Save 12% On NEC Spectraview Monitors

NECPA272WSV

Get 12% off NEC monitors with this discount code JPCPHOTO.

I use the NEC PA 272W-SV.

10-bit GB-R LED backlit AH-IPS LCD

Internal 14-bit programmable 3D LUTs

Wide Gamut – 99.3% of AdobeRGB

High resolution

Easy on the eye flicker rate

Now with lower power consumption and heat output

Check out NEC’s Spectraview pro monitors here.

Investing in a high quality monitor is one of the most important things we can do to ensure our digital files and prints achieve the highest quality. Visual artists who don’t invest in a great monitor are like audiophiles who don’t invest in good speakers. The monitor is what we look at; the speaker are what they listen to.

NEC’s Spectraview monitors are among the monitors that achieve the widest gamuts available today, making it possible to see more of the color contained in your digital files and more accurately represent the saturated colors that are printable with today’s fast-evolving digital printing media.
Simulating print brightness and contrast with monitors has always been one of the most challenging tasks. NEC’s unique combination of hardware and software solutions are the most sophisticated solutions available for setting monitor white, far exceeding the accuracy of the vast majority of other LCD monitor’s too bright results. As a result, predictions of print quality are significantly more accurate, saving time and media. Use NEC’s Spectraview / MultiProfiler software for best results. It calibrates the monitor’s LUTs and loads ICC profiles directly into the monitor for optimal color space matching.
Read what other top pros are saying about NEC monitors here.
Learn more about the tools I use here.
See them in action in my digital photography and digital printing workshops.

Good Enough – The Story Behind The Image

Condensation X - Prelude

Condensation X, 2002  

It’s not the most dramatic wave; it’s rather small in comparison to the enormous waves you find in the Pacific ocean. The ocean waters aren’t glassy smooth; the wave line isn’t fully continuous; the surrounding waves aren’t perfectly scalloped; and the foam in the foreground serves only as accents, indicating a previous passage, rather than forming a clear and present pattern. It’s not illuminated by the clearest light nor does it glow from within. Still, there’s an intensely quiet presence about this image (Condensation X), deceptively calm on the surface but potentially turbulent below, with an air of mystery (Where is it coming from and going to? What surrounds it?) that makes it powerfully expressive in a complex and unique way. It’s not obvious but it is rewarding. You might say it’s a sleeper, something you might not pay close attention to at first but the more you look at it the more it grows on you.
Being sensitive to times when less is more and more is less will help you get it just right. In today’s constantly competitive culture, it’s hard not to over achieve. But sometimes, that’s exactly what you need to do. Sometimes what you really need is to get it just right – and nothing more.
I like to do my very best. I like to try to do it better every time. Sometimes I try too hard and do too much. I’ve wasted hours, days even, trying to perfect something only to find out that along the way the life had gone out of it. I’ve found that things that I thought were distractions were really things that made something richer and more complex, after removing them. I’ve come to the realization that what I thought were flaws made something perfectly imperfect. This is not to say that I don’t still try to make things as good as I can and even to up my game. It is to say that the answers I’m looking for transcend technical perfection and sometimes are better for less of it.
In the world of photography it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture for all of the details. We have an extensive list of physical characteristics to evaluate the quality of photographs – focus, depth of field, frozen motion (or extreme motion blur, but nothing in between), low noise, detail in highlights and shadows, contrast, credible color casts, believable levels of saturation, no lens artifacts, the list goes on – yet we are much more challenged to describe the quality of photographs on the levels of perception and content, which are more important. There are times when technical perfection can be distracting or worse a cover up for what’s lacking. Photographer Ansel Adams remarked that, “There’s nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.”
It’s a matter of appropriate means. You don’t want to create dynamic images to portray quiet, tender moments. You don’t want to retouch portraits of victims of war, famine, or pestilence. You don’t want to reenact the truth to make it picture perfect.
There are many times when things seem more authentic if they’re not perfect.
Besides, the more perfect your presentation becomes the more attention you call to the delivery. When you want to call more attention to the content perfect presentation may not be perfect for the purpose. Make your delivery effective. Sometimes it’s more effective to deliver just enough, not more, not less. It’s part of getting it just right.
Questions
What isn’t good enough? How do you know?
What is good enough? How do you know?
What is too much?
What is perfectly imperfect?
Find out more about this image here.
View more related images here.
Read more The Stories Behind The Photographs here.

Photoshop Plus Lightroom For $9.99 A Month

LR_425
PS_425
The Photoshop Photography Program is available to anyone (long term and new customers alike) for a limited time only – Offer Expires Dec 2.
It includes all of the following for $9.99/month with a 12-month commitment.
– Photoshop CC
– Lightroom 5
– 20GB of online storage
– Behance ProSite
– Access to training resources on Creative Cloud Learn
– Ongoing updates and upgrades
(Though not legally stated, it’s Adobe’s intention to keep these same rates for everyone in this program indefinitely.)
Questions? See Adobe’s FAQ and terms.

20 Quotes On Optimism & Pessimism

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Here’s a selection of my favorite quotes on optimism and pessimism.
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill
“A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.” – Harry S. Truman
“We can complain because rose bushes have thorns, or rejoice because thorn bushes have roses.” ― Abraham Lincoln
“The optimist sees the donut, the pessimist sees the hole.” ― Oscar Wilde
“Some people see the glass half full. Others see it half empty. I see a glass that’s twice as big as it needs to be.” ― George Carlin
“The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.” – Mark Twain
“The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true.” – James Branch Cabell
“A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is one who hopes they are.” – Chauncey Depew
“Both optimists and pessimists contribute to the society. The optimist invents the aeroplane; the pessimist, the parachute.” — George Bernard Shaw
“An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be.” – Anonymous
“An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight … the truly wise person is colorblind.” – Albert Schweitzer
“The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails.” – William Arthur Ward
“A pessimist only sees the dark side of the clouds, and mopes; a philosopher sees both sides and shrugs; an optimist doesn’t see the clouds at all – he’s walking on them.” – Leonard L Levinson
“The nice part about being a pessimist is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised.” – George Will
“Go into situations expecting nothing and you always come out getting something better than you had ever expected.” – Unknown
“It doesn’t hurt to be optimistic. You can always cry later.” – Lucimar Santos de Lima
“Don’t ever become a pessimist… a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.” – Robert A. Heinlein
“Many an optimist has become rich by buying out a pessimist.” – Robert G. Allen
“No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to uncharted land, or opened a new doorway for the human spirit.” – H.Keller
“I’ve never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.” – Paul Harvey
Find more creativity quotes here.
Read more quotes daily on Twitter and Facebook.

30 Quotes By Photographer Diane Arbus

 
Here’s a selection of quotes by photographer Diane Arbus.
“The camera is a kind of license.” – Diane Arbus
“Photography was a licence to go whenever I wanted and to do what I wanted to do.” – Diane Arbus
“My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.” – Diane Arbus
“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.” – Diane Arbus
“Lately I’ve been struck with how I really love what you can’t see in a photograph.” – Diane Arbus
“I always thought of photography as a naughty thing to do — that was one of my favorite things about it, and when I first did it, I felt very perverse.” – Diane Arbus
“I think the most beautiful inventions are the ones you don’t think of.” – Diane Arbus
“The thing that’s important to know is that you never know. You’re always sort of feeling your way.” – Diane Arbus
“One thing that struck me very early is that you don’t put into a photograph what’s going to come out. Or, vice versa, what comes out is not what you put in.” – Diane Arbus
“I never have taken a picture I’ve intended. They’re always better or worse.” – Diane Arbus
“Some pictures are tentative forays without your even knowing it. They become methods. It’s important to take bad pictures. It’s the bad ones that have to do with what you’ve never done before. They can make you recognize something you hadn’t seen in a way that will make you recognize it when you see it again.” – Diane Arbus
“What moves me about…what’s called technique…is that it comes from some mysterious deep place. I mean it can have something to do with the paper and the developer and all that stuff, but it comes mostly from some very deep choices somebody has made that take a long time and keep haunting them.” – Diane Arbus
“I used to have this notion when I was a kid that the minute you said anything, it was no longer true. Of course it would have driven me crazy very rapidly if I hadn’t dropped it, but there’s something similar in what I’m trying to say. That once it’s been done, you want to go someplace else. There’s just some sense of straining.” – Diane Arbus
“The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination and I think it’s true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You’ve just got to choose a subject – and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.” – Diane Arbus
“I’m very little drawn to photographing people that are known or even subjects that are known. They fascinate me when I’ve barely heard of them.” – Diane Arbus“I work from awkwardness. By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.” – Diane Arbus
“What I’m trying to describe is that it’s impossible to get out of your skin into somebody else’s…. That somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own.” ― Diane Arbus
“I don’t know what good composition is…. Sometimes for me composition has to do with a certain brightness or a certain coming to restness and other times it has to do with funny mistakes. There’s a kind of rightness and wrongness and sometimes I like rightness and sometimes I like wrongness.” – Diane Arbus
“The camera is cruel, so I try to be as good as I can to make things even.” – Diane Arbus
“For me the subject of a picture is always more important than the picture. And more complicated.” – Diane Arbus
“I would never choose a subject for what it means to me. I choose a subject and then what I feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold.” – Diane Arbus
“Take pictures of what you fear.” – Diane Arbus
“The more specific you are, the more general it’ll be.” – Diane Arbus
“Everybody has that thing where they need to look one way but they come out looking another way and that’s what people observe.” – Diane Arbus
“Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” – Diane Arbus
“There’s a kind of power thing about the camera. I mean everyone knows you’ve got some edge. You’re carrying some magic which does something to them. It fixes them in a way.” – Diane Arbus
“It’s always seemed to me that photography tends to deal with facts whereas film tends to deal with fiction.” – Diane Arbus
“Love involves a peculiar unfathomable combination of understanding and misunderstanding.” – Diane Arbus
“The world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.” – Diane Arbus
“If you scrutinize reality closely enough, if in some way you really, really get to it, it becomes fantastic.” ― Diane Arbus
“I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn’t photograph them.” – Diane Arbus
Read more Photographer’s Quotes here.