Opinion

A few weekends ago, the French Culture Minister Fleur Pellerin visited Paris’s spectacular Musée d’Orsay to see an exhibition of art by the Post-Impressionist painter Pierre Bonnard. The d’Orsay houses France’s largest collection of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art and for years it has had a strict ban on photography. However when Madame Pellerin arrived at the show she liked what she saw so much she photographed several of her favorites and posted them to her Instagram feed.

Film photographers from yesteryear, as well as today’s 35mm hipsters, have eagerly awaited Yashica’s triumphant return to the digital era with a widely teased camera promising “a journey to the truth.” But now that the camera is here, it’s a major letdown—at least for me..

Sadly, photography is replete with abbreviations, from AE to WB and from PMA right up to DSLR. I believe that collectively they cause AC (Avoidable Confusion) for all, including those who are DC (Digitally Competent). Are you sick and tired of them, too? Read on!

Lightroom is a fantastic piece of software for editing and organizing your images. The only problem with it is that there's so much that this Adobe photography app can do, most photographers only end up using a small collection of its tools.

Here’s a quick camera tip from travel photographer Pierre T. Lambert that’s worth trying out. It often seems like we’re all addicted to reviewing our images on the back screen right after we take them. And, in fact, there’s a camera setting that lets you immediately review the shots for a few seconds on the LCD display on back. (Most of you probably have it on.)

I used to believe that the Auto setting on a camera was something to be avoided the way a tired waitress avoids eye contact when you’re signaling for a coffee refill—she can’t deny that you’re there, but she can ignore the hell out of you. I still feel that way about fully auto exposure, but my maniacally stubborn attitude toward Auto ISO is softening like marshmallow Peeps in a microwave.  

The most hotly discussed photo topic in the past month, undoubtedly, has to be the reported sale of a photo by Australian photographer Peter Lik for a record-breaking price of $6.5 million. I say “reported” sale because, as of yet, no unbiased source has been able to officially confirm this news, which was announced by Lik’s parent company in a press release in early December.