PhotoRadar

I stumbled across this online photography magazine. It looks like it is the online iteration of Digital Camera and PhotoPlus magazines, which I know nothing about. It seems like a pretty useful site. There are links to all kinds of information, camera reviews, etc. At the bottom of the page are links to photography tips and tutorials. The few that I looked at were ok. Nothing terribly new, but still a good resource. Check it out.

www.photoradar.com

Featured Professional: Jeff Vanuga

CO LANDSCAPES 21

Our newest featured professional is Jeff Vanuga. He is a Wyoming based photographer who shoots a variety of photos, but has some especially impressive landscape and commercial work. I haven't included any of his commercial shots, but you can find them at his site here.

REFLECTION ON THE GRAND TETON, TETON NATIONAL PARK, WY


WY LANDSCAPE 37

His photography impresses me because it is so well crafted. If you look at any of his work, whether it is commercial or landscape or whatever, the shot is very well executed. His landscapes are sharp throughout (when they are supposed to be) and don't have any distracting elements. They are well composed and balanced and often shot from novel perspectives. I enjoy looking at photos of a familiar subject, taken in a unique way, as he has done with many of his Tetons photos. Check him out.
































































































FROST ON ARCTIC TUNDRA, DENALI NATIONAL PARK, ALASKA

Website: www.jeffvanugaphotography.com

All images © Jeff Vanuga; used with permission.

Hyperfocal Distance, part 2

Here is some more good info on hyperfocal distance. This one has some nice illustrations. Enjoy!

Hyperfocal Distance

Back to one of my favorite topics: sharpness. I have been doing some editing of old RAW captures and noticed that they are not as sharp as I would like them to be. Some of that can be chalked up to the quality of the lens I used at the time and also maybe to not using mirror lock-up, etc. But, the more I look at them the more it seems that I just wasn't focusing in the right place.

A given hyperfocal distance is the appropriate distance for focusing in order to get sharpness within an acceptable range. It is a concept that I don't fully understand and may have mis-defined in the sentence above. Here is a link to Wikipedia's definition. The point is, is that if you want a photo to be sharp from front to back, you need to focus in the appropriate place in the image.

Calculating the appropriate hyperfocal distance each shot can be challenging, as it is based on the focal legnth you are shooting at, the depth of field, and some camera specific info. I found a site here that has an online hyperfocal distance calculator that finds the appropriate distance given your situation. Also, since I always use the same camera and often shoot at similar focal distances and depths of field, I used the following formula in MS Excel to calculate likely hyperfocal distances and then wrote them down and keep them with my camera. The formula is:

F*F/(f*c)

where

F=focal length
f=f/stop
c=circles of confusion (different for each camera, but usually around .020 or .030 mm)

All units are in mm and the output will be in mm, so divide by 1000 to get meters.

I won't have a chance to go out and try this for a few weeks, but I am looking forward to getting photos with better sharpness throughout.

Pano App

A recent web article turned me on to some iPhone photography apps that I hadn't heard of before, one of which I immediately downloaded and have enjoyed using. The app is called Pano and is a way to create panoramic photos in the iPhone. To start out, you take capture an initial image in the app, which then sets a semi-transparent edge of that photo at the left of the screen to assist in lining up the next photo. When you have taken all of the images you want to include (up to sixteen), the app uses algorithms to blend the images.

I have used it to create several panoramas and am amazed! It blends the photos seamlessly...as long as they are lined up reasonably well and don't have moving elements. The quality of the final image is going to be limited by the size and pixel count of the iPhone's sensor, so don't expect something you can print out at poster size. But, it still does really look good.

You can check out the app here, and at the App Store.

Here is a gallery on Flickr for panoramas created in Pano.

Featured Professional: Dan Baumbach

Tenaya Creek

Dan Baumbach is the latest featured professional. Mr. Baumbach is a California based photographer, but shoots all over the country. You can check out his bio and his images here.
One thing in particular I like about his work is that he captures most of his images using a 4x5 view camera, which gives them greater sharpness and depth of field. He also has his own iPhone app!










Valley Storm










Temple of the Sun









Fog on Bolinas Ridge

Website: www.timelesslight.com

All images © Dan Baumbach; used with permission.

Photoshop.com

A few months back I downloaded the Photoshop.com app for my phone and have played with it a little bit, but hadn't checked out the companion website until recently. I have to say, I'm impressed. There are a lot of photo hosting and sharing sites on the web, but none with the editing power of this one. One of my past complaints with these sites is the inability to or difficulty of editing images once uploaded. I once uploaded a batch of photos to a site, only to find that they didn't appear as saturated or contrasty as they did in PS. So, I then had to delete them, re-edit on my computer, and then re-upload. What a pain! Now it is much easier to do it in site. The question for Adobe is: will communities build around Photoshop.com like they have for Flickr and Picasa?

I also ran across this short article that highlights some of the cool features of the site. It's a bit old, but check it out.