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I deal with the same challenges and frustrations you do. I'm always searching for, and trying to keep up with the latest photo technologies and tips, so let me do all the hard work and sort it all out for you.
I just finished a large slide scanning job for a client of over 4500 slides. The camera scans I did on the 50-70 years old slides made them look like they are taken yesterday, the camera scanning quality is that good.
I can’t show you my clients work, but here are some slides and negatives of mine I recently scanned. Some of these I haven’t seen in decades, but all wonderful memories.
Read MoreAdobe just updated Lightroom Classic with some interesting new features. I’ve had a few clients call me as they were confused about some changes in the way the tools in Develop mode now display. If you wish to set up a session to go over these new tools, or anything else, let me know and we can go through them.
Here are the basics of the new changes.
Read MoreOn July 26th of this year, Apple will be discontinued something called My PhotoStream. My PhotoStream was a feature that iPhones used before there was iCloud to sync photos and videos from your iPhone to your computer. Its now basically obsolete so nothing to worry about unless you might be still unknowingly using it to transfer images from your phone. That might be the case if you are not logged into your iCloud account.
Read MoreLightroom – Information is everything
One of the most common things I come across when I first see my client’s Lightroom catalog is this generic display on their thumbnails, displaying absolutely nothing of importance. So one of the first things I do when helping to set up a catalog for a client is to show them how to display important and helpful information in the Grid view of their catalog
Read MoreWhat you'll learn in this apple training: Apple Photos and iCloud is an easy to use and maintenance-free photo-system for your iPhone and Mac computer, but if it isn’t set up correctly from the beginning you can end up with a real mess and even risk losing photos. It would be nice if Apple did a better job of explaining how it works and how to set it up, but they don’t…
I have been working with my personal clients over the
I work with many clients, and as one might expect the collections I am seeing are getting bigger and bigger. I am currently working on two personal photo collections over 100k images and that is not uncommon.
The question then becomes, where is this going and do we really want to go there?
Read MoreI recently became a regular contributor to the popular website Sixty and me.
Read my latest article here - Have you become the designated family photo historian?
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The photo above was taken in 1969 when I was 15.
I arrived at the Woodstock Festival three days before it was scheduled to start. My friend Clifford and I actually had tickets for the festival, we were 14 and 15 years old respectively and ready for anything. Cliff’s mom was going to be driving to her country home near Bethel and she offered to drive us up, but the deal was we had to go up a few days early if we wanted the ride.
When we arrived, we found the few people already there doing the work of building and putting together the festival grounds. We somehow migrated to the area the Hog Farm had set up, they had a free kitchen that fed us and in return we helped build some concession stands and other structures around the area. They also gave us free hash breaks, which made the work a bit more pleasant.
Once the music started there were two options: cram yourself into the throngs of people sitting on the hill around the stage, or walk around and take in the scenery. I spent a lot of my time doing the latter. People would offer up a variety of drugs as I walked around, both the smoking kind and the pill kind. Sometimes they would just hand you a bottle, jug or goatskin canteen (a bota) filled presumably with wine, but often with some mescaline or other hallucinogen diluted in. Taking a sip was always an adventure, which I sometimes indulged but often didn’t. I suppose I would size up the offerer before making my decision.
The music was always there, whether you were looking directly at the stage or off somewhere in the rambles or over a hill or in one of the few unfortunate Porta-Pottys. I had seen many of the bands perform before, I was a regular at the Filmore East, usually as the result of my asking for free tickets from the parade of concert attendees filing into the theatre. But The Who, The Band, The Dead, were always a must see if I could. I had seen Hendrix a number of times, always magical, but I was long asleep by the time he played at sunrise.
I remember the one band everyone was talking about and anxiously awaiting was Crosby, Stills and Nash, it was to my knowledge one of, if not the first time they were playing together in front of a large crowd, and we were all looking forward to it. They were great, and it was to be the only time I would ever hear them perform.
The last night I ran into a girl I had met earlier in the summer on a bike trip to Nova Scotia. We gathered around some others who had found a dry spot on top of about 1000 Screw Magazines someone had given out. We all sat around a campfire on our Screw Magazine blankets talking about the last few days. Someone had also given out inflatable orange pup tents, which we blew up and then squeezed into for the night.
To this day I have no idea how I got back home to New York City. I remember walking a bit and then perhaps a bus, really not sure. Really doesn’t matter.
My memories of the whole event was that of a strange tableau of people and freaks, as we called ourselves then, having fun, being outrageous and loving and laughing with each other, all to the most amazing soundtrack every presented. I wish I remembered more of it, but as they say, if you say you remember Woodstock, you probably weren’t there.
Apple Photos has a trifecta of features – Live Photos, Burst Mode and HDR, that while offering some convenience and perks, really are part of a strategy that long-term results in massive subscription fees from ever-expanding iCloud accounts. OK, that sounds pretty paranoid, but it’s essentially true.
Apple has released these cool features over the years, which can unquestionably elicit a few oohs and aahs, but ultimately eats up enormous amounts of storage space while the unaware user has no idea why it’s happening. When you think about the relatively short period of time that iPhones, and in particular these features, have been around, it is staggering to think what 10 years, 20 years and more will bring in terms of these growing storage eating features that keep getting rolled out.
Read MoreFor years my mother had old photos of myself and other family members and friends thumbtacked to a corkboard in her kitchen. When I moved my mother out of her home a few years ago I had to remove these up to 40-year-old photos that were now faded and yellow and had multiple tiny holes in them from the repeated thumbtacking. If one didn’t know better you might have thought that I and my other family members were victims of some terrible voodoo ritual. Maybe Mom did have some unresolved feelings she was expressing, but more likely they just kept falling down.
Read MoreI’ve mentioned many time that my Grandfather, Boris Lenoff, owned and ran a portrait studio on the Coney Island Boardwalk in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn. It later moved to Ocean Parkway and probably closed sometime in the sixties when he sold off the entire inventory of cameras and photo files.
Read MoreIts so hard to talk about Capture Dates without getting super excited, so I will just calmly start at the beginning. OK, there’s actually nothing at all exciting about Capture Dates, but if you are working with digital images or scanned prints/film you do need to understand them a bit as they can either make your digital life a lot easier or very confusing.
The Capture Date is the date and time that a photo is taken.
Read MoreMy family and I visited the museum the other day here in LA to see the renowned King Tut exhibit. It will be the last time much of the collection will be able to be seen outside of Egypt, ever! The key word here is “seen”, as in looking at something and experiencing the use of our sensory ability called sight. If I am starting to sound sarcastic it is because as I wandered around the exhibit looking at all these ancient marvels, I also started to notice that many of those around me were not actually looking at the relics, but walking around and taking photo after photos of them with their mobile phones.
Read MoreIn 1974 my brothers Tim and Nico took a trip out the Midwest to visit their grandparents. My stepmother Susan was originally from Minnesota but her parents had relocated to Missouri and so the family took off for the heartland. Along the way they stopped for a visit to Mount Rushmore.
I love this shot that my father took. The quintessential snapshot would have typically had my brothers facing the camera, framed from head to toe (because we all know how important it is to include footwear in meaningful family portraits), with the four presidents shrunk to minuscule versions of themselves in the background.
Read MoreI recently had a chance to visit the fire zone in Agoura and Malibu, this was the wildfire called the Woolsey Fire that scorched parts of LA and Ventura Counties in November of 2018. It burned almost 100k acres, destroyed over 1600 homes and killed three people. Almost 300,000 people had to evacuate their homes, and it was many days before they could return because of fallen power lines and the danger from falling trees and branches. Most were lucky to return to intact homes, but many were not.
Read MoreI am always telling my clients that we all need to become the editors of our own life story, but sometimes figuring out what makes a photo worth keeping and adding to our story isn’t so easy. I’ve been a photo editor for years, but the criteria I used for professional editing and what I might consider for editing family photos isn’t necessarily the same.
What they both have in common is story telling, that’s what editing is. But while a professional edit requires a certain level of technical quality, family photos are more about emotional connections to people, places and things, the stuff memories are made of.
Read More…scanned from my archive. Boris Lenoff, Fire Island 1958. While growing up, there were always certain photos that seemed to be present, either in frames on the wall, taped to cabinets, stuck to the fridge or in one of the several photo albums lying around. My father and my mother’s father Boris, were usually the photographers of most of the family photos, so they aren’t present in as many of the family photos as other family members. Boris was a professional photographer, so like myself, he was usually much more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it.
Read MoreHow many photos will you have in 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Kinda scary right? And what about videos? Yikes!
Aside from the holidays, summer is the time of year we take a lot of pictures. Taking lot of pictures is great, but taking so many that you don’t even want to look at them, let alone edit them, is not OK. Also ballooning the storage on your phone is not fun, so let’s focus on quality not quantity this summer. Here are a few ways to do that.
Read Moreemail - peter(at)fotoflowsolutions.com phone - (three one zero) - 312-6640 All photos ©Peter Bennett - All Rights Reserved
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