Photo Sightings

It's always great to hear where your stock photos get used. It's even cooler when co-workers see your image somewhere and ask you about it. I've had my boss flipping through a trade publication to find me staring back at her (wish I had been present to see the look on her face for that.) I've had a co-worker see my face on a VH1 TV show. And now this morning, I had a co-worker bring in a flyer from PSECU (A Pennsylvania credit union) that had my image right above the address panel.

(and to top it off, we had a block party this weekend in our neighborhood. At least 6 people came up to me and said, "Hi Bob". Bob was my name in the article from the flyer.)

Son of a geek is still a geek Or The Power of Marketing

My 5 year old is pretty tech savvy. At our block party this weekend, he was showing a few of the adults how to select songs on my iPod. (To which a few of the replied, "I just don't get this. Maybe I don't want one.")

He was going on a long car trip this weekend and my wife bought him a Game Boy Advance SP to be entertained during the car ride. So, I took him to Toys R Us to pick up a game. In the car on the way home, he's checking out the box and asks, "Is this from eBay?". Why do you ask? "Because it has a big [lowercase] E on it, isn't that eBay?"

I figured out he meant the "Rated E for Everyone" icon, but it made me realize just how powerful a job eBay has done with their marketing. Soo much so that my son associates the letter e with eBay. (That, or he's just a big computer/internet geek like his father.)

Photo Collage Frames

Our walls are bare! I hate decorating. It gets in the way of daily life. Normally, I despise when I have a collage frame to put up on the wall, but I came up with an easy solution the other week.

Take your Matte from your frame, and scan it (provided you still have one of these ancient devices - ;-)

Open it in Photoshop and make this a new layer and ghost it.

Add all your image you want in your collage and resize and position them in the "holes" of your matte. Then when you are finished adding images, discard your "matte" layer, flatten your image and print it.

Luckily, I have a wide format printer, so I was able to do one single print that was easy to glue down and put in the frame.

PVC Backdrop Pole for Muslins

Looking for an easy way to hang your background muslin? I was just "clamping" mine to my backdrop stand till I saw this idea at a photo seminar a few weeks ago.

They took a 10' - 1.5" thick PVC pipe and drilled holes through one half of the end of the PVC pipe. These holes are used to slip over the top of your background stands (but you go halfway to the "top" of the pipe prevents the PVC from sliding down to the floor.)

Then, I took my Muslin and duct taped it to the PVC rod on both ends and lengthwise. To hang the muslin, just sit the Pipe over your stands… and to store it, just pop it off the top and roll it up and store it with your background paper. Pretty simple easy solution. I like those!

It’s ok to admit when you are wrong

I attended a photo seminar last weekend and it really opened my eyes to a lot of techniques I just never explored, or otherwise had forgotten about. I will admit, I’m a bit “bull-headed’ about things at times and my love affair with Photoshop has been one of them. It’s the industry standard, why question it?

It has been a long standing argument with me and a co-worker that Photoshop Camera Raw is superior to Nikon Capture (I’m a Canon user, so I’ll admit my first hand expierence with Capture is limited.) I have watched all the training videos and read the PDFs on how to use Camera RAW and just accepted that it was the best solution, till this seminar.

One of the shows “key sponsors� was CaptureOne from Phase One. I have always heard great things about CaptureOne, but I still chalked up the “vast praise� for CaptureOne at this seminar to the fact that they were one of the people paying the bills. One quote from the show was, “Photoshop is a great photo and design tool, but it doesn’t do RAW conversion as well as a dedicated RAW tool.�

So, tonight for giggles I downloaded the latest version of Canon’s Digital Photo Professional software (available free for download from Canon for users that have Canon software that came with your camera installed, unlike Nikon which requires purchase of their Capture software, sorry Matt, had to say something.)



I played around with a recent picture that I wasn’t “wild� about the final image in DPP and then opened it in Photoshop Camera RAW and gave it the amount of attention I would normally given it to produce the best image I felt I could (which is much faster then using DPP).

The difference in the two images is dramatic! I’m floored at the difference in the Canon Digital Photo Pro software. I hate to say it, but it’s true. The Canon processed file is much richer and more detailed. Take note of the branches, they appear to have Chromatic Aberration on the Camera RAW file and are a little mushy. The color is also more vivid and brilliant in the Canon file.







Now, could I make the Adobe File look more like this? Probably. But, why when it seems like Canon Digital Photo Pro yields a richer, better file?

Now I’m curious to try CaptureOne Pro!