Archive for December, 2007
Posted on December 31, 2007 - by Patrick
A Great Year for Photographers, Adobe, and Scott Kelby?
It’s New Year’s eve and a lot of sites are putting up their obligatory “Look Back at 2007″ posts. In general, what I think you’ll find is most bloggers mentioning Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom, and of course I’ll have to add to that. You’ll remember Lightroom was released earlier this year, but for alot of photographers and certainly myself, it seems longer than that. That’s because Lightroom was so easy to use, and such a natural fit into my workflow that it just seems like it’s always been there. Prior to Lightroom, my catalog of photographs was in shambles, completely and utterly unorganized. Worse, because of the time involved in bringing photographs into Photoshop, a large portion of photos were totally unedited, you know, exposures too dark, white balance off, and just a little drab looking. Enter Lightroom, now my photos are nicely keyworded, very organized, and consist of almost all “keepers”. A great many of them have been processed to some degree, friends and family get to see them, thanks to slideshow and web modules, and they’ve even been backed up– Lightroom told me to. In short, Lightroom has changed the way I work. I take more photos now, because they’re easier to manage. I look at more photos now, Lightroom makes it easy to see them. And most importantly, I have better photos. Lightroom’s develop module tools are so easy to use, and so intuitive, that it’s easy to turn drab into amazing, in no time. All that, and it’s completely non-destructive. I can’t wait for 2.0.
Of course alot of other products deserve props for their contributions in 2007. Adobe’s Photoshop CS3 of course was a potent weapon to add to the processing arsenal. I wonder how many more photographers are now doing panoramas now than the year before thanks to photomerge? On the camera front we had Canon and Nikon releasing their flagships, Canon with their EOS 1Ds Mark III and Nikon with their D3. Both cameras have recieved great reviews, and the overall consensus is they both have moved the standards much further ahead. For non pros, 2007 has been a field day. While we were late for it’s arrival the Canon 40d has quelled the desires of the countless pro-sumer type photographers previously probably shooting with the 30d. Sony released the A700, and judging by hits here, it’ll will be very popular. Olympus released a couple of good cameras, so did Panasonic, and of course Nikon did very well critically with the D300, having already won several “Camera of the Year” awards. If you were a camera consumer in 2007, there were a great many cameras to consume.
Finally, I just have to mention Scott Kelby. How many books can one guy write? I personally have several of them, and have always found them to be insightful, especially in the way he shares “what a pro would do” type tips. Even though I use Photoshop everyday at “my other job”, I always end up learning something from Scott’s books. But my point was, this guy is a book writing machine! I count 6 books for 2007! That’s just crazy. Keep in mind he’s doing this while traveling all over giving seminars on Lightroom and Photoshop and conducting photography workshops. To get the full gist, you have to check out his end of the year post in which he lists his many accomplishments this year–congrats to you Mr. Kelby, this was definitely your year.
-Patrick
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 Win/Mac
Posted on December 31, 2007 - by Patrick
Improve your popup flash results
Browsing around this morning, I noticed Terry White had a little blurb about a device that helps improve your popup flash results via a little gadget that attaches to the flash. It’s called the Lightscoop and it seems like it might make a nice addition to the ‘ol camera bag. I know there’s alot of these gadgets out there (Gary Fong’s puffer comes to mind) but this one works by bouncing the flash to the ceiling or wall behind you using a mirror inside the gadget. It’s not a substitute for external flash by any means, but it does seem like a clever solution and it’s only $30. Terry has some sample results here.
-Patrick
Gary Fong The Puffer, Pop-up Flash Diffuser
Posted on December 30, 2007 - by Patrick
What did you get?
I hope everyone is enjoying their holiday season. Around here, I’ve been very busy updating the site–polishing it up just a bit here and there. Neutralday.com 
is running on Wordpress and while it’s fairly easy to configure using a template system, it’s not exactly intuitive to the non-web programmer guy that I am. Also, If you don’t know CSS, it’s even harder, as everything visually is controlled by stylesheets. Anyway, it’s been a learning experience. Now more to the point, because what people really want know is what’d ya get? Well lets see what we have here, a Wacom Bamboo Fun, Scott Kelby’s 7 Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3, and oh, an iPhone.All of them were great gifts, and I’ve spent some time with all of them. I love the iPhone. Love it. It does have some imperfections and they are somewhat annoying, but it’s by far my best phone. The Bamboo is a great addition to my macbook pro. It lacks the precision that the intuos has, but it’s perfect for general navigation and creative use, and has been a lifesaver for my poor hands when I can’t get on the imac. Finally, I’m almost done with Kelby’s book, and it’s been great so far. I’ll be putting up a review soon so keep an eye out for that.
I’m almost done with the site so regular posting will continue, everybody talking about PMA rumors of course, there’s Nikon D60 talk and D90 talk, and the Canon 5d replacement speculation grows–more on all this later.
-Patrick
Bamboo Fun (Small) Black Tablet with Pen, Mouse & Graphics Software
Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Adobe Photoshop CS3 (Voices)
Posted on December 30, 2007 - by Patrick
onOne Software and Mac OS X Leopard Compatibility
Posted on December 30, 2007 - by Patrick
Sony A700 Camera Firmware Update v.3
Posted on December 30, 2007 - by Patrick
Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III Firmware Version 1.0.6
Posted on December 30, 2007 - by Patrick
Adobe Camera Raw 4.3.1 update
Posted on December 30, 2007 - by Patrick
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.3.1
Posted on December 24, 2007 - by Patrick
A very merry Christmas to all…
Apologies for the lack of posts, I’ve been busy with the normal holiday affairs: family, shopping, oh and trying to finish this dang site up— in the near future I’ll have finished with most of the additions and fleshing out of neutralday.com. Some of these additions and changes are purely visual, others functional. Also, I’ll be working on some reviews of a couple of items that non-pros might be interested in. Anyway I promise normal posting will return ASAP, although there might be a few rough ends being polished over the next week or so.
All my best to you and yours-
-Patrick
Posted on December 20, 2007 - by Patrick
Nikon D300 survives ultimate field test in Antartica
Photographyblog.com has a great article up with photographer Jan Vermeer who took his Nikon D300 down to the Antartic. It should put to bed all questions you never had about the D300’s toughness in ridiculous extremes. Whilst I haven’t yet encountered a “Nikon D300 survives lava flow” article yet, I’m sure one is in the works. In case you had any questions about the pro quality of the D300, do yourself a favor and check the article here.
-Patrick
