If you are like me, you probably own a variety of Nikon lenses spanning many years of production. I think my oldest lens is a 50mm F1.8D; whatever happened to those great lens distance scales and focus marks? One thing you might notice is different VR choices for your lenses. Looking through my lenses, I Read More
Tech Tips
Rating photos in the camera
On many shoots and workshops, the photography can be intense and heavy with gaps of down time in-between. Imagine photographing two grizzly bears wrestling for 30 minutes. You might shoot 500 images in that time. Then the bears get tired, and head off into the tall grass to sleep. Which leaves you sitting there for Read More
D850 Auto AF fine tuning
What happens when you use a 45MP camera with a 500mm F4? Any lapse in your technique shows up as slightly soft images! Honestly, this is user error more than anything. My 500mm F4 is razor sharp, and the D850 continues to amaze me on many levels including resolution. But one way to improve performance Read More
Aurora HDR 2018
I’m getting ready to go to Old Car City this weekend to teach a sold out workshop. We are going to photograph the old cars in this amazing location, as well as use speedlights and photograph models. The last time I visited Old Car City I had some constanty light, so I decided to create Read More
Dehaze Filter
If you are not familiar with the Dehaze filter in LR or Photoshop, you should be. This slider can be the silver bullet to improving images…or making them totally over processed. Some situations you can just grab the slider and do a global adjustment. Try it out on Northern Lights images or hazy scenes (thus Read More
SB5000 Remote Direct Mode
Just returned from teaching a great lighting class with the Mentor Series in Austin Texas. Cowboys, barbecues and retro were the themes. I literally walked into my hotel room, saw the retro refrigerator, and started setting up my speed lights (see my instagram account for the final shot…’tombolphoto’). Also had a great time teaching with Read More
Landscape Pro
I’m always up for new software that opens up some new possibilities. But when I saw Landscape Pro being used on a recent workshop to Cuba, I was a little unsettled. This program just seemed to go over the top in what it could do, and things looked a little overdone in the final shot. Read More
Portraits in the snow
The last thing most photographers want to do is go out in the snow in a howling snowstorm. Not only are you going to be frozen, but your gear is going to get wet, and if you are photographing models, they probably aren’t going to have a great time. If you are shooting adventure sports, Read More
Alien Skin Exposure X2
There is some terrific software being introduced that will give photographers some new editing options, including non-destructive editing similar to Lightroom. I’ve long been a user of Exposure, and they have really added some great new features in recent updates including Exposure X2. Exposure is best known for its brilliant analog film action presets. If Read More
D500 quick selection of flash control screen
Last spring I wrote on this blog about how to set a control button on your D810 to bring up the flash control window with one click. If you were using the popup flash as a commander, this gave you one click access to the flash control window to adjust your flash setting. Recently I Read More