ken zirkel

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 [...]

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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 — can [...]

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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, [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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An opinionated evaluation The first and most important observation is that either brand has some very significant strengths, and both brands serve serious professionals the world over each and every day. Either brand offers cameras that are simply marvels of technology. Generally speaking, however, there are some general differences i can point out: Nikon generally [...]

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Whenever you’re traveling anywhere, and you want to shoot photos to sell as stock, the advice is always the same: look at the tourist guides and the postcards and see what kind of imagery is used. Make sure to get the free brochures at the info booths (you can often mail away for those in [...]

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The portrait photographer Platon did a nice series for the Wall Street Journal. On this promotional site, you can see not only Platon’s photographs, but also some behind-the-scenes video of the shoots. Between the inspirational gobbledygook, you can get a tiny sense of what the photoshoot must have been like. Here’s one: Looks like a [...]

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