New Travel and Street Photography Book

March 30, 2014 by John Batdorff Leave a Comment

Travel and Street Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots

My love of street photography and passion for travel have finally come together with my latest book, “Travel & Street Photography: From Snapshots to Great Shots.” All photographers, including me, make their fair share of mistakes along the way and this book is a culmination of everything I've learned from those mistakes. My objective: Create an essential guide for travel photography and expand upon the basics of my most recent eBook on Street Photography, “Street Photography: A Guide to Finding and Capturing Authentic Portraits and Streetscapes.”

It's my hope that the book speaks to amateurs and serious hobbyists alike by providing key building blocks and great tips to hone your travel and street photography skills. Whenever I read a book my number one hope is to walk away with a new idea or different perspective on how to do things. I like a book that makes me say, “Hmmm, I would have never thought about that!” I hope I have achieved that in writing this book for you. It is written in a practical manner melding tips and recommendations from the early stages of planning, traveling to your destination, and how to get great images on location.

We cover a lot of ground in this book including:

My favorite camera kits for street and travel photography
Packing and planning guides
Essential travel accessories
Trip planning tools and tips
Setting goals and getting the shots
Useful checklists
Domestic and international travel
Considerations for urban and rural destinations
In depth coverage of the legal issues surrounding street photography

I am really proud of this book because I share tons of truly practical advice that I have gathered from my own travel and experience as a street photographer. I hope you enjoy it!

Available From

Street Photography e-Book

September 27, 2013 by John Batdorff Leave a Comment

Street Photography

Street Photography has always been a passion of mine so it brings me great pleasure to announce my new ebook “Street Photography: A Guide to Finding and Capturing Authentic Portraits and Streetscapes.” This ebook has truly been a labor of love and at the same time a bit of a departure from my more technical processing-focused books. This book focuses more on my mindset and approach to street photography, while fueling you with solid tips that will hopefully make you a more confident street photographer. What I love about street photography are the barriers of entry are low (you just need a camera) and the only limits are your creative boundaries.

I get a lot of questions from photography workshop attendees on how I approach my street photography and this books answers many of the most common questions such as:

How do you approach people?
Do I need to tell someone I’m taking a photo of them?
What are the best locations to photograph people?
How do you make sure you’re prepared?
Do I need a model release?
What sort of equipment do I need?
What lens do you recommend?
What are your thoughts on color or black and white?

What’s even better is I’ve decided to give away five new presets dedicated to Street Photography. These presets will be available free of charge to any that purchases the ebook and registers. Click this link to order my Street Photography ebook.

I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Update:

New York City Photo Workshop

I've recently added a 3 day New York City photography workshop dedicated to improving your street photography. If you're interested in learning more then click on the following link: New York City Photography Workshop

My new book — Nikon D7100: From Snapshots to Great Shots

June 10, 2013 by John Batdorff Leave a Comment

I’ve been absent from the blog as I’ve wrapping up a few projects, but I’m happy to announce things are settling down for the summer. I promise to start posting regularly, but in the meantime here’s what you may have missed:

New book announcement:

I just finished writing my book, “Nikon D7100: From Snapshots to Great Shots,” and was recently informed by my publisher (Peachpit) that the book will be shipping by July 4th. The D7100 is an impressive camera with many great features for it’s price range. The book is targeted at beginning to intermediate photographers who are looking to brush up on their photographic skills while learning what camera features will help them reach their creative goals.

New projects:

I’m currently in Brussels (with my dad) gathering images for my new project that I know my readers are going to love, but I can’t share it with you yet! As soon as everything gets locked down then you’ll be the first to know. Why did I even bring it up? Because I’m super stoked about this new writing project and I can’t wait to spill the beans!

Black-and-white presets:

I’ve had a lot of people buy my Lightroom black-and-white presets and I want to thank you. As a reminder, I’ll be updating the presets for Lightroom 5.0, once Adobe has officially released the update.

Heading west:

I’m heading to Montana in a few weeks and will remain there for most of the summer, so be prepared to see a shift in images from streetscapes to mountain ranges. 😉

That’s the quick update, but I’ll be posting more in the coming days.

Take care,
John

Google and Nik Software Deliver!

March 25, 2013 by John Batdorff 3 Comments

Google and Nik Software is proving a lot of skeptics wrong, showing the new merger can provide some robust offerings. Let’s start with it’s recent announcement that it will be offering it’s newly updated Nik Collection suite for a whopping 70% discount off it’s original price. If that wasn’t sweet enough, they’ve made the deal even better by providing current owners a free upgrade to the entire suite regardless if you own the suite or just one of the plugins. Yeah, I know, it’s sounds too good to be true. However, this is just plain smart because now you have no reason not to explore Nik’s entire suite of plugins. Did I mention Nik has adopted an “evergreen” policy? This means that once you own the product you’re entitled to any and all future upgrades free of charge.

Now I’ve always been a fan of Nik Software, and like everyone else I was a bit concerned about it’s acquisition by Google. But in my humble opinion this is a game changer. Google and Nik have delivered a solid one-two punch by providing photographers with the best photo editing software at an amazingly affordable price. Apparently, Google is very serious about it’s commitment to photographers and I’m sure their hope is this will help them gain market share as they continue to lure photographers to Google Plus. In a nutshell, I don’t think there’s ever been a more exciting time to be a photography enthusiast.

If you’re looking for a reference book then might I suggest “Plug In with Nik”. I hear the author is a good guy and has an easy going writing style. Plus, there’s a few free presets included.. 😉

Plug In with Nik is now shipping!

January 28, 2013 by John Batdorff 4 Comments

It’s official: all the major book suppliers have begun shipping “Plug In with Nik.” It feels good when a big project is finally completed. It feels even better when you wake up and find out your book is the number two best seller in the photography category!

I saw this and about spilled my coffee.

Crazier yet, is to find out it’s ranked number one in digital photography and digital media management categories.

It was even more humbling to see these stats.

These rankings change hour to hour, but at 10:30 last night in the midst of a winter thunderstorm I couldn’t help myself from yelling in true Highlander fashion,“There can only be one!” (Favorite childhood movie reference.) Of course this led to Anna looking at me in bewilderment and pointedly asking? “It’s not a hardcover? You mean your number one in the flimsy book category?” Pop….goes my ego. 🙂

Anyway, I’m truly pleased with the book and happy customers are finally receiving copies. If you're interested in buying the book, you can check it out at these locations:

Plug In with Nik

January 10, 2013 by John Batdorff 2 Comments

Plug IN with NIK by John Batdorff

A good image begins with a solid foundation, built with an interesting composition and good content, but one of the dirty secrets in photography is that post-processing can be every bit as important. When I clicked the button to purchase my very first Nik plugin, Color Efex Pro, I didn’t realize the world I was opening up. That first plugin, which I used to warm up a portrait had a huge impact on my final image. This powerful, yet simple approach to image manipulation opened my eyes to all the creative possibilities that I thought were reserved only for the very best Photoshop experts. I quickly added the rest of these unique and powerful plugins to my workflow.

It’s these possibilities that I’m so very excited to share with you in my new book, Plug In with Nik: A Photographer's Guide to Creating Dynamic Images with Nik Software. When I began writing this book, I imagined the reader would be someone who is relatively new to Nik Software or possibly a current owner who never felt like they harnessed all of the potential. The book was written to provide a solid reference for each plugin and its interface while giving some insight with some of my favorite techniques that I’ve developed. You don’t need to own the entire software suite to benefit from the book, so feel free to jump around to chapters that interest you the most and I think you will agree there is power with the simplicity of these tools, whether you’re using Lightroom, Photoshop or Aperture with the plugins.

In this new book I cover:

Dfine Best practices for applying noise reductions. How to manipulate noise reduction in a particular color.

Viveza 2 Processing a color image using U-point technology. Register your book and you can download some of the images to process along side me.

Color Efex Pro 4 Hands down one of my favorite plugins! We’ll explore some of my favorite effects and learn how to create your very own recipes. I’ll even include a few of my own to download.

Silver Efex Pro 2 Black and white at it’s best. If you love black and white then this is the chapter for you. I’ll cover the interface at length and show you first hand how I process images.

HDR Efex Pro 2 Nik has totally rewritten HDR Efex Pro creating what I consider to be the best HDR software on the market. I’ll cover how to use the software with a single image or truly harness the power of the dynamic range by merging several properly spaced exposures.

Sharpening Pro 3 Get an edge on your competition by learning how to properly sharpen your image for output for print or screen display.

Nik Software’s plugins are simply the best in class because they provide the key to unlocking your creative potential. Processing shouldn’t be hard work; getting a good image is hard enough! There’s a lot of good content online but it’s my hope that this book will help to consolidate those answers and serve as solid reference for the Nik Suite into the foreseeable future.

BONUS: Don’t forget to register your book after purchase on Peachpit's website to receive practice images as well as a handful of free presets I created. I hope you enjoy the book and it helps you tap into your creative genius.

As always, if you have any questions feel free to drop me a line.

Very best, John