Friday, November 25, 2011

Thanksgiving With Family

That's four generations of the Krill family.

For me Thanksgiving is the time in America when Family gatherings occur. It's that simple.

Get them all together and have them completely ignore you when you are trying to take the official photos of the event. Being the (Un)official photographer in the family has become so much easier since the convergence of the computer and digital camera. I've already uploaded the photos from the Thanksgiving Family gathering.

Now I have to get the word out. That's kinda' easy too what with e-mail and Facebook.

I have put all the photos at my Live.com site. This is the link to the folder with the photos.

And here is that folder embeded into this post.



You can click on either the link or image and get to the photos. Enjoy

Original contents copyright 2011 by John S. Krill and/or the by lined author. All Rights Reserved.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

It's Called Evolution

The form of photography that I would like to practice is called: photojournalism, or photoreportage, or documentary photography, or photo illustration. Though I'm not sure what photo illustration is.

So is photojournalism dead? Not by me. I see it everyday in the Los Angeles Times, my local regional newspaper.

It's not dead it's just evolving using different methods for distribution, mainly the Web. If we as photographers cannot adopt then we die. Yes funding is a big problem but the plus of lack of money is a freedom to do your own work and not what the owners of the large old school newspapers and magazines want. Yes it's difficult but the rewards are great.

Here are three articles on the state of photojournalism and documentary photography. I suggest you read them in the order presented.
Original contents copyright 2011 by John S. Krill and/or the by lined author. All Rights Reserved.

Monday, November 21, 2011

It's My Camera I'll Party If I Want

Was up real early this morning and saw the moon sitting just over the canyon. Got the camera out, set ISO to 6400, and fired away.

On my first try I was trying to hold the camera steady. That was a joke. But I did notice that the exposure was good. So the next few tries I moved the camera around. The above photo was one of those efforts.

What do you want for 3 in the morning?

Original contents copyright 2011 by John S. Krill and/or the by lined author. All Rights Reserved.

Sunday, November 20, 2011

This Is Powerful Stuff

Sometimes video can be the more powerful source of information. I don't do video but in this case ONLY a video can show the power of silence. See and not hear for yourself.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Thru November 19, 2011 Adobe Lightroom 50% discount

Adorama is offering Adobe Lightroom at a 50% discount. Thru November 19, 2001 Adobe Lightroom is $149.99. Go to this link at Adorama.

This is probably an Adobe sale price. So it may show up at other dealers such as Amazon and B&H Photo Video.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Nikon's D5100 and D7000 Get Firmware Updates

I just updated the firmware in my Nikon 5100. And I did it all by myself. So what was the update all about. Answer is: Nothing and everything.

I say nothing and everything because the manufacture will give you reasons for the update and you may read them and decide you haven't got any reason to update the firmware in your camera and you'll pass on the firmware upgrade.

Don't. I'm telling you to do the firmware update no matter what you think. The reason is simple. Manufactures lie. They all lie. Every single one of them.

Their lies are lies of omission. It's what they NEVER tell you that is the big reason for doing the update of the firmware in your camera.

I know they lie because I worked in the computer industry for 30 years and I was one of those nice people that would announce the firmware updates. I REALLY knew what the update was for because I would force the engineers to tell me. If they didn't I wouldn't release the firmware to our customers.

Camera manufactures are no different. No manufacture will ever tell you what really goes on. It's in their DNA.

So when your camera manufacture releases a firmware update get it and update your firmware.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Does Thousands Of Posts Mean Anything?

This is my third blog. The other two also started at Blogger but one of them, Photoessayist.net, is now a Wordpress blog. The other, LagunaBeat, is still at Blogger. I mention all this because with all the raw-raw up at the Blogger convention, or whatever they're calling it, LagunaBeat has never been highlighted by Blogger. It only has 2869 posts with over 3000 photos and has had a posting everyday since August 15, 2007. Not bad.

Me complain? Not really. I will say that Blogger's attempts at updating it's templates is way late and not much to talk about.

Everyday I get closer to moving LagunaBeat to Wordpress. The only reason I haven't is I'm just too lazy.

Sounds like a good reason to me. Wouldn't you agree Blogger staff?

PS: I still don't understand shy I can't do a 'Preview' before I Publish.

Now I am complaining. If you are in HTML mode then the keyboard command, 'Ctrl I' doesn't itialize but gives you some Bookmarks sidebar. WHY in gods name do you do this Blogger?

PSS: This new Blogger editor interface is just not happening. Very poor. The old editor interface works much better.

PSSS: No spell check for the title. The old editor does this.

PSSS: And don't even get me started on the new Blogger home page.  Reminds me of a Mercedes-Benz dashboard. Nothing on that dashboard makes sense.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Lets Try This With A Photo

So here we are posting a photo when I said I wouldn't being do this in the last post. There is a reason for this. Let me explain.

Still can't do a preview. Wonder why? One method is to publish the post then view it. Then you back to edit and you can Revert to Draft.

Now back to why a photo here and not at Photoessayist.

This is a whole new template for me and I think for Blogger. I need to experiment with it and I wanted to discover what is the biggest photo size I could post.

Currently I'm creating an image that is 725 pixels wide. Looks O.K. Though I only viewed the post with one style, magazine, available to the visitor.

I don't expect the look will be very consistent with different browsers and even with the various styles the viewer can use.

This has been instructive. I now think I will post photos here after all. Probably the artsy fartsy stuff.

Anyone out there? Hello? Well if you are taking a gander at this blog could you tell me what you think?

Original contents copyright 2011 by John S. Krill and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Friday, November 4, 2011

A New Blog To Experiment With

I'm a Photographer. I love what I do. And no I don't earn any money from it. Yet. Money isn't my primary motive. Photography is. If you want to experience my history as a photographer then go to Photoessayist.com. Everything is there. How I started. My experience in the Marines and Vietnam. And life after the Marines.

I did a lot of freelance work in the 70s but never enough to pay the bills. Not even close. So from the middle 70s on I made a living doing other work. Primarily in computer hardware.

I'm not going into my personal life with this blog. What I hope to do is talk about photography in general. We'll see.

This isn't my first blog. I have two others. The first is Photoessayist.net. This blog is for my photography outside of Laguna Beach.

My second blog deals with Laguna Beach. It's called LagunaBeat.com. This blog gets most of my attention. I have over 2800 posts and many thousands of photos there. All of Laguna Beach. Because I come from the news side a lot of the photos here are no different that what you would see in your local paper. Other photos are pure candy of the beaches and coastline of Laguna Beach. And the remainder are of  Laguna Beach that isn't remotely of the beach. Old homes, cottages, interesting cityscapes and Laguna Canyon. I'll do nature, landscape, and architecture, and people. In general a visual document of Laguna Beach at this moment.

I have also posted photos at 500px.com. But that site isn't nearly ready for prime time. I will write about this very soon. The short version is don't use it. If you need a place to display your photography don't do it at 500px.com. Take a look at SmugMug.com. It's more expensive than 500px.com but appears to have many features that are lacking at 500px.com. Take a look for yourself.

So what is this blog for? Writing. I've never been a good writer and I hope to develop some decent writing skills with this blog.

I may post photos here from time to time but I really want to leave that to Photoessayist and LagunaBeat.

What really motivated me to start this blog was Blogger's constant hype about how it's been improved and updated. If you go to Photoessayist.net you will discover that it's not on Blogger but at WordPress. I got tired of waiting for Blogger to get their act together and in 2009 I moved over to WordPress.

So we will see. If I determine after a few months of using this new version of Blogger that it is not any better than the old one then we're out-of-here. I will probably take LagunaBeat.com with me even though with all the posts I currently have there it would be a major effort.

That's it for now.

Next I have to get the header and sidebar organized. That will take a while but I hope to write about those experiences as well.

PS: Already I've seen weirdness here. I can't do a preview for whatever reason. I rely on preview to help me spot really bad spelling, grammer, syntax, etc. I don't get it.