If you look at these photographs or any other successfully wildlife photograph, one thing you will always be able to identify as a contributing element is a clean background that tells the story of the critters environment! A photograph should tell a story without words, so think about that when you make your images. Does the background I’m incorporating in my photograph improve my image or does it take away from it? While this is a thought process that should be sub-concious for you after practice, I was thinking about exactly that this past weekend when photographing Red Deer in Montebello, QC.

The Red Deer lives in beautiful pine forests amongst gorgeous view’s and scenery, when I made these images, I cropped them in the camera so as to show not only the critter’s magnificent pose, but also it’s environment, therefore communicating the grand nature of the subject. Background is everything in wildlife photography! Jay Maisel says that Light, Gesture and Color are the fundamentals of all successful images (notice the above image has all of these?), but for wildlife photography, I like to think of one other, background! Want to learn more about working the background? I’ll be hosting a webinar in the near future on the topic, so stay posted!

More tk…

It’s always quite nice when a new product launches! The excitement starts to stir as people wonder what new features will be put in place! Will that little function you’ve always wanted to have in your workflow be included in the next major update? Who knows… but when the Beta copies come out, everyone get’s to put in their two cents and contribute their own needs to the development of the software they will use. What do I mean by this? Today is the first day of the Lightroom 4 Beta, which mean’s thousands of photographers around the world will download their copy free of charge to become part of a worldwide beta testing of the software that we love so much! Anyone who know’s me know’s that I am a tried and true Lightroomer (pretty sure that’s not a word). I’ve used Lightroom in conjunction with other DAM’s like Photo Mechanic & Digital Pro since the very beginning and have been a true evangelist of the program since I first used it in my workflow. Well I can’t possibly express to you the thousands of reasons I use and love Lightroom in a single blog posting, I can recommend to new user’s and seasoned Lightroomer’s (theirs that word again!) to go download the beta at adobe labs NOW! It’s free, so why wouldn’t you!

So now that all that hooey is out of the way, I thought I would talk about my first impressions on the new release of this amazing software!

The two major new additions in Lightroom 4 Beta are the Maps and Books module, and they are just amazing! Starting off by talking about the Maps module, I’ve been bugging the guy’s at Adobe for as long as I can remember to create a better way to manage embedded location information in your images. GPS devices that allow the camera to save coordinates into your metadata are so popular now that it’s about damn time that Adobe caught up with Aperture on this simple function. In previous versions, for a photographer to see a map of where an image was taken, they would have to go to the metadata panel in the library module and seek out location information, click on the coordinates, and a google maps page with the images capture location would open in your default web browser. The problem with this is that a user can not see the locations of multiple photographs or all of their photographs on the same map at the same time! Since Apples Aperture & iPhoto have had this feature for quite some time now, it’s only Natural adobe caught up!

Of course, who can overlook the swanky new Books module! Photographers can now use Lightroom to create photo books for PDF (to send to a printing company of their choice) or to upload to Blurb (an amazing site that allow’s photographers to publish and sell their photo books without the hassle of dealing with

manufacturers and distributors)! What’s really cool is that you can even view an estimated price per book when creating books for Blurb! That’s just über cool! If your working with other photographers, say creating a gallery book or something like that, you can share your creation as a PDF in emails with your colleagues using the simple export to PDF feature that already exists in the Print Module.

In the develop Module, some of your favorite slider’s have been renamed to make more sense. For example, the Recovery slider of Lightroom’s previous versions isnow called Highlights! A much more appropriate name if I do say so myself seeing as the recovery slider was meant to reduce highlight clipping however the word recovery could also refer to the recovery of shadow clipping as well. Additionally, the  Develop module is now home to a soft proofing feature that allows you to soft proof your images right in Lightroom! Amazing!

So if your still wondering, yes, I do have Lightroom 4 Beta loaded on my computer to work with until the release of Lightroom 4 sometime this spring. Once again, remember to download your copy of Lightroom 4 Beta today and get started testing out these and many other amazing new features!

Remember to register for our debut webinar, this friday at 7:00PM EST! I’ll be teaching quick and effective landscape finishing techniques using Photoshop and a variety of plugins. It’s free and it’ll be a load of fun, so register before it’s too late!

Educating photographers on the whole process of image-making is at the forefront of priority’s in my mind when I write this blog, make a video or help someone improve their work. With todays technology, their is no excuse fore people to go looking for their own information, instead, we should be delivering it to you on  a silver platter. As a holiday gift of thanks to all of my follower’s, we will be hosting my first webinar for FREE on January 13th, 2011 at 7:00PM EST to 8:30PM on Landscape Image Finishing. I will show you images that I have made over the years that have gained a positive response from you, and run you through each step in bringing them to life in the digital darkroom. For financial reasons, we can’t keep these webinar’s free in the future, so hurry and take advantage of this very special deal! You can register here or by clicking on the image above!

This is the first webinar I have ever taught so bear with me, but if this is a success will be having more webinar’s in the future, so also make sure to join our mailing list to hear about special events and webinar’s coming up!