Lazy Linus

 Perhaps the coolest cat I've ever owned, now I'm not going to try to turn this into a photography lesson or anything, because sometimes its not about using special techniques and rule of thirds...

 Sometimes the only thing that matters is whats in front of the camera... no matter how awesome your angle is, how fast your shutter speed it or how much DOF you have in the shot... none of that matters if your subject is boring ;)

Blending in is the only way I can survive...

oh yeah... 

Zzzzzzzzzzzz

if you really want something out of this post it would be this:

Don't waste too much time learning techniques and stuff, sure its important, but a lot of your time should also be spent with the side that "normal people" actually care about - subjects...

DSLR Sensor Cleaning (Lazy Guide) "Hot Pixel"

in the spirit of lazy this blog post will be very lazily done*


To clean your DSLR sensor WITHOUT touching, risking or damaging your sensor:
*don't take off your camera lens*

1: Set your camera to Manual Mode

2: Go to the options (middle yellow wrench thingy on Canon DSLR's)

3: Select "Sensor Cleaning" (your camera will open it's sensor where you could if you wanted to, put a sensor cleaning device inside and clean it, however if you screw up, you may potentially render the camera completely useless... )

4: after about a minute to 2 minutes turn your camera off

5: Take a blank picture and check it for hot pixels and other dirt... if the picture looks cleaner then your sensor is clean and there is no need to take it to a camera specialist.

this is a picture taken with the lens cap on... LOOKS perfectly black right?

this is the EXACT same picture as the one above, only slightly zoomed in to reveal that even though the picture looks black, there's still plenty of dirt and dust and all sorts of imperfections on the sensor... (just proves how incredibly sharp and sophisticated camera's these days are)

and that one bright white dot in the center is called a "hot pixel" usually hot pixels aren't a problem and are virtually invisible unless you shoot in low light... where they can often become distracting and frustrating... They can always be colored over but if you shoot video, its a little harder to cover it up...

This picture below is the exact same zoomed in selection as the above picture, only taken AFTER I did the above procedure to clean my sensor... notice the hot pixel has vanished :)

there is still a little bit of dots and noise... but that can't be helped, and after a little touching up all that stuff can be fixed up! (only a truly picky photographer would gripe about something so small as a little bit of noise)

Incredible above pictures taken by Andrew Taraba, please no stealing?

HSL Magic! The Magic of adjusting Hue, Saturation and Lighting...

Using HSL in any photography editing program and even video editing programs, you can go from the original left photograph, to the new HSL enhanced right photograph with almost no work at all... 

feel free to copy and past the photo below, if you want to follow along with this tutorial

STEP 1:  Do all the "usual" adjustments, from the original photograph and pretty it up the way you think looks best... I usually do a brightness and Contrast adjustment with a few Color Curves to get what I thought looked pretty nice:  

Step 2: HSL adjust... 

Experimentation is the best way photographers will learn... 

THE FINISHED PRODUCT: 

Here's some other photographs edited using HSL adjustments.

Pictures by Andrew Taraba

Incredible Canon T3i/600D Example Pictures

Incredible Canon T3i/600D Example Pictures

The Canon t3i is an incredible camera both for video and photography. I fell in love with this thing since the first time I touched it. Here are some photographs I took using only the Standard 18-55mm kit lens.

All the stars are smoking cigs... or maybe... All the cigs send us to the stars....

Time to make dinner... Someone forgot to clean out the oven... House instantly got filled with smoke... PICTURE TIME!!! ;]

Nothing turns a stomach or moves my hunger more than a nice old Live Sea Urchin...

Two satellites floating in the sky...

This was my picture for the Animal Photography Contest... I later found out that the magazine article I found the add for the contest in was three months old...

Symbolism in the cymbal....

Pictures by Andrew Taraba