Chris Casciano’s Place Name Here

There’s been lots of buzz surrounding Content Aware Fill in Photoshop CS5 but I’ve seen a bit less about the updates to the photo merge and HDR features. These were the tools I was most interested in taking for a spin when I installed the upgraded applications. If they delivered at making it easy to create High Dynamic Range Photographs, particularly that are more photorealistic then fantastical and candied looking, then it would save me from buying other apps to do that processing or forgetting the genre existed all together.

After watching a video of the new HDR Pro features and some desire to play with new toys firmly seeded I decided to rattle off a few bracketed exposures while in Central Park earlier this week and give the new HDR Pro a spin. I hadn’t gone out intending to shot for HDR and without a tripod the handheld, roughly steadied and quickly taken photos aren’t the best platform to use for an analysis of the application. Still, I have to say I was really happy with the results and the lack of manual input and fighting in the process. Features like image alignment and the new ghost removal features performed better then expected and gave me passable results.

I’ll leave the in depth analysis and comparison between tools to other people, but I thought it would be helpful to others to see a quick rundown of my proces to create the two photographs featured.

Often the goal of a new technology or new feature for an exiting technology is to lead a silent existence while making the owner’s life easier. Rather then being in your face forcing you to notice it, or worse, not working as intended and doubly frustrating the device’s owner it hums merrily along unnoticed.

I’ve been shooting steadily with the Nikon D90 dSLR since November of 2008. It struck me only last week in part because I was shooting some sky photos — which are notorious for making dust apparent — that in all that time I hadn’t had to do a manual sensor cleaning like I had often with my previous camera. The built in sensor shake/cleaning that Nikon has added to some of its recent camera bodies, and that triggers automatically each time the camera turns off or on, just works.

A while back I posted instructions on geotagging photos with any GPS capable cell phone or device. Prompted by a question from one of my students (oh hey, I should talk about my new gig sometime!) and the fact the post is one of the more popular around here I thought the post deserved revisiting.

Since 2008 I’ve updated my camera body, gotten an iPhone, and streamlined both the number of devices I carry and the workflow for getting geographic data into my photos. Still, the premise of the old post hasn’t changed — you can encode any photo you take from any digital camera you have by syncing the photos timestamp with your saved GPS information.

Here’s how I’m currently tagging photos from my Nikon D90 with information saved on my iPhone using the RunKeeper Pro app.

Digital video and digital photograph formats are so close, and yet so far away.

On many cameras like the Nikon D90 I use, the difference between capturing one or the other is a switch or a button away, and destinations for the content like Flickr do little to distinguish the two formats. However, when you get the memory card back to the computer what you do with them and how you process the captured files is worlds apart. I don’t have a handy solution to process images and video in the same way, but here’s one way to help the management of the files by using a still reference photograph as a hook for the metadata though our workflow from acquisition right through publishing onto web sites.

Many photographers on Flickr and across the web have come across Project365 in the last few years. As described by early driving force Photojojo, along with other benefits:

Taking a photo a day will make you a better photographer. Using your camera every day will help you learn its limits. You will get better at composing your shots, you’ll start to care about lighting, and you’ll become more creative with your photography when you’re forced to come up with something new every single day.

I’ve thought about joining in each of the last few years — hey, I already take photos a few times a week, what’s a few more? But that’s why I never have. I already shoot a few times a week, carry one of my cameras almost everywhere and spend more time then most looking around for a potential photo op. In the end I just didn’t think taking more photographs would advance my skills.

After a long fight that started when I handled the Nikon D90 Digital SLR camera at the PDN PhotoPlus Expo in October I finally lost my battle against the upgrade bug and bought one to replace my 2 year old Nikon D80. I had been on the fence about the upgrade being worth it. I knew the D90 would be a great camera, but my D80 doesn’t yet feel like yesterday’s technology and I wasn’t convinced the newer body given my expectedly light use of big bang features like video would pay off for me.

Update 2/1/2010: I’ve written a new post about my current workflow for geotagging photos based on information from my iPhone

While some cameras and camera phones have the ability to geotag digital photos as they’re taken, most still don’t. However you can still geotag your photographs accurately and automatically with the use of an external GPS enabled device like a cell phone, navigation device, or a dedicated GPS logger. Any device that can record a “GPS track” that can be transfered to your computer can be used to tag photos. And photos taken with any digital camera can be tagged in this manner.

Here I’ll explain how I use GPSPhotoLinker on OS X to batch tag many photos from a day’s photo shoot with GPS tracks recorded on either a Sony GPS-CS1 or a Nokia N95 cell phone in order to create mapped photo galleries, like this one on Flickr.

Seems like a good time for a little update on my contributions to other sites around the internets…

I’m looking for your vote, if you think the shot is worthy, on this image of seedlings for the JPG Magazine ‘Breakthrough’ theme for their next issue.

And last weekend was the Lunar New Year parade in Chinatown, the weather was pretty good and the costumes better. A bunch of photos from the event are now up in a new Flickr Set

For digital photographers, particularly people shooting any sort of volume of RAW files you may find you need a better workflow for ‘development’ and organization of the photographs then simply storing the files on your file system and then opening a few at a time in Adobe Photoshop. Into that gap has come a few new applications including Apple’s Aperture. More recently, Adobe has finished work on its Lightroom application and moved it from a long public period to an official 1.0 release.

With that release two professional photographers and bloggers, Micah Walter and Michael Clark, have committed their time and expertise to putting both Aperture and Lightroom through the paces on a typical week or so of shooting and editing.