Digital Innovations

"What me worry"--Alfred E. Newman

For many people, planning for New Year's Eve will be a little different this year. Instead of just ordering party hats, noisemakers, and your favorite...

"I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy."--Frank Zappa

One book that hopefully won't put you to sleep is entitled How I Photograph Women and is the successor to my eBook titled Everyday Glamour Photography, which just happens to be this book's subtitle. The 80-page book contains more than 100 color and black and...

Like most photographers I occasionally become equipment obsessed, but sometimes even the smallest tool, something as simple and useful as a new LensPen, can make creating new images a little easier. I’ve often said that the most important piece of equipment is the one between a photographer’s ears, but creating images also requires tools. Choosing the right tool or accessory may not make the difference between a good photograph and a bad one, but may make the difference in whether or not you even try to capture it.

While it may not be nice to fool Mother Nature, photographers have been doing just that since Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths photographed the “Cottingley Fairies” in 1917, but a lot has changed since then and we’re now more skeptical of images that appear “shopped.” (Portrait photographers engaged in retouching even before Mathew Brady opened his New York studio in 1844.) To me, part of the fun of photography is enhancing reality, creating images that could be true or might be true in a parallel Fringe-like universe. That’s one of the reasons I like shooting digital infrared images because photography, for me, is all about having fun and if you happen to play a harmless—emphasis on harmless—photographic April Fool’s prank on someone, let’s hope it’s accepted in the spirit of the day.

You don’t always need a lens to make photographs. When I was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art, our instructor Jack Wilgus had all his students make their own pinhole cameras and shoot images with them. I took the easy way out and used a Quaker Oats box and used photographic paper cut into a circle to fit the box as my capture media. My homemade camera produced round, negative images that I kidded myself into believing echoed the style of early photographs but now, as with many things photographic and not, I know better. Yet one thing remains: you don’t need a lens to make photographs. Sure, many new SLRs, such as the Olympus E-30 that I tested (April, 2009, issue of Shutterbug), have a “pinhole” filter but the camera itself uses a lens and internal software to create the look of the real thing. But shooting film in a real pinhole camera brings back that very “ah-ha” that Ernst Haas was talking about.

Alien Skin Software’s Exposure 5 is powerful monochrome conversion software that lets you produce accurate film simulations while adding a range of creative effects. Wrapped up in a redesigned and easy-to-use interface, Exposure 5 can also be launched as a stand-alone application, which can be useful in a workflow that doesn’t support plug-ins. This latest version includes controls for emulating color or black and white so you don’t have to switch between modes or, as in previous versions, separate plug-ins. It’s all one happy family.

When I was a student at the Maryland Institute College of Art back in the film days, there was a bulletin board near the school’s darkrooms where misplaced negatives were pinned. It was officially called “The Little Lost Negative Board” but someone had surreptitiously added, “Someday my prints will come.”