We had a few last minute cancellations for the upcoming Colorado Fall 2016 Workshops and I wanted to let our readers know, that it is the last chance to secure a spot. Airline tickets can often be really cheap in the off-season timeframe and sometimes there are some really good choices available for not only US, but also international travellers (check out Cheapoair for some good deals). So if you would like to come learn landscape photography with us this year, please join us!
PL Back Online
Things tend to go wrong at the worst times, and this time our team was out traveling in Mount Rainier when Photography Life went down. While we were filming a part of our upcoming landscape photography course, one of our servers experienced a critical error and the number of requests to the site ended up piling up, eventually overwhelming the site completely and bogging it down. We didn’t have cell coverage or wifi for three days, so we only found out about the problem this morning! The good news is that the website is back online, and we have posted all the articles that had been scheduled during the mean time.
[Read more…]
Guest Post Month
While part of the Photography Life team is on the road filming our next video course on landscape photography, we thought it would be a good idea to start a guest post month dedicated to posting content from our readers. Last year’s guest post month was amazing and we got so many great articles, which were both very educational and inspirational. Well, it is again time to give the chance for our readers to speak out and show off their work! Because many of our readers are as passionate as we are in sharing their knowledge, they often share articles with us in the form of Guest Posts, the best of which we often feature on the site. We would like to invite our dear readers again in participating in a knowledge sharing contest, in which we will reward every writer when their article is posted on the site. If your article is published, we will reward you with a $50 gift card from B&H, Adorama, Amazon or any other store of your choice as a token of appreciation, or if you prefer to be paid instead, we will transfer the sum to your PayPal account. This way, you are rewarded for your contribution even if you do not win the ultimate prize, which speaking of, is going to be amazing this time around! The person who submits the best guest post will be rewarded with the Fuji X-T10 mirrorless camera kit (see our detailed review of the Fuji X-T10), or the equivalent sum towards the purchase of any camera or lens valued at $900, in addition to a full year of SmugMug membership (see our review of SmugMug). We will not limit your contributions, so you could submit as many articles as you would like and get paid for the work. Sounds exciting? Then read on!
Video Course Sale Ends Tomorrow
Hey Everyone! Just a friendly reminder that our current sale on Photography Life videos is ending on August 1st. That means you only have 24 hours left to take advantage of this great pricing.
Nikon 105mm f/1.4E ED Announcement
Nikon has been on the roll in the past few years, releasing one amazing lens after another. We have seen a refresh of the f/1.8 prime lens line with some amazing optics, but those craving for more have been patiently waiting for a modern replacement of such lenses as the Nikon 105mm f/2 DC and Nikon 135mm f/2 DC, absolutely amazing and beautiful lenses in every way, capable of rendering stunning bokeh for portraiture. Well, the waiting for the first lens replacement is finally over, because today Nikon gave us something truly groundbreaking – the Nikon AF-S NIKKOR 105mm f/1.4E ED. While the de-focus control feature on the previous 105mm f/2 lens allowed one to modify the bokeh rendering of the lens, it would end up changing the field of view and it was a bit hard to get used to utilizing that feature effectively for many photographers. Plus, the maximum aperture of f/2 put it in competition with the superb Nikon 85mm f/1.4G (review soon to be updated), as the latter is a faster lens and has superb rendering capabilities wide open. For these and other reasons, many photographers having been choosing the 85mm f/1.4G over the 105mm f/2 DC for portraiture, while the 135mm f/2 DC remained untouched. Now that the 105mm f/1.4E is out, let’s talk about what is so amazing about this gem and why we can mark today as an important milestone in the history of lens making.
Exclusive PL FastRawViewer Discount – 25% Off!
Our friends at LibRaw are joining our video course promotion by offering an exclusive discount for PL readers – 25% off the software! This is a time-limited offer to give you access to the fastest and best (in our opinion) RAW viewing and culling software on the market – the deal is only good until August 15, 2016, so act quick to get this amazing tool. In addition, everyone who has purchased our video courses will be receiving a permanent 30% discount, which is awesome! If you have bought the course, you were probably amazed by how quick one can go through hundreds of RAW images using FastRawViewer directly from the memory card and leave only the images intended to be imported into post-processing software like Lightroom. It is a huge time saver for me personally, which is why I have been advocating the use of the software to our readers.
KeepSnap Third Place Winner
We are happy to announce the third place winner of our PL + KeepSnap contest/giveaway. Big thanks to everyone who voted! It looks like the majority of those who participated in the poll favored the following portrait of a biker in a forest:
KeepSnap Contest 2nd Place Winner and Poll for 3rd Place
While our KeepSnap contest ended a while ago and we have previously identified the 1st place winner, the winner of the second place has not yet been announced and we have not yet run a poll to choose the third place winner. I definitely let this one fall through the cracks and it has been my fault all along for making such a late announcement. Due to lack of time and my mailbox overflow issues, I have been having a hard time with catching up with everything that’s going on. But, I don’t want to blame it on anything other than myself, so once again, for those who participated in this contest/giveaway, please accept my apologies! So for those who have been waiting, the winner of the second place has been identified – congratulations to Owen Clarke for being randomly selected for the second place!
How Was This Picture Made #11?
It is great to finally be back to posting regularly on the site! It took us a while to finally wrap up our second video course, and despite my attempts to keep the site fresh with new content, things have been quite hectic to say the least. And now that most of all that is behind us, I cannot wait to start posting great content again. I have a lot of things lined up for this month, and next month is going to be even more exciting, because we will be hosting another guest post month, where our readers will get a chance to submit content for a chance to win a camera, in addition to getting paid for writing and sharing the content with others (we will post the announcement later this week). On top of that, a number of big reviews are coming up – with the Nikon D500 review being the first. The review is 95% done (written by our very talented team member John Lawson and co-written by Tom Redd and yours truly); I just need to add ISO comparisons and notes to finish it up. I have to say, this one is well worth the wait! I know many of our readers have been waiting for us to review the camera and we have put a lot of time and effort into it. We did not want to review this camera without spending a lot of time in the field! Anyway, today I wanted to share an image that I captured when I visited the Great Sand Dunes NP with Spencer Cox. He has already posted an image of his own in the last “how was this picture made #10?” article, so I am posting mine. This one was interesting, as it is something I did for the first time in my life.
PL Level 1 Workflow and Post-Processing Announcement
We are very excited to announce the release of our second video course, Level 1: Workflow and Post-Processing. After months of hard work and many sleepless nights, we were finally able to wrap the course up and make it available for purchase. After receiving a lot of positive feedback on our first video, we decided to take it up a level and deliver something we are truly proud of. The result is a 14-hour educational course that will surely satisfy your hunger for photography knowledge for quite a while. In this course, we pick it up right where we left off last time; from the moment you insert your memory card into your computer, all the way to the image export process. We go over each step of the photography workflow process, provide detailed information on different post-processing tools available on the market today (along with the overview of the most popular ones), and give you in-depth coverage of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. In addition to the above, you will also learn how to properly organize your images and your Lightroom catalogs, find out about computer hardware required for post-processing, and even learn how to properly backup and export your images. To make it easy for you to follow the course, we are providing all relevant raw images, so that you can try all the tools we teach you to use. Without a doubt, this is one of the most detailed and complete courses you will find on both workflow and post-processing!
