Capture the Moment!

Here are all my posts on photography, covering techniques, trips, research, exhibitions, talks and workshops. Watch out for my latest article every Saturday.

I’ve also written dozens of articles for Expert Photography and Camera Reviews.

If you’d like to contribute a guest post on any aspect of photography, please email me at nick@nickdalephotography.com. My standard fee is £50 plus £10 for each dofollow link.

Note: Some blog posts contain affiliate links to Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.

How to enlarge a photo

Gigapixel AI is the ‘ugly duckling’ of the Topaz Labs suite of software programs, but it can be just as useful as Sharpen AI and DeNoise AI if you need to enlarge an image, say for printing.

How to reduce noise

I’ve recently discovered the Topaz Labs suite of software products that includes Sharpen AI, Gigapixel AI and DeNoise AI. This article discusses how best to use the last of these.

How to sharpen an image

I use Adobe Lightroom for editing all my images, and it’s a very good program, so generally I have no complaints.

However, there’s one thing I never do in Lightroom, and that’s sharpening.

The problem is that ‘sharpening’ in Lightroom is not really sharpening at all. It’s contrast. And there’s a big difference.

Post-processing in Lightroom

There are two main steps I go through to edit my images:

1. Rating and adding metadata

2. Preparing for upload to stock agencies

Microstock upload procedure

I earn around 35% of my photography revenue from stock agencies and microstock sites. I started off submitting all my content at once to around 25 agencies, but I’ve gradually changed my workflow.

My top 10 birds

I’ve taken pictures of well over 200 birds around the world, so it’s been very tricky narrowing down the list to just ten. In the end, I had to cheat by broadening the definition of ‘bird’ from species to something like ‘genus’ or ‘family’.

My top 10 animals

The hippo is not one of my favourite animals. I just want to get that out of the way right at the start. They spend most of their time submerged up to their snouts in water, and it’s very difficult to get a decent picture of any of them.

What has Lightroom Ever Done for us?

…Apart from cropping images, adding vignettes, changing highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, chromatic aberration, camera profile etc, etc, etc!

My top 20 wildlife images

I recently joined the Society of International Nature and Wildlife Photographers (SINWP), and one of the first things I did was to apply to join their mentoring programme. The criteria they use to rate the images are as follows…