A quick drive uphill from the ranch house led to this California Oak and hillside grass. Hoping that the sun might pop through that small slot in the clouds, I opened a beer, leaned against the car and watched. I turned away for just a minute, the sun snuck below the clouds, and for 2 minutes lit up the green grass. I almost missed it. Photo Geek stuff: the sunstar comes from using a very small aperture and getting just a part of the sun. (Or by using a star filter - which I

I just had the dreaded phone call from a photographer friend: "My Lightroom Catalog is corrupted and I cannot open my main or backup catalogs". This is a thing that I can't fix over the phone - It's time for Adobe Help. They are skilled photographers that do amazing work, but did not know about Saving Metadata to File. This step saves all the work done in Lightroom (except Collections, Virtual Copies, and Flags) into the actual photo file - DNG, RAW Sidecar, TIFF or JPEG. T

Here is an example of finishing a photograph. All photos are "finished" - either by chemicals, by the camera, or by software. A digital camera turns light into 1s and 0s, and straight out of camera would show a blank screen! The camera can convert this into a finished file that you can see, or provide you with a RAW file that you can adjust as you wish. In this case, I've adjusted the RAW file to highlight the yellows and greens of the Cholla and bring out the colors in the g

Layers of stone, tilted and worn by time, stand against a battering sea. From a 2 person private workshop last spring at a favorite spot on the California Coast. I shot this with using a combination of telephoto, polarizer, and 4 stop ND for a 30 second exposure. #california #ourpubliclands #pacificocean #geology #danholmesphoto #longexposure