Monday, November 9, 2009

Blog Blog

KEN POSNEY: DAILY POST

Lindsey and Peter Mason Wedding
Ha'ena, Kaua'i










BLACK STAR RISING
Ask the Photo Business Coach: Beate Chelette
Editor’s note: Black Star Rising is pleased to introduce a new series of video blog posts, “Ask the Photo Business Coach,” featuring Beate Chelette. The high-energy entrepreneur and former Corbis executive has been profiled twice on this blog, once while with Corbis and again after leaving the company. Today, she is a successful consultant and author. (more…)

DANE SANDERS
Custom Tasty Treats Sweet and Saucy Shop

KEN ROCKWELL
NEW: Contax G2 Review. Better than the LEICA M9, for a lot less money! The M9 is the world's best digital camera, but the Contax G2 is about 40 years more advanced.

NEW: Contax G2 Users' Guide. How to use every feature of the G2, which is a lot simpler than I make it seem.


MIKE LARSON
Ireland... The story begins...
After flying out of New Orleans, through ORD to LHR, I Just arrived in Ireland, its 45 degrees out & rainy, I rented (hired, as they say here) a car and was traveling and exploring down Irish roads that reminded me of the chronicles of Narnia, as when they were in the forests along winding narrow roads with walls of green trees at dusk as the wind blew. Outside I could smell fires as the houses looked so warm inside! The farther I got away from Dublin, the more country-esq the landscape looked. As the sun faded the green grass turned to grey and after praying to find the house, no number address out here, just a ranch name on a street in a town. If found it!

Now we sit by the fireplace warming up over some tea as I get to know the family and we chat about the wedding tomorrow. Its amazing to hear the culture of the Irish, how they do things and what they talk about. I'm excited for tomorrow! Castles churches and green countryside's!
I know some of these people, they know me from a Wedding I shot in Italy last year, Martina, the beautiful bride had some friends who wanted the images for their wedding, just what she had. It makes such a difference to have my couples already know they are in for a big treat, and a great experience. There's no icebreaker needed! Just fun, and an amazingly beautiful day. I'll totally be posting amazing shots tomorrow!...
Photo of the Day
Canon 7D Video Example
I spent some time with my friend Dane Sanders helping him with a workshop down in Newport Beach, CA a few weeks ago. On a totally spur of the moment basis, with no planning, not much gear and no idea what I was doing, I decided to make a little video of the experience so that others might get just a taste of what it was like to hang out with Dane. The result is this video. I shot it on a Canon EOS 7D with a Canon EF 50mm f1.4 lens mounted on a Red Rock Micro Event. I also used a Zacuto Z-Finder and a Lightpanels MicroPro LED light. I forgot my mic so there’s little audio here.

Photo Book Review – Practical HDR: A complete guide to creating High Dynamic Range images with your Digital SLR


Wedding Photos You’ll Love (Even if You Hate Wedding Photos)

Inspiration Board for Brides

TIM GREY (Digital Darkroom Questions)
Today's Question:
When saving Photoshop images what is the best way to save the images--PSD or TIFF--and why?

Tim's Answer:
For most photographers under most circumstances, on the assumption we're talking about a "master" image file that has a variety of layers, it frankly doesn't really matter. Both PSD and TIFF files support all the features you need within Photoshop, so you can save multiple layers, adjustment layers, layer masks, alpha channels, and much more as part of either image file type. In both cases there are compatibility issues since most applications can't understand the PSD file format, and most imaging software can't interpret layered TIFF images saved from Photoshop. That means you should really think of both as being Photoshop-only file formats in terms of compatibility.

The only really significant reason you might want to choose one of these two file formats over the other is file size, but there's actually not necessarily a lot of clarity there either. In most cases if you save a PSD with Maximize Compatibility mode turned off, the resulting file will be smaller than a TIFF image with layers, even if you use LZW compression. But not always. To give you a somewhat typical example, I have an image saved with a variety of settings. The PSD without Maximize Compatibility mode turned on is about 65MB, the PSD with Maximize Compatibility mode turned on is about 85MB, the TIFF with no compression is about 73MB and the TIFF with LZW compression is about 88MB. Do keep in mind, however, that PSD files with Maximize Compatibility mode turned off can't be imported into Lightroom. Since you have to choose, I'll give you a definitive suggestion. I think you should use the PSD file format. One reason is that by design it is a Photoshop file format, and since you've (presumably) created a layer-based master image you'll only be using Photoshop to apply modifications. So there's no need to try to achieve compatibility (and again, when a TIFF is saved with layers intact there are going to be compatibility issues anyway).

I also have a "historical" reason for using PSD as my master image file format. It used to be that you could only save layered image files as PSD. Photoshop didn't support layered TIFF files. So all files with layers were PSDs, and in general TIFFs were used for the final flattened output file you would send to a lab for printing, for example. So many of us got to think of PSD files as the master image, and TIFF files as the flattened derivatives. So you could look at a list of files and easily know which was which. Part of the reason I still use PSD files for my master image files is this habit, but as mentioned above, there are other reasons as well.