With only a bit of effort and expense, it's amazing what can be accomplished online these days, thanks to various services, products and widgets. Here are some of the web-based tools I've used in creating my online presence. As with other recommendations, I make these from experience. And I have no financial interest in any of these items other than as a customer of them in the course of my normal photography work. I receive no freebies, kickbacks or fees for promoting these things.
The NiO PhotoShelter RSS Gallery Widget is the brainchild of photographer and developer Johan Peijnenburg. This widget is built in PHP and permits anyone running appropriate web site server software (including WordPress, Joomla or Nucleus) to create a highly flexible array of image galleries that automatically populate themselves from PhotoShelter galleries. This is a killer tool Johan has put together, and he offers it as free software to the PhotoShelter community. Thanks Johan!
June 2012. In Podcast #107 for Photograph.ca, Photo Realistic HDR, host Marko Kulik interviews me about HDR and the photorealistic techniques I use in my HDR work.
September 2011. 6 Tips for Photorealistic HDR is my brief take for Outdoor Photography Canada magazine on how to keep images looking photorealistic with High Dynamic Range (HDR) technique. Presented as a series of tips with some examples, I outline the basic approach I use in my HDR work.
March 2011. Roads More Traveled is an article published at NatureScapes.Net. Starting with the lines from the famous Robert Frost poem, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference," I look at the idea of what to do with roads more traveled.
August 2010. Why I Love HDR -- Part 1 is a the first of a series of articles on HDR that I'm writing as guest posts on the Bret Edge's blog. At a high level, I use HDR tools and technique for a couple of key things in my photography -- high fidelity capture and creative development. In this article, part 1 of the series, I give a perspective on HDR for high fidelity capture.
November 2008. Pepper Dreams is a code phrase I've developed for myself. I use it when I realize my challenges or preconceptions have blocked my creativity and enjoyment of photography. When I need to take a fresh view, I try to set my sights on something over-looked... like the front garden and a small pepper in a planter.
December 2007. An interview with Royce Howland is an opportunity I got to do an interview with Bill Lockhart. Bill is a traveler, accomplished photographer, and a writer on photography. He kindly gave me an opportunity to speak about some of my motivations and influences in adopting HDR technique for my photography.
July 2006. The High Dynamic Range (HDR) Landscape Photography Tutorial was the first comprehensive article that I know of on using HDR technique for landscape photography, including stitched panoramas. Despite its age, from the feedback I get, the article remains one of the best online references for HDR. And it's free!
These are all things I actually use, typically as core components of my digital darkroom. I only recommend from experience. I have no financial interest in any of these items -- I haven't been paid by or received any benefits from any company related to these products. I'm simply a satisfied customer.
DDI Software is run by photographer and developer Mike Chaney, maker of several software tools. The indispensable one for me is Qimage. You can think of it as a Swiss Army knife for photo printing. Reasonably priced yet packed with functionality that rivals software costing hundreds of dollars more, one of Qimage's key design themes is premium quality output with powerful layout options and efficient workflow. All of my own photo prints are made with Qimage, and prints that I have prepared by third-party services are often prepped through Qimage before I send out the master files.
HDRsoft, a French software company, are the makers of Photomatix Pro. Photomatix is one of the most popular High Dynamic Range (HDR) processing tools out there. On the market since 2003, it's also one of the longest shipping HDR tools. I have been using it since 2005, and have found it to be a powerful and indispensable element of my digital toolbox. I wrote extensively about Photomatix in my HDR article linked above, and still use it heavily today. Many of my images shown on this site and elsewhere were created in part with Photomatix.
Imatest is a company founded by master photographer and pioneering digital imaging scientist Norman Koren. He produces the software tool of the same name, but what I'm linking to here is his other main tool Gamutvision. Gamutvision is an incredibly useful piece of software that lets you slice and dice ICC profiles, whether for monitors, printers or other devices, and compare them to each other using a wide selection of metrics and visualization techniques. Quite simply, applying Gamutvision to color management in my digital work was a tremendously enlightening experience. If you work with ICC profiles in a color managed workflow, this tool will give you a nearly unrivaled depth of insight into what is going on with your images as they pass through the color management system. It's worth the learning curve if you care about color.
Kolor, another French software company, has produced Autopano Pro since 2005, now joined by Autopano Giga since 2009. Based in part on technology licensed from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Autopano is a sophisticated yet easy to use stitching tool. Digital stitching is another staple process in my digital darkroom, whether to create large format panoramic images, or densely detailed images in a traditional aspect ratio like 4x5. Autopano handles many complex situations, including gigapixel scale stitching jobs, and it natively supports HDR projects. It's another indispensable element in my work.