I love playing with the isolation that a thin depth of field offers, and a 340mm lens wide open offers a pretty darn thin depth of field.

I was at the Kamo River for an Anthony school event, and snapped a few pictures of a hedge of long thin branches. The next two shots are of pretty much the same scene from the same location, but the first is focused further away, while in the second the focus point is closer to the lens...

Both are at f/14 which should generally give a fairly deep focus area, but with this [...]

A couple of weeks ago I posted Lightroom Plugin Development: What To Do When a Hobby Becomes Work, a long missive about the weight that Lightroom plugin development has taken on me.... how something that I intrinsically enjoy has become, in part, a chore. I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of support and encouragement, both online and off.

I've decided to take the route that I speculated I would take, and that many encouraged me to take: Tim Armes' "donationware" model.

(The stack of unanswered email and comments has only grown while I've concentrated on implementing this system, so I've [...]

I forgot something when writing yesterday's post on spot metering. I'd posted the photo above as part of a pair, but forgot to pose this question: why is there a red outline around the sun?

It's not an effect of overly-harsh post processing (or any post processing).... you should be able to answer from just the information in yesterday's post. I don't intend this to be one of my "What am I?" quizzes, but rather, I pose it as a self-check "exercise for the reader"...

(By the way, despite a mention in an overly generous comment to yesterday's post that [...]

Cameras are not nearly as good at capturing a wide range of brightnesses as our eyes, so a high contrast scene that appears fine to our eyes often ends up with either washed-out highlights or dark, muddy lowlights, like the two shots above.

When using automatic exposure metering, most cameras default to trying to achieve a balance between the two extremes, often by sampling the scene across large areas of the frame. The simplest mode is for it to pick an exposure that averages the brightness levels seen throughout the frame, but this is apparently not very useful because it's [...]

I do a lot of Lightroom-related development. I don't get paid for it, but I'm a geek and I really enjoy it.

In case you're familiar with Lightroom, but not with what I've provided, here's a bit about what I've done...

Well, that's enough of tooting one's own horn... you get the picture.

I don't actually use most of these personally, and I don't get paid for them; I work on them because I enjoy it. I enjoy creating useful stuff, I enjoy that people use the useful stuff I've created, and I enjoy the warm fuzzy feelings that people [...]
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