Luminous Landscape Print Tutorial

If you are seeking out resources that will improve your photography and particularly your digital printing...stop right now and purchase the Luminous Landscape Tutorial "From Camera to Print." The tutorial is available via download and contains over 6 hours of instruction on how to optimize a photograph for fine art printing. The tutorial features accomplished landscape photographer Michael Reichmann who is joined by digital photo guru Jeff Schewe. It is the best $35 value available in photography today. Highly recommended!

From Camera to Print Tutorial on Luminous Landscape

San Juan Published in Lenswork Extended

I am very honored to share with you that the San Juan Portfolio has been published in the Lenswork Extended DVD. Lenswork is my source for artistic benchmarking. I am quite surprised that my first submission was accepted and published. The DVD is a supplement to the award winning print version of Lenswork. I consider both to be "must have" resources for any photographer. You may find out more at the link below.

Lenswork Extended DVD

San Juan Portfolio

DOP interview with Charles Cramer

Another insightful interview with one of today's photography masters has been published on Digital Outback Photo. The interview is with noted landscape photographer and instructor Charles Cramer. Mr. Cramer will be the guest instructor at the upcoming Fine Art Summit in November which I will be attending. I invite you to listen to the interview for some wonderful background and insight into the photography of Mr. Cramer.

Webpage with interview link

Charles Cramer's gallery

Rho Ophiuchus and Antares Nebulae Complex

Well, I finally finished my first DSLR astrophotograph and my first astrophoto in nearly 4 years. It was a very steep learning curve, but I came close to my original visualization. I have more information at the astrophotograph webpage below. I hope you enjoy the image and I look forward to more compositions this summer.

Rho Ophiuchus with Canon 350D and 135mm f2L lens

PhotoTech EDU at Google

I stumbled across a collection of presentation videos archived at Google Videos that discuss various aspects of photography in detail. The topics vary widely and even include some astrophotography presentations. There is a ton of material here and I have only begun to review it. The material is very detailed and at times overly technical, but hey it is Google. One interesting tidbit I found was a discussion at the end of Ben Lutch's Astrophotography presentation where Google is mapping the entire heavens with images from anyone willing to contribute their astronomical photos to the project. Depending on your interests, there is a wealth of information on this site. I encourage you to check out the topics and see what catches your eye. Here is a link to the search results for "phototech EDU" at Google.

Phototech EDU at Google

Like falling off a bike

Great news! I finished painting the house. So with that project out of the way I can now spend some time at the processing computer. That is exactly what I did today. It was a very frustrating first few hours. I can't believe how difficult it was for me to get back into the swing of enhancing astrophotographs, but it was like I had never worked on them before. I was constantly "falling off of the bike" and I nearly gave up entirely. At one point I thought I simply did not have enough data for the image to work the way I visualized. And then, it hit me, and I regained momentum and have successfully gone through one iteration of image enhancement on the Rho Ophiuchus image. I have plenty of data to work with and I am pretty confident I can get the image to what my initial visualization was for this composition. It takes a great deal of time and many iterations for enhancements to come to completion. I also like to step away from the image and let things "stew" a bit as I contemplate the direction the image is taking. So, I am working very hard on new stuff, it is just taking some time to get through the process and get things posted. Thanks for your interest in Jeff Ball Photography and there is much more to come.

P.S. I also spent several hours today preparing for my upcoming presentation at the Almost Heaven Star Party. I hope you can make the event and I hope to post my presentation on the website after the event in August.

A winner of a night

Another night under the stars and this time the transparency cooperated. Last Friday night I visited the wonderfully dark skies of my friend Rob Adkins home in Wayne County. We had a wonderful night of photographing and viewing. The dark lanes of the Milky Way were easily visible from Sagittarius to Scorpius, even with bright Jupiter in the middle of them. We viewed numerous deep sky objects with and without the OIII filter. The views were just stunning on this night and compared favorably to any I have had anywhere over the years. We viewed Venus, Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and Mars-all in one night. The seeing really steadied nicely for some wonderful early morning views of Jupiter.

Upon first review, it looks like I have at least 2 hours of very good data to work with on Rho Ophiuchus. Astrophotography images come slowly as preparation, imaging, and processing are extremely involved. I hope to have the image up soon. I am about 50% finished with painting the house. Once that project is completed, I can get back into updating images and the website.