London Photography – October 2018

Tower Bridge Light Trails

London Calling?  In October I had a business trip over to London to attend the Payment Card Industry Community Meeting as well as a visit to our European HQ offices. While there was a ton of work to do in the ten days I spent there, I did have a number of opportunities to get out […]

Milky Way Processing in On1 Photo Raw 2018

Final Milky Way Image processed through the steps in this tutorial

Bringing the Milky Way to Life As I’ve posted previously, I have been intrigued by astrophotography and photographing the Milky Way for a while, but really never took the plunge. A lot of the information on the interwebs make learning this almost cult like… there are secret handshakes, obscure references and seemingly mystical processing steps […]

Bitten by the Astrophotography Bug!

Francis Walter Dam Milky Way: II - 09052018

Is there a cure for this Astrophotography Disease? Having recently gotten back into my photography hobby addiction, I seem to have developed a bad case of the infamous Astrophotography bug. Symptoms include insomnia, hyper-caffeination, mumbling to oneself about cloudy skies, cursing the dawn, and chasing the Milky Way. If you see someone with this condition, give […]

Migrating from Lightroom to On1 Photo Raw

My Workflow prior to migrating everything to On1 Photo

Operation: Workflow Simplification – On1 Photo Migration For a long time now, I have been using Adobe Lightroom for managing my photo collections and libraries, while using On1 Photo to perform the bulk of my editing, primarily because (in my eyes) On1 wasn’t yet mature enough to risk it. With the release of On1 Photo […]

SteelStacks – Bethlehem Pennsylvania

Bethlehem Steel Stacks HDR Image

SteelStacks in HDR It’s been a bit of a slog getting back into photography. Picking up the camera again has been difficult, tedious and ultimately rewarding. This morning I took a drive down to Bethlehem and stopped at SteelStacks to get a few shots to ‘reboot’ my creativity. I ended up staying for an hour […]

Bear Creek Falls Pennsylvania – Photography & Lesson Learned

Bear Creek Falls - ©2018 John P. Hoke

Bear Creek Falls Waterfall I like to ride my motorcycle through the Poconos, and I regularly pass the Bear Creek Falls on my ride around the Francis Lewis Dam. It is usually a trickle of water falling down the step like rocks, but we have been deluged with rain for a couple of weeks and […]

Australia, New Zealand & New Photo Gear

Sydney Opera House Sunset

Business travel may not be glamorous, but has its perks. I returned home from this weekend from a business trip that took me to Auckland and Christchurch New Zealand as well as Sydney Australia. While I do love visiting these cities, the trip there and back is hellacious and it takes me days to recover […]

Image Optimization – ShortPixel for WordPress

ShortPixel: Of course size matters - nobody wants a small cup of coffee (or large images)

ShortPixel – (Image) Size Does Matter The majority of this website is related to my photography obsession hobby. I’ve always walked a fine line on image optimization – trying to get the smallest images with the best quality and retain the EXIF/Metadata of the images. Until recently, I have been using a mix of  EWWW Image Optimizer […]

Photography backup and archiving – plan for disaster

Photography Backup - Meme

Protecting your work with a successful photography backup plan I’ve been asked how I protect my artwork, images and related information with a dedicated photography backup plan. I take a belt and suspenders approach with multiple copies on and off site using both free and subscription services. When approaching a backup solution or plan, first […]

Holyrood Palace Panorama

Holyrood Panorama

Holyrood Palace – Edinburgh Scotland I am going through some photos I took on a trip to Edinburgh back in October… Yes I am procrastinating as always 🙂 I found a series of shots I took to create an HDR panorama of Holyrood Palace, so I had some time while downloading software and wanted to […]