I’ve been consistent with capturing images on a near daily basis, mostly in “Sniff and Shoot” mode, just carrying a camera when out in the back with the puppy. While casual photography is clearly where we are today, capturing in the camera with with an expressive exposure only gets the image 80% there. And some of my adjusted photos capture the scene, but just don’t have that dramatic, cincematic quality that I picked up from Vincent Versace’s Oz books. For the techniques, the color book Welcome to Oz 2.0 is all you need. It’s out of print, but there are used copies on Amazon.
This week I reviewed the two Oz books, taking notes on the techniques, which I can now distill way better than I could when I started down the path a bit more than 10 years ago. Hopefully, with a deeper understanding, speed and facility will follow. Sadly, two of his important tools, FocalPoint is no longer supported by its developers and the Lighting Effects filter in Photoshop has been abandoned. So we need to use alternative means to introduce lens blur and selective lighting. So far, not too much of a problem.
At least I have a few hundred captures this year, so some nice pixels to work on.
