Photography and the Art of Seeing

The Map Module: What is the actual purpose of the Map Module in Lightroom Classic? I have Googled this question several times over the years and always end up with the same search results. Which you can see in the attached screen shot. I have to admit, for the most part, I don’t get it. The recurring search result is “It’s something fun to do in Lightroom”. Well, if that is the main purpose, I am not interested in it. But … and there is always a but.   If I am contracted by the Tourism Dept of any Government be it local, Provincial/State or Country, to photograph tourist attractions or conservation areas to name two uses, I would have to either have a GPS option in my camera or the ability to add those GPS coordinates after capture … otherwise I will not get that contract. Government tourism departments of any level like to promote their areas of interest to potential visitors from all over the world. And when they post an article which include photographs, they want the reader to ...

  This is yet another NHL 2022 Heritage Classic image of Craig Anderson sprawling and diving backwards in an attempt to prevent #25 Ondřej Kaše of the Toronto Maple Leafs from scoring a goal. Unfortunately for Anderson, he wasn’t able to get back in time. Ondřej Kaše scores the opening goal in the second period of the game. #Fujifilm , #FujiFilmx_ca , #FujifilmCamera , #FujifilmLens , #FujifilmPhotography , #FujifilmPhoto , #FujifilmXSeries , #FujifilmXT4 , #FujifilmXT3 , #FujifilmXT2 , #Fujifilm_Street , #FujifilmX , #FujifilmX_US , #FujifilmXPro1 , #Fujifilm_NorthAmerica , #Fujifilm_US , #FujifilmStreet , #FujifilmStreetPhotography , #FujiXSeries , #FujiLove , #Fujinon , #FujiLovers , #FujiXLovers

Every once in a while I get asked to cover some of the more unique NHL events that are somewhat local. Like the NHL Scouting Combine (Buffalo), The NHL 100 Classic (Ottawa) and most recently The 2022 NHL Heritage Classic (Hamilton). I will start off with a few from that game and then post more from the other events/games. Later on. This first one is from the The 2022 NHL Heritage Classic where the Toronto Maple Leafs played against the Buffalo Sabres. All of the media outlets that have a higher readership than the blog I shoot for get the prime shooting places that actually have the photographer portals to shove their camera lenses through and and guys like myself get to shoot through the plexiglass from behind the goalies - well, off to the side a bit. The first time I was placed there (Ottawa), I wasn't particularly pleased because I never shoot from that angle but once things got started, I realized that I was getting shots that nobody else was. This first one is of Craig Anders...

 DxO PhotoLab is available at www.dxo.com Wow. Look at the digital noise in this image. Both the luminance and colour noise are so pronounced you could probably feel it if you ran your hand across this print. This image was taken back 2013 in the evening on a poorly lit football field at ISO 12,800. The noise reduction software we had at the time was relatively good back in those days but once I enlarged it .... well you know where I am going with this. This image is cropped quite a bit and ended up about 5.3 inches square. Good enough for social media but not so good for enlargements so I decided to disguise the flaws in the image by adding a painterly filter effect to it. That actually looked quite good as a 16 inch square print. Quite the conversation piece. The technical specs are: Nikon D3 (12 MegaPixel sensor), Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8 VRII lens shot at 1/500th second at f2.8 using ISO of 12,800. I am sure that the newer cameras on the market today would produce better quality im...

DxO PhotoLab's Deep Prime noise reduction is simply amazing at getting rid of unwanted noise in your images to say the least. Don't get me wrong; I do like the look of film grain in some images and leaving some of the digital noise in our images is perfectly fine but I believe there is a better way to achieve that look than what some or most software does with the click of a button or moving a slider one way or another. I'll leave that for another post . For this article I will be using an image shot on a Nikon D500 using a Nikon 105mm f2.8 lens. The technical specs are as follows; ISO 4000, 1/640 sec at f2.8. There are two things about crop sensor cameras; one good and the other, not so good but not terribly bad either. Crop sensor cameras can get in closer to your subject due to the nature of the crop - this is the good thing. The not so good thing is these sensors tend to product more visible noise in our images. More on the pros & cons of crop vs full-frame sensors ...

The Fuji X-T4 and Fujinon Lenses continue to wow me at every turn and in this case I want to discuss the Fujinon 50-140 f2.8 lens that I use to shoot Pro and Semi-Pro hockey in today’s arenas. I have been shooting hockey since the late 1980’s when the arenas had some of the poorest lighting known to man. Today, these arenas are much brighter and for a photographer this means that we can use lower ISO settings than in the past and this translates into our images having less digital noise to deal with. In the image examples presented here I used an ISO of 3200 at 1/1000 sec @f5. Yes, I could have shot at f2.8 and probably and ISO of around 2500 or lower but at f2.8 the depth of field is not too great. Anyways, let’s get back to why I am “wowed” by this Fuji camera setup … well, why don’t I just let the images do the talking for me? Before that, I just want to explain my shooting vantage point or lack thereof at this particular arena. A lot of arenas have “photographer portals” cutout of ...

 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...