Shooting Fireworks

(Click for an even larger view)

You never know when you might see a fireworks show. It could be on the 4th of July in the USA, Bastille Day in France, Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, or after the Friday luau at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikiki, Hawaii. Whenever it happens if you want to take good photos of it you need to know how. You can watch videos on YouTube, find a magazine article, or go on a Google search and end up here. Shooting fireworks effectively is the topic this week.

Adaptive Lens Corrections

Russell Brown is the Sr. Creative Director at Adobe Systems and a great innovator in the use of Photoshop. Until I discovered his new video above I wasn't even aware that Photoshop CS6 had the capability of adaptively correcting lens distortion. I frequently shoot various wide angle lenses and have long been a devotee of panoramas, but this will take future creations to an entirely new level.

Have a look at what Dr. Brown has done here, and if you have CS6 be sure and give the new Adaptive Wide Angle filter a try. This video is sure to help you learn how to process images with this amazing filter correctly!

Enjoy!

Higgs Boson

Oh, great.  Now everybody is going to want one!

The Higgs Boson is no longer the theoretical particle of the Higgs mechanism that physicists have believed would reveal how all matter in the universe gets its mass.  Physicists at CERN pretty much confirmed today that their experiments have found the particle.  They did it with the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, Switzerland... otherwise known as "the Big Bang machine."

Most amazingly, Peter Higgs, the theoretical physicist from England who predicted the particle in 1964 in a paper that was rejected by an academic physics journal edited at CERN, was on hand in Geneva today when the formal announcement was made.  The guy who admitted to being "incompetent" in science in the lab was just surprised to be alive when his theory was proven correct.

You can get your very own Higgs Boson particle at the ParticleZoo while they last.  9.95$US plus shipping... Fair warning tho': They tend to live very short lives! :)

Still don't know what any of this is all about?!  Me either.  But the video below might help.  These guys do know!





Enjoy!

Export Settings in LR4

Here we go with another Lightroom 4 video.  Again, this is in response to a question I received recently about how to set up LR4 to save (Export) photos in a format other than TIFF.  This one was kind of fun to produce because I used my new headset/microphone setup for the first time... so you get to hear my "Charlie Chaplin" voice.  :)  But I also messed with ProShow Producer to add background music.

You learn, I learn.  That's how it works, so I hope this helps someone out there.  I know of at least one person who will find it useful.  By the way... this is not meant to be a definitive instructional on this aspect of LR4.  It's just how I do things.  What works for you is what matters.  With that being said,

Enjoy!

Spot Removal and LR4 Adjustments

A friend of mine asked me a couple of questions the other day about using the new version of Lightroom 4 (LR4), and since we're thousands of miles and many time zones apart I decided to help via the blog and YouTube. Hopefully some of this may help others too, so here goes!

There are two videos here... the first one talks about Spot Removal. The second talks about using the Adjustment Brush. Both use a couple of photos in the Lightroom library. The idea will be to clean up the spots first on a reference image and then use that to Sync a target. Then we'll continue on the target with brush adjustments.

Both videos are best viewed full screen at 720p HD.

Kamehameha Day Parade 2012

It was parade time again this past weekend, and one of my favorite photo ops of the year.  The colors and the joy on faces everywhere makes this day an annual favorite.  This year the weather was perfect once again and I shot everything with one of my best lenses, an 80-200mm f/2.8 zoom.  It is the "fast" nature of any f/2.8 lens when shot close to wide open that yields photos with a crisp clean subject and creamy backgrounds. In photo terms, that background cream is known as bokeh.

You can find the images here and many more of the festivities at my PBase photo site.

Enjoy!

Wordless Wednesday