Blog Archive
A hearty THANK YOU to each and every one of you who commented on my last post on The Power of Music cover! A final decision was reached just in the nick of time for it to be printed and bound before the West Virginia Family Encouragement Weekend next week where it...
Could you please post some tips on taking pictures of oceans? --Anna 1. Consciously Keep Horizons Straight 2. Shoot When the Sky is Colorful Oceans really don’t change that much; but the sky does! If you are on the beach during the hours around sunrise and...
In a recent post, The Work of Art, I talked about how difficult it is to create beautiful landscape images. More often than not, beauty is ascertained by much more than just our sense of sight, so it is often discouraging when we return to our homes, look over our...
I have fond memories from childhood of reading and re-reading a delightful little children’s book called Someone is Eating the Sun, which in it’s own humorous way described the scientific marvel of a solar eclipse. Now as of this morning, some 15 years later, I can...
In my recent post All in a Weeks Work, I mentioned embarking on an interior photography project for a hotel in Chicago. The hotel is still in the beginning stages of being decorated, but images were immediately needed for the design of a website that will go live...
Four tips to keep in mind when photographing children.
I will be the first to tell you that I’m about as far away as one can be from claiming an entitlement of expertise in the genre of travel photography. Yes, I take pictures while I travel, but that doesn’t make one a travel photographer. It is very seldom that my...
There’s a key design concept that I learned at Desktop Publishing II last week. We learned a lot of cool, geeky deep things, but this one jewel of knowledge kept popping up over the course of the entire week. Without it, you can do all the re-designing you want but...
James shares pointers on how he pulled off shooting portraits at a wedding reception with a guest attendance over 400.
3. Adding falling snow All this step takes is a little understanding of the Brush Tool and it’s corresponding Brush Pallet. You can either download a free brush online or make your own (which I recommend, though it is slower). This is what my brush looked like when...
A few winters ago, my brother Jonathan and I did something we had never done before. With several inches of freshly fallen snow on the ground and predictions for more in the forecast, we jumped into the Envoy and headed out to Coopers Rock State Forest in the...
2. Adding Light in the Windows There is always more than one way to do things in Photoshop, but this is the way that I happened to liven up the windows in this cabin. First, I made a new, yellow-colored Solid Color Adjustment Layer using something like #c5c46b....
With much planning and little shooting over the past few weeks, I haven’t had much to post. So I guess I’ll post a little project I was working on just for fun the other day. I’m working on designing a calendar for a local heritage site called Fort New Salem. It’s...
Between fulfilling volunteer responsibilities and attending various events at the National Bible Bee in Nashville, Tennessee, I was able to snap a few shots of the friendly, spirited, and emotionally thrilling mood of the occasion! In both shooting and editing, I...
Thank you everyone for your comments; I know how to capture lightning now! Seriously, because I do so much trial and error, and I don’t get to shoot storms very often, I really enjoyed reading your comments. In all actuality, you probably don’t want to take...
The evening was warm and blustery, the gusts of wind bringing with them the suggestion of an approaching storm. Then feeble flashes of light could be seen on the distant horizon, easily perceived from my vantage point on the front porch of the Wilkes new home in...
I was going through pictures today and came across two practically identical waterfall pictures I took last month at Bond Falls State Park, Michigan. Notice how the second picture looks so much better than the first one. Both were taken on a tripod only 26 seconds...
After Robert’s wedding, we stopped at a few places in Texas in the Dallas area. This old shed, now out of commission, was on a chicken farm that we toured. It was a drab picture originally, being taken in early afternoon. But I found a new Adjustment in Photoshop...
Over the past month, while traveling through the Appalachian mountains, I have begun experimenting with taking true panoramic images. Not one image cropped to a 3:1 ratio, but a series of images side by side that, when stitched together, create a true high-res...
Not too long ago, I read a photography tip from another nature photographer: learn to love bad weather. I wasn’t too sure about this, but I couldn’t help but think about this comment when I saw the weather forecast for last Saturday. Saturday was going to be a...
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