My name is Jeff and I am addicted to Fractalius! Careful or you’ll catch it too!

Fractalius is digital art software from Redfield and it is really so much fun, that you’ll have a hard time stopping once you start.

I really enjoy making digital paintings…taking one of my photographs and via the power of the computer turning it in to something completely different. Fortunately, you don’t have to have any artistic talent at all, but a good picture to start with helps a lot. A few clicks and voila, art! Ok, perhaps not art and I am reluctant to use that word, but I have seen other users make some fantastic images and so I had to try it myself and now I can’t stop Fractaliusing.

Redfield’s Fractalius is software that is very simple and easy to use. Honestly the best way to learn it is to push all of the buttons and sliders and gizmos and see what happens. There is also a cool “roll the dice” randomizer that makes great art…well sometimes! As my friends David and Roger say, “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” I am sure that you are all savvy enough that you are working on a duplicate layer so that really shouldn’t count as a tip, but if you aren’t, shame on you. Always make a duplicate layer when you use Fractalius. Two reasons, I’ve discovered that changing the opacity for some of the more bizarre variants like Glow100 look better by fading the duplicate layer a bit to reveal more of the subject under neath. This is particularly true when creating animals. Secondly, if you change your mind about your creation, just delete the layer and start over. The most difficult part of the process is picking just the right images for the effects. It takes a bit of work to get ones that work. I find that the simpler the background the more appealing I find the end results. Your results may vary so go play!

Here is a link to the Redfield site. OH, the big bummer. It is only available for 32 bit Windows versions of Photoshop. On the plus side it is only $40!

Here are some of my images re-worked as a Fractalius.

[View with PicLens]

If you Fractalius let me see your stuff!

There was a time that I absolutely loved adding frames to my images and I scoured the internet for Photoshop actions to help me find new ones. I mean with frames you can’t do the same ones over and over…seriously, what is the fin in that? Then I kind of out grew that and went for something more austere a border and a drop shadow perhaps. Anyway, I don’t use any of that anymore, letting the image stand alone and speak for itself. Of course, there is still a dark part of my brain that like to frame images and in particular there are times when a website design really “needs” a framed image. onOne software to the rescue.

I’m going to let onOne tell you about the software…their marketing words are better than mine!

From onOne Software:

“Add the perfect finishing touch to your images with PhotoFrame 4.5 Professional Edition. It features over a thousand design elements like film edges, borders, textures, backgrounds and adornments. It even has complete layouts where you just drop your image in and you are done.

• Over 1,100 professionally created edge effects, backgrounds, and adornments.
• Easily add realistic film and darkroom edge effects.
• Create full-page layouts complete with backgrounds.
• NEW! Now supports 64-bit CS4 on Windows.“

Ok, I’m back. The software is dead simple to use and a lot of the time you don’t need to do much more than pick a frame and click “save”. However the fun is really when you play with frames and mke your own configurations. Your choices are nearly limitless.

The really spectacular news is that they are now offering a “free” version, seriously its free! It does have a limited set of frames (20), but they are still customizable and still quite useful. Did I mention you can own it for free?

These shots took about 10 minutes for me to frame. Here is the link to download onOne Software PhotoFrame 4.5.

[View with PicLens]

The Back Story

I finally switched to a MAC when the new MAC Pro towers came out in March. I had used PCs for years and had pretty good computer skills. I’m the guy that friends and family called when they could not figure out what was up with their computer… My experience with the switch was awesome! Literally it was like I had always had a MAC, no issues, just joyous ease and blazing speed. To be fair my move up the performance ladder was rather substantial. My PC was a core2 1.86GHz machine with 2GB of ram running Vista. My MAC is a dual quad core 2.26GHz machine with 10GB of RAM!

The Upgrade

Of course there was some drama sot get started. I went to my local Apple store promptly at 10 to get the shiny new disc, only to discover that they were closed for remodeling until September 18^th! That was a tad longer than I wanted to wait and so I went to the nearest Best Buy, no Snow Leopard at that store, but the one across town had discs. Note to self: CALL FIRST!

The Preparation

I read some stuff online and I had my hard drive all backed up via Time Machine (How cool is that app?)  I chose to do an on top install rather than wipe the disc. My machine was new and I didn’t think that I had done anything to it that needed a start over. Bottom line the only preparation was to back up the drive that my OS was on.

The Install

1)   The Unwrapping. You have to love Apple’s typical over the top and somehow endearing packaging. Inner cartons on an install disc!

2)   Started at 12:07 and a very cool flash movie setup assistant plays. It predicts about 45 minutes for the install.

3)   I think it did 2 re-boots during the process neither of which required my intervention. My only action was to re-boot when it was over.

4)   Finished the final re-boot and 12:40. A quick 33 minutes to install a new OS.

My expectations were pretty high based on my experience with the MAC so far. I was also excited about the upgrade because most of it was really designed to make my turbo charged computer perform at its most awesome level.

The Big Reveal

1)   Opening applications is noticeable faster, especially Apple apps like Safari. Safari is blink and you’ll miss it fast. I did a speed test on Firefox and on Safari. Safari’s download test was 7 MBPS faster. Obviously subjective, but my feeling of speed shows that Safari is far faster as well.

2)   I have 2 monitors and one of them is swiveled portraits style. The new OS new this. In fact I didn’t find any old preferences that had been forgotten. Nice! On my last windows upgrade I even had to locate USB and Ethernet drivers! Try that without getting online…

3)   Entourage is the only software isn’t working right. I get my mail, but the views filters are not working

4)   My Adobe Lightroom and CS4 products all work as do all of the filters from NIK, Auto/FX and Lucis Arts.

5)   It does see my Epson NX515 printer, but cannot get the drivers. I thought that was odd since the printer is brand new on the market. I delete and re-install the printer and it works just fine.

6)   I still have a PC and am using a venerable Linksys WR54GT router. No problem going MAC to PC or vice versa. I didn’t touch anything here. The printer is also wireless…

7)   My Logitech mouse works in basic mode. I use the back button extensively on the web and it doesn’t work now. The Logitech software does not install with Snow Leopard.

8)   I booted in both 64bit (hold the 6 and 4 key while booting) and in 32 bit. I didn’t find any gotchas in one that was not there in the other.

9)   Apps open and close immediatel

10) I have not played very much with the new features. I use Finder a lot and I was looking forward to the increased thumbnail size. This is great, but only works in the grid view. I kind of like the column view myself.

Conclusions

For my system it was absolutely worth the enormous $29 to upgrade! In the first couple of hours I can easily notice speed improvements and have no complaints about the process or the issues that I have found so far. I feel like all the little buggy things will get sorted out quickly.

It really was a no brainer and easy process. Oh and by the way windows users, you don’t have to re-install any of your software, WOW!

I’ve been blessed to photograph a Snow Leopard!

You can see more of them in my gallery here. I also teach photography and you can join me and get a chance to photograph a Snow Leopard too. Here is a link to the workshop.

In the mean time enjoy the upgrade to Snow Leopard it’s been great for me.

After almost a week of traveling through the arid and hot South Texas, I arrived in Fredericksburg, Texas on my way to Block Creek Natural Area. Wow, what a difference a day makes. No more deserts, no more dust and way more relaxed. One thing that wasn’t missing was the charm and friendly nature of my hosts. As was the norm on my trip, the people were really terrific.

Block Creek Natural Area is about 400 acres of pristine Texas Hill Country that has been in the Langford family for 6 generations now. Their stewardship of the land has kept this area untouched and undeveloped. A remarkable feat considering it is only an hour drive from San Antonio!

David Langford and Larry Jay are photographers and very good ones at that. This made my all too short visit very productive. They know about light and they know about backgrounds and all of the birding setups are perfectly positioned. Not only are they in perfect position, but also they have been used for years and so all of the local birds know they are perfect too!

There is more to Block Creek than just birds. Although I do need to point out that this is one of the few places that can boast a reliable ability to photograph Green Kingfishers!  The landscape is stunning with meandering creeks, waterfalls, massive oaks, giant boulders and rock face. Did I mention the wildflowers? Oh yeah, some of the most famous displays of native wildflowers bloom in the hill country. Imagine acres and acres aglow with a carpet of wildflowers and then imagine them being even better than you can imagine and you might be close.

You can be sure that you will be reading more about the ranch as PAW will be offering a Spring in the Texas Hill Country Workshop in 2010.

Here is a sampling of the birds that I was able to photograph in couple of hours one morning…Imagine your portfolio after 3 or 4 days of Block Creek Natural Area!

[View with PicLens]

Theses images and more from Block Creek Natural Area are available for purchase here.

Part 1 of my Great Texas Bird Photography Trip

It was a Texas twister of a trip with 10 ranches on the itinerary. I did have help and lot of it from John and Audrey Martin as well as Gail Hoffman from Images for Conservation. None of this would have worked out or would have even been attempted without their kind efforts.

Martin Refuge

One of the places that I have always wanted to photograph was the Rio Grand Valley. The valley is an oasis for bird photography with a large variety of birds and many species that are only found in that part of the US.  The grand dame of the Valley’s bird photography is Martin Refuge: The Javelina.

The Javelina is 300 acres of thick brush near McAllen TX. The Martins have added professionally designed photo blinds, water features and feeders in order to attract birds, mammals and reptiles to a perfect proximity for your camera. Many of the 7 blinds are sunken which gives you a perfect eye level view of your subject, which is of course a key to any great wildlife photograph.

This was my very first time using blinds to photograph birds. I must say I may be ruined to the good old stalk and shoot method. It was amazing to have all of the birds come right to me while I sat in comfy chair camouflaged and ready. Of course, creature comforts were fine, but at 102° it was still hot sweaty work and I loved it. I spent about 6 hours photographing at the Javelina and during that time I saw approximately 40 species of birds. Out of those 15 or so were new species for me. Needless to say it was a big treat. Some of them were quite exotic like the ubiquitous Green Jay.

And others although not so bold, were equally great to find, like this Olive Sparrow.

As any of you know that regularly photograph birds things come in waves. During the in between time, I took this shot of a couple of Yellowjackets. Patty Raney the guide and professional photographer for Javelina will attest it took a lot of silicone to get this one and she even joined in the fun trying to grab these shots…

John and Audrey were tremendous hosts and I owe them a big thank you for all of their help. Really nice people were a trend started at the Javelina that continued throughout the trip. I cannot wait to get back and spend more time photographing and just having fun with John and Audrey. You can also watch the PAW website for workshops in South Texas and the Hill Country in 2010.

I give the Martin Refuge: The Javelina unreserved recommendations. You can contact them at 956-381-1264 or martinrefuge@aol.com. Their website has all of the details. www.martinrefuge.com.

You can see all of my images and order prints from Martin Refuge on my website.

What a fantastic piece of software for the birder or perhaps even more so for the bird photographer. Just to be clear, I am not a birder, but I am a bird photographer. I also firmly believe that you cannot be a really good wildlife photographer without knowing your subject. So I am always reading and observing in order to improve my chances of making a really great photograph. Now along comes iBird!

iBird is the first software that I purchased for my iPhone and I have had my phone for almost a year! It has everything that I need to know to identify birds while in the field. Great descriptions, great illustrations, great photographs (yes, some are mine) and even calls are included in this application.

Why is a correct ID so important? First, if you ever hope to see your images published they must be correctly identified and iBird will ensure that you get even tricky IDs correct. They are part of the ID centric What Bird website and so are experts at providing the details that you need to sort out what bird (sorry) you just photographed.

One of the terrific features is the bird calls. I can’t tell you how many times I have been able to take a picture  of a bird because I heard the call and could then locate the bird or even better anticipate a behavior based on the call that was being made. This bird knowledge has really helped me take better photographs and I expect iBird will advance those skills even further.

One note about birds calls. In some cases and with some bird species playing their call will cause a reaction. While this can be a boon for the photographer it can be seriously bad for the birds. Please use this feature under the American Birding Associations code of ethics.

You can buy the app at the iTunes store for a paltry $19.99. That is about $80 less than another application that I was looking a that had nowhere close to the features of iBird Explorer.

Visit the iBird Explorer website for all of the juicy details.

I am quite pleased to not only introduce, but be a part of an exciting and brand new photography workshop company called, the Photographer’s Alliance Workshops. We call it PAW for short. My friend and mentor, David Middleton has finally decided that after 25 years of working for photography workshop companies it was time to start his own, and so PAW is here!

It is a great concept and full of a great leaders and great locations. Here is a description from the PAW website that really sums it all up:

“The Photographer’s Alliance Workshops (PAW) is a new photography workshop and tour company dedicated to exemplary teaching and superb photography. It is a community of professional photographers brought together to teach and to share their passion for photography. Simply, we are photographers from all over the country who love to help other photographers be their best. No nonsense, no excuses, no inflated egos, no huge overhead; just folks taking pictures, teaching photography and loving what they are doing. PAW is how photography ought to be taught.”

Here are links to the workshops that PAW will offer in 2009:

Imagine yourself in a Florida swamp and you are in a bird rookery that is home to nearly 5000 herons, egrets, ibis and more.  And now imagine that you are there during their breeding season and so the place is alive with activity. Leader(s): David Middleton and Jeff Wendorff

Florida Birds and More, March 12-15, 2009

The Oregon coast is a spectacular place for photographers. There is so much to explore, so many places to take pictures, so many things to point your camera at and it is all close by and easily accessible. Leader(s): David Middleton and Brenda Berry.

Oregon Coast, October 9-13, 2009

You will never get better images of raptors than on our fabulous Colorado Raptors Workshop. This is your best chance to photograph owls, eagles, falcons, and hawks in superb natural settings and up close! Leader(s): Jeff Wendorff

Colorado Raptors, October 25-27, 2009

Zion National Park is one of the photographic jewels of our National Park system.  There is no better time to visit than during the fall color season, after the summer crowds have departed and the cottonwood trees change to gold. Leader(s) Rod Barbee and Don Mammoser

Zion National Park, October 27-November 1, 2009

Have you ever thought about looking through your viewfinder and seeing a frame filling mountain lion or black bear or wolf or…? Leader(s): David Middleton

Lions, Tigers and Bears!, October 28-November1, 2009

Death Valley is a place of extreme desert beauty: dunes, 10,000 ft. peaks, dry lake beds, volcanic craters, the lowest place in the Americas, the hottest place in the Americas, spectacularly crisp sunrises and sunsets: it’s all there. Leader(s): Moe Witschard and David Middleton

Death Valley November 11-15, 2009

Bosque del Apache is one of our favorite locations and a must for anyone interested in photographing Snow Geese and Sandhill Cranes during their fall migration. Leader(s): Jeff Wendorff

Bosque del Apache, November 19-22, 2009

So as our motto says: “Catch the light with the best leaders, locations, and instruction” and visit our website for more details about The Photographer’s Alliance Workshops!

[View with PicLens]

It is ironic that the first step in digital workflow is to actually delete most of the images that you have worked so hard to create. The images that were created with promise and passion must now be looked on without emotion or feeling and be culled, killed, deleted, zapped, smushed, axed! Such a cruel sounding words for your dear pictures Webster’s defines culled as, “Something picked out from others, especially something rejected because of inferior quality.” See, you are doing it because of ‘inferior quality,’ that should make you feel a little better.

Editing is the process of going to get rid of the inferior images now, not later. You don’t need them now and you’ll certainly never need them in the future, so why keep them on your hard drives? Yes, I know hard drives are cheap, but so what? Why keep inferior images when you have better ones? Software is always leaping forward and the things that we can do with images today are staggering to say the least. However, they are never going to create software that fixes focus, or composition, or subject or put chopped feet back on. Well, Ok you can sorta put feet back on, but ignore that for now, I’m on a mission. So lets get started.

Once your images are on your hard drive, use the browser of your choice to go through and get rid of the junk. I am currently using Lightroom and so this article is Lightroom centric, but the principles still apply. I use Lightroom because the process is so easy and simple and fast. Let’s start looking at the images and on this first pass our mission is to cull out the junk. We are not going to rate them or OOH and AHH, OK a little, but keep focused on getting rid of the bad stuff. When you see a stinker you simply hit the X key and that image is now marked for deletion. You have not deleted anything yet, but you have given notice that you intend to put that image in the trash can! Proceed through all of your images happily deleting the out of focus, legs cut off, bird flew out of the frame or otherwise obviously a waste of memory space images.

If you are an advanced user feel free to get rid of obvious dupes here as well. You neophytes, just get rid of the really bad ones. Now go to the grid view of the Library module and select the rejected flag. This will now show you all of the images that you just culled. Take a look at all of these images to make sure that you didn’t get falg happy and cull one too many images. If they are indeed all bad, select them all and then hit the delete key. Lightroom will ask if you want them out of the collection or deleted from the disk. You know what you have to do, deep breath…delete from disk! God job, Grasshopper. Don’t you feel better knowing those icky images are never going to show up to shame you on the internet?

This image shows a Lightroom screenshot.

Now this is why my editing process is called 5 star culling. Some people see that they have all of these stars and colors and other hoohaws to mark their images for something. We really only need 3 stars and one of those is special. Why in the world would you want to rank one of your images as a 1 star image? To me that says it is already marked for deletion so why not get rid of it now before your emotions over rule reason and you keep the stinker. If it is a 1 star it shouldn’t be in your library. Keep your best and then the best of your best. I’m a 5 star photographer and so I only want my best, 4 stars and the best of my best, my 5 star images. You should be doing the same thing.

So, in this pass of reviewing images we are going to go through the images and you now have 3 options (in my system) to deal with images, rank it 3 stars, 4 stars or delete it. We’ll get to the 5 star thing in a minute. So now is when we have to be critical of our work. The first cull was easy the second is much more emotional. So look at your images, the best get 4 stars and the ones that deserve a second look get 3 stars. If it doesn’t meet those categories then it gets the X and is deleted. This is where you get rid of all of the duplicate shots. You know that 8 frame burst that captured a stationary object…yes that one, keep 1 delete 7. Mark the keeper as a 4 and move on. Also, get rid of all semi-duplicates. These are the ones where the subject eyes are closed or the head is turned or something is off. There will be times when the image is good and you are not sure about it, give these a 3 star rating. You should still only keep the best of the series from these 3 star shots. As with the round one culls, use the flag to find and then select the rejects, delete them. Now, I select all of my 4 stars and move them to my working folder. I keep a folder that are my “to be edited” images. I like to do this step as it helps me with my filing system. That is another article, stay tuned. I now move the 3 stars to a further review folder. I usually wait a week or two or even more sometimes and then come back and look at these images with fresh eyes. I then repeat the culling process on these images.

Now the 5 star pay off. We have now edited the images from the photo shoot and we have only processed our best shots. We have deleted the junk and are really satisfied with life. Now is when you reward yourself with that last 5th star. The 5th star is reserved for the best images in your library. Your library should never have more than about 100 5 star images at any given time. These are the 100 shots that you use to brag with friends and family, to show publishers your chops and to just enjoy after the work that you put in to making those images. After you reach 100 then when you want to nominate a new 5 star shot move a lesser image to a 4 star image. Lightroom has something called smart collections and it will automatically keep track of all images that you have rated 5 stars and with the click of a mouse all of your best are right there ready to be proud of. Hey you are a 5 star photographer now too!

Got a question or comment, sign in and leave it below!

As programs like Lightroom getting more and more powerful there is less need to work on your photographs in Photoshop and at $200 a pop to upgrade, well you may want to learn about what’s new. To help without I am writing a series of articles exposing new features in Photoshop CS4. Today’s lesson is about a great feature for those of you that create panoramic images, Auto Blend Layers.

This is going to be more show than tell as it all automated. If you have ever built panoramas before you know that once you have the merge complete the blue sky can be off a few degrees in color temperature. In the past cloning, blending, and patching would help, but often with less than stellar results. Adobe has now added this slick new feature to take care of that problem automatically. Here’s the scoop,

After your panorama is created, select all of the layers in the image. You select the layers in the layers panel on the right by holding the CTRL key and clicking on each layer. Then go to Edit>Auto-Blend-Layers. Photoshop will ask if it is a panorama, click yes. And voila all is done!

Click on the image to enlarge it and you can also have both of them enlarged at the same time!

Before

After

Now that is a cool feature! Enough to buy photoshop? If you are a panorama junkie it just might be!

I spent the last week in Seattle and the San Juan Islands and just had a blast! First, the weather was stupendous. I’ve never been there when it was 75 and sunny everyday for a week. It really was just brilliant. It was also great because I got to hang out with my photo pal, Brenda Berry. She is a great portrait photographer and a lot of fun to hang out with.

Brenda and Jon have a great house on Bainbridge Island and I always find something to photograph in her yard, which always manages to annoy her because she never gets around to photographing her own yard birds! Here are a couple of favorites from this trip.

I’ve also always wanted to go watch the Orca’s in the San Juan Islands. With the weather being perfect and having some extra time, I made it happen on this trip. I left out of Bellingham aboard the Island Mariner. Very well run trip on a very large boat. The nice thing about this boat was that it was very stable, no rocking and rolling. This is a big plus for photographers and those without sea legs. The downside was even though fast for its size it can take a while to find the whales. The naturalist on board made the

time without whales entertaining and educational. I was happy to get a couple of bird shots as well as my first jellyfish photograph.

Of course the Orca’s are the stars out here and it was with some relief that we found them. Even though the success rate of seeing the whales is high, they are wild and you just never know. This was a very challenging shoot to say the least. Even though stable, the boat is moving, the whales are moving, the whales are underwater 95%  of the time… You get the picture. So I was very happy to get a couple of keepers. My favorite is this with Mt Baker for a background. I was soo busy trying to get a shot that I didn’t realize that we were in line with the mountain until the naturalist asked if I got it in the images. I re-doubled my effort to make that happen and got a bit lucky.

I also took a trip out of Friendly Harbor aboard the Western Prince. This was a smaller and more intimate boat. It was a very fast boat and we were with the whales in a fraction of the time it took aboard the larger boat. I had a better time viewing the whales on this boat, but had less success in my photography. I would like a to go back and give it another try and would spend more time in San Juan and Friendly Harbor.

I am very excited to get back out there and give the orcas another shot!

From time to time you will find posts about ways to improve your photography. Here is the first one. It was inspired by a recent encounter with a Sandhill Crane.

I usually associate these birds with winter and the fall migration in New Mexico, but we do have a population of them here in Florida. The other day it was kind of a sunny day and the light was from the side. I compensated for the inevitable shadow with a high ISO. ISO1600 to be exact, on my trusty Nikon D300. While I didn’t eliminate the shadow, it is acceptable. Withou resorting to a flash I used the high ISO to prevent the left of the head from being completely black.

The second “trick” to this picture is have as much depth of field as possible in order to keep that long bill and the eyes in focus. You MUST get the eyes in focus, so get your focus lock on an eye and then adjust depth of field for the bill.

The last trick to the shot was getting the background “clean” and clear of stuff. There was a light tower in the background and by moving just a few inches it was gone and I had this creamy background.

The last was waiting for the Sandhill to stop eating and take a look in my direction!

Got it? Click it!

One of the plans is to make available site guides to photography hot spots. These guides will provide professional photographer tips and tricks to maximize your “keepers” at all of the killer locations. You will be able to photograph just like a “local” even if you have never been to the area before.

This is an example of the type of information that you should expect to find in a site guide. I’ll be adding a page to this site with all of the details. So be sure to bookmark this page or at even better add it to your RSS feeder.

Site Guide to the Dunedin Causeway