Newsletter

Kay Levie has loved photography since she was old enough to hold a camera.
She says that was a long time ago. Her first camera was a Kodak Brownie Box
Camera. She stated it was very limiting to use and challenging to capture images
it wasn't made to capture - like cats jumping in the air or horses running.
It taught her a lot about timing, which is what sports photography is all about.

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For those who have been working with the latest digital cameras--both
integral and interchangeable lens types--you've probably seen an
option called Raw among your file formats. Unlike JPEG and TIFF, Raw is not
an acronym and therefore we don't capitalize it, and is just what it states--the
"raw" image date received by the sensor and digitized within the
microprocessor of the camera. It is not "raw" in the sense that
it is unfettered or unrecognizable, but it does take image processing software
other than what's in the plain version of some image processing programs
to see it. That Raw software converts the Raw image file format to an image
on the screen and allows you to save it to a format other than Raw--such
as TIFF or JPEG.

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Backlight has been bedeviling photographers for years, particularly in landscape
pictures and those where you want to take a shot but simply showed up at your
location at the wrong time of day. Backlight in and of itself is not the problem;
it's how your meter behaves and how you make the reading that creates
it. Simply put, when the subject falls within its own shadow because the brightest
illumination is behind it the meter can be overwhelmed by the illumination and
"fooled" into thinking it has more light for the exposure than the
main subject dictates.

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While the usual photographic rules, such as using shutter speed to portray motion
(slow to blur, fast to freeze) and using focal length, aperture and camera-to-subject
distance to create a certain depth of field apply to both film and digital photography,
digital offers some intriguing options for making camera settings. In some cases
these settings relate to film photography settings, or choosing a specific film
for its "personality", but with digital you can alter these settings
on every frame you shoot and not be restricted to the attributes of a particular
film you might have loaded in the camera.

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The digital darkroom has made it simple to accomplish print and image effects
that would have taken hours in the chemical darkroom environment. While the
learning curve can be steep (as it certainly was for the chemical darkroom,
at least if you wanted good results) the ease with which some tasks can be accomplished
is almost...well, embarrassing, at least to those who once labored in the
amber-lit confines of the darkroom.

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Now I know how stagecoach drivers felt when they saw those first rail lines
being laid over their routes. The recent announcement that Kodak would be discontinuing
their silver black and white papers didn't come as much as a shock as
an inevitability that one always hopes will not be manifest. With inventories
expected to last a few months, we're now witnessing the disappearance
of venerable brands such as Polycontrast IV, Azo and Polymax Fine Art, Kodabrome
II and Portra, even their "Digital Black and White" paper, which
was used for digital printers. According to a Kodak spokesperson, Kodak has
seen a cumulative drop in black and white paper buying of 25% per year over
the past few years and could no longer justify being in the market. We also
learned, by the way, that Kodak black and white papers had of late been produced
in Brazil, being packaged from rolls in Rochester. The spokesperson did stress,
however, that Kodak black and white film and chemistry was not on the chopping
block and that Kodak sees silver photography as still extremely viable.

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