Don’t ever make the assumption that just because Nikon releases the predecessor to the legendary D3 series, that camera is right for you, or that camera will improve your photography. I cannot stress enough that garbage in is garbage out, and if you aren’t a good shooter in the first place, buying a $6k body is not going to make you hot *&^%. No human body is perfect, so obviously the same applies to Camera Bodies. The Nikon D4 was launched a little over a month ago, and with good reason, it stirred up a lot of attention! 204, 800 ISO? Really? Seriously?! When I first read that little detail on the Nikon website I just about lept from my seat. This coming from a guy who started out on 64ASA b&w film and thought 400 ASA was incredible! For a guy like me, shooting things like concerts, having that low light capability is absolutely crucial (theirs one point for the D4!). Additionally, I do a ton of wildlife work, and having that 10fps is similarly, crucial. So without question, if I was debating what body would be best for me at the moment (the D4 or the D800), I would most definitely say the D4. But you are not me, and most likely you aren’t shooting concerts frequently, and maybe you don’t need that 10fps. Which raises the question: Are you sure that the D4 is right for you and your photography? While this little blog posting may seem short and to the point, I hope you can derive the point I’m trying to communicate to you here. Think about how that $6k hunk of metal and circuit-boards will help you improve your photography. What will it bring to the table? The D4 (nor any camera body) is not right for everyone, so make sure to think about these things before you go breaking the bank. And remember, most importantly, that camera body is nothing without your passion for photography! So get out, get shooting and have fun exploring your passion in this beautiful world we all share!

Image courtesy of Nikon USA

I’m often shocked when I hear someone talk about the importance of shooting Raw and when I ask them why they do it, they have no answer for me! If you’re a little shy on information, go give this a gander! It just might clear things up for you. Curious about what I shoot? My personal preference is to shoot in Raw+Jpeg or Raw (depends on the situation) but never just jpeg!

More tk…

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!

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It’s kinda rare when you find those wicked cool places purely by chance. This weekend, we didn’t expect to be in Ottawa, nor did we expect to be in Montebello, Quebec’s amazing Parc Omega, but you know, plans change! Well on a search for wildlife shooting opportunities, we headed north to see if the Ottawa Valley would provide the juice we needed! When discussing our needs with some relatives living in Ottawa, we were introduced to this amazing place where Elk, Arctic Wolves, Bison, Black Bear, Caribou, Red Dear and more critters rome without boundary! As you can see from the images, this sort of wildlife photography doesn’t typically come shot from a car 45 minutes from the capital, but Le Parc Omega is incredibly different! The best way to describe Le Parc Omega is how the owner’s describe it: A Natural World Oasis. A place for city dwellers to get close to wildlife without the Some might call it a shooting pen, a photographer’s haven! They’d be right! No matter where you turn their are shooting opportunities! The wildlife comes right up to your car! You think I’m kidding? (See Below)

At Le Parc Omega, It's as if the wildlife is right in the car with you!

Le Parc Omega is actually privately owned by a team of people who’s goal is to make wildlife and natural exploration accesible to those who don’t live in Yellowstone National Park! What they’ve done is a blessing to all of us out here on the east coast who really don’t get to enjoy the beautiful big game of the west. If you get an opportunity to visit Le Parc Omega I strongly advise that you take it! It’s a great gem of a place that you should definitely check out next time your in my neck of the woods!

By the way, if you want to check out more about Le Parc Omega head here! 

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I always like exploring new destinations! Whether it’s flying across the country to a new National Park, or taking a drive through a small town in between travel’s, I love to explore my surroundings! So as you can imagine, when I found an email from a friend of mine this morning linking to this great website, I had to check it out! At the moment, I live in the capital of Frontenac County, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and the great thing about Kingston is that it is the perfect cross-over between picturesque canadian shield and bustling city life. Explore the Arch is an online guide for visitors or residents of Frontenac County to get the most out of it’s outstanding biosphere! Whether it’s bird watching, hiking or just plain exploring that makes you happy, this website has got the information you need to go out and do it! I can tell you one thing, I will be hitting up some of these destinations over the course of the week and will keep you posted when I do! Check it out now!

If you know me, you know I’m incredibly anal about color accuracy. I use X-Rite products to ensure accurate color’s from point of capture to output either on the web or in print. Now despite the fact that I’m normally quite hopped about having the newest technology at my disposal, I still use an X-Rite i1 Display 2 calibrator to create custom profiles for my monitors. Yes, they are discontinued and the latest and greatest is the i1 Pro, but I realize their are other people out their who are still using this device because of it’s incredible accuracy for the price. If you fall into this category and are using a mac running the latest OS from Apple, OS-X Lion, you may have noticed that your computer, nor the profiling software provided by X-Rite seems to recognize your i1 Device as being connected. Thankfully, X-Rite has caught on to this and has released an update for Lion users to download to allow full functionality of the i1 Display 2 monitor calibrator. Don’t freak out! Stuff like this happens all the time when new OS-X versions are released. My own Lightroom catalogue disabled the ability for me to delete images from disk for over three months! I only recently got it fixed. The moral of the story is, if you can resist upgrading to the latest OS for just a little while, at least until all the glitches and bugs are worked out, you will run into much less problems when migrating your operating system.

Hope this helps!

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!

1) Continuity is Key

A lot of people Everyone who has been successful in the blogesphere knows just how important continuity is. The reality of the matter is, if you don’t post on a frequent and continual basis, you will not gain any following. People just don’t want to be left in the dark. “Maybe I’ll hit up that guy’s blog today, maybe he’ll have updated it, maybe not” is not something you want to communicate to your audience. Google+ is much the same as any old blog, but on a grander scale. Google+ is a blog dedicated to you, that is linked to millions of other blogs like never before. Photographers, everyone for that matter, have a much better opprotunity to build their following through Google+ than through their own blog and so it is important that you stay “virtually alive”. Update as frequently as you can with pictures, story’s, links so as to keep people looking!

2)  Use your own website as a follow-up!

Like all things in life, this sort of picks up from my 1st point. Many people may wonder, “So I’ve got this schnazzy new Google+ page up, time to ditch the blog right?” WRONG! Google+ certainly offers people an extended platform to showcase to the world than things like Twitter or Facebook, but it does not replace the need for a website or blog. Clients, and followers in the photographic world will not be given a very professional impression by a Google+ profile. It’s very important to have this follow up available. Aditionally, link to your Google+ profile through your website! This is very important, because it directs more traffic to your Google+!

3) Stuck for idea’s? Use StumbleUpon!

This is a twoforone deal! For one, their’s nothing that makes people more bored than a person on Google+ who only posts pictures. This brings me Deja Vu to a Grid Live episode a while back to which Scott and his wife Kalebra talked about the annoyance of such things, if you want to see that episode, you can go here. “This is a picture”, “This is another picture” and so on is not a good way to grab attention! Your work is important! You work tirelessly to perfect your craft so the last thing you want to do is bore people out! Posting other stuff, like links to other blogs, youtube video’s or production photographs are a great way to keep people interested! For two, what if you run out of idea’s, not shooting much lately, and you NEED something to post to your Google+ to keep up that continuity? Guy Kawasaki, the man, the legend, recommends using StumbleUpon to search for things he can post that are related to his interests and his follower’s interest, I recommend you do the same! Not a member? JOIN HERE!

4) Comment, Comment, Comment!

When people put up a website, they have a general expectation of traffic, but when they look at their analytics, they are saddened to see a mere 3 visits, two of which of your parents. People generally don’t find photographer’s out of the blue, they hear about them from some guy’s blog, or they see them teach a seminar and visit their website after the fact. If you think your going to rock the universe via Google searches, sadly, your wrong. You need to be seen by people. So yes, it’s a stereo-type but get yourself out there! Comment on post’s, +1 and build relationships, don’t just circle someone and say that’s that! If you like someone’s work, why not chat with them? Who knows you might end up collaborating for a project in the future!

5) Go Check out Scott Kelby’s Google+ Training Video!

Just so you know, I don’t get a kickback from Scott for mentioning him in my blog posts, he’s just a great guy that I think you should all know of. He, Matt Kloskowski and RC Concepcion have done a great video series to get people started, you can see it here! It’s a great watch if your still just playing in the mud with the idea’s of Google+.

You still haven’t joined? JOIN NOW! Get on the Google+ bandwagon today!

It always surprises me when the images in my library that I consider three star are more than that to you! I got a few question emails asking how I did my sepia processing on the above image. It was actually very basic, just a preset in Lightroom 3 and some cloning in CS5. Wanna see it in action, check out my processing vid below!

Download your copy of the Gentle Sepia Toning Lightroom Preset HERE!