Recently, the local photography club I am part of had an outing at a local cemetery. Some people might think this is an odd place to photograph, but you can find beauty almost anywhere if you just look. This particular cemetery is filled with many impressive old trees that exhibit beautiful colour. Our target was light and shadow, right in my wheel house. Light can elevate a good photo to a great photo, I often tell people “it’s all about the light” .
Photo of the Week #149
We went out in search of autumn colour which was scarce. Weather conditions weren’t great, but we made the best of it. As my music photography has increased, I have found that my other interests such as landscape photography have suffered a lot and I miss it. I really had a good time and I’ve decided to force myself to get out and shoot a lot more often. Outside, fresh air, how could that ever be wrong? This image is from today at Otter Lake near Frontenac Park. We saw colour on the highway on the way but the colour was spotty at best. There seemed to be many bare trees already and we had to look for what little good colour we found.
Photo of the Week #148
During this time of not being able to travel, I have spent some time looking at older images of times when we were. This is from 2011, nine years ago when I was able to go to the southwestern United States.
Photo of the Week #147
When you are traveling, you will more often than not find yourself at some great locations at the worst possible time. We were on Skye for only the day and having a fair drive back to where we were staying, time didn’t allow me to wait for the light I truly wanted. The original photo in this case had an empty blue sky……I hate plain blue skies. :) I made a lot of photographs that day but none were what I was hoping for. The thing is, you have to make the best of what you get, right? I decided to play with new skies to see if I could make the image look more pleasing to me. I really kind of like this one finally.
Monitor Calibration, Do I need it?
What is meant when someone mentions calibrating a monitor? Your operating system cannot be expected to get colours accurate considering there is an almost infinite combination of hardware available nowadays. Calibration is a process where you use a colour measuring device to measure the colours displayed on your screen. Together with the software, it compares them to established standards and corrects the displayed colours by way of an icc file.
Does this mean everyone needs to calibrate their monitors? That depends, where are your photos going and who is consuming them? If your photos end up floating around Instagram or Facebook, the need for calibration may not be important to you as your photos are being viewed on many different systems and monitors and it’s safe to assume that the majority of them are not calibrated either so you have no control over what your photos look like on those machines.
If you are a person who likes to print your images to hang on your wall, sell, give as gifts or what have you, you likely would benefit from calibrating. When you send your photos to a print house, colour becomes more important. Professional print houses typically take great care to assure their equipment is representing colour accurately so if your files are off due to inaccurate colour handling, it could cause trouble that you won’t like later. Besides colour rendition, most calibration devices also help you to set brightness and contrast of your monitor. This is pretty important also as most monitors are set way too bright, they want to draw attention in the showroom, right? A monitor that is set too bright will produce dark images when printed. If you are experiencing prints that are too dark or too light, I would bet that calibration is your culprit.