2017 is a huge year for Nikon, as it marks the 100th anniversary of the company. A century of innovation in creation of optical instruments, binoculars, telescopes, microscopes, engineering tools, medical tools, precision instruments, scanners, cameras, lenses and other accessories is something Nikon is planning to celebrate on July 25th, 2017. Our team at PL congratulates Nikon with this big achievement and we hope to see Nikon continue to innovate for many years to come! At the same time, we…
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Best of 2016 – Part Two
In Part 1 of Best of 2016, I showed images from my trips to Death Valley NP, Joshua Tree NP and Saguaro NP, then finished up the post with two of my favorite images from Istanbul, Turkey. In this second part, we will be touring through the Rocky Mountain region of the USA, then explore some of the images from my recent trip to New Zealand. As before, I will be spending a considerable amount of time talking about each…
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Best of 2016 – Part One
Another year is over and it is that time of the new year when many of us go back and assess our personal successes and failures of the past year. While 2016 was surely an eventful year, we should be grateful to be alive and well, as many were not as fortunate. We have seen a number of both positive and negative changes that affected the world we live in today and how we will be living it in the…
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What is Landscape Photography?
The most fundamental part of taking good landscape photos is knowing what landscape photography is in the first place. I’m not talking about dictionary definitions here, either — what matters is how it works in practice. So, what is landscape photography, and why is it so amazing?
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How to Make Sharp Watermarks in Lightroom
One of the biggest frustrations with Lightroom’s built-in watermarking tool, is the fact that it often ends up making watermarks appear too soft / blurry, especially when extracting smaller JPEG images. This happens due to Lightroom’s rather poor implementation of watermarking on images. Not only does Lightroom seem to apply sharpening to images before adding a watermark, but also, the resizing algorithm used by the software appears to be pretty bad. No matter what image dimensions one chooses, Adobe has…
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How to Watermark Images in Lightroom
While it seems that adding watermarks to images does little nowadays to deter image theft, watermarks can still be very useful for photographers and business owners for promoting their work and their brands across websites and social media. Unfortunately, for those who are just starting out, adding a simple watermark to images can be a rather painful experience, especially if they are not already familiar with the process using such software tools as Photoshop. Thankfully, Adobe has made it easy…
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Integrating JPEGmini Pro to Lightroom Workflow
Although we have already published a detailed review of the JPEGmini Pro software a while ago, a number of readers have reached out to me, asking how to effectively use the software, specifically when extracting images for clients from Lightroom. I have now been using JPEGmini for over a year and both Lola and I have been extracting images from Lightroom in a specific way to get the highest quality JPEG images to our clients, while retaining the smallest file…
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Photography Workflow – Year-End Activities
As a photographer and a photography business owner, I go through a number of activities at the end of each year to close it out, just like many businesses do when performing year-end activities. These activities have become an essential part of my photography workflow, allowing me to continue using a very consistent and reliable method to not only store and archive my images, but also to be ready for future data growth and potential hardware changes. If you have…
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Nikon 85mm f/1.4G Review
This is an in-depth review of the Nikon 85mm f/1.4G AF-S lens that was announced with three other lenses in August of 2010. Ever since the manual focus AI-s version of the Nikon 85mm f/1.4 lens was introduced back in 1981, the Nikon 85mm f/1.4 lenses have been used as references for superb sharpness, best-looking bokeh and beautiful color renditions. The last autofocus AF-D version of the lens produced in 1995, the Nikon 85mm f/1.4D, was often called the “king…
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Creative Landscape Photography eBook Announcement
To culminate more than a year of work, Spencer and I are very excited to announce the release of our first eBook, Creative Landscape Photography: Light, Vision, and Composition. This 149-page Level 3 book dives into the creative side of landscape photography, including everything from finding subjects to composing difficult scenes. There are some exciting details below, so we encourage you to keep reading:
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Nikon 24-120mm f/4G VR Review
This is an in-depth review of the Nikon 24-120mm f/4G ED VR lens that was released in August of 2010. The constant maximum aperture, mid-range Nikon 24-120mm f/4 VR zoom lens was a major update to the Nikon 24-120mm f/3.5-5.6G VR, which had been known at the time for being a sub-par lens optically. Shortly after the 24-120mm f/4G VR was announced, Nikon discontinued its variable-aperture predecessor and made the 24-120mm f/4G VR into a premium kit lens to be…
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Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8E VR Review
It took Nikon nine years to finally release an update to its popular workhorse standard zoom lens in the form of the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8E ED VR, which gained a few new features compared to its predecessor, including the much desired image stabilization. Nikon engineers have always put extra effort and emphasis on updated professional-grade lens designs, typically delivering outstanding performance. However, the release of the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8E ED VR lens has been one of the most controversial in…
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Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G Review
This is an in-depth review of the Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8G ED lens that was released back in August of 2007 together with the 14-24mm f/2.8G ED lens. I have owned a number of different copies of the Nikon 24-70mm for many years, pretty much from the day the lens was announced and I have probably spent the most amount of time in the field shooting with this lens. Since it is a workhorse pro-level lens, I have used it for…
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Recommended Canon 5D Mark IV Settings
With the arrival of the much-anticipated Canon 5D Mark IV, many photographers might be either moving up to, or upgrading their existing Canon 5D-line cameras to this latest and greatest tool. The 5D line has always been Canon’s stronghold for most types of photography, particularly because of its amazing low-light performance, reliable autofocus, superb ergonomics, solid build and overall stability, making it a preferred DSLR among most professionals. Due to the numerous buttons and the sophisticated menu system of the…
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Photographing the Supermoon
If you have not heard yet, tonight, we will experience something truly magical – the supermoon of a lifetime! That’s right, the moon will be unusually close to our planet at 356,500 km, so close that we will not see another approach like that all the way until 2034! The size of the moon will be 14% larger than typical full moon. The so called “perigee moon” will coincide will the full moon, making it appear not only unusually large,…
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What to Photograph in Colorado
Colorado has been my home for the past 20 years. Having had the chance to travel all over the USA for photography and other personal and professional needs, every time I would come back to Colorado, I would tell myself that there is simply not a better place to live and be. The Centennial State is remarkable in so many ways, that the more I explore it, the more I fall in love with it. Here in Colorado, we have…
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Winner of the Guest Post Contest
Back in August, we started a guest post challenge with our readers, asking to submit content to get $50 for a published article and get a chance to win a Fuji X-T10 kit. A number of great submissions followed and we published a total of 15 articles in total. While all submissions were great (and we thank everyone who participated), one specific post was surely the most talked about. Everyone I know who regularly visits the website would bring up…
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NiSi Filter System Review
For most photographers, especially those who shoot landscapes, it is crucial to have a good set of filters at your disposal. Filters come in two types: screw-on filters (attaching directly to your filter threads) and square filter systems (sliding into a holder on the end of your lens). A lot of landscape photographers move to a square filter system over time — they have a wider selection of filters, and they let you move your filters from lens to lens…
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Glass vs Resin Filters – Are There Any Differences in Sharpness?
Landscape photographers often deal with the dilemma of choosing between different types and brands of neutral density and graduated neutral density filters for use in high-contrast situations such as sunrise and sunset, where their cameras might not have enough dynamic range to be able to capture the entire scene. While we are not going to go over each and every brand to see which one performs better, we do want to show the difference in sharpness between glass and resin…
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Site Maintenance and Speed Optimizations
Lately, you have probably noticed that we have not posted much content on the website. Ever since we had an attack on the site a couple of months ago (where our site was down for a day), I have been planning on upgrading the server infrastructure in order for us to be able to handle much more traffic and potential attacks. So after I got back from New York, I decided to make all the necessary changes, since we are…
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