I’ll admit, I’m not the biggest winter fan as I like Spring and Fall much better, but if it has to be cold outside I’d prefer snow.
It snowed a little for us in the beginning of January and since it was a full moon or close to it I decided to try taking some long exposure night shots. Below is one of those shots. I’m amazed at how bright things look just with the moon light. If it wasn’t for the stars and the house light in the distance, it could almost pass as a daytime shot.
First Snow of Winter
Enjoy
If you have ideas on this image or other thoughts of what other subject to get photographs of during the winter, please drop me a comment below or feel free to contact me.
It’s that time of year again, that it is the end of my Art Show Season this weekend. If you are in the Carroll County, Md area, but sure to stop by the Carroll Farmers Market in Westminster at the Ag Center this Saturday from 8 am to 2 pm.
Since it is the last show of the year, it is also a customer appreciation day, and I will be giving up to 25% of my prints. So if there was something that you liked during the year, but didn’t get it, this weekend will be your best deal of the year.
The home by the stream
Abandoned A-Frame home and broken footbridge
Not totally sure that no one lives in this home anymore, but I’ve always loved the look of it by the stream. Even though the footbridge is no longer usable, I think it still ads character to the scene
You can download a 7 day free trial of Luminar 4. The quickest way to get the download is to click the Learn More link above, then on the page, you are sent to, click the Luminar menu at the top of the page and select the Download Trial link
Fujifilm recently had the 2019 Fujifilm Printlife Photo Exhibition & Sweepstakes contest of which I entered one of my prints.
I was honored to receive the following email from them.
Hi Mark,
On behalf of the entire Fujifilm Printlife team, we would like to thank you for submitting into the 2019 Fujifilm Printlife Photo Exhibition & Sweepstakes.
We are pleased to announce that you have a submission that has been sent to be printed and put on display at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal!*
You will be a part of this year’s incredible exhibit, showcasing 13,640 photos!*
We hope that you will join us October 16th through the 20th in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall to see all of the amazing photos on display this year.
We are looking forward to seeing and meeting you at the event!
Thank You,
The Fujifilm Printlife Team
So if you are in the New York area from October 16th through the 20th and have a chance to stop by the Grand Central Terminal. Keep a look out for my image being displayed as part of this exhibit.
Here is my image to keep an eye out for. Note: in the exhibit, this image was cropped to fit the square format, the below image is the full image as taken
I belong to my local camera club, the Carroll County Camera Club, which is part of the Maryland Photography Alliance (MPA), an organization of the made up of many of the local camera clubs in here in Maryland. It’s a great club and we participate in several photography contests during the year. Be sure to see if there is a local camera club in your area. They are a great place for getting together with other photographers that have the same passion as you.
The Maryland Photography Alliance (MPA) recently held it’s 3rd annual photography contest. Although I didn’t win the prize level in any of the 3 categories that I entered, I was invited to exhibit one of my entrees as one of the top images of the competition.
The image that I was invited to display in this gallery is titled
Jesus in the Dome
The Statue of Jesus in the Billings Building of Johns Hopkins Hospital
So be sure to visit the Activity Center at Bohrer Park in Gaithersburg from November 1 2019, through January 20, 2020, to see my work and the works of other members of MPA camera clubs. There wa some great images entered this year and I plan to go and check them all out.
This was taken with my Nikon D80, at ISO 200, 18mm focal length, 0.8 sec at F8.0. It is cropped a little as I had to lay my camera blindly on the floor and set it to take my 3 bracket exposures on a timer so everything wasn’t exactly lined up. It was edited in Aurora HDR 2018 and may have been touched up with Luminar.
I know I’ve been kinda absent from doing posts like I use to do, but I’ve been a little busier that I thought with a project I’ve been putting off for some time. What is that project you say.
Finally getting around to doing cleanup and merging all my photos into one location. I didn’t think it was going to be as big a job as it has been and I”m still not really finished. To my surprise I have many copies of files all over the place on different computers, spare hard rives, flash memory, etc.
I didn’t know how I was going to deal with all the duplicate images. Even though programs like lightroom have a duplicate photo not to import option I found that even though the image looked the same in some cases, the metadata was different and that is what lightroom seems to rely on as part of its determining if a photo is a duplicate. Another problem was that after using several different applications over time each had created a preview version which is a low resolution version of and image and I had to make sure I was only importing the full resolution image instead of just the preview.
One program that I found that was some help was Duplicate Photo Fixer Pro. It did an excellent job on helping me find duplicates of my non raw images. (jpeg, png, tiff, etc). So if you have a folder full of images that you thing contain duplicates I can recommend this program. Just note that it does not work with RAW files.
Here is the interface with some of my images where is found a duplicate and I choose the Auto Mark Option. Note the one’s in RED are the images marked and will be deleted.
After using this program I freed up almost a TB of space when you total up all the duplicate images that I removed.
Like I said earlier, I’ve been using various programs over time and what prompted me to start the cleanup is the fact that Apple’s Aperture software, which was my first real editor, will no longer work with the next release of the Mac OS (Catalina) so I needed to make sure I could access all my Aperture images in other programs before that happened.
I’m almost done and I hope to get back to editing more images, taking great fall images, and finding and showing you more interesting photography software and tools in the near future.
But as the Fall season is upon us and in some locations, the tree leaves are already at their peak, make sure to get out there as soon as you can before the season is over and get those great fall photos. It’s one of my favorite times of the year to photo.
Have been given the opportunity to review Mass Water Mark for Mac and Windows OS. Disclosures: I have been given access to the software, but other than that I have no affiliation with the software vendor.
I’m not one to usually watermark my images and I will not get into that debate here as to why or why you wouldn’t want to watermark your images. But for those that do and need an application to watermark your images, this may be your solution, especially if you are a Windows user.
Features and notes on each platform version
The features vary between the Mac OS and Windows versions at the moment with the Windows version having the full feature set.
Windows Features
Add Text or Image Watermark to a collection of Images
Batch Resize Images to meet Web standards
Retouch your Images before Watermarking with Image Optimizer
Create your own Branding Watermark with Custom Text and Custom Logo
Crop/Rotate/Resize the image and the image for a watermark
Create a Zip file.
Improve Image Quality by applying effects like Mean Removal,Sharpening Etc
Can export the watermarked image asjpeg, png, bmp, gif, or tiff. It does have an option for the original format if you want to keep it the same as the imported image.
The windows version of this app is full-featured app for creating watermarked images as well as a way to mass resize images. It can import jpeg, png, bmp, gif, or tiff images.
Below is the Mass Watermark interface. You have quick access to all the features in this one interface. The top left is where you import the images to be watermarked, the top right shows a preview of the selected image with the watermark. The bottom half is where you enter your text, image logo, and choose your various options
Windows Mass Watermark app interface
Below is the Watermark Designer interface where you can make your custom watermark with text, logo, or both and resize the logo image if needed. It lets you select the font size, type, and color and you can set options such as have the logo appear overtop of text. Once you have created your watermark, you can bring it right into the app or save it to bring into the Mass Watermark interface as a logo.
Watermark Designer Interface
Since my logo is usually a large format image I needed to scale it down and the Watermark Designer handled this very easily.
Logo before scaling
Logo after scaling
Another option under the top right section is the ability to do a quick optimization of the image. Below shows the basic editing options you can do with this app when you click Optimize.
Now that I’ve created my watermark with the Watermark Designer I have brought it into Mass Watermark and showing a preview of a watermark on which I added text and a logo. It is showing large and not transparent for easier viewing as an example.
Interface showing text and logo watermarks
Watermark Designer to create a custom watermark with a logo and customized text. I did save it for future use, but if you click the use as watermark and you will be sent back to the Mass Watermark interface and see it as a preview of one of your current images. If you choose to save it, to use it in future watermarking, you would choose the save image in the open image logo section to bring it back in. Here is an example of a custom watermark created with the WaterMark Designer.
Now in this is the interface showing the custom watermark that I created above with the Watermark Designer. Once it is in the Mass Watermark app and you want to move its location, you can double-click on the preview and it will present you with another window where you can click and manually move the watermark’s location. You could also use the logo positioning options to autosize the image, make it transparent, and choose a position. Keep in mind that the location applies to all the images you export. So take that into consideration when you position it and when you are creating it. For example, in my sample images, if I had chosen the black text for my solar eclipses images you would not see the text.
Once you have set all your options and positioned your watermark, just click the WaterMark Images button. You will be prompted on where you would like to save the watermarked images via a standard windows dialog box. Selection your location (I recommend creating a new folder) and away the program goes rendering your watermarked images. Below I show one of my images with a custom watermark. Again, I left it large and none transparent for easier viewing as I would make the watermark smaller and transparent as not to take away from the image.
Example Watermarked Image.
One note: as in my example above I have the solar eclipse image as both a jpg and tiff image in the import folder, the program is smart enough too realize that this is the same image and when applying the watermark and saving the resulting images, it only saved one version of this image. This can come in handy if you have a folder of images that you are bringing and you didn’t realize you have multiple formats of the same image
The Windows version of Mass Watermark is a fully featured program that lets you create custom watermarks, position them, and apply them to as many images as you want. If you are looking for an easy way to do this and are Windows users I can recommend this program-
Mac Features
Add Text or Image Watermark to a collection of Images
Batch Resize Images
Create your own Branding Watermark with Custom Text and Custom Logo
Can export the watermarked image as jpeg, png, bmp, gif, or tiff. It does have an option for the original format if you want to keep it the same as the imported image.
The Mac version is missing most of the features you find in the windows version. It does function as a mass watermarking and resizing app with some caveats mentioned below.
It can import jpeg, png, tiff formats. It does not import HEIC format which is one of the formats from your iPhone. You will have to convert it to regular jpeg first.
The interface is rather dated and it does have some limitations such as you cannot resize the window to take advantage of your larger screen sizes. This is still version 1.0 and was written in 2015.
I have been testing it under Mac OS 10.14 and it does run. It will open two applications, one is the Mass Watermark app that has the app menus and the other is the interface showing up as MassWatermark. This does make things a little confusing. Shown below are the two dock icons that show for this app and the Mac Interface.
Dock Icons
Mac Interface
As with the windows version, you can enter your custom watermark text, change the font and size of the text, choose the placement of the text, select a watermark logo image, and place the position of the logo image.
If you are going to use an image for your watermark, you will have to resize the image outside of Mass Watermark before you bring it into the app. If not, depending upon the size of the image, it may fill the image with your watermark depending upon the resolution of your watermark image and the image you are watermarking.
To enter your license key in the Mac version it is not obvious as there is not a menu option, you have to open the app then click the close button on the interface app and you will get prompted with the below dialog where you can enter your license key, buy the app, or quit the application.
On occasion, I have had and issue with some of the menus in the menubar of the application disappearing, but if you quit and reopen the app they come back. This is a 32bit app, so mac OS 10.14 will be the last version that can run this application as with the next version of Mac OS you can only run 64bit applications. I have been informed by the vendor that they have plans to redo of the software and I expect it will get the same features as the Windows version and be compatible with the current Mac OS at that time.
In short, though, I cannot recommend the Mac version as a whole, but if all you want to do is a text or image watermark it may work for you. I would recommend waiting on the new release when it comes out.
This week ON1 Software has announced their new vision for photography for 2020.
Adding to their existing product line of ON1 Photo and the ON1 Plus subscription with a series of new applications to complete your photography workflow.
Coming in 2020 is a new release of ON1 Photo, ON1 PhotoRaw 2020 along with the new applications of On1 Photo Mobile 2020, ON1 Sync, and ON1 Video 2020.
With the new apps being added to their existing product line you now have a complete set off applications for your workflow.
A brief description of each new app
ON1 Photo Raw 2020
New AI-powered features AI Match and AI Auto, four filters in Effects (Weather, Sun Flare, Color Balance, Channel Mixer)
Custom Camera Profiles with X-Rite, SmugMug integration
Improved noise reduction
A map view – Something that I have been waiting for
A Print Module
and significant speed and performance enhancements.
ON1 Photo Mobile 2020
Capture raw photos on your smartphone using the pro-level controls you are familiar with on your interchangeable-lens camera.
Works with the On1 Sync optional service add-on
ON1 Sync
optional service add-on
You will be able to view and edit photos on all your devices without requiring you to store them in the cloud or a closed system.
The new service will also sync albums, presets, and more between all your devices.
ON1 Video 2020
video editing app explicitly designed for the photographer.
Features include tools for trimming, enhancing, adding audio tracks, grading and sharing video clips using tools, adjustment sliders, and techniques typically found in a photo editing workflow. Additional features will include the ability to create professional time-lapse videos, slideshows, high-quality still-frame captures, and seamless integration with ON1 Photo RAW.
ON1 is running a special where you can upgrade or purchase the current release of ON1 Photo Raw 2019 and you will receive the next release ON1 Photo Raw 2020 when released. Just a reminder, if you are an ON1 Plus subscription customer, you receive the next release as part of the subscription.
If you do need to upgrade or purchase don’t forget to use my ON1 Coupon Code of MDODD20 to save more.
Capture One has created Capture One Express for both Fuji and Sony users and made it available for free. It is a complete editor with catalog (DAM), and all the tools you need to edit an entire RAW or JPeg image. The pro version adds the ability to do local edits, but you can get your feet wet and do most of what you need with the express versions.
Quick intro to the Express version and how to activate it.
While out taking a few images for a long term project which will take me at least nine months I decided to see what different kind of compositions I could get.
Below is one of my favorites of the evening‘s experiments in different compositions. I may post some others later on
A field of wheat with the great backdrop of an awesome sunset.
The great folks at Peak Design have just kicked off their latest kickstarter product.
This time it is what I’m sure is going to be the world’s best travel tripod.
It comes in two flavors. Aluminum alloy or carbon fiber. Even at the retail price, these come in my lower than their closest competition. Especially for the carbon fiber model.
Some of the highlights
It has a new unique ball head design
folds up with no wasted space so it can fit in your water bottle holder on your bag
quick release and locking for your camera
fast to setup
includes an adapter for your cell phone
and more.
Check out this video for for a preview of this new design.
I’ve already placed my kickstarter pledge for the Aluminum alloy version as I’m that budget kind of guy, but if you are looking for a carbon fiber tripod this one is a deal during the kickstarter.
Check out the kickstarter now as it won’t last long and prices usually go up towards the end. Below is a link to the kickstarter so you can make your pledge and get the full details on this new tripod.
