Blog

Several years ago, along with two wonderfully talented photographers, I was teaching a photo workshop in Montana. On a cold, rainy day when it was too unpleasant to shoot outside, the workshop’s moderator set up a panel discussion with the three of us to answer questions from the attendees.

Photographers love to tinker with their images. If there’s too much grain in a photograph, we use all kinds of digital methods to eliminate it. If there’s no grain in our digital images, we want to add some.

I really want to bring back #filmfriday and today’s post is my attempt to do so. I can’t promise to do it every Friday but I will give it a try. I have finally been hit with the reality—what everybody had been yelling at me about— that shooting film is expensive and cranking out a weekly post is not practical for me, at least not at this time. But I’m going to try anyway, so hang in there with me as I take a look at one of my favorite 35mm film cameras…

Conventional lenses are optimized for focus at infinity not for close-up photography but true macro lenses are corrected for close focus and can also be shot at infinity. Canon’s EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM, for example, has a floating optical system that lets it focus to life-size (1:1) magnification at four-inches allowing you to fill the frame with a subject the size of a penny.

A long time ago, my friend Rock Sammon wrote a newspaper column in which he dubbed me the “Plug-in King” and I did write the book Plug-in Smart! Regular readers know that I often like to use Photoshop-compatible plug-ins to enhance my photographs.

I’ve been interested in infrared photography for more than forty years but was re-introduced to the concept of digital infrared photography when a student at one of my workshops—in Miami—showed me her images made with the Hoya infrared filter