I am up in Hartford, Connecticut on business for a couple days. While I was packing I decided to take my DSLR with me. At the last second I threw my little tabletop tripod into my briefcase. That decision had turned out be be a good one. I got a shot this evening that makes all of the hassle worth it. I cannot wait to get home to post it. Hopefully upon the RAW conversion it will live up to my expectations.

I found a technique for faking the lomo effect using Photoshop. I tried it out on a previous post. I like the result and offhand can think of a couple other shots to use it on.

One question I have is how much do I fiddle with the conversion of the RAW file, knowing that I am going to increase the saturation and hue in Photoshop? It was not an issue on my first attempt, as I only had a .jpg to work with.

Matt has successfully used a similar technique on several photos. My favorite is this portrait of me that I recently framed and hung in my home office.

As Napoleon Dynamite would say, “I’ve got skills.” While they do not include mastery of the bo-staff and nun-chucks, I am a self taught coiffeur. For those who do not speak French, that means I can cut guys’ hair. My grandfather was a barber and I inherited his equipment. Back in high school I started clipping my own hair and soon started cutting my friends’ hair.

Matt came over for a trim this morning. In return he gave me a mini-lesson on sharpening in Photoshop. He cleaned up this image for me (though unfortunately we lost the EXIF data along the way). Tonight I applied those lessons learned to this image.

Post processing is a dirty word to a lot of people, but I am beginning to learn that it is a lot bigger part of being a successful digital photographer. There will have to be a lot more haircuts and lessons before I feel like I am consistently in control of my images, but hopefully this is a good start.

I think I want a dedicated macro lens. I try to take close-ups of bugs, but I can never get close enough with my DSLR. I can actually take better macros with my Canon A400. My inspiration? This guy takes awesome shots of bugs. Fascinating, really!

Last night my friend Matt took me downtown for a lesson in night photography. It was a lot of fun. I will be posting photos from our excursion for the next several days. I always thought that taking long exposures was super difficult. However, once you get the basics down the rest comes pretty easy. We shot a lot of the same stuff, including this picture of the Delta Queen that Matt got published on The Chattanoogan.

A couple gadgets that Matt had made some of my shots possible. The first was a shutter remote. It is a good thing that we both have Canon DSLRs, or I would not have been able to take bulb shots. The second item was a little hot shoe level. In the dark it is hard to frame a shot, so the level was useful in preventing “wonky horizons.” One related tip that Matt gave me was to set your ISO really high and take a shot just to check the framing. I will have to try that next time.

I admitted as much on the PixelPost forum. I think I am going to take the suggested online photography course.