Photo Insights, April '16

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P H O T O I N S I G H T SJim Zuckerman’s

April 2016

BacklightingMultiple selectionsA cool sharpening techniqueMannequin headsFlood pluginPhoto toursStudent showcase

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4. Backlighting 11. Multiple selections 13. Sharpening 15. Mannequin heads 18. The Plugin Flood 22. What’s wrong with this picture? 24. Short and sweet 25. Ask Jim 26. Photography tours 29. Student showcase 33. Back issues

On the cover: Backlight-ing on Jim’s great Pyr-enees, Princey. This page: Ramses II and Nefertari at Karnak, Egypt.

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4. Backlighting 11. Multiple selections 13. Sharpening 15. Mannequin heads 18. The Plugin Flood 22. What’s wrong with this picture? 24. Short and sweet 25. Ask Jim 26. Photography tours 29. Student showcase 33. Back issues

Google has just announced that it is making the entire Nik Software col-lection available to everyone -- both Mac and PC users -- for free. If you purchased it in 2016, according to their announcement, they will

give you a refund. This includes Color Efex Pro, Silver Efex Pro, Viveza, HDR Efex Pro, Sharpener Pro, Dfine, and Analog Efex Pro.

This is both good news and bad news. It’s good for people who have wanted to use these software programs but didn’t want to spend the money. Now you’ll be able to enjoy the great effects these plugins offer without charge. It’s bad, how-ever, because this means there will be no further upgrades or enhancements of Nik Software. And, as time goes on and computer operating systems continue to evolve, the likelyhood that Google will make Nik Software compatible with these new systems is, in my opinion, unlikely. That’s a shame.

This happens over and over again when a giant company like Google buys a smaller one like Nik. In most cases, that marks the end of development for plugins that so many of us have enjoyed for years. You may not remember Kai’s Power Tools, but they were popular in the 90s, and they offered amazing effects. Corel bought them and then let them die a slow death. There probably isn’t a computer made in the last 10 years that can run Kai’s filters.

If you would like to download the Nik Collection from Google, here is the link: https://www.google.com/nikcollection/

Enjoy these plugins while you can.

Jim Zuckermanwww.jimzuckerman.com

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Backlighting

One of the most beautiful and dra-matic types of lighting occurs when the light source is behind

the subject. Several things can happen at the same time: the subject has a wonderful glow around the edges; if you include the sun, this adds a dynamic focal point; if the subject is translucent, it it will be imbued with brilliant saturation; and long shadows extend toward the camera to add powerful leading lines.

When your subjects are lit from behind, there are a number of things you have to think about, such as:

1. Should you include the sun

2. How to eliminate unwanted flare

3. How to expose for the extreme contrast

4. How to prevent blown highlights

The sun

The sun is an ulra dynamic element that, when included in a picture, makes a power-ful statement. I like to include it with a back-lit subject especially when I use a wide angle lens. With a wide lens, the sun is rendered

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relatively small in the frame and it doesn’t af-fect exposure very much because it’s so small. Since wide angles have extensive depth of field, the sun will be as sharp as the fore-ground. In most types of shots, this is the ideal.

Sometimes I will block the sun with the sub-ject as I did with the model above left. Notice the intense glow around the young woman as well as the intensity of color in the fabric

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she’s wearing. I did a similar thing with the costumed model in Venice, Italy above. The sun in this case made the translucent fabric of the umbrella glow.

Sometimes I will allow the sun to peak around the edge of a subject as I did with the glacial ice on the next page. I used a 14mm lens here, and with the sun so small in the frame I positioned myself so the sun peeked over the edge of the ice. This adds a brilliant glow behind the blue ice. The star effect comes from using a small lens aperture.

There are several possibilities when shooting toward the sun, and I suggest you try every-thing and then decide which one or ones you like best when you’re examining them on your home computer.

The problem of lens flare

When you include the sun in the frame, lens flare often results. This is, in my opinion, al-ways undesirable. Sometimes we can live with it, but most of the time it is unsightly and hurts an otherwise successful image. The landscape I shot in Namibia at the top of the next page is an example. When flare like this occurs, there is nothing you can do at the time of shooting to eliminate it. Only in post-processing can you get rid of it. There are three tools I use in Photoshop to do this:

1. Healing brush2. Clone tool3. Content aware

Usually the healing brush and/or the clone tool

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will do the job, but if the flare is particularly bad, content aware is necessary. This is done by using the lasso tool to encircle the flare to be eliminated, and then you choose Edit > fill. In the submenu of the dialog box, choose content aware. Hit OK and the flare should disappear.

If the sun is composed so it is just outside the frame, flare can be avoided by using a lens hood. You can also block the sun with your hand from striking the front glass element of the lens.

Exposing for extreme contrast

The position of the sun in the frame as well as the focal length of the lens you use to take the shot af-fects the exposure. If the sun is in the middle of the picture and you used a 400mm lens, it will be large and it will have a huge impact on the exposure. In fact, the picture will turn out very dark. That’s why the candelabra tree on page 9 is a silhouette. I used

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UPCOMING PHOTO WORKSHOPS

Babies workshopJan. 29 - Feb. 4, 2016

Lots of baby animals such as coyotes, wolves, bear cubs, skunks (adorable!), foxes, and more, plus adults in this great workshop held in Hinckley, Minnesota

June 30 to July 3, 2016

Frog & Reptile Workshop Close-up encounters with poison dart frogs and exotic reptiles such as chame-leons, geckos, snakes, and more in St. Louis, Missouri.

June 25 - 26, 2016

Home Photoshop workshopLearn amazing techniques that will give you unparalleled control over your images such as replacing the sky, making com-posites, using layers, being creative with plugins, and more.

Oct. 29 - 30, 2016

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a 500mm lens and the sun is close to dead cen-ter in the frame.

In the picture of the glacial ice on page 7, I placed the sun far from the center of the frame (the meter takes most of its information from the center) and because I used a wide angle lens, the sun is small in the frame. This means that, even though the sun is very bright, it has little influence on the meter reading, hence the photograph is perfectly exposed.

With extreme contrast and brilliant hot spots such as the sun in a picture, it is hard to predict exactly how accurate the meter reading will be. Therefore, you must constantly check the LCD monitor on the back of the camera to ascertain whether or not you are happy with the expo-sure. If the picture is too light or dark for your taste, simply use the exposure compensation

feature built into the camera to tweak the ex-posure in 1/3 f/stop increments. This is assum-ing you are using either Program mode, shutter priority, or aperture priority. If you are using manual exposure mode, then it’s a simple mat-ter of changing the shutter or the aperture to adjust the exposure.

Even with backlit pictures that don’t have ex-treme contrast but still have a noticeable dis-crepancy in lights and darks, like the forest I photographed at sunset in New Hampshire, be-low, you still need to monitor your exposures to make sure they are perfect.

Preventing blown highlights

Backlighting can easily cause blown highlights -- meaning certain areas of a picture are so light they’ve lost texture and detail. The sun itself is always a solid white object (unless it’s observed through a special telescope), and so are street lamps and car headlights at night. We accept

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this because, in reality, this is exactly what we see. When we look at the sun, it is solid white or solid yellow or red when it is close to the ho-rizon. Street lamps from a distance also look solid white.

Backlit subjects like blonde or white hair, sheer white dresses, ice, snow, and similar subjects are a problem, though, and to prevent a loss of detail you need a special strategy. The young mountain goats, below, show a perfect example. Their white coat was illuminated from sunlight behind them, and the resulting rim lighting is light as it should be but it’s not blown out.

The technique I use to retain detail in the high-lights is to underexpose my images by 1/3 or 2/3 f/stops. This protects the highlights, and

this amount of underexposure is not enough to cause unwanted noise. In post-processing, you can then tweak the highlights and shadows in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom until you like the results.

If the highlights are still blown out even with this small amount of underexposure, then ei-ther there is no detail worth saving (such as a reflection of the sun in a chrome bumper) or only the HDR technique would provide the ex-tensive dynamic range needed. When shoot-ing animals, of course, you can’t use HDR be-cause of their movement. But with landscapes, architecture, and so many other subjects, HDR is a phenomenal tool that will reveal detail throughout a contrasty image, and it is partic-ularly useful for backlit subjects. §

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Multiple Selections

Many times when you replace a background there are multiple noncontiguous areas to be se-

lected. As I wrote in the February, 2016 issue of Photo Insights, I like to use the pen tool to make selections because of its precision. The edges of the subject blend perfectly with the new background, and it’s impossible to tell that there was any Photoshop workshop work done.

So, when using the pen tool, how do you make multiple selections to ultimately blend all of the various areas into a single selection to receive the replacement background? For example, in the picture of Karnak in Egypt, right, there are actually nine different areas that must be se-lected separately and then combined so that I could drop in the new sky.

I described how to use the pen tool in the Feb-ruary, 2016 issue of this eMagazine (you can access that by going to the past issues section on page 34), but I’ll briefly outline it in step one below:

1. Choose one of the areas (in this case be-tween the ancient columns) to be selected. Grab the pen tool in the tools palette and place a succession of anchor points, or dots, along the periphery of the area. When the last point is placed on top of the first point, you now have a path. In the paths palette, use the tiny icon in the upper right corner to pull down a submenu, and there you’ll choose ‘make selec-tion’. In the dialog box that opens, choose one

pixel and click OK. You now have one selec-tion with the “marching ants.”

2. Now go to Select > save selection. This saves the selection, and you can see it in the channels palette. This is called an alpha channel.

3. Deselect the selection with Select > deselect.

4. Repeat the process to select each of the oth-er areas until you have saved the selections for each individual area. In the channels palette, you will see the list of selections. If you didn’t

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name each selection, they will be called Alpha 1, Alpha 2, etc.

5. To combine all of the individual selections into one all inclusive selection, hold down the shift and command keys on a Mac (or the shift and control keys on a PC) and, in the channels palette, click on each Alpha channel until they are all selected.

6. Go to Select > save selection. This will make a new Alpha channel that combines all of the individual selections into one large selection. At this point, you can save all of the Alpha channels or trash the individual ones to reduce the file size. I like to keep them all.

7. To eliminate any telltale line around the se-lected area from the old background, and to make the edges blend perfectly, use Select > modify > expand. In the dialog box choose one

pixel and hit OK.

8. Now choose Select > modify > feather. In the dialog box, choose one pixel.

9. Now you can paste the new background into the all inclusive selection. When you’ve chosen the image for the new background, choose Se-lect > all, then Edit > copy (this places the back-ground image into the clipboard, Photoshop’s temporatory holding place for a photo or part of a photo) and then Edit > paste special > paste into.

When you have a complex subject like the 1910 Mitchell, below, there are many selections to make. By using the pen tool and then combin-ing all of the selected areas, you can drop in the background (in this case a castle from Slovakia) with a single command and the results are flaw-less. §

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A Cool Sharpening Technique

There are a number of decent sharpen-ing programs available, such as Nik’s Define 2.0 and Topaz DeNoise 6..

While they do a good job, sometimes they add a bit of noise or artifacting and the resulting im-ages look a bit gritty. This is less obvious with an image like the eye of a Tokay gecko, below, because of all the color and texture, but if you enlarge the picture to 100% or more you can see the introduction of the undesirable courseness. A great sharpening technique is as follows:

1. Open an image and use the pulldown menu command Filter > other > high pass.

2. In the dialog box, choose either 3 or 4. The

higher the number, the more sharpening takes place. (Keep in mind that if a photograph is not focused well and the subject is decidedly not sharp, you can’t bring back critical focus. This technique, and all sharpening software, is made to make in-focus images a bit sharper.)

3. Go to the layers palette, and access the sub-menu that shows the word normal. These are the blend modes. Choose ‘soft light’. You will now see that the image is sharper without any additional noise or artifacting.

I captured the gecko eye at my frog and reptile workshop with a 50mm macro lens and two extension tubes plus a ring flash. §

NEW eBOOKPhotoshop taps into your creative potential like nothing photogra-phers have ever had in the past. Once you feel comfortable working in this program, the sky is the limit. You can do anything your mind can imagine. Pretty amazing, indeed!

This eBook explains many of the techniques that Jim uses all the time. These include replacing the sky, compositing images, add-ing textures to photos, introducing natural looking streaks of light, realistic HDR, combining black and white with color, Jim’s favoritre plugins, using the blend modes, and more. Use this as an idea book as well as a reference. If you’ve limited yourself to Lightroom’s abili-ties, consider expanding your horizons and learn Photoshop. It’s about time.

Click the cover to see inside the ebook

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MANNEQUIN HEADSIf you like to think outside the box and create images that are on the wild side, try experi-menting with mannequin heads. They make compelling subjects especially when you com-bine them with other images and/or apply vari-ous types of effects like mirroring (as in the im-age below) and distortion.

Although I’ve purchased three different man-nequin heads so I could have complete control over the lighting, the depth of field, and the an-gle, you don’t have to do that. You can simply photograph them through a display window in a shop. I’ve done that all over the world when

I see a particularly intriguing face. The head below is an example. I found this in a store window in Brugge, Belgium, and I was drawn to the stylized facial features. Photographing through the glass doesn’t appreciably degrade the image quality, but make sure you don’t see any reflections in the window from behind you. Shoot from an angle to eliminate these.

Combining pictures of mannequin heads can lead you down many paths. You can convey many types of concepts such as artificial intelli-gence, mankind, meditation, aliens, the future, and more. I’ve sold many of these images to

Being creative with

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various end users of photography because they wanted to express a concept. For example, Omni Magazine, an avant-garde psuedo science pub-lication popular in the 80s and 90s and famous for their unique covers, used the picture at right on the cover of the magazine that they tied to the lead article titled, “What would you say to an alien?”

Once you photograph a mannequin head, you have to select it (my recommendation is to use the pen tool for this). This allows you to paste it into any background or combine it with any other image. There are obviously no limits as to what you can do -- it’s all up to your imagination. If you want to review other images I’ve done with mannequin heads, check out this link that goes to the conceptual page on my website:

http://www.jimzuckerman.com/conceptual §

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Photo Tour to

NepalMarch 3 - 14, 2017

Awesome landscapesGreat portraits

Holi festivalBirds

Ancient temples

The Plugin FloodFlood is my favorite plugin. It is made by flamingpear.com, and it makes realistic watery reflections that are quite believable. Flood works best when the horizon line, i.e. the water line, appears to be at a distance. Wa-ter lines viewed from across a large pond or lake look straight, and that’s important because that’s the kind of water line Flood adds to a picture. If you apply Flood to a landscape or cityscape seen from a distance, as I did in this shot of a Bristlecone pine tree in the White Mountains of California, right, the picture will look real. If you use Flood with a macro shot, on the other hand, it usually won’t look real. That might not be a bad thing, but if you are going for realism, heed this advice and the reflections you introduce to landscape and other distant scenes will be very impressive. §

Become a better photographer witheBooks

Click on any ebook to see inside

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LEARNING TO SEE online course by Jim Zuckerman

The ability to ‘see photographically’, to really grasp how your camera and lenses capture a subject or scene (which is different than how we see with our eyes) underlies successful picture taking. It is the bottom line that you’ve been looking for to take that quantum leap forward in your photography.

The great thing about online courses is that they can fit into any schedule. Life gets in the way at times, and Jim puts no limit on the time you can submit your work for his critiques. CLICK THIS PAGE to read more about this course.

INDONESIA WILDLIFE & CULTURAL TOUR July 8 - 22, 2016

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orangutans komodo dragons birds Bali ancient temples

What’s wrong with this picture?

Some photographers might argue that the jaguar is too obscured by the grass to be successful, but I would disagree with this assessment. Usually in this column I show a picture that definitely has problematic

issues, but in this case I wouldn’t change a thing. I shot this picture during my last photo tour to the Pantanal in Brazil, and I particularly like the way the big cat melds with his environment. This is what camouflage is all about, and this picture conveys that.

Had the face of the jaguar been blocked by grass, then sure, it wouldn’t have worked. We must see the face and especially the large teeth in order to claim this is a successful picture. But I feel the thick grass adds intrigue and mystique to the picture, and we get a good sense of the jungle enviroment in which the jaguar lives and hunts.

Jaguar sightings along the river where we cruise up and down during the photo tour are surprisingly frequent. Every sighting is special and exciting, and there-fore I very carefully chose my camera settings to produce exactly what I wanted. The most important thing is sharpness, so I chose a fast shutter to make sure ev-

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erything was tack sharp. Since I was in a boat hand holding a large lens and the cat was moving, I selected 1/1250 of a second. I wanted enough depth of field so the grass in front of and behind the cat was sharp, thus I chose f/8. Given the overcast lighting conditions, that forced the ISO to 1600. I used a 500mm f/4 lens to capture the shot.

The picture above, some might argue, is better than the previous image because we can see without obstruction the beautiful markings of the jaguar. I do like this image, and if it were the only picture of a jaguar in the wild I’d taken, I would be very proud of it. But to me the picture in the grass is more compel-ling, more exciting, and more beautiful. It conveys the stealth and the power of the cat, and even though there is no audio, we can sense how quietly this preda-tor moves through vegetation when stalking its prey.

In the above photo, I captured the typical cat posing for the camera with the at-titude, “I know I’m beautiful and I’ll let you take my picture because I’m in the mood at the moment. Hold the accolades till later!” §

SHORT AND SWEET

1. Successful wildlife photography is dependent on the turn of the head of the animal as well as the posi-tion of the legs. Notice this marsh deer in the Brazilian Pantanal has one leg bent as he walks along. That made the shot. The background is complementary, too.

3. When photographing a seascape, like this shot above Piran, Slovenia, pay careful attention that the horizon line is parallel to the top and bottom edges of the frame. If you are shooting fast and don’t notice that the line isn’t straight, one way to correct it in Pho-toshop is: Select > all; then Edit > transform > distort.

2. When photographing small animals, it’s not essen-tial to be biologically correct. For example, this Asian vine snake doesn’t usually hang out on mum flowers. But in my frog and reptile workshop, these kinds of color combinations make for striking pictures.

4. I recommend using the HDR technique for virtually all landscape photography. This is particularly impor-tant when you include the sky and/or when there is both sun and shadow in the photo. This creates contrast, and HDR is designed to show detail throughout the picture no matter how much contrast there is. §

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ASK JIM Every month Jim will answer a question from his online students, from people who participate in his tours and workshops, or from subscribers to this magazine. If you have a question you’d like Jim to answer, please drop him a note at [email protected].

Q: Jim . . . People whom I’ve met who are technically knowledgeable about photography tell me that depth of field is entirely related to lens aperture and has nothing to do with the focal length of the lens. But most people believe that wide angle lenses have more depth of field than telephotos. Can you clarify this for me, please?Lasse Jansson, Stockholm, Sweden

A: If you compare a 24mm lens with a 300mm lens, it looks like the 24mm wide angle has more depth of field. But . . . if you crop the 24mm shot to match the narrow angle of view of the 300mm lens and use the same f/stop for both pictures, then the depth of field will be the same for both lenses. That means that the lens aperture is the only determinant for depth of field. This assumes that you compare the exact same composition by cropping the wide angle image to match the telephoto shot.

In practicality, though, we don’t compare depth of field like that. We compare the entire frame of a wide angle with the entire frame of a telephoto. When you do that, it appears that the wide angle lens has much more depth of field.

Photography Tours 2016 - 2017

For a complete list of all the photo tours/workshops Jim conducts, go to his website: www.jimzuckerman.com.

CROATIA, MONTENEGRO,SLOVENIA. May, 2016

PATAGONIAApr. 2017

ICELANDMar. 2017

KAZAKHSTANAug. 2017

EGYPTOct. 2017

NEWFOUNDLANDJun. 2017

THE PANTANAL, BRAZILNov. 2016

SNOWY OWLS, CANADAFeb. 2017

CARNIVAL IN VENICEFeb. 2017

AMERICAN SOUTHWESTOct. 2016

CHINASept. 2016

INDONESIAJuly 2016

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CHINA PHOTO SAFARI Sept. 16 - 28, 2016

Unreal landscapes culture Shanghai people

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AMERICAN SOUTHWEST photo tour

October 7 - 16, 2016

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Student ShowcaseEach month, Jim features one student who took beautiful and inspiring images on one or more of his pho-tography tours or workshops. It’s really fascinating how photographers see and compose such different im-ages even though we may go to the same place. Everyone gets great photographs on my trips.

Kayla Stevenson, Pitt Meadows, British Columbia, Canada Namibia photo tour, Venice work-shop, Photoshop workshop, Vermont fall colors

© 2016 Kayla Stevenson

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Student Showcase, continued

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Student Showcase, continued

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PHOTOSHOP WORKSHOP Sat. & Sun., Oct. 29 - 30, 2016

Photoshop is a photographer’s best friend, and the creative possi-bilities are absolutely endless. In a personal and ‘homey’ environ-ment (I have a very cool classroom setup in my home), I start at the beginning -- assuming you know nothing -- but I quickly get into layers, cutting and pasting, plug-ins, using ‘grunge’ textures, modi-fying lighting, replacing backgrounds, using layer masks, blend modes, adding a moon, and a lot more. I promise to fill your head with so many great techniques that you won’t believe what you’ll be able to do. I go over each technique several times to make sure you understand it and can remember it.

Photoshop instructors approach teaching this program from dif-ferent points of view. My approach is to be as expansive in my thinking as possible in creating unique, artistic, and compelling images. In addition to showing you how to use the various tools, pull down menus, layers, and so on, I spend a lot of time giving you

creative ideas that will inspire you to produce amazing images with the pictures you’ve already taken.

I live in the Nashville, Tennessee area, and if you fly into the airport (BNA) I will pick you up. If you drive, I’ll give you my address and you can find my home on Mapquest or with a GPS. For the $450 fee, I include one dinner in my home (prepared by my wife who is an amazing cook and hostess) and two lunches, plus shuttling you back and forth from my home to your nearby hotel.

Contact me if you would like to participate in the workshop and I will tell you how to sign up ([email protected]). All you need is a laptop and a lot of your pictures. If you don’t have a laptop, I have two Mac Book Pro laptops I can loan out for the duration of the workshop. §

i n m y h o m e

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• Topaz Glow• A different approach to composition• Photographing puppies• Kaleidoscopic images• Online photo course• Student showcase• Photo tours


January 2015

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• White balance• When can highlights be blown• Abstractions in soap• Fisheye lenses• Online photo course• Student showcase• Photo tours


February 2015

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• Realistic HDR• Selective focus• Simulating bokeh• Sepia & Dark Contrast• Online photo courses• Student showcase• Photo tours


June 2015

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Mar. ‘16 Apr. ‘16



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PHOTO INSIGHTS®published by Jim Zuckerman, all rights reserved

© Jim Zuckerman 2016 email: [email protected]

mail address: P.O. Box 7, Arrington, TN 37014

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Photo Insights, April '16