zacklayman's photostream

The photography gene seems to run in my family, but in me it's been recessive. It started with my Grandfather- a consummate shutterbug. My middle brother is establishing a name for himself in the Birmingham, AL market as a professional photographer (www.nalphoto.com) and my youngest brother is an accomplished hobbiest photographer. I've been very envious of their amazing photographs, so I just bought my first "real" camera. It's a Nikon D80 and have been enjoying my journey up the learning curve. I have the AF-S DX Zoom-NIKKOR 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED, the AF Zoom-NIKKOR 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lens, and I just bought a new Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D lens that I'm very excited about!

For Post Processing I rely heavily on Adobe Lightroom2 (excellent app!) and for higher level touch-ups and image manipulation I use Adobe PhotoShop CS2. Lastly I use Photomatix 3 for HDR.

I recently received the Spyder2 Express monitor calibration system (by DataColor) as a birthday present from my brothers. Let's just say that all of my postings should be a lot less "red" and a bit brighter from now on...

I'm pretty fascinated by long exposure and HDR, so I plan to dabble in that a bit. I'd also love to get into Macro, but I may have to wait to get a better closeup lens before I get serious with it. Otherwise, I'm learning to use natural light as much as possible, and to set my camera correctly for the best exposure, color saturation, white balance, etc...

Flickr has been great for fueling my creativity and helping to develop my "eye" for good subject matter, perspective, etc...

I appreciate any comments or constructive criticism.
-Zack