Digital Photography Sessions on D'Arcy Norman, PhD

The Bike Blur Photo - behind the scenes

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 14:10:23 +0000

I was asked to share how I got that Bike Blur photo yesterday. It’s really simple, once you know a couple of tricks.

(in case the video doesn’t show up in the RSS feed, here’s the link)

random photography assignment generator

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 13:49:53 +0000

I’m working on my third year in a photo-a-day photography project, and there are days when it’s pretty near impossible to think of something to shoot. On days like that, you need an assignment - someone to give you a topic or subject, and you go hunting for (or staging) a photo to meet the assignment.

So, I cobbled together a simple web page to randomly generate assignments.

on following the light

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 17:07:42 +0000

Photography literally means “the process of drawing with light” - it’s not “taking pictures of people or things,” it’s all about playing with light. If the light isn’t there, there’s no photograph. If the light is boring, the photograph is boring. But, if the light is right, even the most boring subject is transformed into something magical.

Much of the time, when I jump to grab my camera, it’s because the light has caught my eye. Warm light coming through a window. Light refracting through glass. Reflecting off of a surface. Sometimes it’s just a property of the light that catches my attention - warmth, softness, darkness, harshness.

rethinking the digital photography sessions

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 11:57:54 +0000

I’d planned to keep doing episodes of the sessions, even going so far as to map out a few on the wiki. But, the folks at Inside Aperture are doing such a fandamntastic job, that there isn’t really much point for me to do Aperture-related screencasts, which is really all I’d done so far.

I’m going to rethink the sessions a bit. Maybe they’ll evolve into more of a storytelling thing - picking a shot and talking about the story behind it, and how the shot was composed, taken and processed… Something like that might be more interesting for everyone, rather than just duplicating a set of screencasts.

Digital Photography Sessions - Episode 003 - RAW vs. JPEG

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 21:08:37 +0000

It’s not a full examination of every technical aspect of RAW vs. JPEG, but I show some of the reasons why I try to shoot RAW almost all the time, as well as some reasons why I sometimes shoot in JPEG instead. Some of the subtle differences didn’t really translate into the compressed video files, but hopefully you can get an idea of what the extra data in a RAW file is handy for.

Digital Photography Sessions - Episode 002: Basic Workflow

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:52:33 +0000

Time for another episode, this time on basic workflow - importing a few photos, deleting the crap, and processing the one(s) that don’t get nuked. This time, the dogs were quiet, and The Boy™ decided not to make an appearance. I might schedule him for a later episode…

Episode 2: Basic Workflow weighs in at 12.1 MB, and clocks in at 10:27. Or, if you want a full HD version, use the second link.

Digital Photography Sessions - Episode 001

dnorman@me.com (D'Arcy Norman) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 20:44:05 +0000

I’m going to try producing a series of presentations in various media to document and share some of the tricks I’ve learned in my playing with digital photography. There are lots of other resources out there, so I’m not going to try to be canonical or exhaustive, but will try to answer some of the questions that people ask me.

This first episode is mostly just an intro/warmup for me, and I picked a basic topic: project and album management in Aperture 2.