Two Photos, Two Different Lightroom Edits

Some great tips here from Jeff Ascough for monochrome edits in Lightroom. You might notice he hardly touches the AI masks, preffering brushes and gradients, and makes extensive use of the curves tool to affect localised regions exposure levels (and therefore contrast) without affecting the white and black points.

Stop Sharing Your Photos (Why You Lost Your Joy for Photography)

The realisation that you’re not shooting for yourself but for an algorithm. I arrived at this conclusion about six years ago and divested myself from most social media and feel much better for it. Now I share on Flickr occasionally, to like-minded photographers and that’s about it. This video’s a reflection by Gerald Joehri.

Moment of Impact

The story of that photograph.

Has Taking the Perfect Photo Ruined Tourism in “The Spectacle”?

The answer, of course, is yes. We have a road near us in Gerringong which hit that weird Instagram zeitgeist and now it’s tough to drive down the street without endlessly dodging Chinese tourists. I stopped naming the locations in my photos a decade ago.

Do You Understand ISO?

Turns out that I did know what ISO is, in terms of digital cameras and sensors. But if you don’t, this is a great explainer.

I Photographed “Boring” Things For A Year. Here’s What Happened.

Jimmy West is a Swedish photographer who accepted the fact that he doesn’t live in the Dolomites and decided to just star photographing the ‘mundane’ scenes close to where he lives. And in doing so he discovered that, actually, they aren’t mundane at all.

The wrong way to add contrast (and what to do instead)

Great little instructional video from Todd Dominey here. If you’ve struggled with your contrast adjustments, there’s a simple explaination and a simple fix.

Why and How I use Artificial Light in Macro Photography

I do like Courtney Victoria’s video guides – always very calm and beautifully filmed. In this episode she talks about using artificial light when you’re taking macro shots out in nature.

RAW Tone Curve options in Affinity 3.1

All that Canva money hasn’t exactly lit a fire under Affinity’s development, but they just rolled out a new release – v3.1 – which includes a couple of new features for photographers. This is the most interesting of those new features, a tone curve method tool, which is explained well by the lead developer of the app – James Ritson.

The Wildest Camera Market I’ve Ever Seen (Pakistan)

Camera stores are few-and-far between here in Australia – even in Sydney and Melbourne there’s only a couple of independent shops and a few small chains (Ted’s, DigiDirect etc). So seeing something like this bonkers market in Pakistan is something of a revelation. I’m sure an enterprising local could make a killing picking up deals in this market on behalf of foreign buyers!