David Tremain

@dotremain, thank you for carefully following the assignment details and providing some more information about your issues with focusing!

I’m not familiar with the “split manual focus system”. Do you only use manual focus these days?

Oh dear, @dotremain. That’s right. Many things can be “fixed” in post-processing, like exposure, color and noise. But focus is not one of those things.

How to troubleshoot the lack of sharpness completely depends on the kind of blur. Can you tell if the blur is from camera shake or subject movement? Or does it appear to be miss-focused, tack…[Read more]

Sorry for the confusion, there, @dotremain! It’s all the same course, just being introduced to different audiences over the course of a few months, and this time highlighted as a stand-alone, forever-access product. It’s new to 2023, you might say, especially to those who are not in the membership or didn’t recognize it earlier as part of the…[Read more]

@robo062003, great job getting out there and practicing! If you’re working on learning how to focus well, I’d encourage you to work mostly with stationery subjects for starters. Compose your photo so there is an obvious subject, and focus on that. Once you’re more comfortable with that, branch more into moving subjects and complex compositions.…[Read more]

@dotremain

when taking pictures “in the wild”, the focus being off seems to be a common problem.

For me, this is most often a problem when I’m in too much of a rush. When I slow down and…focus on “focus”, the chances my photo will be tack sharp are exponentially higher. That being said, some lenses are softer than others, particularly at cer…[Read more]

That’s fun, David! And usually how it always is. I see something and I like it, so I capture it, even though I don’t know why. There are reasons why, and it often doesn’t matter if we know why, but it’s always fun to analyze to sorta find out why. 🙂

TheAuburn_IMG_6013.jpg – Perhaps there’s a sense of depth because of overlapping elements.…[Read more]

@dotremain, my apologies for not answering your question from Friday before the assignment ended! Thankfully, the resolution of a photo has no bearing on how it is viewed on a screen. The low-res photos you uploaded here at 96ppi would have looked the same if you had exported them at 240ppi, or 72ppi.

However, it would be different for printing,…[Read more]

@dotremain Haha! Reading your message made me smile. Those were wonderful things you learned, and so funny how we both overlooked the crop orientation directions!

About the ISO, you don’t have to do 100. Try 800 or 1600 (or even 3200 as I did for the indoor shots) and remove the noise in post production (editing). I am not sure if your iPhone…[Read more]

How do you change the dpi in Lightroom Classic?

@dotremain, this area is not my forte, but I don’t think the dpi is something that you can adjust when exporting as DNG. I’ve attached a screenshot of the export settings for DNGs. If you’re seeing file properties saying the dpi is 96 my guess is that’s talking about the DNG preview, not the…[Read more]

This is really good, @warrior-princess, asking for advice here on the forums one litter at a time! Looks like it’s already been helpful. I love the two photos that you chose.

And thank you, @dotremain, for your specific help there, sharing your thoughts one photo at a time!

Thank you for all your critique David, Hannah, and Lydia!!

@dotremain, thank you for the suggestion of desaturating the background, and leaving more of the bowls in the photos. When you said about triangles, were you referring to the three bowls – two soups and a bowl of yogurt – as making a triangle? Did you have any other triangles that you…[Read more]

@dotremain What a good thing to think about…

I would list these things as the reasons why I take photos:

1: Ultimately to glorify God by using my gifts and talents for Him
2: To capture and preserve the beauty I find everyday
3: To save precious memories for years and generations to come
4: To fulfill the desire God has given me to explore and…[Read more]

Wow, thank you @dotremain! I struggled with getting interesting shots of the waves, especially since there wasn’t much light (it was either very cloudy or very windy most of the time). I did see a few pelicans, but my shutter speed wasn’t fast enough, so they were a little blurry. I tried some long exposure shots of the waves from a balcony, but…[Read more]

Thank you @lenspirationlydia! I am very excited!

@dotremain Ah, yes I was worried about my lenses too, but thankfully I only had a few that were EF-S.

Wow, what a sunset, @dotremain! Looks to me like you edited it well for what you were working with. I’d probably suggest a slight crop on the right side of the photo to exclude the boat that’s heading its way off the edge of the frame, but other than that nothing major comes to mind. Yeah you could get nitpicky and start editing out elements in…[Read more]

Hello all! I have edited #4 @dotremain, @lenspirationlydia.

What do you think?

@dotremain Thank you for the wonderful critique!

Set 1:

#1: I totally agree about the closed eye looking like a defect. Thanks for that remark. 🙂 I’ll pull it out of Lightroom.
#3 I actually de-saturated that same puppy’s collar in some other poses of her, but forgot to in this set! Thanks!
#4 This one is one of my favorites, as well.
#5 I…[Read more]

@dotremain Thank you, David Tremain!

And welcome, by the way. 🙂