All My Blogs

You can be sure to be met with smiles and helpful salespeople when you walk into The Brick.  Eager to make a sale, the people there will no doubt approach you with all the professionalism and knowledge you would expect from Leon's parent company.  And, once they have convinced you to buy their products, they will offer you an opportunity to purchase an extended warranty. You may hesitate at the expense, until they tell you that, "If you do not use the extended warranty, you may return to our store and put that money towards another product."  Ergo, it ultimately costs you nothing to have an extended warranty.  It sounds like a win-win situation.  Pay for something, then get it back later and put it towards something else.  Like many others have done, we thought it was a good deal, and we fell for it. What they don't tell you is that the day the extended warranty ends, you have 90 days to take them up on their offer.  However, they are not likely to tel...

The colours here may not represent the actual colours from the scene.  Screens and prints do not have the same broad ability to display all the colours of the spectrum.  The range is the colour gamut. What is a colour gamut (also called a colour space)?  Essentially, it is the entire set of colours that can be displayed on media.  Although there are millions, even trillions of colours available in a file or print, they do not represent every single colour originally present.  Even our eyes are limited in that there are colours they cannot pick up that exist in nature.  The colours that we can see are the visual colour gamut.  The ones that can be seen in print or electronic media are other colour gamuts. How many gamuts are there?  In Photoshop, there is an almost unlimited number.  To see the list in Photoshop, Click on the top menu View > Proof Setup >  Device to Simulate > and then look at the list - there are hundreds of cho...

Jpegs use the three primary colours RGB in the Additive Colour Model It turns out there are a lot of ways to identify colour.  We learn early on how to identify colours - the primary Crayola crayon box carries green, yellow, orange, red, blue, purple, brown, and black. As we advance into larger colour palettes, we find there are several shades of each with a white thrown in.  Then, when it comes to painting, the world of colour opens up to us as we find we can mix paints to produce an almost infinite range of colours. We have to draw a line between analogue colour (film) and digital colour (computer).  Film produces continuous colours, albeit with a limited spectrum compared to what modern digital cameras can capture.  Colour information from digital sensors is based on integers and is not continuous in nature.  To put that more succinctly, analogue deals with real numbers with every imaginable decimal between any two numbers, while digital has only whole number...

Photo of baskets I took in 2016 converted from colour to black and whites. Gone are the days of using coloured filters and panchromatic paper in a darkroom to take a colour negative and print it in black and white.  While it is true that you can use standard b&w paper to create a print, the medium's limited sensitivity to orange/red/yellow safelights means that you will not get a true grayscale image.  The filters allow you to change which hues come out darker or lighter than would otherwise be possible. Now we can simply convert a coloured image to grayscale (Image > Mode > Grayscale in Photoshop) to get a single-channel instead of the standard 3 (RBG).  The problem is that you can't control the way the hues turn to gray.  A better plan is to alter the colour balance before converting to grayscale.  This can be done manually through the Color Balance menu or automatically through the Black and White menu, found under Image > Adjustments in Photosho...

Relationships are important.  So, why aren't you photographing them more? My favourite thing to talk about in the photo courses I teach is the importance of relationships and the need to photograph them.  Most of us will agree that a photo of one person has a certain amount of value, although usually not to the person being photographed.  We love photos of individuals because of what those people mean to us, but they do not convey a relationship.  A photo of two or more people who have a strong connection means much more - especially to the people in the shot. The above photos (Leanne and Sarah in most of them, Lianna in one) were taken by me of my daughter and friend(s) - meaningful relationships that she had while growing up and carry on even now as they approach their 30s.  But I guarantee that these photos have a far deeper meaning than a shot of just one of them.  Why?  Because it stands for a relationship and a time together.  A memory, a fr...

Microscopic view of blood.  The fluid is plasma. My wife and I went to a talk about live blood analysis last night.  I wasn't interested in going, but she wanted me there to see if what she was saying was true.  I was actually flattered by that, as I am often skeptical of many health-related schemes designed to separate you from your wallet.  I am often accused of being overly opposed to the myriad of claims out there purporting healing where all other methods fail.  And it's true - I am a nay-sayer when it comes to some of these elaborate means to an end, and rightly so. So, off we went, and there we were, in the front row, listening to the presenter's every word.  She had an impressive microscope (phase contrast, dark field, light transmission) with good quality optics and an HD feed to a large screen TV.  She drew the blood of a volunteer client and created a cover-slipped slide.  She did not use any stains or viscous agents.  Then she mou...