Category: photography

  • Zenfolio, Lightroom and the art of digital picture maintenance

    The intersection of everything with magical, behind-the-scenes connections continues to blow me away. Today, I’ve been admiring the photo archiving and display site Zenfolio along with a nifty, high-powered plug-in for Adobe Lightroom written by software consultant Jeffrey Friedl that makes uploading photos a snap. The cool thing about Lightroom’s export system it that can…

  • It’s a heavy, heavy snow out there

    Wandered out today ’round my Needham, MA, home to give my Canon Rebel XT digital camera (complete with Canon’s wunderbar 50mm 1.4 EF lens) a cold weather work out in the umpty-umpth snow storm of the 2007-2008 winter class. If I had to categorize this dump of some 6 to 8 inches, I’d call it…

  • Time for a seasonal photo update

    It’s been getting colder and colder up in here in the Boston burbs and the leaves are turning all sorts of excellent colors. Seemed like an excellent time to swap out the picture at the top of the blog for something a little more seasonal. If you’re an RSS devotee, stop by to see the…

  • A couple of better Lightroom guide books

    I’m happy to report that I’m learning a lot and getting plenty of use out of both of the books that I bought last week about Adobe’s Lightroom program, my new preferred photo manager. Martin Evening’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book: The Complete Guide for Photographers, with the dark grey cover above, is a bit…

  • It’s Lightroom by a full length over Aperture

    (Updated 6/21) Some time last year, I can’t say exactly when, I crossed a threshold with Apple’s iPhoto software. The program had already slipped from the “greatest thing since sliced bread” category down a few notches to just “really useful” as my growing photo collection had slowed basic operations and made the program’s tagging deficiencies…

  • Tim Grey’s Lightroom book fails to inform

    Adobe’s wonderful new digital photo program, Lightroom, has a lot more bells and whistles than iPhoto or other typical low-end photo software. That’s exactly why I bought it. With a so-called prosumer camera, the Canon Digital Rebel XT, I’m able to do many more sophisticated things while shooting pictures and I needed a software program…

  • He marched in the animals, two by two

    …And he called out as they came through Hey Lord, I’ve got green alligators and long-necked geese Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees Some cats and rats and elephants, but Lord, I’m so forlorn I just can’t find no unicorns. Ah, the Irish Rovers and The Unicorn Song. Brings back fond memories of rainy…

  • Canon’s new hybrid camera: umm, wow?

    (Updated with further reports) Canon unveiled a hybrid still photo/video camera today at such a low price point ($500 manufacturer recommended) with such an insane feature set (7.1 megapixel camera plus high definition video recording and image stabilization) that it almost defies belief. The new Powershot TX-1 has a lot of smart features, from obvious…

  • Why I got such a good deal on my Canon Rebel XT

    Canon introduced an update to its top-selling digital SLR today, according to the Digital Photography Review web site. The main new features seem to be a slightly bigger and brighter LCD, 10.1 megapixels instead of 8 and some kind of automatic lens dust cleaner. Can’t say there’s much there to make me sad I moved…

  • New camera needs lots of accessories

    For a recent business trip to Alaska (sweet!), I determined that my trusty & wonderful Canon SD 400 Digital Elph wasn’t up to snuff. So I splurged on a digital SLR that was on sale at Best Buy, Canon’s Rebel XT. Va-va-voom. It’s big and bulky but takes me back to the days of my…