Recent content by drsilver

Back when I was using film I used an incident meter, always. It's just the way I worked. These days I still carry a little Sekonic 308, but with the dynamic range and post-processing capabilities we have available, I don't use it much. Still, there are times when I take an incident reading, or...

I was driving in the mountains today and a thought popped through my mind, damn, day-old plowed snow is ugly. I should try to make a picture that tells that story. Here's what I got with where I was and what I had to work with. I may try this again if we get some snow closer to home.

Most cameras write shutter count to the EXIF data on each photo. So, most of the free counting apps and websites just scrape the count out of the image's metadata. Starting with the Digic 6 processor in 2013, Canon stopped putting that data point into EXIF. Now the only way to get at that piece...

This is a good long read. I'm fairly new at this and I was looking for a photo-sharing site. This article convinced me that Flickr is where I should be and that, while they're happy to host us for free, we should probably be pitching in for storage and upkeep if we want this project to succeed...

I'm an F-2 guy from way back. Still use one because I know how. One less thing to learn in my advancing years. Here's a configuration with 1 DSLR, 24-105mm attached, a 17-40mm and a 70-300mm. That's representative of my standard kit. There's still some room left. I'd probably say no on 2 580...

Why's this guy hate green? :) Good video. Might watch some of his others. But his main point about blue and green seems to be, avoid it. Shoot around it if you can, mute it or turn it B&W if you can't. All good advice, but still, I'd like to figure out a way to use it. Autumn moving into winter...

My dad passed away a few years ago. He had a darkroom that probably hadn't been used as a darkroom since I left the house. (He built it by hand. Small, but still the best darkroom I ever worked in.) He had gallons of 40-year-old chemicals in there as well as photo paper. I called the city waste...

You think I'm exaggerating about the gray? Here's a picture of my car. One on the left is color. One on the right from a selenium B&W preset. Here's my birds for this post. Wasn't room for them up above. Gotta post the birds.

I've kind of neglected this thread, but I've been working on my gray. Plenty of opportunities around here this time of year. I mentioned I had an epiphany. I'm surrounded, all the time with soft, dull light. My instinct is to fight it but I don't win much. And soft light can be good if you stop...

Google fishing gloves. They come in a variety of styles at every price point. I spent 30 years fly fishing obsessively. Quite a bit of the gear carries over nicely. Back when I was taking pictures for a living I carried a pair of winter golf gloves. Thin lining makes them fairly warm and the...

I've heard Kodak developed its film speeds by taking pictures of the sky. It's always 18% gray in Rochester.

I've seen plenty of HDR abominations come out of Photoshop and Lightroom. I've never heard anyone tell photographers, "Stop using that software - see what might happen!!!"

Last post on this. Wrong place. Who is Prof Jon Crowcroft from the University of Cambridge and what does he teach? I bet it's not business. Anybody who works with numbers for a living, from office clerks to C-Suite executives, uses Excel. It's the user interface for their numbers. An...

I actually read one of those articles. Thanks for linking. Here's a money quote. "For a bit of context, Excel's XLS file format dates back to 1987. It was superseded by XLSX in 2007. Had this been used, it would have handled 16 times the number of cases. " Speaks to the importance of keeping...