John Borwick's blog

Over winter break I got Aperture, Apple’s photo “workflow” tool.  I didn’t really know what Aperture was, or why you might need a “workflow” tool.  I thought Aperture would be a lot like Adobe Photoshop, where you do lots of fancy editing of your photos.

Well, it turns out tools like Aperture (and I believe Photoshop Lightroom) are their own thing: they are tools to help you go from the image on the camera to the completed roll.

As a way of explaining what Aperture is, I’ll explain my “workflow” based on what I understand of Aperture so far.  My … Continue Reading

For Christmas I received a Canon Speedlite 430EX II Flash.  We anticipate taking lots of indoors pictures this year, since we’re expecting in May.  I haven’t learned much yet about the flash, but even in full auto mode the flash looks really good–much better than the built-in flash.

The flash attaches to the flash mount on top of my Canon XSi.  It takes four AA batteries–I’m not sure how many flashes you get out of one set of batteries.  The flash is divided into two parts–the bottom part … Continue Reading

I don’t want to know much about post-production photography right now.  However, I would like to know how I one day could learn more.  To that end, I just discovered thePSpod, a blog with Photoshop basics videos.  So far I’ve done the first three episodes, which introduce layers and selections.

Flowers and butterfly, originally uploaded by borwick.

This picture comes from Winston-Salem’s “Bethabara Park Medical Gardens.” When I was shooting, I was trying to be very careful about a couple of variables:
* don’t shoot “wide-open” (this photo was taken at f/7.1)
* shoot at a high shutter speed (taken at 1/320 with a 55mm zoom=88mm-equivalent)
* keep ISO low (taken at ISO 200)

That said, I’m trying to figure out why this photo doesn’t look better. My guesses are
* photo overexposed–should have … Continue Reading

Plastic flippy cat, posing, originally uploaded by borwick.

Lauren got this toy when she went to Raleigh last Friday. You crank it up and it does flips! It’s fun to photograph: at 1/60 you can capture the motion and still tell what it is (sort of). However the continuous drive on my camera “only” shoots ~3 photos a second (I’m shooting JPEG and it might be faster if I were shooting RAW because there wouldn’t be any … Continue Reading

Lauren in a guitar, originally uploaded by borwick.

Here’s a Flickr photo of Lauren in a guitar!

I haven’t used the blog in quite a while.  My latest idea is to use this blog to document what I’m learning… which right now, is photography.

I couple of months ago I got a Canon EOS Rebel XSi digital camera, plus three Canon lenses: an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 (kit lens), a 55-250mm f/4-5.6 (sort of a kit lens), and a 35mm f/2 prime.  I got them all from B&H photography, because they were having a deal on the camera plus the two kit lenses.

I’ve been posting the better photos on flickr.com/photos/borwick.  Here are a couple of things I’ve learned to … Continue Reading