ken zirkel

The furor across the web about microstock has largely died down, but clearly there are still people out there who are (understandably) threatened by it. The argument, most recently expressed by Kenneth Jarecke in The Online Photographer, goes something like this: Time Magazine used to pay $4,000 for a cover photo, but now they only [...]

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Someone on Reddit asked advice on becoming a professional landscape/wildlife photographer. I’m not a pro, but I’ve followed the industry for a few decades from a few different angles, and I have met a lot of professional photographers. Anyhow, this was my reply:
I don’t want to discourage you. I’d never want to discourage somebody young [...]

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Constantly look at the media all around you. Pay close attention to commercial photography; not photojournalism or art. I’m talking about photos that are used in posters and advertisements, magazine articles, travel guides, church newsletters, even (to some extent) magazine feature articles (not news), etc. What kinds of imagery are they using and why? What [...]

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There is a lot of fear, uncertainty, and doubt about sensor cleaning. Frankly, I think it’s outrageous that there are no good self-cleaning sensor technologies out there. To think that a whole day’s shoot can be ruined because of a foreign object on the sensor that you cannot see until the shoot is over, it’s [...]

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Somebody on an online forum asked if High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography wasn’t “cheating” somehow. My response:
As for whether HDR is “cheating”: I’m sure the first time somebody picked up a digital camera, the film shooters thought it was “cheating.” The first time somebody picked up a Leica, the sheet film shooters thought it was [...]

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NPR’s program “On the Media” has a great piece about portrait photographers and journalistic ethics. They interview some of my favorite portrait photographers including Jill Greenberg, Platon and Martin Schoeller. The basic point of the piece, I think, is how the subjectivity of artistic portraiture — which necessarily reflects the photographer’s own point-of-view — [...]

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There are several alternatives to Photoshop that nobody seems to know about. Here are a few:

Pixelmator is $59 (OSX only)
Lightzoneis $129 for basic, $199 for full version (OSX and Windows)
Portrait Professional is $119 but at this moment on sale for $60 (Windows only)
Flying Meat Acorn, $50 (OSX only)
Helicon Filter, $0-75, Windows only

Note: I don’t actually [...]

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If you have Bridge and Photoshop CS3, why would you want Lightroom?
Lightroom is a complete workflow solution. You can do everything from assign metadata on import to process your photos to manage your printing. Lightroom does everything Bridge does, but easier. Lightroom does a lot of things bridge does not:
1. manage your printing. So if [...]

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Somebody on a Listserv asked if there were alternatives to Flickr. I like Flickr, but it was a good question to answer.
1) You can use desktop software like Photoshop, Lightroom, or iView (or others) to make html galleries. Then upload them to a server by hand.
Example: http://www.zirkel.com/galleries/elmer/
2) You can install a gallery program on [...]

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I love the new image management software from Adobe called Lightroom. These are feature requests I submitted to Adobe:
1) Backup to external media
Lightroom should enable a smart, organized backup of all images (plus metadata?) to CD or DVD or other external media. This should be executable on request, or automatically according to a regular [...]

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