SFredrickPhoto.com Blog

Victory Declared!

Steve — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 05:39:00 +0000

The blog is back on line and everyone should be able to access it normally. It was frustrating to be able to navigate into the history and to even be able to create new posts but to have the way most folks get into the blog not work.

Anyway all that is fixed now. So tomorrow (or , later today; after some sleep) will be getting the formatting of the theme back. I really do not like the white background.

Problems with Blog

Steve — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 16:00:59 +0000

The blog has been off line for a while. I’m working on it. I’ve upgraded to a newer version of WordPress but still having problems. I can navigate into the blog thread using a URL or Permalink. But still can’t get in via the front door.

Currently using the default theme after upgading versions of WordPress. Will work on getting my theme to work after getting the other issues taken care on.

Thanks for your patients.

White Balance Series

Steve — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:54:45 +0000

I was recently looking through the achieves of this blog and ran across a series of posts I wrote two years ago on the topic of white balance. And it occurred to me that I should link them together somehow and decided to just create a post that does just that. So here goes….+

Part 1: What is White Balance?

Part 2: What’s the Correct White Balance Setting?

Part 3: When Should White Balance be Set?

Part 4: Setting Camera White Balance

Lightroom 4 Beta

Steve — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 16:29:03 +0000

Today Adobe has made Lightroom 4 Beta available for free, until it is officially released March 31, to anyone who wants to try it out. Two of the many new features look very promising.

New slides in the Basic Panel for better highlight and shadow recovery
Being able to paint White Balance with local adjustment brush

And remember, even if you don’t use Lightroom, these new features will, at some time in the future, be a part of Camera Raw. So Camera Raw uses my want to take a look at all the new features. Very exciting stuff—local noise reduction, better Clarity, soft proofing, adjust the individual R, G and B channels with curves (just like in Photoshop) and more! Check them out.

This all means that even fewer on my images will ever see Photoshop and that means less time spent at the computer working images. And hopefully that means more time of other stuff like shooting more images.

Just Google Lightroom 4 or go the the Adobe Labs Lightroom 4 Beta site to learn more and download the ap.

As with all Beta software you should not use it for production work. In the case of this beta you should not use LR4 to manage your image files. Continue to use LR3 for that. Use and play with LR4 on a “dummy” catalog.

First Sunset of the New Year

Steve — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 03:22:23 +0000

Hello 2012!

Merry Christmas

Steve — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 21:08:22 +0000

Merry Christmas to all of you and to your families.

Happy Birthday Jesus

Steve — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 13:33:00 +0000

Winterfest of Lights: Ocean City, MD

Steve — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 20:41:04 +0000

I’ve been remiss in making viagra posts for a couple of weeks now. And I thought I would get back into it with some seasonal pix. These are from the Winterfest of Lights in Ocean City, Maryland. Unfortunately, to see the displays visitors must ride a tram that doesn’t stop on the tour. So all these are shot hand-held at elevated ISO.

Fall Color and Sunburst

Steve — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 23:16:19 +0000

One day last fall I had field trips for two of my Chester County Night School classes; one was in the morning and one in the afternoon. After getting a bite to eat I took a few minutes to do some shooting myself. This is may favorite image from the shoot.

The sunburst is a result of shooting a point light source with a wide angel lens set to a small aperture (large f-number), like f/16 or higher.

For this image I was more concerned with getting the star burst effect than with loosing a little sharpness due to diffraction and shot it at f/29. That resulted in a shutter speed of 1/20 sec.

One of the classes that had their field trip that day was my Digital B&W class so I created a B&W version. For the conversion I was going for a high contrast infrared effect.

Here is the resulting image.

Guadalupe Island: Great White Sharks (#5)

Steve — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 21:51:11 +0000

One last post of GWS. This time the sharks are really close. This first one was shot at 12mm. I’m not sure how the sea weed got between his teeth. I really wish it wasn’t there but I was not about to try and floss for her.This one was shot at 22mm.