Radiant Imaging Labs just came out with their mobile app this week, Radiant Mobile, that will work on both images and video. I love their desktop application, “Radiant Photo,” and use it as a finishing step on all my photos. The mobile app has many of the same features, but I love how it takes a photo and makes it look great without going over the top. For social media, this is a one-tap application, and you have an image that can be posted immediately. The app is more powerful than that, and you have all the controls you would expect from a photo editing application on your mobile device. Rad ..read more

I was informed yesterday that my image is in the top 32 in the commercial category in Professional Photographers of America’s (PPA) all-new “International Print Competition (IPC). There are 16 different categories, and the winner of each category will win $1000 in a head-to-head competition at Imaging USA in Louisville. The IPC overall winner will receive a $10,000 cash prize. The IPC has changed over the past years and is the very highest level of photography competition with some of the top photographers in the world. All the images in the 16 categories and specially trained judges scored on ..read more

Back in July, I completed one of the most challenging endeavors I had ever tried: I applied for the American Society of Photographers "Fellowship." To give you a small idea of what this process is like, you must fill out an application with all the requirements. Next, write a minimum of a 2000-word paper that chronicles your life, progress as a photographer, and how it relates to the 25 incredible images you send in. Let's talk about the images that you submit to a jury of past Fellowship recipients and/or respected photographers for them to accept. The twenty-five images have to work cohesiv ..read more

On my desk sits the first camera I ever bought. It is an Olympus OM-1 MD, and I purchased it in 1978 while I was in high school. I remember looking through all the camera magazines, trying to decide which camera I wanted and could afford. It still gives me a thrill when I think about how I walked into Ardens Camera Store at their old location in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan. I had the salesman show me the camera and how it worked, as it was a little different from other cameras at the time, with the shutter speed controls on the front of the camera next to the lens. I could not wait to go o ..read more

What is the value of architectural photography? Before I answer that question, let us take a look at a few statistics about photography. In 2020 1,436,300,000,000 photos were taken, and 90% of all our available data has been produced in the past two years! Of the 1.4 trillion annual photos taken, only 7% were taken with a professional camera. Never has our society been so visual, so how do we put value on Architectural Photography? Considering that architectural photography is such a small niche market, the value may start with the time, experience, and technical abilities it takes to become ..read more

I recently came back from attending a photography workshop in Buffalo, NY, hosted by my friend Mark Maio. This workshop is held at Silo City and is one of the more interesting workshops that you can go to as you have access to six acres and over a million square feet of silos and support buildings. The silos have been abandoned for years and in some cases decades and create a unique opportunity to photograph using both HDR and light painting, allowing you to come away with some incredible images. Many of the attendees will bring in models to photograph inside these locations and have done so e ..read more

If I was to say that I was going to Prague to photograph you would probably think I was going to photograph all the historic places and I would. But I had planned to also photograph Prague’s subway. While doing my research on places to photograph in Prague I came across images of the subway stations and decided to spend one-night riding subway cars. I wanted to keep the images symmetrical and from close to the same height. I pick a night that was cloudy and just not nice to be photographing in the center of the city. I set my tripod to a low height and used a Canon 17mm tilt/shift lens on my ..read more

I have taught at the PPC’s West Coast School of Photography in San Diego for the past couple of years. One of the places I take my students to is the library at the University of California San Diego campus. This building is an icon to modern design and is named after the author who wrote the Dr. Seuss books, Theodor Seuss Geisel. I have photographed the building many times and there’s some unique angles and cool detail shots that you can take, but I wanted to shoot it at twilight. I was in contact with one of the students that was going to be in my class, and we decided to go to the library ..read more

Whenever I travel for a speaking engagement, I try to make time to photograph something cool in that location. This time I was in New York for Photo Plus Expo and I was told about the JP Morgan Library and how cool it was, so I needed this photograph the library. This is actually J.P. Morgan’s Office and library but when you get to the entrance it is a modern building and you think, “This can’t be the place,” but it is. Once you pay your entrance fee, they will point you to a door off in the corner where you can go inside his library and office, which once inside is very historic looking. Yo ..read more

Aurora HDR 2019 was released and in my opinion, it is the best HDR program on the market by far. I'm an architectural and travel photographer and use HDR programs in my workflow to get some the best images I can, but I've always had issues with noise, ghosting and the glow around windows that I always had to deal with in HDR programs. But the Skylum team has had me reevaluate my thinking with the new release of Aurora HDR 2019. One of the biggest problems whenever I use an HDR program was photographing an interior that had a window in it with a bright exterior. There would always be this glow ..read more