Starting my next e-book project
I've been mulling over my next ebook project for a while, with some ideas I wanted to explore but no real idea of what that meant. Over the weekend , I realized what it should be, and so it's now started. I’m guessing it’ll be ready for public release by the end of November, but it’s going to take a good bit of work and I really want to sweat the design details more and make it a lot prettier than my first e-book.
I’m not mentioning the topic yet, but it does mean I'm digging through and cleaning up a bunch of older images. That’s actually teaching me a lot — unfortunately, one thing it’s already taught me is some of the pretty painful gaps in my images that I really need to put some energy into in 2021 to fix (for instance: I do not have a photo of a Mallard that I can use within the context of this book — and I call myself a bird photographer. Evidently one who puts too little time into common birds)
One thing I try to do every year is 1-2 blurb books of the images I really like from the year. For -- reasons (glares at viruses) -- that just doesn't seem likely, and so this is going to be an alternative until life returns to the point where I am producing a regular supply of new images of quality.
Reprocessing images that I haven't touched in over a decade just reminds me how much better our digital darkroom tools are today (and how much better I am at using them), and how much you can pull out of even a relatively ancient, "low res" image. Some of these images are out of a Canon 30D, with a whopping (for the day) 8 whole megapixels.
You can consider that a quiet reminder if you're still grinding away with Lightroom 6 or older, you're leaving a lot of image quality on the table and putting in a lot of time the tools could save you when you upgrade.
Of the four images below, two of them were shot in 2009/2010 on an 8 Megapixel Canon 30D. Two in 2020 using my Fuji X-T3. Without dumpster diving the metadata and just by looking at the images, can you tell me which are which? And what clues you in?
