Blog.JimDoty.com

Laureesa. Photo © Jim Doty Jr

Although studio lights give you an amazing amount of control, you don’t have to have studio lights to do nice portraits. The right kind of natural light can work very well.

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Recently announced Canon EF 70-200 mm f/4L IS lens

This week, Canon announced the new EF 70-200 mm f/4L IS USM lens. The expected release date is in November at a price somewhere around $1250 (USD). A lot of photographers, myself included, have been hoping and praying Canon would make this lens. The price should drop several months after its initial release and after the usual first rush of purchases.

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New Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi/400D

This week Canon announced the new Digital Rebel XTi (400D in Europe). The XTi will have a 10.1 Megapixel CMOS sensor, a new EOS Integrated Cleaning System, and a larger and brighter 2.5” LCD and 9-point AF system. The maximum frame burst increases from 14 to 27 large JPEGs and from 5 to 10 RAW files. So how much better is this camera?

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RGB Color Channels. Photo © Jim Doty Jr.

There are several ways to convert color images to black and white. One simple way that provides a lot of control is Chanel Mixer which is part of the recent versions of Adobe Photoshop. Read how in the full article at my web site.

If you read this blog regularly and think I’ve been doing a lot of portrait work lately, you are right. I will be back to landscapes this fall (I think).

Three of Ryan. Photo © Jim Doty Jr.

If you do everything right during the shoot, it is pretty simple with digital photography to put one person in more than one location in the same photo, provided the light source remains constant. It didn’t take much longer to composite the above photo in the computer than it did to set up and shoot in the first place. Working on the tiny details of the photo took a lot longer than compositing three photos together.
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Ryan’s Yearbook Photo? Photo © Jim Doty Jr.

Ryan’s senior pictures will be even more unique than I had planned. We showed up at one of my pre-selected outdoor shooting locations, only to find these two dancers using the same location to shoot a video-tape for a national competition. (A good location is a good location.) They were doing the last few “takes” as we arrived. It would have been a shameful waste of good talent not to include them in some of Ryan’s pictures.

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