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What makes us stop and say to ourselves, “There’s a photograph here!”? It really comes down to one element that is all around us—light. The play of light off objects, critters and people is what grabs the mind’s eye and makes us take note and sparks visual interest in the viewer. There are lots of processes that go into that final photograph to make it successful, yet none are as important as how we speak with light. And that’s all done through exposure.

OnOne Software’s Perfect Effects 3 (www.ononesoftware.com) offers more than 300 effects in 14 categories: Vintage, Darkroom, Borders, Portrait, Color and Tone, Film, Glow, Detail, Black and White, Landscape, Movie Looks, Photo Filters, Textures and Vignettes. For maximum flexibility in your workflow, Perfect Effects 3 works as a standalone program, or as a plug-in. Perfect Effects 3 integrates as an external editor for Lightroom and Aperture or as a plug-in for Elements or Photoshop. If you are using PE3 as a Photoshop plug-in, the effects appear under the File>Automate menu.

All the photographic effects you select are now previewed full screen before you decide to apply them—they draw in seconds. Further, the program offers the ability to stack multiple effects together to create your own unique look, with the option of selective masking on each layer. Advanced tools allow you to change the Blending mode options of the layers, as well as to control which tonal regions and/or colors of the image the effect is applied to. With new manual controls, you can adjust every element of an effect—not just the strength but also the color, tone and texture—to fine tune and customize your personal look. Here’s a look at some of the magic you can perform with this program.

There’s a considerable difference between resizing, which means maintaining the same pixel dimensions and adapting to different document sizes at the same print resolution, and resampling, which means building additional pixels from the original file to enable printing larger documents at the same resolution. Say you have a 24MB file, obtained from an 8 megapixel digicam, that will normally fill an 8.5x11” print at 300 dpi when printing. But you just got a 13x19” printer and want to try your luck at that size, still at 300dpi. Well, for that you would need a 62MB file.

As the sun was setting, I continued to photograph the historic Neue Synagogue in the eastern sector of Berlin, making sure to include the sightseeing boat on the river. I set my framing and exposure to capture some detail in the foreground but in the process I lost any hint of the colorful tapestry I’d hoped to capture in the sky. I took another exposure, this time underexposing by 1 stop. There was more of a hint of sunset, but still not as much as I’d wanted and I’d lost the boat, which had moved on. Worse yet, the foreground was now muddy, practically entirely devoid of detail.

There’s an intriguing rumor making the rounds that, if true, could dramatically alter the way in which photographers interact with wireless devices like smartphones, tablets and laptops. According to Sony Alpha Rumors, a typically reliable source of information regarding future digital imaging technology from Sony, we may soon see the unveiling of a high-quality lens featuring WiFi connectivity, a built-in imaging sensor and its own power source.

Photogenic Professional Lighting is one of the classic names in portrait lighting and has been making studio equipment for more than 100 years. A lot has changed in technology since 1903 but one thing that hasn’t is Photogenic’s manufacturing their lighting gear for studio or location portrait photography here in the USA. I chose the AKC55K 640 WS Soft Box Portrait kit for this review because it was a 2-light system that includes a soft box on a boom, something beginning portrait photographers sometimes overlook because they think this particular lighting tool is too expensive and too complex to use. My experience with this kit demonstrated otherwise.

Digital cameras allow photographers to stretch the boundaries of what we can capture like never before. Using extremely high ISO settings like 25000, in-camera noise reduction algorithms, and expanded dynamic range capability, we can now photograph in low light situations and expect to use shutter speeds fast enough to take sharp pictures. This is truly revolutionary. However, there is a price to be paid, and that price is image quality. You just can’t expect a picture taken at ISO 25000 to be as sharp and to show fine detail with tack sharp clarity like a picture taken at ISO 200. There are limits to what advanced technology can deliver.