It it excessive to spend $10 a month on your photo hobby? Adobe's photographic plan costs $10 per month and that's something that distresses some photographers. I can't afford that, they say. But let's consider this through a lens of of historical perspective.
Remember film? Amazon sells 10 rolls of Kodak GC Max 400 24-exposure color print 35mm film for $29.99. A little quick math shows that this is about $3 per roll and 12.5¢ per shot. Then you'll need to pay for developing and printing: $10 or so for drugstore-quality images, or about 42¢ per image. That brings your cost to about 54.5¢ every time you click the shutter. So now let's assume you use 2 rolls of film per month (48 pictures). Your cost per month for 48 film-based images would be about $26 per month just for film and processing. Plus the cost of prints that you might want to give others.
Adobe's photography plan is less than half that whether you take 48 pictures per month or 480 pictures per month. It includes Lightroom, Adobe Camera Raw, Bridge, and Photoshop. These are the applications you can use to make your photos better -- more like what you saw with your eyes.
Before getting into the topic of what you can accomplish for $10 per month, I should acknowledge the dancing chicken on the far side of the room: Digital cameras cost more than film cameras and generally need to be replaced sooner because of changes in technology. Maybe you have a $1000 digital camera lasts for 5 years, so that's about $200 per year. Maybe 10 years ago you had a $1000 film camera that lasted 10 years, for about $100 per year for a film camera. Either way, the hardware expense is less than the ongoing costs of film, processing, and printing. That's where the real costs were in the good old days.
So what can you do with $10 per month?
I'll start with this seemingly obvious observation: There's a difference between what we see and what our camera sees. Experienced professional photographers can visualize how the camera will record a scene and won't be surprised later when they see the image from the camera. If you're frequently disappointed by images from your camera, you can make the image more closely resemble what you saw. All it takes is a bit of money, time, and effort.
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Let's say you're driving down a road in eastern Ohio and you see a barn in front of a beautiful blue sky with a few puffy clouds. Your eye filters out the power pole, the power lines, posts, a sign in front of the barn, a house in the background, road signs, and a shed that's attached to the barn.
When you get home, all of those distractions are quite visible and you notice that there's not much detail in the shadowed areas of the trees. Bummer!
The photo can be substantially improved with less than 5 minutes worth of work in Lightroom.
Despite those improvements, though, the power pole, the power lines, posts, a sign in front of the barn, a house in the background, road signs, and a shed that's attached to the barn still draw too much attention to themselves. Further cropping would help to isolate the barn, but I like the composition with the road leading in from the lower left.
Now it's time for Photoshop, which can take the corrected image from Lightroom. Before starting, here's an important note: Never work on the original image. Instead, place a new layer above the image and make changes on that layer. In the images that follow, the transparent layer above the photo is on the right and the result of activating that layer is on the left.
Removing 2 of the 3 posts and a drainage cover was easy. The third post partially obscured some brick work, so matching the bricks was a little more challenging.
The bottom part of the power pole was also easy, but it was also in front of tress and the sky. It was also necessary to remove the house in the background and finding a good source to clone grass from was challenging.
The power pole's guy wire was also in front of the barn, so it was important to match the texture and grain of the barn.
The sign turned out to be less challenging than I expected it to be, but it created an obvious problem.
Enough barn and shed existed that cloning was relatively easy, but then I realized that I had eliminated a window. The left edge of the window is just barely visible along the left edge of the sign in the previous images. Besides, it was clear that the barn would have had two windows on the left and right sides of the barn door.
So I cloned the third window, increased its size slightly, and added a tiny bit of rotation.
But that shed still bothered me.
This was tricky because of the length of the areas that needed to be cloned and the need to maintain some sharp divisions around the front right corner of the barn.
I rarely spend as much time as it took to edit this image. In fact, most of the corrections I make are in Lightroom. I knew that this image would be challenging and that I could use it to improve my skills.
Improving your skills is important, whether you're a professional or an amateur. Photography is part craft and part art. Art is the part that allows us to envision the image we want. Craft is the part that allows us to create the image our mind sees. My younger daughter, the graphic artist, used to cry when she was about 5 years old that she could see pictures in her mind, but she couldn't draw them. Through primary school, middle school, high school, and college she worked to improve her craft skills. There's no substitute for the time and effort needed to develop the skills you want to have.
While I was working on this week's lead article, I started thinking about professional photographers. For professional photographers, this is a terrible time to be in business -- unless it isn't. Long ago, in what seems like a distant galaxy, I was a professional photographer. I'm not now and haven't been for about 30 years for a variety of reasons, but today's photographers can do -- in just a few minutes -- what it would have taken hours to accomplish in a darkroom (had it been possible).
Professional photographers feel challenged because anybody can buy an camera and kit lens for just a few hundred dollars and they can use the same software the pros use for just $10 per month. They consider this situation and conclude that they are doomed.
Well, some of them certainly are. There are parallels.
To bring this back to the plight photographers face: It's no longer sufficient to just create photographs that are well lighted and in focus. Today you must master both the art and craft of photography along with public relations, advertising, and marketing.
I'm a member of a Facebook group for photographers. The group has about 300,000 members, pros and amateurs from all around the globe. Some give advice that includes terms such as "must", "always", and "never". I suspect that these are the photographers who will not be in business a few years from now because I routinely see outstanding work by those who want to become professionals.
One of the best photographers I've had the opportunity to know and work with lived in a tiny east Ohio town. He worked for a railroad until he developed his skills and his marketing capabilities -- then he quit his day job. He was willing to try new methods.
TONE is an acronym that was popular in the 1980s -- Technique Only, Nothing Else. This was used as an epithet to describe photographers who created a single all-encompassing setup that they used for everyone. The studio lights might as well have been nailed to the floor. The TONE photographers are out of business today, except for those who work in department stores and produce cheap photo packages that are designed to get customers into the store.
I said that marketing and advertising are crucial to success today, but that assumes the mastery of at least the technical/craft basics -- the ability to create a usable, properly exposed, in-focus, well-composed image in the camera. That's the baseline minimum. Being willing to try something new is another essential part.
And then you have to decide whether you're someone who can create exceptional, memorable images. If you are, this is a great time to be a photographer -- amateur or professional.
Adobe announced Project Comet in 2015 and released Experience Design (XD) a year later to provide a way for designers to create a framework for websites, mobile apps, and documents. Now they've released a free version.
There are, of course limitations. The free version supports only one active shared prototype, one active shared spec design, 2GB of cloud storage, and 280 TypeKit fonts while the paid plans have unlimited prototypes and specs, 100GB of cloud storage, and 5700 typefaces. Those who have Creative Cloud subscriptions already have XD, so this is intended to convince new users to try it. Full details about how the plan works are on the Adobe website.
Paid versions start at $10 per month for XD alone, but the application will be more usable in conjunction with the other apps that are part of the Creative Cloud plan at $50 per month.
Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky says the intent is to “give everyone—from emerging artists to enterprise brands—everything they need to design and deliver exceptional digital experiences and explore the rapidly expanding field of UX design with no financial commitment.”
Although UX doesn't create code that can be used on websites or in other formats and Adobe has no current plans to add that functionality, UX does support plug-in technology. Most Adobe applications expose an interface that allows other developers to create tools that add capabilities.
Adobe has also set up a $10 million Fund for Design that will be distributed as grants and equity investments. The fund is intended to help designers and developers do innovative experience design and leverage Adobe XD as a platform supporting plug-ins and integrations with third party tools and services. It is open for individuals, small teams, and companies interested in or already building products to empower creatives. In addition to providing the financial means to enable growth, working with the Adobe Fund for Design will provide recipients access to industry experts and significant resources to fuel development, including early access to technology, partnership, and go-to-market opportunities.
If you'd like to take a look at XD, you can download the free version from Adobe's website. Unlike the rest of the applications, this is not a limited-time free trial. The free version of XD includes a perpetual license.
A survey by a company that offers services for providers of internet of things (IoT) devices says that 90% of consumers already have such a device. That may seem high -- it did to me -- but it depends on how the terms are defined.
You may think of IoT devices as light bulbs, thermostats, and other components that are part of a house's infrastructure. The survey widens that a bit to include not only those devices but also assistants such as Google Home or Amazon Alexa and even appliances such as Smart televisions.
So ... OK. By that definition, 90% seems reasonable. Metova, a provider of mobile, connected car, connected home, and IoT devices paid for the research in an attempt to understand the sentiment of consumers in the United States about these new technologies.
CEO Josh Smith says that many businesses don't understand how widespread these devices are. "Consumers have already made the leap to connected devices in their homes," he says. The survey shows:
The survey was commissioned by Metova and administered to over 1000 consumers in the US market covering a wide range of demographics and distributed proportionately across the country.
The past year has been, shall we say, “interesting” as we learned more than we ever wanted to know about how the liver works, how it fails, and organ transplants.
On Monday, May 15, 2017, we learned that older daughter, Elizabeth, was in the emergency room at Fairfield Medical Center. Liver failure was the initial diagnosis. After being in intensive care overnight, she was transferred to Ohio State University Hospital the following morning. Barely conscious on arrival, she soon slipped into a coma.
An outstanding team of medical professionals from many departments confirmed the liver failure diagnosis. Because the failure was acute and immediately life threatening, she was moved to the top of the list for a donor organ. A match was found on May 19 and the transplant surgery began late that afternoon.
The following afternoon, Elizabeth met her surgeon (lower left photo) and has been observed closely in the year since by the head of the surgical team and the hepatology department at University Hospital.
As essential as the medical staff has been, this past year would have been much different without Donate Life Ohio.
Donate Life Ohio is a coalition of the state’s organ, eye, and tissue recovery agencies dedicated to educating Ohioans about the need for donations and motivating them to join the Ohio Donor Registry.
Similar organizations associated with Donate Life America exist in all states. If you’re not yet a registered organ donor, please consider signing up. The donatelife.net website can guide you to your state’s organ donor registry, help you determine if you’re already registered, and assist with registration if you’re not.
On average, 20 people die every day in the United States while waiting for a transplant that doesn’t come in time. More than 100,000 people are on various transplant waiting lists.
We are eternally grateful to the organ donor, the organ donor’s family, the intensive care doctors and nurses who kept Elizabeth alive during the wait, and the surgical team. These are the heroes who gave Elizabeth a second chance at life.
