Photography and the Art of Seeing

 So as you know when taking photographs, we have one vision in our mind's eye but the camera sees something completely different. Well, the camera sees what is actually in front of it and not necessarily what our creative thoughts are conjuring up. Cameras are literal where as our thoughts are fluid, right? So here I am shooting a condo for a real estate agent friend of mine and I ask; "Can we go up on the roof to get some "bird's eye" view shots?" So I am thinking that this is going to be great and I have all kinds of possibilities running through my head and then reality kicks in .... cloudy and more clouds are rolling in. Oh well, let's see what can be in post. Then I start thing what if I change the sky to be more like a sunset ... So I go under the Edit Menu in Photoshop and choose "Sky Replacement" just to see what my options are. After searching through some of the options I find this sunset sky ... In the sky replacement window there ar...

What is Film Grain? This is a topic that has come up quite frequently in recent months. People keep asking if either they should add some grain to their digital images or not and if yes, what is the best way to achieve this? I get it that some people do not like adding grain to their images but there are a lot of Photographers and Digital Artists that do. So in this article I am going to discuss what film grain actually is and then once that is understood, then we can apply grain to our images the proper way. When I say the proper way I mean let's apply this grain to our images in a manner that resembles how grain manifests itself in the film world. This is the image that I going to use in this tutorial. And, more specifically, the sky portion with clouds. I come from the film world and I can actually say that I have spent countless hours in the darkroom attempting to come up with some of the finest grain possible, especially when using high ISO (ASA for us old dogs) rated films. A...