Ein Beitrag von: Markus Thoma
„Wer sehen kann, kann auch fotografieren. Sehen lernen kann allerdings lange dauern.“ Mit diesem Sinnspruch hat die Leica AG bereits geworben. Manche meinen, ein fotografischer Blick muss angeboren sein. Das ist wie ein Talent. Ich finde aber, man kann mit gezielten Übungen auch aktiv daran arbeiten, seine Sicht in der Fotografie auszuprägen.
kwerfeldein – Fotografie Magazin | Fotocommunity
Today is Day 3 in our 12 Deals of Christmas and we’re slightly worried about server capacity on this one because it’s 70% off our most popular dPS product of 2015 – our very own Lightroom preset collection!
Grab them before the deal ends here.
For just $ 10 USD this deal gets you 101 useful Lightroom* presets. That’s less than 10 cents per preset!
These presets are simple to use, are exceptional quality and will enable you to transform your images in a click. Full instructions are included, so you’ll be walked step-by-step how to install and use them in Lightroom.
Preset bundles like this might set you back upwards of $ 100 on other sites but for today only this pack can be yours today only for just USD $ 10!
Grab yours before time is up.
Note: Even though these presets are just $ 10 each, they are still fully backed by our 60-day money-back guarantee. If you don’t find them useful simply contact our support team within 60 days and we’ll return your $ 10.
*All 101 presets in this pack work flawlessly with Lightroom versions 4, 5 & 6, or Lightroom CC. Lightroom is required to use these presets.
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The post Today Only: 70% Off Our 101 Lightroom Presets Pack by Darren Rowse appeared first on Digital Photography School.
Das Bild des Tages von: Dieter Irschitz
Im Ausblick: Paris 1914, Polarfüchse und Unterwasserkunst
kwerfeldein – Fotografie Magazin | Fotocommunity
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Sigma has created an all-new protective filter, the Sigma Water Repellent (WR) Ceramic Protector, using Clear Glass Ceramic with water and oil repellent coating. This is the first filter to use such a material in its construction. It promises both lighter weight and higher strength than normal protective filters with minimal effects on transmittance and sharpness.
It will be available in common filter thread sizes between 67mm and 105mm. See the press release below for more info, or take a look at it on their website at: http://www.sigmaphoto.com/wr-ceramic/
New scratch- and shock-resistant material provides protection for investment
RONKONKOMA, NY — December 16, 2015 – Sigma Corporation of America, a leading DSLR lens and camera manufacturer, today announced the new Sigma Water Repellent (WR) Ceramic Protector, a lens filter that features new Clear Glass Ceramic material and provides enhanced protective qualities. Pricing and availability is not yet available.
This shock- and scratch-resistant Clear Glass Ceramic was developed specifically for Sigma in partnership with a glass manufacturer. Made with a special heat treatment that evenly precipitates microcrystalline spinel throughout the materials, the Clear Glass Ceramic is 10 times stronger than a conventional protective filter and three times the strength of a chemically strengthened filter. The lens protector also contains WR coating, which repels water, dust and oil, and allows fingerprints to be easily removed. This enhanced protection helps to preserve the lens and ensure long-term, top-notch image quality.
“The Sigma WR Ceramic Protector is the latest example of Sigma’s dedication to innovative and first-to-market photography equipment,” said Mark Amir-Hamzeh, president of Sigma Corporation of America. “The new Clear Glass Ceramic protector is the first of its kind and the strongest material used in the industry. It will enable photographers to safeguard their lenses, while maintaining the impressive sharpness offered by high-quality glass, like our Global Vision line of lenses.”
Key features of the Ceramic Protector include:
This filter is offered in the most popular filter thread sizes, and is compatible with all Sigma lenses and other lenses that accept front filter threads that are 67mm-105mm diameters. Compatible lenses in Sigma’s Art line include: 35mm F1.4 DG HSM, 30mm F1.4 DC HSM, 18-35mm F1.8 DC HSM, 24-35mm F2 DG HSM, 24-105mm F4 DG OS HSM, 50mm F1.4 DG HSM, 24mm F1.4 DG HSM, 19mm F2.8 DN, 30mm F2.8 DN and 60mm F2.8 DN. Compatible lenses in the Sports line include the 120-300mm F2.8 DG OS HSM and 150-600mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM. Compatible lenses in the Contemporary line include the 17-70mm F2.8-4.0 DC OS HSM, 18-200mm F3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM, 18-300mm F3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM and the 150-600mm F5-6.3 DG OS HSM. As with all of Sigma’s lenses, the filter is checked with Sigma’s own Modulation Transfer Function (MTF) measuring system, “A1,” in the company’s factory in Japan.
For information about Sigma, go to www.sigmaphoto.com or follow the company on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.
[ By WebUrbanist in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]
Lighting up the night sky like artificial lightning, this incredible homemade lamp boasts a 90,000-lumen output (over 100 times that of a typical Maglite) that would put the flashiest high-beams on dark roads to shame, making nighttime scenes look uncannily daylit.
Constructed by RCTestFlight and published on YouTube, the project consists of ten 100-watt LEDs mounted on a heatsink and powered by twin 8 amp-hour, lithium-polymer batteries (about the equivalent energy of 10 mobile phones).
In the embedded video, you can see comparisons between car lights, streetlights, other handheld lamps and this flashlight, as well as demonstrations of lighting up clouds and mountains at a distance. Even the short-exposure shots reveal an incredible degree of brightness.
The rig uses ten 100-watt LED chips in a row, each connected to a large heatsink with bolts and thermal grease to help the heat transfer, each component tied to its own driver. Each LED has its own lens focusing light projection at around 60 degrees.
Made to burn fast and bright, the projection lifespan is accordingly limited: it can only run for about ten minutes and gets hot even faster than that. Cooling fans would be useful if longer blasts were needed, but for short bursts the system holds up just fine.
It shines bright in part due to LEDs trumping halogens, but also the various engineering details that help optimize for power and heat. The device can turn well-lit rooms into sun-bright spaces and even outdoors, at closer than 100 feet, it is basically blinding.
Lamps are usually used to illuminate other, more interesting objects – but these 15 designs deserve their own spotlight.
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For 500 years, visitors were able to see Michelangelo’s famous 6,000-square-foot painting bathed in natural light, but for the last 3 decades they have …
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LEGOs can form the basis of all sorts of amazing things, but would you ever have imagined they could create working prosthetics, mechanical looms, drivable …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Gadgets & Geekery & Technology. ]
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Casio’s TR series of Exilim compacts has propelled the Japanese company to record profitability this year after the cameras caught a firm grasp of the massive Chinese selfie market. According to a report from Nikkei Asian Review, Casio is on-track to make a $ 403 million profit this year, and a good part of that has come from the sale of its unusually shaped EX-TR compact cameras that the company has designed to appeal to female selfie shooters.
Just after the launch of the first TR – the Exilim TRYX EX-TR100 – in 2011, Casio’s photography business was in such trouble that it pulled distribution in the majority of territories it operated in. At the time Casio concentrated on the ‘cool’ looks of the camera and its ART modes that created HDR and painting-effect images, but since 2013 the TR cameras have proved such a hit with the Chinese that its imaging division expects to make a ¥4.2bn (about $ 34.5 million) operating profit. That comes after four years of losses, up to 2012.
The secret of the camera’s success has been a combination of a growing fashion-conscious design and the product’s suitability for shooting selfies. With a hinged frame the TR models can support themselves standing upright so are ideal for placing on a table facing the subject. They also have a number of ways to trip the shutter including squeezing the frame, using a ‘selfie pad’ on the side of the body, using a count-down-display self-timer, by the camera detecting the subject putting his/her hand in a certain part of the frame and by touching the 3″ LCD. The 921,600-dot LCD also acts as a digital mirror so the subject can check hair and make-up before the picture is taken – as the camera lens and the LCD face in the same direction.
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It has become common to feature digital retouch shooting modes in compact cameras, but Casio’s Exilim TR models go a step further with make-up modes that offer up to 12 levels of skin smoothness as well as skin tone adjustments to suit the way you want to look. A step beyond that even is make-up mode bracketing that provides three images with smoothness levels either side of the setting you chose yourself. In the latest model, the EX-TR70, make-up mode is now available when shooting movies too.
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For those not sure of their best side, pose bracketing gives you five chances to look good as the camera’s voice guidance counts down three-two-one between pictures so you have the opportunity to ruffle your hair, bend a knee or pout a little bit more.
All of the EX-TR models use a lens with an angle of view equivalent to a 21mm on a 35mm system. Such a focal length would seem excessively wide for general purpose photography, but when holding a camera at a short-arm’s length it has proved perfect for getting you and your friend in the frame. Instead of a flash the cameras are equipped with an LED light that’s positioned very close to the lens axis to create soft and shadowless lighting – and the LED is round to form an attractive circular catch-light in the eyes. Genius.
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The cameras have proved so popular in China that Casio has opened three stores that sell only TR series models. The stores are designed like make-up boutiques, to set the products apart from other cameras in the market. At up to ¥100,000 (about $ 800) a pop these are not low-cost novelties priced for the mass market, so clearly Casio has been doing something very right indeed.
For more information on the Casio Exilim TR series see the Casio digital camera website.
For those of you who have been following my Lightroom articles I thought it would be fun to test your knowledge. We’ll start with the Lightroom Library module because the work you do here, lays the foundation for everything you do inside Lightroom. Master the Library module and you’ll be well on your way to becoming an expert on the entire program.
Ready? Let’s start with what is probably the most important thing of all – backing up your Catalog.
This is really important. Your Lightroom Catalog is absolutely essential because it’s where Lightroom stores every piece of information it has about your photos. Not only does this include the location of your photos (i.e., where they are saved on your hard drive) but any metadata associated with them (from camera settings to keywords), Lightroom specific information (such as which Collections a photo belongs to) and any edits you have made in the Develop module. Yes, these are all stored in the Catalog.
How much of a disaster would it be if you lost all this data? I’m sure it would be a major loss. That’s why it’s so important that you back up your Catalog regularly. You should also back it up to an external hard drive, not to an internal one, in case your computer is lost or stolen.
You can check your back up settings by going to Lightroom > Catalog Settings. Click the General tab – Back up catalog should be set to Every Time Lightroom Exits as shown below.
Connect the external hard drive on which you back up your Catalog, then exit Lightroom. Before Lightroom closes down, it displays the Back Up Catalog window. The Backup Folder setting should point to a folder on your external hard drive. If it doesn’t, click Choose and change it now.
When you exit Lightroom is the only time you will see this popup box, and the only place you can change where it saves the backup of your catalog.
Make sure the Test integrity before backing up and Optimize catalog after backing up boxes are ticked. When you’re done click the Back up button. Lightroom will save a backup of your Catalog to your external hard drive before closing. This may take some time, especially for a large Catalog, so be patient.
This is important to mention because I want to make sure you understand that your photos are not stored inside Lightroom, or in the Catalog. Your photos are saved on your hard drive (or drives) and you need to back them up yourself. It is your responsibility – Lightroom doesn’t do it for you.
There are many ways of backing up photos, you need to find the method that works best for you. However I’m sure it will help if I share my method. Feel free to use, adapt or ignore it.
This system works because it’s easy to see whether your Raw files are backed up. Want to back up all your Raw files to another hard drive? Just copy the Raw folder. Want to see whether you’ve backed up all the photos you’ve taken this month? It’s easy to do so with this system.
By the way, I keep my Raw files backed up to four different external hard drives, one of which is stored off-site. That way, if one of the hard drives fails, I have three other copies.
The File Handling settings are important because they help you strike a balance between optimizing Lightroom’s performance speed, and using hard drive space.
The first thing you need to look at is the total size of the cache. This tells you how much hard drive space your previews take up. For example, looking at mine (see below) I can see my Lightroom previews are currently taking up 28GB.
It’s important to keep some of your hard drive free (at least 10%, but preferably more) otherwise Lightroom will slow down (as will everything else your computer does). If you are running out of hard drive space, come and have a look here to see if your preview files are too large.
There are two steps to keeping your previews file under control.
1. Make sure Lightroom is generating the optimum size Standard Previews. These are used to display your photos in Loupe View and don’t need to be any larger than your monitor’s resolution.
If you have Lightroom 6 or Lightroom CC you can set the size to Auto. Lightroom will calculate the optimum size for you. In Lightroom 5 or earlier pick the size that best matches your monitor’s resolution.
Set Preview Quality to Medium – it gives you the best balance between quality and size.
2. Set Automatically Discard 1:1 Previews to After 30 Days. You need 1:1 previews for zooming in to photos, and working on them in the Develop module. However, they are very large. If you generated 1:1 previews for every photo in your Catalog, and never deleted them, you would eventually run out of hard drive space. To be honest, it doesn’t really matter which setting you choose here as long as it’s not set to Never. You can always regenerate discarded 1:1 previews if you need them again later.
One of the benefits of building the Lightroom architecture on a database is that it is easy to search your photos. You do this in the Filter Bar, which is displayed above the Content Window in Grid View (press ‘\’ on the keyboard if you don’t see it).
There are three types of searches:
Have a play with these options to see how it works. Just bear in mind that Lightroom is searching the selected folders or Collections, not your entire Catalog when you do so (select All Photographs to search your entire library).
Collections are virtual Folders, which you use to organize your images. Folders are limited because a single photo can only be stored in one Folder at a time. The same photo can be stored in as many Collections as you like, making Collections the easiest, and most flexible, way to organize your photos.
An example of this is a photo taken of a person called Jenny in Rome in November 2015. The photo can only be stored in one Folder, but it can be added to a Collection called Jenny, another one called Rome, another called 2015 – in fact as many as you need.
Your folders should be set up to make backing up easy (see earlier point). Your Collections should be used to organize your photos. My article Use Lightroom Collection to Improve your Workflow will help you with this.
Of course, this list is not exhaustive, but I’d like to hear your thoughts as well. What do you think is essential to know about the Library module? Do you have any questions about the points raised in this article? Please let me know in the comments below.
The Mastering Lightroom Collection
My Mastering Lightroom ebooks are a complete guide to using Lightroom’s Library and Develop modules. Written for Lightroom 4, 5, 6 and CC they show you how to import and organise your images, use Collections, creatively edit your photos and how to work in black and white.
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The post 5 Essential Things You Need to Know About the Lightroom Library Module by Andrew S. Gibson appeared first on Digital Photography School.
[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]
When thoroughfares are subtracted from city grids, subsequent urban infill is shaped by the voids of these former roadways, streetcar or rail paths, standing out like architectural scar tissue when viewed from above. The effect is all the more pronounced when the disappeared passageways cut at odd angles through city blocks, forcing particularly odd-shaped ‘scarchitecture’ to follow.
When architectural writer Geoff Manaugh came across this phenomena in the streets of Los Angeles, readers rapidly began sending in examples from other cities. Some are surprisingly complex and counterintuitive, like the half-circle seen below (if you look closely) that seems to arbitrarily slice across multiple city blocks.
Manaugh’s fascination is infectious: “The notion that every city has these deeper wounds and removals that nonetheless never disappear is just incredible to me. You cut something out—and it becomes a building a generation later. You remove an entire street—and it becomes someone’s living room.”
Perhaps most remarkable of all: many of these scarchitectural expressions frequently go largely unnoticed on the ground level. Most, however, emerge immediately as visual patterns when seen from aerial vantage points, their persistently unconventional orientations going against the grain of gridded streets surrounding them.
Small buildings can completely conform to the unusual geometries these ‘ghost streets’ trace; some sides of other structures, reconfigured paths and even parking space orientations may also follow these uncanny trajectories, in part or in whole, as if aligning to secular ‘ley lines’ of invisible force. Next time you are using Google Maps, pan around your own neighborhood and you could find evidence of scarchitecture, perhaps cutting right through your own backyard.
Half-forgotten historical urban rivers are set to resurface in San Francisco as part of a civic installation project designed to fill in their historical …
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No matter how far and often you might wander around your city, there’s one way you most likely never get to experience it: from above. Approached from …
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Flying over New York City, San Francisco and Las Vegas, this photographer has managed to both capture the essence of each city he shoots from the night sky …
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[ By WebUrbanist in Architecture & Cities & Urbanism. ]
[ WebUrbanist | Archives | Galleries | Privacy | TOS ]
Like much of the DPReview staff, editor Barney Britton is a self-proclaimed super-fan of the 35mm focal length. The Sony Cyber-shot RX1R II has the same permanently affixed 35mm F2 lens as its predecessor, but it is backed up by almost completely new internals, including the same 42MP full-frame sensor and autofocus system as the Sony a7R II. Barney’s put the RX1R II through its paces in a wide variety of shooting scenarios, and shares his thoughts about what’s new, what isn’t, and more importantly, whether or not the Mark II version is worth the upgrade. For more sample images, click the link below.
Take a look at our Sony Cyber-shot RX1R II Sample Gallery
The use of reflectors in photography is just a way of taking advantage of the existent light, and bounce it to different places in your image. This can be done with virtually any surface that reflects light, like a wall, a mirror, cardboard, styrofoam, aluminum foil, etc.
Dedicated photography reflectors come in many different colors, shapes and sizes. Silver, gold, white, and sometimes mixes of these three colors commonly know as zebra reflectors are the most common colors. There are also 5-in-1 reflectors that include a black surface to absorb light, and a translucent surface to soften light.
The shape of the reflector depends on the subject you are trying to photograph. Usually collapsible round reflectors are the most used because they are easier to handle on location, and also easier to fold, but triangular and rectangular reflectors are very popular too.
The size of the reflector depends on the area you are trying to illuminate, and when it comes to small subjects like tabletop photography, things get tricky because standard reflectors are usually too big to produce small spots of light. In this article, I will guide you through the steps of building your own customized small reflectors for tabletop photography like the ones above.
Even though you can use simple paper sheets with some kind of object as a stand to hold it in place, this simple folding technique will for sure give you more control on the way you place your reflectors.
To start you will need some metallic paper sheets. The ones I’m using here can be found in office supply or craft stores, and exist in various sizes and colors. I bought 50×70 centimeters sheets, that are about 20×28 inches, and that allowed me to make a nice set of reflectors of different sizes and shapes.
A useful feature of this type of paper is that the back side is white, so you can use the metallic side or just flip to the white side to have different types of reflections. Beside the obvious silver and gold, you can also buy metallic textured papers for special effects of light reflection.
Now it’s time to cut the paper to size. This depends on the reflector size you want to create; in this case I’m making a 8x13cm (3×5 inch) reflector.
Now mark the lines with a ballpoint pen and fold the paper on those lines. You will end up with something like this.
To keep the overlapping folds on the back together, I used small magnets. You can use tape, velcro or even re-usable adhesive, but magnets give you more choices of repositioning the angle of the reflector when you are looking for the right spot.
Magnets are also very useful if you use a gooseneck or a magic arm to hold the reflector instead of placing it on the table.
Now that we built some nice reflectors it’s time to try them out.
I have used some high end lighting equipment along my career as a professional photographer, but I must say that it always amazes me what is possible to do with the light of a window or a tabletop lamp and a couple of reflectors. The following image is an example.
Start with Tabletop tungsten lamp with a diffuser as a back light.
Now the same tabletop tungsten lamp with a diffuser, plus a reflector on the left side.
Now AND another reflector on the right side.
So, there it is, a simple and highly effective setup that is guaranteed to give more control over the way you light your images for tabletop photography.
Give it a try!
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The post How to Make DIY Reflectors for Tabletop Photography by Ivo Guimaraes appeared first on Digital Photography School.