Ernie Brooks - B&W Master

Beneath the Sea is the country's largest consumer dive show.  Last weekend, we had the good fortune to meet this year's "Legend of the Sea."

He is a sincere gentleman with a quick wit and great eye for light, especially underwater, and the atmosphere as he is now photographing clouds.  We caught his presentation "Adrift with Penguins."  What a departure from the usual in a great way. 

As a photographer, he has a philosophy of sharing that most of us feel on an intutive level, but he shared by giving out many archival prints to the audience that were hand signed and embossed.  Free.  Wow.   We just had to promise to frame them and give them a place of honor.

Check out the preview for his new book SILVER SEAS here.

Buy the book here.

Additional Photo Blogs

We love hearing about more good sites go to and get ideas. 

C.A.S.E.  "COPY AND STEAL EVERYTHING."  :)

My buddy Dave Haas started a nice U/W photo blog and you can find it here and in the Resource Center sidebar.  I have purchased Ikelite equipment from Dave for years.

He told me yesterday about a photographer he had seen recently who specializes in HDR (High Dynamic Range).  Check out Trey Radcliff's blog here.  This is also posted in the resource center.

A Photographer Produces Photographs...

Short observation.  Since most of us are digital these days, does this mean we are no longer Photographers?  After all, Kodak is on life support.

If a photographer produces photographs, or a photo or pictures, who produces IMAGES?  An IMAGIST?  An IMAGE-OGRAPHER?   When we change the names, the meaning changes.  Marketing is very powerful and SUBTLE.  HOW IS IT DIFFERENT? AND WHY?


How has this term IMAGES infiltrated the culture? How are images meaningfully different from Photographs?  We know how BOTH are different from SNAPSHOTS.  I contend we need to do away with the word IMAGES.  Fragments use as components of Photographs should be called by those names.  If your name is Denise, and I call you Britney, do words mean anything?

Bring back William Safire.


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LIGHTROOM PERFORMANCE IMPROVEMENT - PART 2

With my new memory installed, importing into Lightroom is also much improved.  Pulling in 4BG cards used to take about 25 minutes or so.  Now, when Lightroom wants to grab all the remaining memory, the picture looks like this.  Bottom line, it now takes 15 minutes to download.  If you need to mess around with viewing and editing while downloading, the download will take longer.

Almost 40% faster download?  I'll take it.

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MAJOR IMPROVEMENT IN PERFORMANCE

I have been going through the PERFORMANCE BLUES lately.  My machine was grinding to a slow slog as it tried to use PHOTOSHOP, BRIDGE, LIGHTROOM and a couple of browsers at the same time.  Shame on me for trying to do that with only 6GB of RAM.   And I thought 6GB was a lot.

I caucused with folks at the APPLE GENIUS BAR and they showed that I needed to monitor FREE MEMORY in ACTIVITY MONITOR.  I barely had any Free Memory showing (green area), which is key to performance.  All it took was Firefox getting stuck on one FLASH webpage and it could bring the machine to its knees.  I added 8GB and now with a total of 14GB, I am a happier camper.   Windows folks will have a similar feature in Control Panel or similar "under the hood" utility.

Moral of the story: Max out your Memory in your machine if you use PHOTOSHOP, BRIDGE, LIGHTROOM or Apple Aperture if you don't want to waste time.

Here are the Halloween Cats, the latest from the EYES Gallery.  Enjoy.
JA

ADOBE LIGHTROOM 4 BETA Announced

Adobe announced a few days ago that there is a new BETA for LIGHTROOM 4.
According to Adobe, here are some of the new features:


New Features in Lightroom 4 Beta
- Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.


- Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.


- Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.


- White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.


- Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.


- Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.


- Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®.


- Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.


- Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

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