tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-40928574285625047772012-01-20T22:22:36.643-05:00Photography and ArtHuw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.comBlogger1821100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-77986639044727377672012-01-20T17:54:00.003-05:002012-01-20T22:20:40.331-05:00

Warning: this is a geeky post. If you have no interested in computers and technology, skip town. You remember Moore's Law: According to Wikepedia, "Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware: the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The period often quoted as "18 months" is due to

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-65699172086215405082012-01-15T11:54:00.001-05:002012-01-15T11:54:29.080-05:00

Brrr! It was a cold morning out there, but I was up early and out the door to take a couple of shots that I'd happened on when I was driving into downtown Toronto last night. The Golden City After I got back from my little expedition (with my wallet lightened to the tune of $40 thanks to a parking ticket at 9 am on a Sunday!), I checked my e-mail and found a linkedin request from Cary, an

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-40064098761436972252012-01-06T19:11:00.001-05:002012-01-06T19:16:44.604-05:00

2012 is going to be a terrific year for photographers. This year was a little lean, due in part to the tsunami in Japan and the floods in Taiwan. If all goes well and natural disasters don't interfere, we'll have lots of new hardware and software to buy in the coming year. Software Let's look at software first. In 2012, we are going to see a lot of new stuff. We'll see a new version of Photoshop

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-51183838450406164182012-01-03T21:51:00.000-05:002012-01-03T21:51:10.946-05:00

There is nothing like a construction site to bring out the little boy in a man. As I mentioned in a previous post, a building next door to my client's office was being torn down. The building is now no more than a stump and the heavy machines that were needed to demolish it are now waiting for pick-up and transport to their next assignment. Just before the holidays, I looked down from the 20th

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-51377923109599156262011-12-20T23:01:00.002-05:002011-12-20T23:01:42.600-05:00

One of my favourite photographers is the late James Ravilious. I reviewed his book, An English Eye, earlier this month. However, try as I might, I just couldn't get my black and white photos (converted from digital colour) to look anything like the photographs of Ravilious. Let me show you what I mean. Here's a nice photograph of the Bell of Skenfrith on the Welsh/English border. It's a

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-62549436010864742262011-12-13T19:35:00.001-05:002011-12-13T19:35:45.047-05:00

If you were a three year-old boy, that would be the man who drives the Zamboni!

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-70776401418492889832011-12-12T22:50:00.000-05:002011-12-12T22:50:19.159-05:00

I've had a front row seat for the last few months, watching a building being torn down. It was a fairly new office building, probably built in the 60's, and it was quite sizable, about 12 floors. The land owners are going to build a couple of large condo towers and some town houses.  The demolition was so much fun to watch. The workers must get a tremendous amount of satisfaction from ripping

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-55974861837519776992011-12-06T18:15:00.001-05:002011-12-06T19:02:22.171-05:00

I recently ordered An English Eye, The Photographs of James Ravilious by Peter Hamilton from Amazon UK. I've always admired the photography of James Ravilious, but had not been able to find one of his books in print until recently. The book came the day before yesterday and I haven't been able to keep my eyes off it. It is simply sublime if you like this sort of photography -- beautifully

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-57964255779269391802011-11-27T16:27:00.001-05:002011-11-27T16:37:45.991-05:00

This summer, Trish and I have done a bit of biking on the fantastic network of trails that run through Toronto's many ravines. There are two large networks that are accessible close to our house, one that runs south and eventually emerges just to the east of the downtown core and the second that goes northbound to Steeles Avenue, the northernmost street in the Greater Toronto Area. When we take

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-65661657180200701452011-11-19T09:49:00.001-05:002011-11-19T09:53:31.095-05:00

Each year, we go to the beautiful town of Niagara on the Lake for a week-end to see a play at the Shaw Festival and buy some wines at the local wineries. This year, I took the Fuji X100 along and became enamored with some of the patterns, textures and colours in the winery yards.

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-69024542666292922402011-11-10T17:18:00.001-05:002011-11-10T22:17:49.454-05:00

One of the results of shooting through a telephoto lens that always surprises photographers is the compression effect. Here's an illustration using three photos from a recent shoot. I didn't set out to shoot a comparison of three focal lengths, but it just worked out that way. Here's a photo taken with a focal length of 100mm. The other side of the lake looks roughly like it does to the naked

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-86691025263473765252011-11-08T22:17:00.001-05:002011-11-08T22:17:25.741-05:00

We went to Tanzania in the summer of 2010. I've published a lot of photographs from our trip, but nothing from my collection of African landscapes. Here are some of the better images of a most beautiful part of the world. The Selous, in southern Tanzania, is dotted with lakes and wetlands. Here's a dead tree with its reflections. Here's another image of the Selous. This sunset was

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-19246738798916285032011-11-03T21:08:00.004-05:002011-12-06T19:05:25.553-05:00

I needed a new bio pic for an upcoming musical (Christmas Survival Guide) and enlisted my wife Trish who can take a mean picture if she's asked. This is a great example of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-85230936697064574472011-11-02T22:14:00.001-05:002011-11-02T22:14:23.411-05:00

When you drive through the countryside as often as I do, you start to notice that things are not going well in farm country. It seems that marginal farms are being abandoned one by one and the land is reverting back to nature. Maybe Mom and Dad hung on as long as they could and the kids beat a hasty retreat to the city, leaving the farmhouse to rot and the land fallow. Maybe the family farm can

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-33551639848186212172011-10-31T21:18:00.002-05:002011-10-31T21:18:48.300-05:00

I've got all these little projects on the go that rejuvenate photography when it gets a little dull. Earlier this week, it was time to feature rural mailboxes, an ongoing project that is a lot of fun although it sometimes irritates people who are along for the ride when I suddenly screech to a halt, do a u-turn, go back 100 yards, do another u-turn and leap out of the car with the camera to take

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-15648747786055929512011-10-30T20:45:00.001-05:002011-10-30T20:45:51.214-05:00

By last week-end, the fall colours up north were starting to fade, but there was still enough left in the tank for a couple of photos. Here's the view of a wetland from Highway 35: Further south, my eye caught a farmer's field where the tracks of the machinery were a different colour from the rest of the field: Not really a fall photo, but here's a shot of an abandoned junkyard that

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-45031460939674206382011-10-25T20:57:00.001-05:002011-10-25T20:57:57.281-05:00

It was nearly dinner time at the cottage on Canadian Thanksgiving week-end and my young grandson came racing up from the beach to tell me that a loon was catching fish in our bay. I brought the camera down to the shore and saw that it was a blue heron who had decided to pay a visit, not a loon at all. I took a lot of photos of the heron until he finally got fed up and flew away. The next morning

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-31873911331778105802011-10-22T21:41:00.001-05:002011-10-22T21:42:46.863-05:00

Nearly every week-end, I travel to our cottage in Haliburton through southern Ontario farmland. This is some of the most beautiful farmland on earth. However, this post is not about scenery, it's about self-expression. One of my fascinations is how people express themselves through mundane objects. for example, if you walk along European residential streets where the houses are very close to the

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-21577032422207639902011-09-20T19:12:00.002-05:002011-09-20T19:12:23.261-05:00

One of the nice things about being an early riser is that you either get a) the fish or b) the photograph of the fisherman. In this case, there was a lovely mist out on the lake, the surface was a mirror and my neighbour was heading out in his canoe for some fishing.

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-40581352722548125222011-09-18T20:08:00.001-05:002011-09-18T20:08:12.096-05:00

Earlier in the year (July), I was able to capture a shot of a nearly full moon. As usual, I was travelling north to Haliburton and found a nice field with interesting patterns of light and colour. The moon was well up in the sky, but it makes a nice, simple composition nevertheless.

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-52405678465745789252011-09-15T20:43:00.002-05:002011-09-15T20:47:36.153-05:00

Last Saturday, I went in search of the harvest moon. I knew that the moon was set to rise at 6:50, but there were three questions to answer: what would be the subject of my image (in addition to the moon), where could I get a vista with a good subject and a low horizon and would the moon be visible or covered in clouds? I started driving east about 5:00 pm. I drove through the farming country

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-21721530331118121252011-09-13T22:00:00.001-05:002011-09-13T22:00:06.313-05:00

It was a fine Haliburton morning. There was a slight mist on the lake, but the sun was up in the east and was shining its golden light intensely on our shore. It was very early and I was the only one on the beach. A family of loons was feeding inside the sand bar. The mother would duck under the water and swim around looking for a minnow. Her two babies would duck their heads under the water to

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-15930783441677005472011-06-26T19:14:00.002-05:002011-06-26T19:20:21.565-05:00

I recently had the good fortune to get involved in one of Sean O'Boyle's Scottish extravaganzas as a member of the chorus. Sean is a very gifted Australian as you can tell from this quote from his website: "His latest recording for the ABC — a concerto for didgeridoo — which he wrote and conducted with the Queensland Orchestra, is his 108th album. Sean O’Boyle is second only to the great Slim

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-19974396984261287132011-06-02T18:05:00.001-05:002011-06-02T18:08:54.232-05:00

As many of you know, the hottest camera on the market is the Fuji X100. After reading umpteen reviews that raved about its features and picture quality (and complained about its firmware foibles) I decided to get one. Mother nature intervened in the form of the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan and X100 shipments dried up. I left my name on a list at Henry's camera and, lo and behold, they

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-51985593802205001282011-05-17T19:16:00.000-05:002011-05-17T19:16:31.270-05:00

It was a beautiful, sunny winter day and I'd been up to the cottage in Haliburton for a quick day trip. On the way back, it seemed like a great opportunity to take a photograph of one of my favourite Haliburton landmarks, the old bubble car that sits slowly rusting away on the Drag River. I packed my snowshoes into the car and headed down Chandler Drive, a narrow cottage road that winds its way

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-62358699248808153362011-05-05T19:08:00.000-05:002011-05-05T19:08:48.607-05:00

A couple of weeks ago, I drove up to my cottage on a Saturday that was heavy with weather. On the way up, we went through snow, sleet, rain, hail and lots of wind. A sudden snow squall left a nice dusting on the trees and I stopped at one of my favourite wetlands to take a photo of the scene. Every time I drive by, I see this tree and say "some day I must take a picture of that tree". Well, that

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-76860043898027668372011-05-02T19:53:00.000-05:002011-05-02T19:53:26.072-05:00

I'm working on a project called Juxtapositions. The images in the collection present buildings in Toronto that contrast with their surroundings: old buildings juxtaposed against new, different architectural styles or even two similar buildings painted different colours. Many of the images work just fine in colour, but some of them seem better in black and white, especially if the image is all

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-28285468824182483092011-05-01T21:57:00.000-05:002011-05-01T21:57:25.741-05:00

On the way down to the city from the cottage on the same week-end that I photographed the abandoned log cabin in the last post, I saw a lovely isolated farmhouse on a country road that had been nicely brought back from the dead. Note the new metal roof and the satellite dish showing obvious signs of occupancy. The drooping window sill to the left of the front door and the missing shutters show

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-6657625410111439762011-04-23T12:10:00.002-05:002011-04-23T15:01:40.918-05:00

One of my favorite photo subjects is "The Road North". I drive to our cottage in Haliburton and back many times a year and love to uncover new subjects for photography along the way. I look for strange things in the woods (like Phonehenge - a collection of English phone booths in a field) as well as beautiful landscapes. I like to find things that talk to the pioneer era, like old homesteads and

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-16725547588426231062011-04-11T22:22:00.002-05:002011-04-11T22:30:33.732-05:00

My daughter Erin had to put down her boxer Rocky today. He was a terrific dog and lived to the ripe age of 12 which is pretty good for the breed. Here are some photos of Rocky, Erin and family members. Here's Erin with a much younger Rocky - he was her constant companion. Here's Rocky as a young dog, full of beans. My son David found out that Rocky wasn't much of a conversationalist.

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-7604510283105823082011-03-29T18:10:00.001-05:002011-03-29T18:19:35.874-05:00

We were recently on a ski holiday in Italy and stayed in a lovely small town in the Dolomites called Moena. Here are some photos of this classic northern Italian town and the surroundings:

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-29555428602020952162011-03-17T21:05:00.001-05:002011-03-17T21:08:05.898-05:00

On the occasion of my 60th birthday, we had a party and gave out "loot bags" to all the guests. The contents of the loot bag consisted of your choice of a print from my studio. The guests seemed to like the idea and several picked two or more prints and took them home with them. It was a fun idea and it now gives me great pleasure to go over to a friend's house and see one of my prints up on the

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-38782801668315114332011-01-16T16:55:00.000-05:002011-01-16T16:55:37.464-05:00

The Consumer Electronics Show has just wound up and there have been lots of new devices with built-in cameras as well as dedicated consumer-oriented cameras introduced. At the same time, there has been a lot of chatter about a professional photographer (Lee Morris) who did a shoot of a model, complete with studio lighting, with an iPhone (see http://fstoppers.com/iphone/). The upshot is that an

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-4966280306653695812011-01-08T17:33:00.000-05:002011-01-08T17:33:24.714-05:00

The forecasters were wrong, but this time we had more snow than expected. Usually when we are promised a snowfall, it all goes south to Buffalo. I headed downtown to try out my new tilt/shift lens and new tripod and head on the flatiron building. The snow started to thin a little as I set up, but the large skyscrapers of the city are still slightly obscured by snowflakes. The shift of the lens

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-10868658559991758752011-01-02T19:50:00.000-05:002011-01-02T19:50:43.557-05:00

Santa was very nice to me this year. I got the gift of slow photography. The theory is that if I use a tripod and take my time to plan and execute a photograph, then the results will be better and I won't spend as much time sorting and editing photographs. I did have a tripod, but it had a ball head that used to sag whenever I tightened down the locking lever. I'd get my shot lined up, let go of

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-28437045054796278592010-12-21T22:18:00.000-05:002010-12-21T22:18:52.428-05:00

Over the past six months or so, I've been using Ilford Galerie Gold Silk paper for my prints. I bought a roll for my Epson 4880 printer and I've been very happy with the results once I'd purchased a D-roller (see http://www.luminous-landscape.com/reviews/accessories/d-roller.shtml) to remove the curl from the paper. Every now and then, I get a hankering to try some new paper to see if the champ

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-66913015571945997462010-12-06T19:17:00.002-05:002010-12-06T19:38:20.631-05:00

You've booked your African safari dream vacation. Now comes the tough part -- what camera equipment do you take with you? On one hand, you have to travel light. On the other hand, you want to come back with terrific pictures for the enjoyment of yourself and potentially others. Let me take you through this from three points of view: the pro, the enthusiast and the snapshot artist. For the pro,

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-8198420321239655422010-12-01T13:07:00.002-05:002011-10-31T21:39:43.461-05:00

As I travel around the world, slowly pecking away at my bucket list, there are still a few places that feel like you stepped out of a time machine. Zanzibar is one of those places. If you squint your eyes just slightly, you can convince yourself that the year is 1880 and the slave and spice trades are still going full swing. Stone town seems timeless with its winding alleys, its imposing doors

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-83686186088330450372010-11-30T23:18:00.001-05:002010-11-30T23:18:54.719-05:00

As you may know, the folks at DxO have added tests of lens/camera combinations at their dxomark.com site. They test various things like resolution, transmission, vignetting and chromatic aberration and assign a weighted composite score. It's a lot of fun to look at the various combinations to see if there are any surprises. And, indeed there is a major surprise. If we limit our search to Canon

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-25042473013739353252010-11-20T01:20:00.000-05:002010-11-20T01:20:00.108-05:00

A is for Antelope B is for Baboon B is also for Buffalo C is for Crocodile C is also for Cheetah D is for Dik Dik E is for Elephant E is also for Eland F is for Fox (the bat-eared variety) G is for Giraffe H is for Hippo H is also for Hyena I is for Impala J is for Jackal K is for Kangaroo (didn't see any) K is also for Kudu

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-36112609847523955092010-11-18T18:43:00.000-05:002010-11-18T18:43:30.067-05:00

We were originally going to skip the balloon ride on the Serengeti. It's expensive ($500 a head) and a bit scary (see http://www.eturbonews.com/18869/tanzania-bans-hot-air-balloons-its-national-park), but fortunately we relented and signed up for the trip. It was one of the main highlights of our vacation. It all starts well before dawn when the balloon company comes to pick you up at your camp

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-51368398806399744402010-11-15T18:33:00.000-05:002010-11-15T18:33:02.072-05:00

Cue the Hallelujah Chorus! Today I managed to solve three problems that have been bugging me for MONTHS. In case you were suffering the same symptoms, here are the solutions: Does your Nvidia video driver crash if you do a print preview for your Epson printer from Photoshop or Lightroom in Windows 7 64 bit? Mine did! Here's the simple fix from Epson (courtesy of a discussion forum):  Click on the

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-62916563781772812312010-11-11T22:31:00.000-05:002010-11-11T22:31:23.945-05:00

Kolo is a small village in the middle of Tanzania just north of the town of Kondoa. Kolo is unremarkable as African villages go. It has a dry river that runs through it and the villagers tend herds of cows and goats. However, if you climb the walls of a canyon just outside the village, you come across shallow caves that have long been inhabited by bushmen. These are the caves that shelter some

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-71527753321602718002010-11-07T21:47:00.000-05:002010-11-07T21:47:56.759-05:00

Perhaps the highlight of our trip to Africa was our journey to Kondoa to view the rock paintings at Kolo. It all seemed pretty simple when we were planning this part of the trip on the Internet. The distances looked quite modest and the logistics of putting up four adults in "semi-luxe" camping style in the middle of the African countryside were not particularly daunting. In other words, I had no

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-43898192558935142212010-10-29T16:42:00.001-05:002010-10-29T16:43:19.460-05:00

Let's take a break from Africa for a moment and reflect on a bittersweet photograph: The Cathedral of the Transfiguration was built by a multi-millionaire called Stephen Roman as a Slovak Byzantine Rite Roman Catholic cathedral. It was started in 1984 and was never really finished. Roman died in 1988 and the air went out of the balloon. In 2006, the cathedral was de-consecrated and it now sits

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-29397933492081773742010-10-23T10:06:00.003-05:002010-10-23T10:25:39.287-05:00

We landed in Arusha airport, a classic mid-African airport with lots of small planes taking off and landing and a bunch of miscellaneous tin-roofed buildings masquerading as airport terminals. Each small airline had its own little waiting room and operations centre and you walked from your airplane, through the waiting room and out into the busy parking lot. There were dozens of safari jeeps

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-46216139724000805782010-10-10T16:50:00.009-05:002010-10-23T09:33:29.943-05:00

The birds of the Selous are spectacular! As Monty Python would say: "Beautiful Plumage! One of the unique things about Lake Manze camp in the Selous is the opportunity to safari by boat. You take a short ride in the camp Landcruiser down to a small dock and get into a small tin boat with an outboard motor and a canopy to protect you from the sun. Your guide pushes off and soon you are cruising

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-78234964634846472642010-10-08T19:36:00.028-05:002010-11-07T21:56:19.674-05:00

This is the first in a (hopefully) long set of posts about our summer trip to Tanzania. I can't remember why we settled on Tanzania as our destination, but now that we're back and have the memories and photos from our journey, I'm very happy that we picked it. It's a beautiful country all right, with the lakes of the south, the great rift valley, the Ngorongoro crater, Kilimanjaro, the Serengeti

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-1321076822038772152010-04-20T21:54:00.003-05:002010-04-20T22:04:15.128-05:00

Dad, Dad, are we there yet? Clues are emerging on the likely release date for Lightroom 3. This thread is an interesting read, partially because the last few posts actually make sense and partially because Jeff Schewe has a complete melt-down half way down. He must have been having a bad day!Bottom line is that Kelby Training is planning a bunch of LR seminars in July, pointing to a June launch.

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com33tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-49884067961492299892010-04-18T17:03:00.005-05:002010-04-18T17:33:27.544-05:00

It has been a long time between blogs and I apologize - life sometimes gets in the way of blogging and photography, but I'm back.A little while ago, I wrote about my upcoming participation in a show at the Elaine Fleck Gallery as part of the Contact photo festival (see here). I've been planning to print the following image on metal so that it projects the mood that I felt being up close to this

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-15917311557135564292010-02-13T08:27:00.002-05:002010-02-13T09:08:23.763-05:00

Serendipity is one of my favorite things. Take yesterday for example. My son-in-law's mother and partner are visiting us from Scotland and I had the pleasure of taking them to Toronto's re-modeled Art Gallery of Ontario. The King Tut exhibit is the big attraction there at the moment, but I wanted to show them the permanent exhibit of Canadian art. This collection always gives me great pleasure,

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-3356017914163583922010-02-01T15:28:00.007-05:002010-02-01T16:05:50.965-05:00

It's my birthday and my lovely wife gave me a cool toy (everyone should get a toy on their birthday!). It's a Kindle. Despite the hubbub about the iPad, I still think the Kindle will continue to sell very well. While the iPad is a jack-of-all-trades tablet, the Kindle is designed for one thing alone and that is reading. To that end, the screen is not back-lit and the type is lovely. It's

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-2022335962089287782010-01-19T16:14:00.007-05:002010-01-19T17:37:12.199-05:00

I can't help it. I grew up in the sixties and seventies and my taste in art was a product of my exposure to record album covers, posters for rock concerts and Canadian artists that were popular at the time. My favourite artists of that era were (and still are) Ken Danby and Alex Colville, two famous Canadian artists who painted in the magic realism style. Magic realism is a style of artistic

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-39236900884752044902010-01-13T21:42:00.004-05:002010-01-14T13:54:31.478-05:00

The Toronto Contact Photo Festival is coming up on May 6th and I'm getting quite excited about it. Contact is the largest photography festival in the world and runs for the month of May. Normally, I'm just a spectator, but this year I'm going to be a participant. Three of my works have been selected for an exhibition in the Elaine Fleck Gallery. Elaine and I had a meeting last week to review some

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-90265964140477068412010-01-04T15:54:00.004-05:002010-01-04T17:10:17.035-05:00

I've been publishing photo books lately and have had some positive experiences that I'd like to describe. I was working on two projects: a high quality art book that features my Road North portfolio, a set of images taken in the countryside that runs from Toronto up to cottage country, and a family snapshot album with pix of our kids and grandkids taken in 2009.These are very different projects

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-7473583521642688372009-12-24T09:22:00.002-05:002009-12-24T09:41:48.724-05:00

Humans have a terrible habit of learning things the hard way. As a seasoned IT professional and serious amateur photographer, you would think that I would have my files backed up to the hilt with both belt and suspenders to ensure recoverability. That would be sensible, but alas not human nature.In late November, one of my disks crashed. It held about four years' worth of original photographs. I

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-72320524848540056562009-12-14T13:10:00.002-05:002009-12-14T13:44:45.602-05:00

I'm a big fan of Luminous Landscape video journals. These started out as a quarterly CD subscription series and have morphed into a periodic downloadable video product. The journals are a collaboration between photographer/entrepreneur Michael Reichmann and videographer Chris Sanderson and feature video clips that appeal to a wide range of photographers. The usual winning formula is to combine a

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-55404317557960761042009-11-26T17:51:00.002-05:002009-11-26T18:05:12.711-05:00

Today I've been musing about whether an artist needs an audience to be happy. As a photographer, I've been rather unsuccessful at marketing my work. I've had my images displayed in galleries and I've been part of a gallery catalog (see http://www.elainefleckgallery.com/catalogue.pdf page 39) and I've sold some works at silent auctions for good causes, but that's about the extent of it. No one is

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-42496877570194840882009-10-23T09:30:00.002-05:002009-10-25T08:52:10.214-05:00

I can now claim to be a Lightroom futurist :-)Back in March, I wrote a blog that predicted that the Lightroom 3.0 beta would be introduced in October of 2009 (see http://huwmorganimages.blogspot.com/2009/03/speculation-on-lightroom-30.html) and here we are with the beta released on October 22nd. What a genius I am!Unfortunately, I also made some predictions on possible new features and wasn't

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-4801460663134294652009-08-21T07:44:00.009-05:002009-08-21T08:48:51.629-05:00

This summer, we didn't take an exotic trip to Italy or France or Orstralia. Our youngest daughter is getting married in September, so our money is committed to paying for a very lovely wedding plus a party in Scotland the following week-end (the groom is a Scot). It should be lots of fun, but there's nothing in the cookie jar for jaunts to Europe and the like. Green Rock and Rapids - Minden

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-77094823089504201802009-08-20T07:45:00.002-05:002009-08-20T07:55:16.309-05:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a first! Canon has released its G11 compact camera and has returned the sensor back to 10 MP (down from nearly 15 in the G10). Could it be that the megapixel wars are over and camera manufacturers are listening to consumers who want image quality above all else? As Mike Johnston speculates in The Online Photographer, maybe Canon's move is motivated by the success of

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-79802627394966292392009-08-16T19:47:00.006-05:002009-08-16T20:10:25.054-05:00

I read a recent article by Mark Segal on Luminous Landscape entitled You'd Be Surprised What Those Files May Contain. In the article, he makes the good point that raw files with blown-out skies may actually contain much more information than you might think. He offers up a rather complex method involving editing two versions of the image in Photoshop. In the original image, he adjusts the tone

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-35273135664882182442009-07-23T12:30:00.003-05:002009-07-23T15:46:55.033-05:00

The big news of 2009 so far has been the advent of video as part of the DSLR offering. We've seen offerings from Nikon, Canon and now Panasonic that have videophiles all atwitter. Michael Reichmann, in particular, has been quite taken with this new development and he's quite an influential guy, not to be taken lightly. However, I'm not a video guy and the whole video thing leaves me cold. I've

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-82029548713149665752009-06-17T12:58:00.003-05:002009-06-17T14:20:45.655-05:00

The U.S. Open golf tournament is about to start tomorrow and they're expecting a lot of rain. There will be more than 50 squeegy people waiting to get the water out of the greens in an emergency. Photo journalists have a hard enough time lugging big expensive cameras with big expensive lenses around hilly golf courses without having to cope with miserable, wet weather. Covering golf events sounds

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-18029404408621290892009-06-09T21:14:00.003-05:002009-06-09T21:26:37.592-05:00

Microsoft has released its new search engine Bing and, purely from a selfish point of view, I'm not impressed. I'm very anxious that anyone who searches for my name and photography can find one of my web sites (either my blog, my website, my pbase site or my flickr site). The good news is that Google finds all of these sites (and more) on the first page. You would expect that out of a search

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-52247490527740651262009-06-04T14:27:00.004-05:002009-06-04T14:53:22.010-05:00

One of the big attractions of capturing your images as RAW files is that you can adjust white balance afterwards so that your images don't have annoying colour casts. There are several ways of adjusting white balance using a tool such as Adobe Lightroom:If the image has a gray or white area in it, you can take the white point eye dropper tool and click on that area in the image. Lightroom will

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-62154166732316246092009-05-24T16:52:00.006-05:002009-05-24T17:55:31.269-05:00

I'm a big fan of raw processing. I use Lightroom to process raw photographs from both my cameras (a Canon 5d and a Panasonic DMC-LX2) because it gives me lots of advantages:White balance Correction. More often than not, the camera gets the white balance wrong. Sometimes the adjustment is minor, but other times (e.g. indoors with the Panasonic), the adjustment is quite drastic.Recovery of blown

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-19088211992263133852009-05-15T08:23:00.002-05:002009-05-15T08:47:32.342-05:00

This is normally a blog about photography, but photographers in the digital age spend an inordinate amount of time on their computers, so occasionally it makes sense to talk about new software tools that make our jobs easier. I'm happy to report that Windows 7 is one of those tools. At the risk of insulting Microsoft, the best operating system for my PC is one that I don't notice. The less

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-57830473466185748482009-05-07T10:33:00.002-05:002009-05-07T10:48:31.579-05:00

I've been doing a lot of reading lately about successful landscape photographers. The common themes include an all-absorbing love of nature as well as a willingness to do what it takes to get wonderful image. Here are some examples:1st place winner of Canon's In the Parks photo contest Robert Blanchard tells Shutterbug magazine that he "positioned myself at "bird's eye" view by lying prone in the

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-50598914086308592452009-04-15T09:04:00.006-05:002009-04-15T09:35:24.183-05:00

I was in New York last week for a fantastic couple of days. I'd been invited to sing in the chorus of Scotland the Brave, a terrific musical show put on by Sean O'Boyle and Andrew McKinnon featuring pipers, drummers, dancers with full orchestra and chorus. We sang in Avery Fisher Hall in the Lincoln Centre - quite a thrill!While I was in New York, I took some time to photograph the city. I'd

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-39568159849609905742009-04-03T11:43:00.002-05:002009-04-03T12:21:50.603-05:00

Many people have written about whether it's the camera equipment that matters or the photographer. Here are two articles on the subject: Your Camera Doesn't Matter by Ken Rockwell and Your Camera Does Matter by Michael Reichmann. I'm somewhat conflicted on the subject. Clearly, having a camera is important. You can't take pictures without one. But, how good does the camera really have to be and

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-19709201252665505242009-03-30T11:34:00.004-05:002009-03-30T11:55:10.731-05:00

Today's New York Times features an article on a new service from Hewlett-Packard called MagCloud. This is a very exciting development. For those of us that really like photo magazines, it is now possible to publish a magazine and not worry about print run sizes at all. HP makes presses that don't use plates, so the set-up cost is virtually nil - the printer just loads your electronic magazine

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-17838564142398374502009-03-29T20:59:00.002-05:002009-03-29T21:08:44.072-05:00

I just finished my second generation web site. I needed a place to market my photographs and it was also fun to work on a web-site trying to use the latest xhtml and css techniques. The web site is very simple in design, but it uses no tables and conforms to strict html 4.01 guidelines with proper end tags and without deprecated parameters or tags. When I was working on the web site, I found a

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-23560253457978951262009-03-13T08:21:00.004-05:002009-03-29T21:38:42.330-05:00

Adobe Lightroom 1.0 was released on January 29th, 2007. Release 2.0 was born on July 29th, 2008. The beta appeared in April. It's hard to discover a pattern with so little data, but let's do some speculation for fun. Let's say that Adobe, a company that likes money and depends on new releases to generate some, wants to sell a new release of Lightroom every 18 months or so. This means that version

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-49142611249028367402009-03-12T16:11:00.006-05:002009-03-12T16:41:22.352-05:00

St. Patrick's Day is coming up next week, so I thought I'd start early and celebrate the colour green. Yesterday, I talked about the difficulties that artists have when they paint or photograph scenery in the UK. The colour green is everywhere. It sometimes dominates to the detriment of the other image elements. You can get away from this by reducing your images to black and white or you can suck

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-59175316688756358252009-03-11T11:42:00.003-05:002009-03-11T12:47:49.132-05:00

Thanks to Mike Johnston over at theonlinephotographer.com, I've just been introduced to the photographs of James Ravilious, an English photographer who died in 1999. Ravilious lived in a very rural part of Devon and was employed for nearly two decades by the local art centre to take pictures of the vanishing life of the traditional farmer. He spent his days chatting up the local farmers and

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-84206380785854198452009-02-20T16:05:00.002-05:002009-02-20T17:07:45.797-05:00

Photo paper has taken on the role that candy bars used to fill when I was a child. I know it's absurd, but if I had a zillion dollars, I'd spend it on fancy paper. The problem is that photo paper is the second most expensive thing on earth (second only to Epson inkjet ink). Let me share with you some costs:The papers below are all intended for inkjet printers that use pigment inks. They are

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-14920676278074970242009-02-18T08:59:00.002-05:002009-02-18T10:50:44.130-05:00

Canon doesn't seem to be getting a lot of respect these days. First, we had the 1d Mark III fiasco where Rob Galbraith took Canon to task for releasing a very expensive camera with a broken autofocus. Next up, we had the tempest in a teapot over the very funny blog site FakeChuckWestfall. Chuck is the top Canon guy in North America and this site, written by a very knowledgeable Canon "fan", takes

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-57046329315101541972009-02-04T11:24:00.003-05:002009-02-04T11:50:37.788-05:00

I really like taking photographs in the winter. The light, especially in the morning and evening, can be lovely and reflections on ice and snow give it a whole new dimension. Sunrise and sunset are closer to the middle of the day, so you don't have to get up at 5 am to photograph a sunrise. The best part about winter photography is the distinct lack of crowds. You rarely meet tourists in Toronto

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-24392760900304072412009-02-03T13:25:00.006-05:002009-02-03T13:55:37.108-05:00

Art City Toronto StorefrontI was feeling a bit worried about the second part of my photo class with the students of Art City. In my previous post, I described how I'd volunteered to teach digital photography to a small group of kids from Toronto's St Jamestown district. We had a great time shooting indoors and outdoors using some cameras donated by my friends and I'd taken all the cameras and

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-56651340920070134972009-01-27T15:26:00.004-05:002009-01-28T15:30:01.036-05:00

I've had a tremendous amount of fun over the last two Sundays teaching a photography class to 7 students between the ages of 7 and 10. The students were members of Art City, a non-profit storefront art school for the kids of St. Jamestown in Toronto.I sent out an appeal to all my friends to dust off any digital cameras they had sitting around in drawers and received about a dozen cameras ranging

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-17588057460900124982009-01-22T11:50:00.002-05:002009-01-22T12:04:21.595-05:00

Contemporary photography is like modern classical music - much of it leaves me scratching my head in bewilderment, but occasionally something really resonates. Lensculture is showing a gallery of work by Michael Wolfe called The Transparent City that really strikes a chord with me. He uses an extremely high resolution camera (over 100 megapixels) to capture voyeuristic shots of people in Chicago

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-91989983705678249552009-01-19T15:32:00.004-05:002009-01-20T09:18:46.661-05:00

True confessions: I was a colour management hold-out. In theory, I drank the cool-aid, but in practice, I could never bring myself to shell out a couple of hundred bucks and go through the perceived hassle of calibrating my monitor.All this changed when I got my new Epson 4880 printer. I unpacked the printer, went through the set-up routine and loaded the paper for my first test print. Maybe it

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-79740959915675362922009-01-19T10:28:00.003-05:002009-01-19T10:51:47.763-05:00

I purchased a new printer just after Christmas. My old printer was an Epson R1800, a perfectly good printer that was bought on Craigslist for $400 and has performed brilliantly for more than two years. I didn't really need a new printer because I seldom print over 18"x12", but I wanted a new printer because some day I'd like to be asked for prints that are larger. Talk about wishful thinking!

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-90221855035030093782009-01-07T11:30:00.002-05:002009-01-07T11:33:32.960-05:00

Last night, I spent about $50 on cable and network cards to bring my network up to 1 Gbps. Fortunately, I didn't have to replace my router -- if all the computers in the network are on a Gig switch, the router only handles Internet communications. As a result, I was able to run Lightroom with the catalog mounted on the network drive (using the DOS subst command to get around Lightroom's internal

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-86802151651183092072009-01-06T14:09:00.002-05:002009-01-06T14:32:58.525-05:00

What is it about the light in photographs shot in places like India and Indonesia? There seems to be a quality in the light that gives images a metallic look to them that is very appealing. At first, based on viewing work by Steve McCurry, I thought it was something unique to him or the film he was using. I rushed out and bought some Kodak Ektachrome, but that golden metallic light wasn't the

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-87332580983952043532008-12-31T10:09:00.002-05:002008-12-31T10:19:05.701-05:00

Yesterday was a pretty dull day around the office. My job mostly involves meetings and there's no one here to meet with, so I decided to download some content management software called Joomla and play around with it. This type of software is designed to make it easy to create and maintain small web sites and it works pretty well. I was able to download the software, install it and build a first

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-74535964207258543772008-12-30T09:29:00.003-05:002008-12-30T11:07:16.745-05:00

I spent a very nice day last Saturday relaxing in my cottage just outside the town of Haliburton. I had two good books that represented the ying and yang of current photography. On one hand, we had Mountain Light by Galen Rowell and on the other hand we had Photoshop CS4 Workflow: The Digital Phtographer's Guide by Tim Grey. These books could not have been more different if I'd selected them on

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-39248146377637167282008-12-29T15:33:00.003-05:002008-12-29T15:40:07.382-05:00

Last week, I wrote a post about using the DOS SUBST command to fool Lightroom into thinking that a network drive was actually a local drive so that the catalog could be stored on a network drive.Alas, although the technique worked inasmuch as I could access my catalog from both my computers (although not at the same time), the speed was agonizingly sloooooow. Lightroom took long pauses between

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-71985799859493942722008-12-24T13:36:00.002-05:002008-12-24T13:48:49.351-05:00

I must admit to being conflicted over the war in Afghanistan. On one hand, I deplore violence and war in any and all forms. On the other hand, I oppose religious extremism, especially when it attempts to suppress the freedoms of other people. In Afghanistan, we have soldiers from North America fighting against the religious zealotry of the Taliban, so what is one to do? My view changes with the

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-56338479817795428032008-12-23T13:51:00.003-05:002008-12-23T14:01:25.193-05:00

I recently wrote a post on my plans to share Lightroom on two computers, my primary editing machine in the family room and my primary printing machine in my studio. After much reading, I decided to place the catalog on a portable disk drive and schlep it between the two machines. This seems to work quite well - my files are spread between the two computers, but the catalog sees all the network

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-37262802996355831612008-12-22T11:24:00.002-05:002008-12-22T12:06:11.740-05:00

I've committed to teaching a photography class to about a dozen ten year-old kids next month at Art City, an organization that teaches underprivileged kids how to draw and paint. In preparing for this class, I've been wrestling with several issues:How can I equip them all with cameras so they can have a meaningful hands-on learning experience?How can I teach them to develop their digital photos

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-89854078393465289752008-12-19T10:57:00.002-05:002008-12-19T12:25:05.822-05:00

Winter Sunset - (c) Huw MorganWinter is here. There is a blizzard raging outside our office windows and it looks like we'll get 15-20 centimeters of snow. How nice! I just talked to the HR Director and we agreed it would be a good idea to send everyone home at noon.Winter provides lots of opportunities for photography and I'm looking forward to spending some time in Haliburton where the winter

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-16517313165342920062008-12-18T09:38:00.004-05:002008-12-18T12:36:01.004-05:00

Private Conversations - Quebec (c) Huw MorganLike many of you I love to travel and take photographs wherever I go. Some photographers really excel at this genre and it is a pleasure to look at their work. This brings me to a recent discovery (courtesy of Rob Galbraith): the Travel Photography of the Year web site and awards.The 2008 winners have been announced and the grand prize winner is a

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-34919319860636654152008-12-17T15:38:00.002-05:002008-12-17T15:42:32.345-05:00

Ken Rockwell often swims against the tide. He is a prolific writer who sometimes gets it right and often takes an extreme view that is just plain wrong (e.g. his preference for creating jpegs over raw images).Today, he has published a very long treatise on purchasing items on eBay and I found it full of terrific advice for the online shopper. He covers bidding strategy, how to check out the

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-37508351894617889112008-12-16T09:32:00.005-05:002008-12-16T09:51:39.223-05:00

One of the side benefits of working just west of downtown Toronto is the proximity of several good photo galleries on Queen Street West. Last month, I had the pleasure of ogling the photography of Peter Brown at the Stephen Bulger Gallery. This show really struck a chord with me because I just love farm countryside and Brown does just a wonderful job of capturing the mood of the plains. There is

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-11962322220668658592008-12-15T09:17:00.004-05:002008-12-15T09:42:19.969-05:00

I spent the week-end housecleaning. No, not the usual kind of housecleaning with dusters and mops, I mean the virtual kind. For over a year now, ever since I got a second computer and moved my older machine into my basement studio along with my printer, I've been meaning to get my networking act together. Believe it or not, despite my day job as a CTO, I've been running separate file systems on

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-21995864910209498292008-12-12T14:45:00.002-05:002008-12-12T17:02:09.778-05:00

Toronto Outdoor Art in Context - Here Comes the SunEvery now and then, a light goes on. A few days ago, I had a chance to view a very good tutorial on smart collections in Adobe Lightroom 2. I'm not going to describe what these are in any detail, so if you don't know, please view the tutorial here. The beauty of smart collections is that they are dynamic and change as the images in the Lightroom

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-16175451607662929102008-12-10T11:55:00.002-05:002008-12-10T12:09:07.339-05:00

There is a Santa Claus. Can a major camera producer create a new sensor that has nearly double the pixel count (and reduce pixel pitch from 8 microns to 6.4 microns) AND actually improve low-noise ISO performance? The answer is now out and it is a resounding YES.Here's a test of the Canon 5d and the Canon 5d Mark II from DxO Labs that shows the improvements in basic sensor science over a three

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4092857428562504777.post-5263820658435992312008-12-09T12:28:00.003-05:002008-12-09T12:31:14.666-05:00

Printing on thicker papers poses challenges to R1800/R1900 users. These printers produce wonderful results, but seem to have issues when top-loading thicker papers (like the Hahnemuhle photo rag baryta mentioned below). Here's a thread from a review of the R1800 that might be useful:Email From Dave Brown: Hi Folks, Just a note tonight to help solve a problem a lot of

Huw Morganhttps://profiles.google.com/116454014079566406338noreply@blogger.com0