Today I begin my fourth trip to Antarctica.

Follow my Antarctica blog for daily updates.

You can read my daily posts from my 2009 voyage there now.

Find out more about my ongoing Antarctica project – book, galleries, maps, facts, statements and more.

Preview the book of work from my first three trips to Antarctica in 2005, 2007, and 2009 above.

Email me to find out about my Antarctica 2013 workshop first.

Category: Destination - Antarctica

 


How do I clean my DSLR sensors in the field?

Get 10% off all Visible Dust products.

Just tell them I sent you.

Call 1-877-999-9404.

Visit Visible Dust today.

Category: Discounts
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Flypaper Textures offers a variety of high quality easy-to-use downloadable texture files.
(I use them all the time with my iPhone photographs.)
You can get 15% off Flypaper Textures with this code – johnpaul .

Visit Flypaper Textures here.

Plus, mouse over images on their blog for  before / after previews.

Read A Little Stress Can Be Good For Your Images on The Huffington Post.

“Stress can be good for your images. The analog materials used in painting and photography, often add rich textures that can enliven images. Throughout the history of art, drips, scratches, cracks stains, grain, vignetting, light leaks, fading, erasure and other analog artifacts have all been successfully used to add a compelling character to many images. Far from being something to be avoided, these effects can become a creative wellspring you can draw from time and time again.

Distress your photographs a little and you can make contemporary photographs look antique. Distress your photographs a lot and you can make photographs seem like they were made with other media – pencil, ink, paint, etc. The same effects and sensibilities can also be applied to and enhance images made by hand, with paint or with painting software, or computer rendered, whether 2D or 3D.

Stress can do a lot for your images …”

Category: Discounts
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“Nature’s beauty can be easily missed — but not through Louie Schwartzberg’s lens. His stunning time-lapse photography, accompanied by powerful words from Benedictine monk David Steindl-Rast, serves as a meditation on being grateful for every day.”

Category: Video, Video - TED
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Julieanne demonstrates how to update, rename and delete presets and templates in Lightroom.

Watch more videos on Lightroom here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

 

Category: Video - Lightroom
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Sharpening With Layers

November 22, 2011 | Leave a Comment |

There are many reasons to use layers when sharpening your digital images.

Layers can be used to eliminate saturation shifts. Change the Blend Mode of a sharpening layer from Normal to Luminosity. Color noise will be reduced this way.

Layers can be used to prevent clipping in deep shadow detail (near-black) and bright highlight detail (near-white). As sharpening is a contrast effect, near-white and near-black values can be driven to pure white and pure black by it. There’s a cure. Double-click the layer to activate Layer Styles. Use the Blend If sliders to reveal the lost highlight and shadow detail in the background layer below the sharpening layer; zoom way into a highlight area, hold the Option/Alt key and drag the right arrow to restore highlights and the left arrow to restore shadows.

Layers can be masked for greater control over confined areas in an image. To begin, add a layer mask. Select an area from which you wish to remove a sharpening effect, like a sky or other area of even tone, and fill the area with black. You can use this strategy to remove unwanted texture or noise from selected areas of an image. Gray values can be created on a mask with the Gradient tool or with a Brush tool to gradually reduce a sharpening effect. This often can produce a more strongly felt impression of space within an image. In anticipation of selectively modifying an effect, you may decide to sharpen an image more aggressively.

One approach to gaining additional flexibility …

Read the rest of this article on Digital Photo Pro.

Read more on sharpening here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Magazine - Digital Photo Pro, Software - Photoshop, Technique - Sharpening
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Julieanne Kost demonstrates the two most frequent methods for importing files into Lightroom. She discusses the advantages of each workflow, whether you’re importing directly from a card or importing images already copied to a specific location on your hard drive.

Watch more videos on Lightroom here.

Learn more in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Category: Video - Lightroom
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Sean Duggan and I discuss Exploring Your Tools and Clarifying Your Process.

Find out more about Sean Duggan here.

Read Sean’s Q&A here.

Find more Photographers On Photography resources here.

 

Category: Photographers - Video Conversation, Photographers On Photography
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Q&A – Sean Duggan

November 19, 2011 | Leave a Comment |

Sean Duggan provides candid answers to a variety of questions

What’s the best thing about photography?
It provides a window through which we can view our own world, as well as the world beyond our experience, other realities and other visions.

What’s the worst thing about photography?
That there so much of it. Our culture is so inundated with photographs that they can become the visual equivalent of background noise

What’s the thing that interests you most about other people’s photographs?

The way they see and interpret their world. Their unique visions show me things I could not imagine, and present new conceptual pathways to follow.

What benefits do you get from (this/these) other art form/s?
Poetry helps me to be visually sensitive to the possibility of metaphor in an image; it helps me appreciate photographs as visual poems.

Writing helps me to more fully explore and understand ideas and concepts.

Making sculptural assemblages is a tactile and three-dimensional way to explore ideas through the combination of different materials and found objects. This work often directly influences my “Artifacts of an Uncertain Origin” series of photographs.

What failure did you learn the most from?
No particular failure, but the general idea that in any failure there is an opportunity to learn something, to take that knowledge, start again, and do it better.

Read the rest of Sean’s answers here.

Read other photographers answers to the same questions here.

Find out more about Sean Duggan here.

Find more Photographers On Photography resources here.

Category: Photographers - Q&A, Photographers On Photography
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Q&A – Sean Kernan

November 18, 2011 | Leave a Comment |


Sean Kernan provides candid answers to a variety of questions.

What’s the best thing about gear?

It’s poetic sense of capability and precision.

What’s the worst thing about gear?

It can seduce you into thinking you can take good photographs if you have it.

How do you know when an image doesn’t work?

When it merely describes a surfaec but is not in itself alive.

How do you know when an image is good?

When it takes me into some new space or understanding, beyond photography.

How do you know when an image is great?

When it smacks me and enlarges me at once, and then does it again when I see it 20 years later.

What’s the most useful photographic mantra?

Shoot first, ask questions later.

Do you practice another art form? (If so, which?)

Chinese calligraphy, video.

What benefits do you get from (this/these) other art form/s?

From calligraphy, a very acute sense of the role of space, of emptiness. From video, a sense of time that is quite like music.

Read the more of Sean’s answers here.

Read answers to the same questions by other photographers here.

Learn more about Sean Kernan here.

Read my Photographers On Photography conversation with Sean here.

Category: Photographers - Q&A, Photographers On Photography
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