A follow up to The Resolution of Film. These are quick and dirty observations about film vs digital while I write a larger article on the topic.
This post is about the dynamic range of film – something film is famed for in photography.
Actually, I should be specific. It’s negative film, both black and white and colour, that has a highly regarded dynamic range – usually considered to surpass that of digital. For transparencies / slides (e.g. Velvia), this is actually the opposite as film of this type actually has a …

Today someone asked me to elaborate about my reference yesterday to the Canoscan’s 8800F “budget” characteristics … here’s a quick summary and a comparison with a Nikon Coolscan 5000.
As a very quick introduction, the Canoscan is a budget flatbed scanner from Canon. It has a high max DPI resolution and retails at the very low price of somewhere between $160 – $200. When I first got the scanner, I was amazed that it could support such a wide variety of film formats – from 35mm film to MF to regular …

I’ve always wanted to use an online self publishing / photo book service and recently I finally made time to give it a shot. I wanted to create Akuri a Christmas gift – a photo book of our beautiful dog who left us this year, Ume – so I chose blurb.com’s offering. On the blurb site, they offer a download for their book making software ‘Booksmart’. Once installed on your PC (or Mac), you get to choose from several book styles such as:

Small Square (7″ x 7″)
Standard Landscape (10″ …

A couple of people asked me how I created the panoramic look in yesterday’s triptych. Here’s a post containing a couple of the original images which made up the final version which provides an easy answer to that question.

I arguably prefer the shots in this format, which fits so well with my recent style and Horizons project – but there’s something about seeing the three shots sandwiched together that makes me want them presented in a triptych. I also think they’ll print well like that (which I’ll try tonight).
All three …

Most people who use Photoshop will already be aware of plugins by NIK software, including Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, etc. I’m generally in two minds about their plugins – on one hand I’ve seen them put to fantastic use, with photographers creating wonderful post processed images… on the flip side, like some Photoshop techniques which are easy-to-use-but-hard-to-master, I’ve seen them horribly overused.
Well the other day I did a quick search for a free processing plugins for Photoshop and came across OptikVerve Lab’s virtualPhotographer, a free filter plugin for …

Day 2 started by leaving Reno in the morning and driving 8 hours South, stopping off for occasional leg stretching, photoshooting and a rosie lee. At around 6pm we arrived at the top of Death Valley National Park and began the 30 minute decent into the park. Being a man who doesn’t like to overplan these sorts of things, I hadn’t arranged a parking spot at the campground (for which we had no camping gear anyway). After 24 hours of driving over two days, I started to look a little …

This ad is cool. I first saw it about a year and a half ago when an agency in Singapore called me into their offices to talk about an idea they had for a commercial spot. It’s of the Rebel XSi.

There’s some background on the web regarding the making of this advert – for that 30s spot, Canon hired 10 photographers and over 70,000 shots were taken. Impressive.
The reason why I was pulled in was because the agency wanted to pitch a similar idea to their client (a corporate bank). …

Chase Jarvis is an award winning, internationally renowned photographer based in Seattle, WA. While Chase is well known for his innovative commercial work, he has also gained a large following through online forums due to his willingness to share advice / tips on his blog, his inspiring collection of personal photography and his advocacy of social networking.
“The Best Camera is the one that’s with you” is his latest initiative, a 256 page photography book featuring only images taken with his iPhone. The book was released in 2009, and also coincides …

While I don’t shoot Nikon as frequently anymore, I was an avid D200 user for almost all of 2006 (and still own a D70 which I travel with). About halfway through the year I switched to RAW and wanted to…

This is a post that is unashamedly geeky. You see I’ve always liked Apple hardware. Partly to do with the design – which is the closest that IT has ever come to being cool, but also the little ergonomic details…