I have been experimenting with its filters. Lightroom offers you a handful of antique styles, ranging from simple black and white to genuine antique lighting. These filters enable you can take a modern digital photograph and convert it to some of its ancestral camera looks. I have found them especially useful for architectural photography, such as the famous pyramids featured above.

Take an antiqued photo and add grains to it, such as the image below, and you get an even more atmospheric look. There is something mysterious about how black and white enhances the message of a photo by decreasing its color.

I recommend this style especially for websites that present travel destinations and ancient architecture. The antique look gives the object the timeless feeling they deserve.

(By the way, my portrait to the right of this page also uses a seppia filter)

Every shoot teaches you something new: this shoot taught me that jewelry requires a macro lens, one that can focus on close-up subjects. I used a Canon 100mm macro over a dark backdrop (the same portable backdrop that folds into a bag, which can them be brought to homes for my Yuba City Photographer clientele).

There’s the macro lens for you! Close-up focus; details pop out crisply; dark backdrop makes it easier to post-edit the ring onto a completely black background, bringing the gold and precious stones into prominence.

(Note to budding photographers: according to my calculations, it will take a hundred jewelry shoots before I can afford to buy a ring like this!)

I did some research and asked a few friends. One couple had never developed any photo that they’d taken, neither from their vacation nor their daily iphone shoots. Another couple had developed two photos (out of thousands of clicks on their hard-drives), and even those were done as gifts for their parents.

So what is it with us, that we stop to capture almost anything with out smartphones – our dog jumping, our child splashing, our sister riding her bike – yet hardly ever do those clicks bear the fruit of photographs?

Ok, you’d say that social media spares us the need of physical prints. You click on the iphone and upload it onto Facebook or Picasa or Flickr. But isn’t that the same as leaving it on your hard-drive, where within a day or two it will never be seen again?

So I am tempted to launch a Yuba City Photographers campaign, where I visit people’s homes and explain to them the importance of printing their digital negatives, of following through all those many haphazard clicks and seeing that the best of them flower into fully-fledged photographs.

You can make timeless memoirs out of your photographs, print pocket-sized copies to place in your wallet, frame canvas prints to hang on your walls or creatively make your own custom cards. It’s all a matter of a little effort beyond pulling out your smartphone and clicking, the little effort of following through.

I’ve chosen 4 favorites (showing two photos of each below). All offer a press printed or matted version.  And here’s where I need your help – which one would you choose to hold your photos from a wedding or portrait session?

Photography Album Number 1:

Classic elegance, heavyweight fine-art paper, swiss ribbon, Japanese book-binding fabrics:

Photography Album Number 2:

Modern chic, opens to lay flat, printed on Fuji-luster paper:

Photography Album Number 3:

Contemporary classic, leather bound:

Photography Album Number 4:

Playful and unique, each album designed by individual artisan,

Please choose between Albums 1, 2, 3, and 4 and comment on my facebook page

Here’s an example: a sweet Chinese hostess serves us tea in one of the many Beijing tea houses. We will sample some of her finest crop and then purchase packs of tea to bring back home. She obliges us, through her kindness, and we then reciprocate by purchasing her produce.

There are a few things in action in this photograph: the precise manner of the hostess, as can be seen by her delicate hand and the stream of tea poured into the porcelain cups. You see the juicy deep green tea-leaves receiving the hot water. You see the steam rising from the cup.

If that were all there was in this photo, I would consider it a mere technical shot of a Chinese tea ceremony. You could judge it more or less successful based on personal opinion, but either way, it would be regarded as impersonal and wouldn’t carry much emotion.

But in truth, this photograph is a family portrait. Mirrored in the silver teapot are myself (a Yuba City photographer in Beijing!), my husband (sipping tea) and my parents. So the photo captures a moment in one of our most special travels to China, where, after a long day of walking around, we stepped into a local store and experienced a serene tea tasting.

So if you’d ask me what qualifies some photographs to be considered ‘art’, this would be my answer: art is judged by meaning, and the more subtleties a photograph–or painting or sculpture or movie–convey, the more artistic they are.

Good luck creating art!

My photography aims for this year are to practice one portrait a week. This has always proven easier said than done, but I never regretted making the effort to schedule a portrait session with a friend. If friends are unavailable, I will shoot pets! Either way, the aim is to keep improving my skills in portrait photography.

I also plan to improve my photography gear this year and stay current with the new trends. I will attend the WPPI photographers conference in Las Vegas in February, which brought me much inspiration and instruction last year. It is one of the best ways of keeping current with leading photographers and newly released equipment.

As far as I can tell, travel plans will be restricted to the US (although I am open to surprises). I will probably travel throughout California a few times, and hope to visit the East Coast sometime in spring or summer.

Theatre and photography go hand in hand, as I’ve mentioned before; the one inspires the other. I’ve agreed to participate in three plays this year! That, already, makes it a special year. For this occasion, I launched a Shakespeare Summary site which will present my visual summaries that are intended to introduce people to Shakespeare and remove the imaginary difficulties they have with his language. I will add more plays to it as we perform them.

“All the world’s a stage”, said Shakespeare. May we all enact our parts as gracefully and professionally as we can, striving to become better each day, and through that, improve the stage and cast and audience around us.