Photography

I have been using Aperture lately for my digital photography post-processing. The work flow and smoothly working tools are addicting, but I have found a fatal flaw in its handling of RAW files. Aperture has no way of handling hot pixels. These dead pixels are a fact of life on digital cameras; although some cameras map these out for you from the factory, more will appear in time. Adobe, knowing this fact, built hot pixel removal into Adobe Camera RAW. Apple's algorithm, however, not only doesn't remove them, it enhances them into a bright dot, apparently falsely thinking the bright, out of place single pixel is image detail to be enhanced. This causes the single failed pixel to become a bright blob on your photo.

I do a lot of photography using rather high end equipment, and am not used to working within the limitations of equipment with lesser capabilities. With the fall colors however, I saw quite a few pictures while wandering around where I had nothing but my cell phone with me. My first instinct was to run and get a better camera, but that isn't always practical. I tried some shots with my cell phone (a Motorolla V600) and was pleasantly surprised with the result. The resolution is awful, and the fixed focus extremely limiting, but working within those limits made for a rather interesting picture.

I have been doing a lot of photography over the past few days of the PA Capitol Centennial. I usually stick with outdoor photography, but I could not resist documenting this once in a lifetime opportunity.

There have been a lot of photographers at this event, so I have been able to compare my techniques to those of others. One instance in particular sticks out; when taking staged group shots of people, I tend to adjust the shot on my end as much as possible and minimize re-adjusting the people. This is no doubt due to the vast majority of my experience so far; mountains and animals don't tend to move when you ask them to. It has become quite obvious to me tonight this is not the best way to work with people after seeing first hand the results that are achieved by coaxing the crowd instead.

In the vast majority of photography I do, I continue to much prefer my current 'journalistic' type approach of trying to be hands-off and capturing the feel of the event without changing it, but in staged shots like this which are obviously staged anyway, I really need to be stepping in and molding the image.

As I have needed to interact with photographers frequently for various projects at work, and finding myself taking increasing amounts of photos for commercial purposes, I have been doing quite a bit of reading on photography rights and pricing models. While investigating the ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers) site, I found an article on the perils of stock photography. Not only is it an important warning about making sure the photos you are using are unique and not from some overused stockpile, it is quite humorous as well.