Most copyright holders are individuals; most infringers are businesses. Things are broken.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/09/one-mans-endless-hopeless-struggle-to-protect-his-copyrighted-images/

My daughter's website came in first in her school, district, and region history fair. She wanted a subject  involving photography so she decided to do her report on Eddie Adams, a well known Pulitzer prize winning war photographer. Here is the website she created. http://bit.ly/1mfLHnw

15 Most Inspiring TED Talks On Photography

http://121clicks.com/inspirations/15-most-inspiring-ted-talks-on-photography

Fuji MX-700

    Now that I no longer had to worry about film or developing costs, I was able to freely experiment and capture all the images time would allow. Not to mention, I could get immediate feedback from the LCD screen on the back and figure out what I had done right and what I could improve on. This was the point where my photography really started to take off.

    I found I could print off a decent 8x10 on my little Lexmark printer but anything much larger then that was pushing the limits of those 1.5 mps. I wanted to create epic images and epic images aren't nearly as epic printed as an 8x10. I wanted to print posters and even wall murals. 

     Then one day as I was editing some images, it hit me. I could resize, rotate and move these digital images. I bet I could combine them as well. The following image was the result.

The White Mountains, NH. Six images hand stitched.  3620x1428

    The results were less than ideal but once I learned about the magical software that could stitch images together I could make those wide panoramas that I had imagined.

Portland Headlight, Maine. 18 images 16,413x1150

     Spring of 2013 I bought my Olympus OMD EM-5. I absolutely love this little camera. I carry it with me everywhere and as a result I'm photographing more. This means more practice and my skill is growing much like when I first received that little Fuji.

    The Olympus was the camera I took to the Utah Color Festival that March. At one point I wanted to get a view from above the crowd. I set the camera to high-speed sequential exposures. I held the camera as high above my head as I could, pressed the button and quickly panned the camera. I didn't get anything too exciting from it but when I got home and started editing I looked at those fourteen photos I took in a little over a second and thought, "I bet I could stitch these". So I gave it a shot.

Salt Lake Color Festival 14 images 12,433x6,390

I ended up with a handheld panoramic of a moving crowd. How cool is that? 

    Recently I've discovered gigapxel with several record breaking images in the news such as the 111 gigapixel image of Sevilla and the whopping 320 gigapixel image of London

    Up to this point I'd only stitched images when the scene I wanted to capture was too big for my widest lens. I hadn't considered zooming in for more detail or taking multiple rows of images. So on a recent trip to Yosemite I decided to see what I could do. All of the images were taken hand held because the sheer number of tourists made using a tripod awkward. I was very pleased with the overall result of the images. I learned from my experiments and I'll get better results next time. A gigapan system is definitely on my wishlist.

Graffiti Tree Trunk from Yosemite National Park, 11 images,  6,301x17,642 pixels

Yosemite Valley from Glacier Point, 53 images, 21,767x6,2904 pixels

Roots of the Fallen Monarch, 50 images, 20,069x12,593 pixels

This was one of the more difficult images from the trip due to all the tourists taking photos in front of it. Finally I set the camera to high speed sequential and panned it across the top row waited for a clear shot and panned the second row and then again for the bottom row.

Here is what I have learned from my experiences...

- It is possible to shoot smaller panoramas hand held. But you have to be remember to pay attention to the edges and corners and to rotate around the camera rather then the camera around you.

- Shoot higher and wider than you think you need to. You will almost certainly have to crop. 

- The low speed sequential setting is better for fast panning. High speed is too fast for the pan and takes unnecessary pictures. Panning too quickly can also cause motion blur. Plus the buffer fills up after a second and a half or so and you have to wait for images to process anyway.

 - The best tripod head (not counting a purpose built pano head) is one with separate vertical and horizontal locks. This keeps your rows and columns lined up better and you are less likely to miss a section.

- The size of the of the panoramas you can make depends more on the size of your memory card and the processing power of your computer then it does the camera you use. 

 - When stitching large panoramas in PhotoShop you can stitch individual sections and then combine the smaller sections into larger ones. It will also go faster if you flatten the layers of individual sections before stitching them together.

15 Photography Interviews From Masters

http://121clicks.com/inspirations/15-photography-interviews-from-masters-a-roundup

]]> aaronlee@explorediscovershare.com (leephoto) https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/5/15-photography-interviews-from-masters Sun, 05 May 2013 20:36:00 GMT https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/4/manning-the-photobooth A friend of mine who is involved in the culinary club at the local community college asked me if I'd be willing to run a photo booth for a dance they had planed. It was a 50's theme sock hop so everyone had fun costumes with plenty of color. It was a great opportunity for me to get some really fun shots. I had a great time and it looked like everyone else did too.

2013 Color Festivale from Aaron Lee on Vimeo.

Analyzing The Iconic Pictures – Part 1

Analyzing The Iconic Pictures – Part 2

Analyzing The Iconic Pictures – Part 3

]]> aaronlee@explorediscovershare.com (leephoto) https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/4/analyzing-the-iconic-pictures Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:05:14 GMT https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/3/olympus-om-d-em5 It's been two weeks since I've bought a new Olympus OM-D EM5 and I have to say I'm impressed. Yes I've moved from my cropped sensor Pentax k200d to a micro four thirds.

The in body image stabilization is rock solid up to a good size lens length. I've bought lens adapters so I could use the lenses from my Pentax And they works quite well although with a narrow depth of field manual focus can be difficult. However my cheap 500mm lens seems to work better on the olympus then it did on the pentax but that may be because the art11 setting helps to get a more accurate focus.

1/250 sec at f8, ISO 200, 500mm

The image is still soft but usable in situations where sharpness isn't as much of an issue. I was pleasantly surprised to find the 500mm lens works very well in video mode.  I suspect it me be the lower resolution of video compared to still photos.

dove from Aaron Lee on Vimeo.

One of the features that has turned out to be very useful that I didn't expect is the ability to set up to four sets of settings. This allows me to easily switch between different modes. I currently have settings for normal images, infrared, and HDR.

Yes this camera will take infrared photos with a infrared filter. Image quality is so good at high iso settings that these can be taken handheld in good light. This is the tutorial I used to set up my camera for infrared. 

1/30 sec at f 22, ISO 6400, 27mm

Using the Olympus for HDR photography is incredibly easy. The tutorial I used for setting this up can be found here.  Five exposures at 9fps  with good light takes a little more then half a second. This can easily be done hand held if you are steady enough or have something handy to brace against.

five exposure HDR at f22, 12mm

Just a few observations to finish up this post. I bought the camera with the 12mm to 50mm lens. A you can see from the above photo At 12mm this lens has a wide enough view it catches the lens hood. I have also found the touch screen is sensitive enough it can be used instead of a remote shutter release if you are careful. 

Finally I love how small this camera is. I had gotten out of the habit of carrying my camera around with me because the size made it awkward and inconvient to use on a everyday basis. My phone taking the place of a point and shoot for everyday photos. The kit lens is good enough for most uses and the camera and lens easily fits into my smallest bag and I've started carrying it with me when ever I leave the house. I've heard it said often that the best camera is the one you have with you. The camera i have  suddenly upgraded from a 5mp camera phone to a very versatile 16mp  camera.

I really enjoy shooting with this camera. I expect to get a lot of use out of it over the next few years.

]]> aaronlee@explorediscovershare.com (leephoto) https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/3/olympus-om-d-em5 Wed, 27 Mar 2013 19:46:55 GMT https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/3/national-geographic-the-last-roll-of-kodachrome ]]> aaronlee@explorediscovershare.com (leephoto) https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/3/national-geographic-the-last-roll-of-kodachrome Sun, 17 Mar 2013 11:07:04 GMT https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/3/street-photography-with-travis-jensen Here's a great video about street photographer Travis Jensen

]]> aaronlee@explorediscovershare.com (leephoto) https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/2/eureka-utah Sun, 24 Feb 2013 17:19:35 GMT https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/2/what-to-do-on-a-snowy-day We've got a snow storm here, not as big as the one back east but it's been snowing off and on for most of the day. It's been a while since I've been out with my camera. I decided to try my hand at photographing snowflakes. Don Komarechka does some beautiful snowflake macro photography and has a lot of advice on how to do it. Here's what I ended up with.

I don't have specialized equipment for this I just used my 70 - 300 telephoto macro  cropped the image way down and made some adjustments in lightroom. I'm very pleased with them considering the limitations I had to deal with.

http://blogof.francescomugnai.com/2013/01/30-of-the-most-beautiful-abandoned-places-and-modern-ruins-ive-ever-seen/

The Magic of a Moment

Here is what she wrote about it...

"The magic of photography is that each photo captures a moment, The rose in my picture is the last rose on the bush, on the last day before it died, in the last bit of daylight on the day. Photographers have two special hours each day. They call them the golden hour and the blue hour. The golden hour is in the morning. My rose picture was taken in the evening and that's when the blue hour is. That's how i got it to be blue. To me it's magical that this rose survived when the other ones hadn't."

All of this she came up with on her own. She made it through the school and council levels to district but didn't get further then that. Still pretty good for a third grader going up against fourth and fifth graders. My daughter is only nine years old and she's already winning photo competitions. Is that cool or what?

 I've been neglectful of my posting over the holidays, but now things are getting back to normal and i have some blogging to catch up on. Several of my subjects over the last months wanted photos for Christmas gifts. Now the holidays are over I can post a few with out worrying about ruining someones surprise.

]]> aaronlee@explorediscovershare.com (leephoto) https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2013/1/a-new-year Sun, 13 Jan 2013 09:43:00 GMT https://www.explorediscovershare.com/blog/2012/12/things-are-picking-up

It's been a busy few weeks. I've been averaging two to three shoots a week and then the editing on top of that. I don't think I really understood the time that editing can add to the shoot. I also get why it's so good to do as much editing in camera as you can. I think I may need to reduce the number of photos in my final cut to twenty or so to make it more manageable.

Famous Photographers: 225 tips to inspire you

The Saturday before Halloween I took my 8 year old daughter out on full "goth fairy" costume for a photo shoot. Here's the best of what I captured.

Yesterday was our big family apple picking and cider pressing. While everyone else was busy picking apples and pouring cider I was roaming around with my camera. I ended up with a lot of great images. These are a few of my favorites.