I love photographing in aspen groves. If you let yourself have time to enjoy your surroundings, it can be a very serene experience. I took my clients to a couple of aspen groves during my Fall in the Rockies photo safari, and the colors were wonderful. However, the conditions don’t always lend themselves to great photographs and it can be hard to capture the feeling of the glowing trees in a photograph. The best conditions for fall colors are overcast or partly cloudy days. However, we had clear skies and very harsh light. What to do? Continue reading Abstract Aspens→
As much as I like using Nikon’s Capture NX 2 image editing software for processing my NEF files, I also really like using Nik Software’s plug-ins. Currently, only Color Efex Pro 3 works natively within the Capture NX 2 environment. However, I was recently having a discussion with one of my contacts at Nik Software, and he mentioned an interesting fact: the Lightroom implementations of Nik’s plug-ins can essentially be made to work as “stand-alone” applications, and launched directly from Capture NX 2. This is because Lightroom doesn’t really support “plug-ins,” instead it supports external editing applications. The upside of this design is that if you have the Lightroom version of a Nik plug-in installed, you can send it TIFFs or JPEGs directly without using Lightroom or Photoshop!
Little Blue Heron, Shark Valley, FL. Nikon D300 and 600mm f/4 AFS VR Nikkor lens
Some people assume that the Control Point technology found in Capture NX2 and Nik Viveza is something you use to make radical image adjustments, like changing the color of a sky. Not so. In fact, some of the most powerful adjustments I make with Control Points are subtle ones, intended to accentuate a subject against its background. The image above is an example of where I used Color Control Points (in this case, in Capture NX2) to enhance the subject.
