After all the bluebonnet euphoria this spring here in Texas I was surprised to find this huge field of sunflowers on my way home from Dallas. I guess it’s been several weeks since I’ve taken this particular scenic route home. Both images are available online to license for stock or for purchase of prints. Click on the images to navigate to PhotoShelter where you may purchase them.

RM Photo (Traveling Man sculpture/Dallas) Licensed!

Very excited to license my “Traveling Man” sculpture photograph Friday, May 18, via PhotoShelter. It is destined to be used for a non-profit art organization’s website, promo brochure, and postcard. I’ll reveal more details and links in a later post.

For related images please see my Dallas gallery and the Texas Collection.

instacanv.as/kenhurstphoto

I guess it was inevitable. Like many other people I take what’s a lot of fun and possibly ruin it by turning it into a way to make money. Or maybe not. It’s still fun. And I think some of my Instagram photos would look great printed on canvas.

So for now, please help me get my Instacanv.as gallery off the ground by visiting the site and requesting my gallery which will help it “move to the front of the line”!

Check it out here: instacanv.as/kenhurstphoto. I hope you like the Instagrams!

 

Instagram. As you can see, I’ve joined the ranks of Instagrammers (Instagram users, Instagrammaniacs, Instagramifiers?) and although I had been hesitant, no actually outright resistant, to use Instagram when it became available for Android phones, I’ve joined and started using it. So now I’m wallowing in my own hypocrisy because only a few weeks ago I was making some disparaging remarks about it on Twitter, Google Plus, and Facebook. But many of my thoughts about it then are still valid. It’s just that I’ve realized that my negativity was misplaced. It’s more of an issue I have with some of the photographers who seem to think that using some new software and photo filters suddenly makes their mediocre photos a work of art. Okay, so it is a work of art but I think some of them tend to overate the greatness of it.

But actually Instagram is pretty cool and I’ll tell you why. Some aspects of it were no surprise to me. I already appreciated the mobility and convenience of my phone’s camera for picture taking but I wasn’t too serious about using it for anything, well, serious. It has been pretty much relegated to family snapshots, test photos, documentation photos, and preview photos. Then Instagram entered the scene (by becoming available for Android phones – I use an HTC Evo 4G) and when I began using it for photos and posting them online I noticed some differences. Not in the camera or the phone – and not even so much in the photos – but in myself and my photographic perception. Almost totally gone were the technical concerns – shutter speed, aperture, noise, ISO, focus, image quality – that preoccupy my picture taking with a “real” camera. Now I’m thinking more about the essential elements of the photo that make it worth photographing. Composition in the square frame, color (or lack of), texture, simplicity (or complexity), geometry and design elements – all good things to consider when creating any photograph are now brought to the front of my mind. The pressure (usually self-imposed) is gone. It’s just for fun. But this is fast becoming some serious fun.

Besides I’ve always (well almost always) subscribed to the “don’t knock it until you try it” philosophy. If you haven’t given Instagram a go, you might want to check it out.

See all my Instagram photos by going online to this page on Webstagram or get the app on your phone, search for kenhurstphoto, and follow me there.

Looking forward to seeing you on Instagram. I suspect that using Instagram is going to be helpful in improving my photography with any camera. Be sure to leave comments about your experiences with Instagram and if you noticed a change in your photographic perception too.

New Articles Coming Soon

I haven’t added new blog posts in awhile but I’m excited about a few new ideas. I guess the articles have been rattling around in my brain but I just haven’t committed them to paper the blog yet.

In one article I’m going to describe the process of taking a photo that I knew had potential and manipulating it with adjustments in Lightroom to create a final product. But that makes it sound like I drastically changed it with tools only found in Lightroom when in fact the best changes were from careful cropping. The article is not going to be as much about the technical aspects of this process as it is about the decision making, creative process. I hope you enjoy the article and that it resonates with you.

I’m also planning to devote a blog post to discussing my new “travel” camera, an Olympus PEN E-PL1, and the advantages and disadvantages of traveling light. I’m very excited about this new camera and so far I have been very impressed with the results from it.

I hope you’ll check back again soon and as always I welcome your response and feedback.

Ken

P.S. Almost forgot to mention – a third post will be about how you can make the best of things when you’ve totally screwed up managing folders and catalogs in Lightroom. I’ll provide instructions on how I made the best (notice I didn’t say fix or cure?) of the situation if you’re made the same mistakes as I have. In my case, I copied the same photos to different locations and made a catalog of each. Yep, you guessed it – I worked on both catalogs and now have two versions of the images in separate Lightroom catalogs. But all is not lost. Stay tuned.

Featured Landscape Photographer on PhotoShelter!

With all the amazing landscape photographers (as well as photographers of other genres) who have portfolios on PhotoShelter (www.photoshelter.com) I am honored to be their featured landscape photographer on the buyer page! Thanks PhotoShelter!

See my photo of Shiprock Pinnacle in New Mexico and link to my website on the PhotoShelter buyer page at www.photoshelter.com/buyer.

Video/Film With Canon 60D

The word “film” in the title of the post needs some explaining. One of the reasons I was excited about the prospect of being able to record video with a Canon 60D (or T3i or 5D Mark II) was that the “look” of video from these cameras is capable of resembling the look of film movies. With the larger than typical sensors and the ability to use high quality, wide aperture lenses these cameras can achieve the kind of look you might normally see in a film shot with much more expensive cameras. I have begun exploring the possibilities for video with this camera and I’ve only scratched the surface; however, that’s not going to keep me from posting some examples of my work so far.

Both of my efforts so far can be seen on Vimeo.com.  The first video “Flow” was a good way to tie together some of the test video I had been shooting which involved motion – from flowing water to flowing traffic.

Flow

Or go here to view it on Vimeo.com.

And my latest film, Rush:

Or go here to view it on Vimeo.com.

As always I love to hear your comments!
Ken

"Three Happy Puppies" by Ken Hurst | RedBubble

“Three Happy Puppies” by Ken Hurst | RedBubble:  Featured photo in “The World of Maltese & Shih Tzu” group on Redbubble.

"The Traveling Man" by Ken Hurst | RedBubble

“The Traveling Man” by Ken Hurst | RedBubble: My first featured photo on Redbubble.com. Selected to featured work in the Downtown! group!

Lightroom Lens Profile Correction

It’s possible that I’M the LAST person to discover this but in case you haven’t AND you’re a Lightroom user and a Tokina 12-24mm user: the profile correction for the Pentax 12-24mm (because there isn’t one for Tokina lenses) does a wonderful job of correcting the chromatic aberration in that lens. It seems like I heard somewhere that they’re the same lens so that would account for the profile working. I’ve added two samples below to demonstrate but I’m noticing after uploading the two images that the purple fringing in the “without correction” photo isn’t as obvious as when I view it in Lightroom. Maybe I’ll use a better example of before and after in a later post or an edit to this post.

Without Pentax 12-24mm profile correction (some purple fringing on edge of plate)

Using Pentax 12-24mm profile correction (for Tokina 12-24mm lens) in Lightroom

Oh, and before anyone says anything: the edge of the plate was NOT supposed to be in focus. It was at the edge of the frame and in the foreground. I was shooting up close with this lens at f8 with the center of focus further away from the edge, so this is more of a depth-of-field kind of thing rather than edge sharpness. I’ve been very pleased with this lens and I’ve heard the latest updated version is even better (and more expensive).