sfpeter.com

If you’re like me and somewhat serious about photography, you probably research your lenses and cameras before you buy them. While I’m eagerly waiting for my new Panasonic LX3 to arrive, I was browsing around a bit to see what other LX3 owners have been able to produce with that camera. Not so surprisingly, I found a lot of great photos. But I also found a cool website that I wasn’t aware of until now: pixel-peeper.com. It uses the Flickr API to let you search for photos made by pretty much any kind of camera or lens.
Have a look and judge picture quality for yourself. Of course it’s true that a $6000 lens also typically has a better photographer behind it so comparing its photos to other random photos taken with a $100 piece of glass probably isn’t entirely fair. But it’s fun comparing anyhow.

Marty and Taylor, our 8 month old kittens are not normal. Really. You’d probably have to meet them to believe it. They like to stay within 5 feet from us, whatever we do. And when they’re not seeking comfort from us, these brothers are seeking comfort from eachother. In any case, sleeping and lounging cats make excellent subjects for practicing my photography skills. Two of these photos were taken with my new EF-S 60mm 2.8f Macro Lens…

I’ve only owned my Canon EOS 30D for less than two months so I have a lot to learn still about digital photography. Only recently I discovered what an amazing difference a few simple tweaks to white balance, color temperature or hue can make to a digital photo. You could argue that I shouldn’t need to do any color adjustments if I took the photo right in the first place, but I bet that even the best of digital photographers use photoshop to fix and enhance their work.

I’ve been using Photoshop Album for my point-and-shoot camera, which is great for organizing photos but not so great for fixing them up. Adobe Photoshop can do it of course, but editing a whole set of photos is cumbersome and the controls are not that easy to get to. I think I’ve found the answer to this problem and it’s called Adobe Lightroom. It puts all the controls that a digital photographer needs right at your fingertips and can manage entire photo shoots. It will simply save your settings in a project file and will not touch your original shots. When you’re all done you can export your photo selection, but you can still go back later on and tweak more if you need to. I can’t wait to get started with raw images now, which Lightroom supports as well (in fact, it was probably designed for raw editing).

Lightroom is still in beta, which is downloadable for free. It’s a little slow sometimes and it seems to be missing some basic features you’d expect to find (like a full screen view or the ability to remove red-eye effect), but all in all in all I think it’s already a great tool for digital photographers. Check it out.