Make Spectacular Reflection-Free Framed Prints
By Al Warfield– After you’ve gone to the effort of taking the perfect shot, making the perfect print, and choosing the perfect frame, why spoil your image by framing it under glass where a myriad of reflections will wreck its beauty? It’s easy to eliminate reflections on framed prints made with Red River Matte and Fine Art Matte papers; you’ll also have the added advantage of displaying an image as large as the frame size instead of a...
Back To Basics: Quick ‘n Easy Print Framing!
By Peter E. Randall— Based on nearly sixty years of experience, I believe there are two major elements to photography. The first part is the making of an image, whether on film, digital or smartphone. The other aspect is what to do with it. Today, internet programs such as Instagram or Facebook appear to be the prime destinations for digital images. This may be momentarily satisfying, but it does nothing for the long-term appreciation...
Back to Basics: The Power of Light
By Suzanne D. Williams— Light is the key element in every photograph and having an understanding of it is essential to becoming a good photographer. Relying on your camera’s automatic settings will at some point become a hindrance because these settings can be misleading. The camera does not always make the correct choice. Instead, you, the photographer, must be able to recognize the light and know how it will affect your final...
It’s Summertime! 25 Cool Tips For Great Photos
By Albert Chi— 1. Avoid wandering aimlessly around looking for good pictures to shoot. Always give yourself a mini-assignment to stay on track. Like, street vendors, kids at play, people at bus stops, interesting doorways, afternoon shadows, and so on. That way, you have a direction in which to go and the challenge of trying to interpret things in your own unique way. 2. Most zoom lenses give you larger apertures at wide-angle...
Seeing Differently
By Michael Freeman— One of the first tenets of professional photography is that you have to try harder, always and all the time. There’s almost too much said about this, so I’ll restrict myself to one only, from American photographer William Albert Allard: “You’ve got to push yourself harder. You’ve got to start looking for pictures nobody else could take. You’ve got to take the tools you have and probe deeper.” Well, maybe I’ll allow...
Think Inside the Box For Dramatic Flower Photos
By Christine Pentecost– I’ve always been intrigued by photos of flowers on pure black backgrounds, so last summer, I decided to do some black box photography, using an abundance of mountain wildflowers blooming around our Montana homestead as subjects. I began by making a box that had four sides: right, left, top and back (no front or bottom) that was 24” high by 15” wide by 17” in depth, using black foam core. The two pieces that...
What Rembrandt Taught Me About Portrait Lighting
By Joel Grimes– Part of the requirements for receiving a BFA in Photography from the University of Arizona included half a dozen semesters of art history.At the time I felt like this was overkill and was only interested in attending my photo-related classes. In hindsight, one of the greatest influences that shaped my personal vision as a photographer did not come from studying the work of the master photographers, but that of a master...
Choose The Right Paper For Printing Old Photos
By Christine Pentecost– Digitally restoring old and damaged photos and bringing them back to life has been a very rewarding and challenging hobby for me over the past 15 years. I have restored photos from the late 1800s that were mounted on cardboard, to Polaroids from the 70s, and to photos ravaged by Hurricane Katrina’s flooding. The heartwarming tears of joy I have witnessed upon returning a restored photo to the owner has always...
Spark Up Your Holiday Photos!
By Suzanne D. Williams– We’ve all done it, taken that endless stream of holiday photographs with the same people doing something, only we can’t exactly tell what. Then there’s the familiar, “Oh look at the tree!” only it’s slightly blurry and the top is missing. Sound familiar? Who doesn’t have similar Christmas and other holiday pictures somewhere? Believe it or not, there is such a thing as...
Add Value and Security to Your Images
By Arthur H. Bleich– If you currently sell (or would like to sell) prints of your best work here’s a technique I’ve used successfully to assure buyers that if they resell my photographs some day it can be proven that they are genuinely mine and not unauthorized copies. I began doing this a few years ago when a friend who sells prints at art shows and fairs in this country traveled overseas and found copies of his work being sold...
Get Maximum Shadow Detail in Your Prints
By Tim Grey– In many cases a print will not reflect the full level of shadow detail as actually exists in the image file. Instead, that shadow gets “blocked up,” similar to the way shadow detail gets clipped in an exposure that is too dark. You can compensate for this issue by essentially brightening the value of black, causing all neighboring tonal values to be brightened up accordingly. With the vast majority of printers I find that...
Try Soft Light For Great Portraits
By Arthur H. Bleich– In the early days of amateur photography, enthusiasts were always being warned to “keep the sun at your back” because films were slow and needed lots of light to record a decent image. But before photography became the beloved hobby of the masses, Victorian studio photographers had discovered that the best way to light their subjects was to avoid the sun altogether. They set up indoor studios with...
Richard Baker: War and Peace
By Arthur H. Bleich– In 1966, Richard Baker aimed his M-16 at the Vietnamese; today he uses an arsenal of analog cameras to shoot them. His goal is to photograph all 54 ethnic tribes in the country where he was once sent to fight. Now 68, the twice-wounded Army veteran has been back to Vietnam about 15 times since the war ended; he jokes that he’s done more tours of duty there than any other soldier. Capturing images on pin-hole and...
What To Think About BEFORE You Shoot
By Arthur H. Bleich– Chances are you already know about different post production work flow techniques that can be used in Photoshop and/or Lightroom after you’ve shot your pictures. But it’s equally important to establish a workflow you can follow before you even make the shot. Here are nine things you should think about before you lift the camera to your eye. I’ve grouped them so when you begin to follow this recipe you only...
Backup Therapy for Paranoid Photographers, Part 2
By Tim Grey– Variability. I am often asked whether it is best to use a full backup solution where the backup is replaced each time you perform a backup, or an incremental backup where only changes made since the last backup are copied. My answer is to use both of these approaches. There are advantages and disadvantages to each type of backup, and so I encourage you to use more than one approach to help make up for the limits of each...
Backup Therapy for Paranoid Photographers, Part 1
By Tim Grey– To me a big part of why I capture photographic images in the first place is to preserve memories that are important to me. By definition, if I intentionally pressed the shutter release button on the camera then the photo I captured is important to me in some way. Therefore, I want to make sure that my photos are stored in a way that minimizes the risk of loss. Hard drives fail—all too often—and I want to ensure that a...
Editing for Print – Sharpening with Tim Grey
If you are printing your work, getting it to look good on the monitor is just the beginning. To make it look awesome on paper, you have to do a bit more work. Red River Paper has teamed up with photography expert and educator Tim Grey to bring you a video series called Editing for Print. Over the coming weeks we will explore a few simple but critical edits before printing that have a big impact. This week we look...
Ask Tim Grey – Print Sizing
By Tim Grey– Today’s Question: In Photoshop you can easily juggle image size and canvas size to obtain a print with the image size and border combination you desire. In Lightroom 5 I cannot find a similar set of functions in the print module where I can do the Photoshop equivalent. The presets in Lightroom 5 give you a maximum cell size in both length and height depending on what paper size you select. How do you do you...
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