Happy New Year, everyone. Here’s a new (slightly delayed) video about finding photography inspiration in the new year, learning from your past images, assessing your progress in 2022, and seeking inspiration from photographers you’s work you admire.
I hope you enjoy it. Best, Keith
A couple of days ago I noticed that my two year anniversary on YouTube was coming up and I took the opportunity to take stock of where I am, what been successful on the channel and what’s next. I hope you might look in, if for nothing else to see our puppy, Poppy say hello to you!.
Can a single body, a single lens and a single film simulation drive your creativity? In this video I picked my FUJIFILM X-T20, a single FUJINON 27mm f2.8 lens and the MONOCHROME+R film simulation to tell the story of a day out in London at the end of June 2021 as the city began to come out of lockdown and personal restrictions were beginning to be lifted. The choice to restrict my gear meant that only choices I had to make were those of subject, composition, and aperture (I was shooting in aperture priority with ISO set at 400).
The Seven Best Editing Features in Lightroom – In this video I discuss what I consider the most useful editing features in the digital darkroom that I use the most; Lightroom. I also offer three bonus tips on how to smooth skin (to erase those crow’s feet that you don’t like), enhance eye details, and deal overly contrast-y sun-stars in landscape photography.
If you like enhancing your photos using Lightroom, this video is designed to give you a leg-up to the next level in editing your photos. The biggest compliment I have received about editing is that for most of my finished photos, you can’t see the edit. This is always my desire – to enhance but not to make the edits obvious to most people. Therefore, I hope this video might help those on their photography editing journey and give them a few more arrows in their quiver.
Following news that the current lockdown was going to last beyond early March, I realised that I wasn’t going to be able to celebrate my birthday down to Cornwall, like I usually do. Frankly, it put me in a bit of tailspin, so after a few days, I tried to look for some positives, and came up with a list of 20 ideas to spark some creativity for photographers like me, fed up with being locked down. I hope you find the video useful and that some of the ideas might help you creatively or give you some inspiration. Let me know. Thanks!
A new video about what I learned in 2020 about landscape photography. Please go and have a look.
A new video just out. I shot a couple of pictures this morning on a very misty day. I also make a clumsy analogy about golf (which I don’t play) and discuss what I and other photographers get out of photography. Oh, and I a make a cup of coffee.
Here is a short video of the pictures I made during our recent, post-lockdown, trip to Cornwall. I hope you enjoy it.
I am now 56 days into lockdown and I am a week into a three week furlough period from my day-job. I started my YouTube channel to learn new skills (making movies, learning to talk to camera) and to begin to get down, if not on paper, some of my ideas about what I have learnt on my ‘journey” (gag!) as a photographer in the past few years. I bought my first digital camera in 2006 (some 20 years after my first SLR camera was stolen) and I spent the first number of years trying to work out how to take photographs with little or no effort, studying or training. My hit-rate (number of decent pictures as a percentage of all pictures taken) was poor. In recent years, I have upgraded cameras, and undertaken some study (reading books, watching, videos) and have begun to understand how to take better images and how I might maximise the impact of those images in the digital darkroom. I now have an inherent passion and desire to make the best pictures that I can; to justify my investment in equipment, and my investment in myself. As somebody once said “anyone can have a world record, but only you can can have a personal best”. I am working hard to being the best photographer I can be. In short my hit-rate is getting better, and my tolerance of poorly images is reducing as I analyse why a particular image does not work.
As I try to distill my learning, I am producing a number of entry level tutorials for Lightroom (and eventually Photoshop), that were I brighter 20 years ago, I might have benefitted from. Each video will only be three or four minutes. This one introduces the series and talks about why the histogram is important and how to use it. I hope you enjoy it.
Sphericity by KeithMasonPhotography 