January 2017 – Winter Landscapes, Bokeh, Night Cityscapes, Memory Cards, Skies

Wow! It’s 2017 already. Boy the year went fast.  Now we get to start all over again.  I hope you all got some great new camera stuff for Christmas.  The internet was a little skimpy with articles this month, too much focus on telling us about the great deals on sale for Christmas.  We did manage to pull out a few gems out of the bag.

It’s officially winter so unless you’re going to hibernate for a few months you’ll be going out to shoot in the cold.  Here’s an article on Picture Correct titled 5 Tips for Photographing Winter Landscapes by Corky Carson.

http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/5-tips-for-photographing-winter-landscapes/

I heard a rumor that one of our contest themes for next year might be people portraits.  Here’s a quick little article, also on Picture Correct, by Ellie Graham titled Using the Bokeh Effect in Child Portraits.  This works on adults too.

http://www.picturecorrect.com/tips/using-the-bokeh-effect-in-child-portraits/

One of the things about winter is that it gets dark earlier so if you’re into shooting cityscapes or nightscapes you don’t have to stay out so late.  The lights come on at 5:00pm.  Here’s a tutorial Mickey Rountree turned me onto on YouTube titled Enhancing Night Cityscapes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXfCz2Dt3mc

Here’s a tip on something we all must deal with, Memory Cards.  It’s written by Jeff Cable.  Before he switched to Photography as a full-time career, Jeff was the Director of Marketing at Lexar. This article was on Peta Pixel and titled The Do’s and Don’ts of Memory Cards: Tips for Photographers.

http://petapixel.com/2016/12/07/dos-donts-memory-cards-tips-photographers/

Now for something a little more advanced to fill a few hours over the holidays.  We’ve all had this problem.  We take a gorgeous landscape or any type of picture really, and the sky is white.  No color, nothing, boring.  It just ruins the picture.  Here’s a tutorial from Blake Rudis on Replacing Skies in Photoshop with Blend If.  The nice thing about Blake’s technique is it blends so nicely with the main image verses just masking out the sky and inserting a new one.

http://f64academy.com/replacing-skies-with-blend-if/?mc_cid=da3634397e&mc_eid=b757bed750