David duChemin's Blog, page 29

Desperate Intention

I told her I had a few things left on my bucket list. She told me my life was a bucket list. I pulled my pen from my pocket, scribbled that down in my dog-eared little notebook. It seemed clever at the time. Like that one time when a friend told me she thought of me as Indiana Jones with a camera, a thought that made me smile for a week. Who doesn’t love Indiana Jones?

What makes me recall these details so fondly is of course that I want these fantasies to be true as much as anyone else does. I’m surrounded by friends that are one martini away from being James Bond, one adventure short of being Shackleton. My friends are hard to connect with. It’s taken me a couple weeks to get something I needed from a friend because he’s been in Antarctica, and the window was tight because he was on his way to Iceland. And when it’s not them it’s me. There’s as much a chance of us meeting in an airport somewhere on the other side of the globe than here at home. Home is a transferable concept, most of the time. But it’s an intoxicating way to live when that same poison doesn’t kill you. I don’t know one of us that wouldn’t claim to be the luckiest man or woman on the planet, and I don’t know one of us that hasn’t been told so a hundred times.

So it makes it hard, when you feel so lucky, so truly kissed by fortune, to have to waver a little and put credit where credit is due, not entirely with fortune, as grateful as we are for her brilliant, meddling ways, but squarely on our own shoulders. It makes it hard because no one likes feeling cocky or ungrateful.

But putting aside for a moment the fact that all of us live our lives floating on a raft that rides the waves and currents of circumstances over which we do not have full, if any, control, it’s the foolish traveler that doesn’t fashion a rudder and do whatever he can to get where he longs to go. The great American thinker Henry David Thoreau said the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. I think they just feel lost on the raft, desperate because the current’s too strong, the waves too big, and it’s never occurred to them to make a rudder and push across the current. It’s never occurred to them to live, instead, a live of desperate intention.

When you awaken to the truly heartbreaking brevity of life, your heart quickens. It’s easy to tape Carpe Deum to your wall, or re-tweet Mark Twain’s encouragement to throw off the bowlines and sail away from safe harbour. But without intention, it’ll fade, and the boat will stay safe in the harbour. Without action, we don’t so much seize the day as slap it on the shoulder as it passes us by.

I don’t think we’re fundamentally lazy, that so many of us don’t make it from re-tweeting extraordinary quote to living extraordinary lives is because we’re just never get around to it. I think many of us don’t know what’s possible. Raised in a culture that honours the patterns, we went to school, got a job, got married and had kids, and it’s only somewhere after that that our souls begin to ask if there weren’t other options we might have taken.  And now we feel stuck, constrained. If only people would live their lives as creatively and intentionally as they create their art. But then maybe it feels safer to take a risk or two with art, than it does with our families, our finances, our futures.

No, the reason so many never got around to it, I think, is because they never knew they had the option. And now they feel stuck. If only they had some notion of how easily we could all climb out of debt if our appetites shrunk. It’s not that we want our big screen televisions and new cars that is the problem, it’s that we want them more than the life we’re always telling others we wished we could live. We want to go to India but it seems so far off. Easier to spend $2000 on a new lens, the one we think we’ll need when we one day get around to India. Except that the new lens just put India so much further away. It’s not wanting this bigger life that is the problem, it’s that we’re choosing a smaller one every day by the accumulation of little compromises and thoughtless activities that, by now, feel like a rut, and we can’t have both. We never knew the other was so possible.

But it is. Most of my friends right now are somewhere amazing on the planet, doing something astonishing, and they’re just like you and I. Like you, they struggle sometimes to make the bill payments. They have kids and families. They have the same fears and health concerns. Yet there they are. Mongolia. Antarctica. Venice. In the coming year and a half I’ll spend time with grizzly bears in British Columbia, and Polar Bears on Hudson Bay. I’ll photograph the snowbound landscapes of Hokkaido, Japan, and the nomadic pastoralists in northern Kenya before coming home to spend a week do-sledding on Baffin Island, then diving with whale sharks in Mexico. And the dirty little secret is you can do this too. Or whatever your version is. You can. And you’re either choosing not to, for a million reasons. Or you’re choosing to do something else. But it’s a choice all the same.

There is so much power in the human will. I don’t want to make this seem so simple that I’m called out for being a dreamer, but it’s amazing what happens when you look at the calendar a year from now and with a red sharpie marker, put a line through three weeks and make a plan. Set a budget. Save your money. Make sacrifices. Sell a lens you don’t use. Put off replacing that iPhone 4. Tech is the worst way to spend money. Put 10% aside faithfully. Tighten the belt. Book the flights on points or start looking for seat sales. Cut the grocery bill by 20% and get creative with lentils and beans. Much of the world lives on a fraction of what we do.

I know. Before you say it, I know. This isn’t realistic. You’re right, it’s not. And it’s not realistic for me, either. It never has been. Not for any of us. And most people that have lived their short lives on their own terms have been told so time and time again. But still they do it. They find a way. They find creative ways around the troubling persistence of reality, their doubts, fears, and whatever constraints they have. They don’t wait until conditions are perfect. Conditions are never perfect. It could be they fail 9 out of 10 times every time they decide to cross the threshold of that next brilliant adventure. But they do it, don’t they? And when they don’t, when it all goes south, they have stories, not excuses. A couple years ago I still managed to set foot on 6 continents while nursing broken feet in the process of healing. I wasn’t brave, and I wasn’t stupid. I was just stubborn. I want to see this astonishingly beautiful planet and all her surprises, and I’ll crawl to see them if I have to.

Whatever your next big adventure – raising your kids, launching your business, seeing the world – do it intentionally. Do it with boldness. Sacrifice what you have to. Cut off the prevailing voices that tell you how impossible it is. It’s why I stopped watching television. Too many advertisements telling me what I needed to live the good life. Those voices will tell you you can have anything you want – as long as it’s a car, something shiny that the Joneses don’t have yet, anything as long as it keeps you shackled to the job that’s slowly digesting your soul. I know what I need to live a good life, and it won’t be found on television. The story that means the most to me will not be acted, but lived. I don’t want to watch Indiana Jones. I want to be Indiana Jones. Or my aging version of it. I promise you, it is possible. But it won’t happen accidentally. It happens intentionally, with many a failure. As beautiful as the words, “I wish,” are, they’re impotent next to the words, “I will…”

This is the third in a series of posts. You might also want to read Life is Short, and Fill Your Canvas.   If you enjoy them, please share them – the buttons below make it easy.  Thank you.

Fill Your Canvas

My mother and I on safari this January. Photographs by Cynthia Haynes.

On Friday I re-posted Life is Short. The comments and the emails I’ve had since that original post have lit me on fire in a way I can’t describe, reminding me how deeply we can live when we get intentional about it. It also reminds me of the powerful voice of fear that whispers in all our ears. It’s likely that voice that has kept us from living intentionally and passionately. It’s that voice that says, “Yeah, but what if…?”

Yeah, but what if I get hurt? What will this cost me? What will they think? What if it’s hard and I fail?

Fear is a junk artist. It creates something of our lives that we never intended, molds us into the same mediocre shape as everyone else. And like any artist, it asks What if… with alarming frequency. But what if we didn’t abdicate our role as the artist of our lives? What if we listened to fear’s question and replied in kind: Sure, but what if I never try? What will that cost me? What if I succeed? What if I don’t, but the failure teaches me better lessons than the mediocrity ever could, and it makes me a different person, a stronger person, a person who one day takes flight instead of stumbling?

I don’t know how to put it into words. Each time I try I feel like I’m flailing. But I feel like I need to try, at least once more, to remind myself and anyone that’ll listen, that we are the artists of our own lives and like any art it is messy, and full of questions and uncertainty, but it is an act of intentionality. Who we are, what we do, who we become, is our art. Sure, it can be accidental, the life that looks like an absent-minded doodle, the life that became what it was while the artist, pen in hand, was busy talking on the phone. That’s one choice, or it’s a refusal to choose. Hell, maybe we never knew we had a choice. But it can also be intentional. A fiery act of passionate brush strokes made in wild reds and yellows across the canvas. We have no idea how large that canvas is, we could reach its edges before we ever imagined, but those colours are no less intense for being on a smaller canvas. And when the paint goes awry, we scrape it off and do it again. Or we leave it and let it slide over the edges, more beautiful for its passion and imperfection.

But God help us, born to this canvas and paint, if we do nothing with it, sign our name on its empty off-white surface and hang it on the wall, after a long succession of lookalike days leads us to our graves, content merely not to have made a mess of the canvas. Who will gaze on that unmarked rectangle on the wall, next to the million others, all of them differentiated only by the names scribbled in the corners, and do anything but sigh? Perfectly safe. Tragically wasted.

Like everyone, I am afraid, and probably afraid of so many of the same things. We share the same night terrors, you and I; I’m sure of it. But if fear’s an artist then I’ll learn from it, and when it whispers I’ll lean in and whisper back a reminder. I won’t be stopped by fear of things tangible, real, and undeniable, but trivial next to the fear of going to my grave safe, my canvas unmarked.

Fill your canvas. Let us hear your voice. Whatever the colour on your palette, however misshapen your stretcher bars. Fill it. If it’s been so long since you’ve used your brushes that the bristles are hard and paralyzed then throw them away and paint with your hands. But paint unhindered by your fear and when it’s voice gets loud again, lean in, and paint harder.

Life Is Short – A Re-Post

Several years ago this post (below) was deeply significant to me. It was an act of nailing my colours to the mast, and not long after I posted it, I began a trip that would change my life forever – selling most of what I owned, putting the rest into a tired Land Rover Defender, and setting off to live nomadically around the continent. A few months into that trip I took a detour to Italy, fell off a wall and shattered both my feet. Today I’m a week into yet another surgery to deal with the aftermath of that incident. This time they chiseled a piece of my hip off and put it into my ankle. It’s been a rough week. I needed to hear these words myself, and since I’m having a tough time writing right now, I thought I’d re-post this for those that haven’t read it, and offer a reminder to those that have. Life is short and beautiful, and the more intentionally we engage it with the deepest parts of us, the more of it we’ll truly live. Don’t you dare waste it. The images above are from the safari Cynthia and I did with my mother this January, a bucket list for all three of us.

Life Is Short. Nov.16, 2010

I had breakfast with a close friend of mine yesterday and it’s that meeting that is making me write this, because I can’t keep it in this morning. His wife, one of my favourite people on the planet, is fighting for her life against inoperable brain cancer. She’s fighting, but she’s not well, and the doctors are talking in terms of quality of life, not healing, not remission. My heart is breaking for her. My heart is breaking for him. A young couple that, like all of us, thinks they have forever together, have all the time in the world to chase their dreams. But we don’t. None of us do. It’s an illusion.

Life is short. We seem to think that we’ll live forever. We spend time and money as though we’ll always be here. We buy shiny things as though they matter and are worth the debt and stress of attachment. We put off the so-called “trip of a lifetime” for another year, because we all assume we have another year. We don’t tell the ones we love how much we love them often enough because we assume there’s always tomorrow. And we fear. Oh, do we fear. We stick it out in miserable jobs and situations because we’re afraid of the risk of stepping out. We don’t reach high enough or far enough because we’re worried we’ll fail, forgetting – or never realizing – that it’s better to fail spectacularly while reaching for the stars than it is to succeed at something we never really wanted in the first place.

A woman emailed earlier this year. Her husband, the love of her life, was a fan of mine and he’d just come through a tough fight with Leukemia. She asked if I’d take some time with him, go shooting with him if he came to Vancouver, sort of as a celebration of his recovery. I said yes, of course, how could I not. But I was busy, about to travel, and could we do it in a couple months when summer rolled around and I had time to host him. Of course. Let’s talk soon. I got back two months later and sent an email saying, let’s make it happen! And 5 minutes later got a reply telling me the leukemia had returned with speed and fury and within days he’d gone. Even now, I’m writing this with tears, though anyone that knows me knows it doesn’t take much.

We think we’ve got forever and that these concerns that weigh us down are so pressing. We worry about the trivial to the neglect of the most precious thing we have: moments we’ll never see again. We talk of killing time, passing time, and getting through the week, forgetting we’re wishing away the moments that comprise our lives. We say time is money when in fact the time we have is ALL we have. Money can be borrowed, time can’t. We fear taking risks, unaware that the biggest risk we run in playing it safe is in fact living as long as we hope and never doing the things we dreamed of. And then it’s too late. We watched our favourite TV shows, we fought a losing battle with our weight, we picked up the guitar once in a while and never quite finished the french language courses we wanted to do. We managed to get a large flatscreen and new cars once in a while, but the list of things we’d have done if we could really, truly could have done anything, kept growing. And we never did them.

I don’t know how to wrap this up. There’s no resolution. I was in Sarajevo last week thinking about all this; I’d be walking the old city thinking how amazing it was, looking into the hills that surround it. And then it occurred to me, just over 15 years ago the citizen of Sarajevo that stood in this spot was likely to be hit by mortar shells or sniper fire. We’re all terminal folks. We’re all in the sniper scope. We’ve got less time that we think. For every ten people that email me and say, “I wish I could do what you’re doing. I wish I could follow my dreams, I wish, I wish…,” I wonder if even one moves forward. I hope so.

Whatever your dream is, find a way to make it happen. Your kids can come with you. Your job can wait. You can find someone to feed the cat. I know, I know, there are so many reasons we can’t and some of those reasons are valid. Life is not only short, it is also sometimes profoundly hard. But I think sometimes our reasons are in fact only excuses. If that’s the case, take stock. I talk a lot about living the dream, and I’m an idealist, I know it. But it’s not self-help, positive-thinking, wish-upon-a-star. It’s the realization that life is short and no one is going to live my life on my behalf. And one day soon – because it’ll seem that way, I know it – my candle will burn out; I want it to burn hot and bright while it’s still lit. I want it to light fires and set others ablaze.

Life is short. Live it now. And live it with all your strength and passion now. Don’t keep it in reserve against a day you might not have. While the ember is still lit, fan it to flame. Be bold about it, even if your circumstances mean all you have is to love boldly and laugh boldly. Because now is all we have, and these dreams won’t chase themselves.

The Created Image 2014

This July we’re inviting you back to Vancouver for The Created Image. It’s an intense workshop about the art of photography and the journey of craftsmanship that gets us there. And this year I’ve invited friends.

Ami Vitale is, among other things, a National Geographic photographer and amazing human being, and she’ll be giving the keynote to kick off this amazing two days together. She’ll also be doing two sessions about photographic storytelling. Piet van Den Eynde is coming from Belgium to do 4 sessions about the art of the digital darkroom, and I will be doing 4 sessions as well.

We will be releasing a full itinerary next week, but wanted to give you a heads up so that when registration opens you’ll have had time to check your calendar and make some decisions. We’re keeping it relatively small, so space is limited, which means those spaces will go quickly. If you would like to be among the first to know, get your name onto the mailing list now and you’ll get details in your inbox before we post the information elsewhere. This mailing list is only for this event.

Where: The Roundhouse Art Centre (Vancouver, BC – Yaletown district)

When: July 9 (evening) through July 11, 2014

Cost: CAD $750 (Early-bird – before April 15), CAD $850 (regular)

Get your name on the mailing list and we’ll let you know when early-bird registration opens.

 

Pilgrimage at Lalibela

I’ve just posted a new portfolio and thought I’d invite you to take a look. My first trip to Ethiopia was in 2006, a month-long road trip that blew my mind, and no place more so than Lalibela. I’ve returned to Ethiopia 6 times now, and to Lalibela three times, and each time it completely captured my imagination. What other places can you go to on this planet with such history, and still so living and active? It’s changing, of course, everything does; in 2006 there weren’t the large UNESCO shelters built to preserve the rock-hewn churches. You see those right away and for me they’re a sad reality. The omnipresence of mobile phones blew me away this year. Some of the pilgrims walked for weeks or months to get there, other piled on buses from the other side of the country, and others still flew up from Addis, took a lot of iPhone selfies, and flew home. Strange. But even in all the change, the place retains a holiness about it, an otherness about it, if you’re willing to sit still with an open heart and open eyes – and I long to go back to. You can see that expanded portfolio if you follow this link. I hope you see in these images some of the mystery and beauty I see there.

If you’ve always wanted to go, Jeffrey Chapman, my friend and partner in crime on two of these journeys, is taking a group back next January, and you can get more information here. Don’t wait long, this is one of those places you want to go to before it gets forever changed by market forces and tourist dollars. I won’t be there – I’ll be in Hokkaido freezing my arse off while you guys are drinking some of the best coffee of your lives in a place that feels 2000 years back in time. But if you want to go, get on it, this year’s trip sold out quickly.

Take me to the Pilgrimage At Lalibela portfolio.

PS – Many of you know I was in surgery yesterday. They pulled some hardware out and fused one of the ankle joints. The surgery went well and I’m now home and grateful for the emails and comments, etc. Thank you too for the prayers and good wishes and healing mojo – all very much appreciated. With any luck this will be the last of it for a while to come.

TEN MORE, Now Free.

After 4 years as one of our best-selling, most loved eBooks, Ten More is now free. Both TEN and TEN MORE have now been downloaded about 100,000 times and I can’t tell you how grateful I am to have seen this weird little, “Hey, what if I made an eBook?” project come to life the way it has. I knew when I left my career in comedy, and returned to photography, that teaching would be part of it, but I never imagined how much it would change my life. To everyone who bought this eBook over the years – thank you. Would you do me one more favour and tell the people in your world that it’s here and it’s free? And if they’ve not got the first one, TEN, it’s free too. You can get them both at CraftAndVision.com. The TEN product page is here, and the TEN MORE page is here.

While we’re talking about free resources, be sure to check out the Craft&Vision podcast, About the Image. There are 9 episodes up now, and the latest is the second half of a two-part series called Question The Image. Check them out here on the C&V podcast page.

Please accept my apologies for the quiet around here. I’ve been gearing up for surgery. After the accident 3 years ago my right foot still has issues so they’re going back in tomorrow to fix some things. I’ll have more time after the surgery, when the pain meds wear off, to get back to a rhythm and I’ll be writing again soon. As always, thank you.

PHOTOGRAPH, Issue 6

The newest issue of PHOTOGRAPH—a digital quarterly magazine for creative photographers—is hot off the virtual press and our team’s created another really great issue.

Issue 6 includes three portfolios and Q+As—this time from Hal Eastman, Scott Rinchenberger, and Nathan Wirth, all of them full of some breathtaking photography and really thoughtful interviews about why and how they do their work. All our regular columnists continue to write from their hearts: John Paul Caponigro, Bruce Percy, Chris Orwig, Adam Blasberg, Piet Van den Eynde, Martin Bailey have written articles about composition, creativity, studio lighting, camera craft, printing, and post-production. It’s a really great issue. 140 great ad-free pages filled with inspiration and education for creative photographers.

Since launching our new website we’ve taken the PHOTOGRAPH subscription off the table in favour of a discount when we launch each issue. So if you’re looking to save money make sure you’re on the Contact Sheet newsletter and you’ll get the discount code, so you can buy the current issue for the same price you’d get it if you had a subscription – $6/issue. You can sign up for The Contact Sheet here, and along with the discounts we’ll send you links to featured inspiration and resources, and tell you how to get in on the monthly giveaway.

If you’ve previously purchased a subscription… we’ve sent the top-secret download link directly to your email inbox. If the subscriber-only email hasn’t landed in your inbox by Tuesday afternoon please check your spam/junk folders before emailing support@craftandvision.com.

Enjoy!

Diving in Zanzibar

After two weeks in Zanzibar at the end of what’ll be almost 6 weeks in East Africa, we’re packing up to head home. From beginning to end it’s been the trip of dreams. My time in Lalibela, Ethiopia, was like traveling back in time. Safari with Cynthia and my mother was a trip of a lifetime and it’ll take me a while to put that one into words. And then to come here and spend two weeks in the blue, getting my scuba certification after over 20 years of putting it off for fear, was the icing on the cake.

I brought with me a Sony RX100(II), easily my favourite pocket camera, and a brilliant water housing with a wide angle lens, both of which were a joy to use, but talk about a learning curve. Making photographs is hard enough at the best of times, but to do it in 30 to 60 feet of water while trying hard to remember to breathe, remain neutrally bouyant, stay somewhat upright, and all of that while avoiding things that sting, cut, and bite, had me laughing so hard at times I thought I’d spit my regulator out. A great deal of fun, but much, much harder than I imagined. Easier, though, than using the larger DSLR gear under water, which is all more responsive, but also bulkier and harder to manage.

Huge kudos to East Africa Diving who took brilliant care of us. Thanks too, to Hans and Zakia from The Beautiful Eyes gallery in Stone Town, for spending a wonderful, unexpected day with us, and showing us the back alleys of such a fascinating town. Next time, Pemba!

And now home to begin what will be the longest stretch I’ve gone without international travel in more years than I can remember. I’ve got another surgery on my foot on February 19th, still trying to fix things from the fall in Italy, and then it’s several months recovering and rehabilitating it. I’m already dreading the cabin fever but the time at home will give me time to catch up on reading, writing, printing, and tucking into the pile of neglect that inevitably builds after so much travel. We’ll be announcing the Vancouver Created Image weekend soon, so keep an eye open for that, and Issue 06 of PHOTOGRAPH is almost hot off the virtual presses too. See you when I’m home! In the mean time, here are 3 of the photographs that best express my feelings about this amazing new world I’ve discovered through scuba.

In the Zone

In my last posts I talked about my reactions to working with both my Fuji XE-1 and Leica M, and I mentioned zone focusing. For those for whom the idea of zone focusing is new I wanted to explain it a little. It’s an old technique but it’s simple and reliable.

My biggest concern with Leica, and the Fuji when using a manual focus lens (which it does beautifully with Leica M-mount, or Zeiss, lenses and an adaptor), is the speed at which I want to focus. Sometimes the Fuji isn’t as responsive as I’d like even when using autofocus. But zone focusing – as long as you’re not after really shallow depth of field (DOF), and you don’t mind using the lenses past their absolute sharpest point, can be faster than any SLR. You just compose and press the shutter. No focus hunting, no cussing at the camera. It’s why we’ve repeated the mantra, “f/8 and be there” for so many years. At f/8 on most lenses, with reasonable distance between camera and subject, the zone of focus is so broad you’d have to be trying to miss it.

As I write this I’m sitting outside in Zanzibar. It’s bright. My ISO is 200, my shutter speed is 1/60, my aperture is f/11, and my mango juice is perfect. That last part isn’t important but it’s nice. Any rangefinder lens, including some of the Fuji lenses (like the 14 and the 23/1.4 which is the classic street photographer’s focal length), have a focus distance scale on them. Right now if I focus my 21mm lens on my subject 5 feet away and look at that scale, it shows me that everything from 2.5 feet to infinity is in focus (see the illustration below). Keep my focus ring there (put a piece of gaffer tape on the bottom of the body and you’ll have a way of making sure it doesn’t move – those Fuji lenses have a tendency to drift) and I have a huge zone of focus. So large in fact that I don’t really have to focus any further. I compose and press the shutter.

The f/stop (f/11) is circled at top. Look to the scale at the base of the lens for the corresponding f/stop. Follow the indicators to your distance scale. That is your zone of focus for that lens, at that f/stop and distance.

That, in a nutshell is zone focusing. It’s simple and photographers have used it for ages, but with modern lenses we’ve often lost these scales and have come to rely on the “what you see is what you get” of the SLR.

With this same lens at f/5.6 I could have a focus zone from 2.5 feet to just over 5 feet, or 4.5 feet to infinity (see the two illustrations below). So the closer your subject at any given aperture, the shallow that zone.

I use zone focusing in two ways – the simplest is the way I’ve just described it. Set a zone that’s as deep as I can get it, and one that includes whatever I’m likely to be photographing, say anything from 3 feet to near-infinity, and then I go. Or I’ll focus by estimating my distance to subject, knowing I have a margin of error of xx distance on either side of that subject.

Focus rings can move, so you have to watch that it is where you want it, and you have to be willing to keep your aperture where you want it – which’ll mean using shutter speed and ISO to regulate exposure but if you use your camera in manual most of the time you’ll get used to this pretty quickly. And that’s the real benefit of all this: speed. Clearly there are situations you won’t want to be, or aren’t able to be, at a tighter aperture, but when you can, zone focusing allows you to photograph very, very quickly. On the streets, or when there’s lots going on, zone focusing is hard to beat.

New LR Develop Presets Released

This Adobe Lightroom Develop preset package includes 42 of Nicole S. Young’s most-used presets and a 16-page PDF manual, which includes installation instructions and complete before/after catalog of photographs of each preset to give you a sense of what to expect.

Presets are extremely helpful in making one’s workflow more efficient. They also give us new ideas about expression, and, if you take the time to look at the changes they create, can help you learn Lightroom in new ways – you’re going to love using these!  These presets are compatible with Adobe Lightroom 4 and 5. Learn more about this toolkit, and how you can save 20% on the Preset Bundle, also giving you LR Develop Presets from David duChemin and Dave Delnea – over 100 presets, total, at CraftandVision.com.

Nicole S. Young is a full-time, Seattle-based photographer and author. She specializes in food and stock photography and licenses her images through iStockphoto and Getty Images. Nicole’s resume includes four titles published through Peachpit Press, an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) in CS4/CS5/CS6, and a regular Lightroom and Photoshop contributor on the National Association of Photoshop Professionals and Photofocus websites.

The retail price of Nicole S. Young’s LR Develop Presets is CAD $10. Before Feb. 3 at 11:59 PM (PST) you’ll find the 25%-off discount code (so you can save $2.50) exclusively in Craft & Vision’s Contact Sheet, and you can get that, if you don’t already, by signing up here - you’ll get the auto-responder inside the hour.