan Heller in October in gorgeous Woodstock, Vermont, right about the time when the fall foliage should be strongest. Read about the workshop and register on Dan’s site. This workshop is all-inclusive, which means you only need to make your way to Woodstock somehow and the rest is taken care of. Dan, Chris, and myself will all be giving instruction, so there should be no difficulty in getting your questions answered.

If you have questions or suggestions about my workshops, leave a comment here!

The absolutely wonderful and thorough camera review site dpreview.com has (finally) added lenses to its repertoire. Not only will they investigate lenses with the same hands-on depth that their camera reviews enjoy, but they have also rolled out a custom Flash-based, interactive widget that allows you to change the settings of the lens and view its sharpness, chromatic aberration, geometric distortion, and falloff (vignette) live (small screenshot to the right). I played with the tool for a little while and was blown away by how easily it allows you to see what the real-life sharpness of the lens is at different distances from center and at different f-stops. Amazing.

If you want to, jump directly to the announcement on dpreview.com, or, for the really impatient, directly to the lenses.

They only have four lens reviews posted at the time of this writing, but I’m sure there will be many more in the coming weeks. It can’t be easy to put together such incredibly detailed analyses.

It has been said that a photograph isn’t truly done—that it doesn’t completely exist—until it has been printed.

Whether you believe printing to be the absolute culmination of your photographic efforts or not, you will undoubtedly have an ongoing need to print your images nonetheless, whether it be for presentation; to give as gifts; to make cards, calendars, or other products; or to wallpaper your bathroom (snap a quick photo of that if you do!)

Here are some services that may come to your aid. (more…)

The Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA (I like to say it “pa-hum-sah” just to be a jerk), dropped a bomb on us recently with a new set of regulations governing lithium-based batteries in public transportation (chiefly air travel, but presumably any transportation system under the DOT’s oversight).

Of concern are so-called primary lithium or lithium metal batteries as well as the somewhat more common lithium ion batteries so familiar to photographers. The regulations basically prohibit loose spare batteries in checked baggage and also place a number of other restrictions on the number and variety of batteries that can be kept in carry-on luggage.

I became concerned because I will be flying out to the California coast at the end of February to scout locations for future art photography workshops and making that voyage across the country is enough of a hassle without TSA inspectors throwing all of my batteries away.

Here I will make a valiant effort to summarize what has already been said by others and tell you why I think this “emergency” might be somewhat blown out of proportion. Continue after the jump! (more…)

If you’d like to see some of the most incredible and moving images from 2007, do take a few minutes (or more than a few minutes) to flip through Reuters’ “Pictures of the Year.”

There are over 100 photographs from all over the world captured during some of the most pivotal events of 2007, many of which I actually didn’t hear about until now. It’s amazing exactly how much happens in a year that we can be completely unaware of.

While these are photojournalism images, many of them could effortlessly qualify as fine art.

Without further ado, Reuters’ Pictures of the Year 2007