family photo album

When we had a compact camera, my wife and I would look through and keep a couple hundred images of each shoot. Blurry images, under-exposed images, images of the back of a lens cap, it didn’t matter. Now, I take a couple hundred exposures and only end up showing between three and ten of them. Another difference is that I no longer choose photographs based on their value as documentation. I now choose them based on whether they are artistically valuable.

Needless to say, my wife does not appreciate this change. Being a mother, she naturally cares more about documenting the life and times of our family, and less about my attempt to make art. So here I am posting my favorites of our Thanksgiving trip to my brother’s house. The rest of them can be accessed by family and friends by clicking this link.

WHAT I LEARNED DURING SHOOT:

Most of these images were shot using the new 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 VR which is not the best indoor lens. I just love its wide angle capabilities and could not resist. Unfortunately, I was using aperture priority and the shutter speed dipped way below where I would have liked it. Next time I will use shutter priority and just up the ISO if I have to. Many of these are blurry on account of my carelessness.

WHAT I LEARNED DURING DEVELOPMENT:

The high ISO required much noise reduction. I use a great Photoshop plug-in called Noiseware by Imagenomic for this work. I do all of my edits in LR 2 and then export to Photoshop for noise reduction. This is a very slow process when editing a large set of photographs that were shot at high ISO. One thing I learned is that I should only do noise reduction at the end of editing the entire shoot. Here is why: After editing all of the photographs from a single shoot, I look back at all of them to get a sense of their uniformity. Many times I find that they’re exposures or white balance are too different to be put side-by-side in a slideshow or an album. So, I will go back and edit them. Because I want to make edits only to the RAW files, I have to redo the noise reduction and delete the first noise-reduced PSD. I can avoid this extra step by simply waiting to do noise-reduction until just before final export.

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Editing photographs from turkey day visit to my brother’s place near Ft. Myers.

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Watched Hancock. First half was great. Second half should have been a sequel. Two thumbs down for laziness.

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This Italian ristorante makes me forget I live in Zephyrhills. Great mood, wine, and live piano.

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lightroom 2 – tip #6

As I said in the beginning, these tips were created using a combination of my own experimentation combined with Scott Kelby’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers. I highly recommend this book for anyone learning LR2.

Shooting in RAW allows the white balance of an image to be modified in post processing without compromising image quality. Many professionals and teachers advise that you get it right in the camera despite this. I, on the other hand, prefer to shoot with auto white balance turned on but with a slight warming compensation. This gets me close to where I need to be and prevents me from having to change the setting for every color of light I encounter. When it comes to white balance, I only care about seeing an approximation of the final temperature during image review. The fine-tuning I do in Lightroom 2.

There are essentially two ways to set white balance in Lightroom 2. You can choose a WB preset from the drop down menu to get you started, then use the Temp slider for the rest. This method is best for setting the mood of an image creatively while using your own visual perception as a guide. If you have a color calibrated monitor and are not interested in capturing the color temperature exactly as it was, this is the way to go.

The other method is the White Balance Selector. This is the eye dropper next to the WB sliders. The goal is to click a color in the image that is a neutral gray, preferably light in tone. As you move the dropper around the image you get a loupe view of the pixels with a percentage value for each color channel (RGB). While Scott Kelby recommends turning this loupe view off, I use it to find a light gray where all three percentage values are the most similar. You can also see a preview of what sampling that part of the image will look like in the Navigator window. This method seems to produce the most accurate result. So what happens when there is no gray in the image? You either have to switch to the first method or purchase a gray card for use whenever lighting conditions change. I’ve heard good things about the WhiBal White Balance Reference Card (there is a keychain version).

I find myself using both of these methods, sometimes even in the same image.

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Hate mornings that require me to continuously re-heat my coffee.

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Seems as though they are bailing out every bank that DOESN’T hold one of my mortgages. ;(

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two more views of alyssa

1/50 f/5.3 ISO 1600 65mm Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 VR)

Can you believe these are ISO 1600? I did use some noise reduction but, damn! After seeing these photographs I hope Sierra will allow me to take some of her lovely face also.

1/80 f/5.6 ISO 1600 68mm Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 VR)

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Catching up on Chuck and Heroes from last week.

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two views of alyssa

1/30 f/3.5 ISO 800 16mm Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 VR)

There is some distortion at the wide end of this lens that changes the shape of close faces. I hope Alyssa can forgive me for that. The portraits I post of her later this week will most likely make up for it, though. Alyssa is very versatile with her facial muscles, but I won’t show those without her permission.

 

1/25 f/3.5 ISO 800 16mm Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6 VR)

Twitter update

Some of my favorite tech journalists say that the Blackberry Storm sucks big ones.

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Sun gets so high so fast. Shadows too deep. Making decisions I don’t want to make. Could use a tuna melt.

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Walking along the river bank camera-free. I want to experience it as a human before shooting it as a photographer.

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My punishment for using espresso during the day to keep me going is a body that is no longer functional in the evening.

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a post for the sake of posting

This is where I am supposed to explain why I have not posted in a number of days. It is here that I am supposed to apologize for being so busy with work, school, or some other obligation. But, that is not what I am going to do. Why, you ask? Because I have had no such obligations keeping me away. In fact, I have had a rather leisurely week. The reason I have not posted is that the two main subjects about which I usually write have been dormant in my mind these last few days.

The first is photography. I am fresh out of photographs that I would dare to share with you. I plan to take enough this weekend for an entire week of posts. Two books, one about the Nikon D300 and the other about Lightroom 2, lay unfinished on my desk. These I will surely have much to say about eventually.

The second topic that interests me enough to opine on is world news and politics. In the past I felt compelled to educate myself as much as possible to the goings on in this country and elsewhere. More recently my hunger for such information has lessened. It could be because of the recent election. I feel now as though things can only get better, even as the economic troubles we face seem insurmountable. Don’t get me wrong, I continue to consume all of the wonderful independent news sources that I love so much. It is simply that the urgency of it is no longer within me.

So what have I been doing this past week? Reading. Reading fiction to be more precise. Every moment of free time has been spent with my face in a novel. I have discovered Anne Rice again and I am totally enthralled by the characters she creates. I just finished Blood and Gold and have moved on to Blackwood Farm. Mistakenly, I have skipped Merrick but will return to it. After Merrick I will read her latest book in the Vampire Chronicles, Blood Canticle. I often lament the death of my childhood imagination, but fiction brings it back to me. Even after I put these books down, the innocent sense of meaning and magic stays with me, if only for a little while.

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There is a lot of putting in and taking out of teeth at this Hardees in Zephyrhills. Gross.

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If anyone knows the guy/gal that came up with VM snapshots please let him/her know I want to have his/her baby. Thx.

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If I played piano I would insist on pianoist rather than pianist. Only because the later would make me giggle every time.

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PC Magazine going out of print. I am terribly upset at this news. I’ll miss Dvorak’s columns most of all.

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Who knew that a grocery store in the morning is like an over-staffed used car dealership on a slow day? I need a shower.

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@ALL follow LameBush for a good laugh. "The phone doesn’t really have a glass cake thing over it. That’s just in the movies."

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out front

These images were shot in an area of my father’s house known to generations simply as “out front.” The second photograph took hold of me when I saw it for the first time on my monitor. There is something serious and aged about her expression. She holds you there and dares you to look away. Click it for a larger version.

1/320 f/3.8 ISO 800 Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6)

1/320 f/3.8 ISO 800 Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6)

1/250 f/3.5 ISO 800 Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6)

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Didn’t expect to be closing down the office tonight. Headed out to find sustenance.

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cold tone

1/320 f/6.3 ISO 800 Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6)

The muted and cold color with the sharp, vignetted corners reminds me of an old film snapshot. Imagine the tricycle blown over on its side, pedals turning in the wind, the leaves swirling above the pavement.

lightroom 2 – tip #5

1/50 f/3.5 ISO 800 Handheld (D300, 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6)

As I said in the beginning, these tips are from Scott Kelby’s The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 Book for Digital Photographers. I highly recommend this book for anyone learning LR2. That being said…

This tip is a kind of counter-recommendation. Kelby’s workflow goes something like this (highly simplified):

1. Import.
2. Flag or reject.
3. Delete rejected.
4. Make a collection out of the flagged.
5. Flag the best of the collection.
6. Make a collection out of the best in the collection.
7. Continue working within collections until output stage.

In step six, he ends up putting the very best of each collection in another collection of the same name but with the word “selects” after it. For example, he would have a collection called Example AND a collection called Example Selects at the same level.

I have tried his method with a few of my shoots and have switched back to using folders instead. Here are my reasons:

• The makers of Lightroom clearly intended for photographers to work in folders most of the time. I worry that a future version of Lightroom will implement a feature that assumes folders and collections are used as intended, thereby causing me to have to make modifications to my workflow. Here are some good uses for collections:
  • Showing images to clients for review without them seeing how the sausage is made.
  • Grouping images from different folders.
  • Grouping images that are normally printed or exported together.
• I don’t like the idea of the two collections being at the same level. I organize everything in my life hierarchically and expect my photographs to be no different. It is possible to create a Collection Set and put the normal and selects collections under it, but that just seems like too much hassle for every shoot.
• I am an IT professional who appreciates that technology advances. I have to assume that inevitably something better than Lightroom will come along and I’ll most likely switch to it. When I do, I want my files named descriptively, I want my folders named descriptively, and I want those folders to have descriptively named subfolders. If I do all this using collections, I am unnecessarily locking myself into LR. Don’t get me wrong, I think LR is the best tool out there right now to manage the entire photographic workflow. If you didn’t notice, the key words in that sentence were “right” and “now.”
• By working in collections alone, you lose the ability to stack similar shots. For example, if I shoot portraits of the same exact pose of the same exact person, it is useful to stack them together for later review. You can’t do this currently in collections, only when working in folders.
• Collections reset your flags so you can further refine your picks (I think this is why Kelby prefers collections). Unfortunately, when you edit in Photoshop, the flag you chose in the collection does not get applied to the resulting PSD as it does in folders. You have to go back and flag the PSD manually.

Now for some praise. Kelby has a deeply insightful suggestion about star ratings that I have come to appreciate. Don’t use them. The reality is that you want to get to the very best photographs in your shoot. Star ratings muddy this goal by giving you the ability to mark photographs as great, good, so-so, etc. I can tell you from experience that this is counter-productive and will waste much of your time. If you need a rating system in addition to flags and colors, use the star rating system as I do: treat it as if there are only two choices, one star or five stars. My workflow only differs from Kelby’s in that I work in folders instead of collections and I use stars just like flags. Here it is:

1. Import by date with descriptive folder names and descriptive file names.
2. If multiple shoots on the same day, create descriptively named sub-folders and move files into them.
3. Using flags, choose picks and rejects.
4. Delete rejects.
5. Filter by picks.
6. Using a single star, mark favorites of the picks.
7. Filter by a single star.
8. Using all five stars, mark the single best image from the shoot.

This is a much simplified description of the actual process (and leaves out keywording). You should really buy the book to understand when to use the various viewing modes during this stage of editing.

concealed camera permit

This was taken quickly at a Barnes & Noble on Wednesday. I haven’t yet the stomach to comfortably take photographs of people in public so I shot this one hastily. Had the place been empty or crowded I could have taken my time. There would not have been the patrons watching or the employees considering what they should do about me. And so I end up with a wanting photograph. How I wish I cared not what others thought of me.  How I wish I were not so completely aware of eyes and body language.

Just by happenstance, less than an hour later, I was stopped by security while walking through this outdoor mall, camera over my shoulder and hanging at my side. I was asked, rather politely, if I was a commercial photographer and told that, if I was, I must check in at the office. I sighed, gave an “I wish,” and continued my stroll.

After all the money I have spent on equipment, on that day I lusted only for a compact point-and-shoot. Such is the photographic life, I suppose.

Twitter update

Unusual day. Glad to be headed home.

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approaching storm

Please click on each image to see the intended size.

(Approaching Storm #1)

(Approaching Storm #2)

(Approaching Storm #3)

color choices

 

This photograph was shot on a recent morning in our driveway. The first view I get of each of my photographs is the RAW color data. There was something off about this image so I converted to grayscale and did some work with the tone curve. It is hard to decide which works better. On one hand, the subject just begs to be in color because, after all, it is a child painting with chalk.  On the other, her dress is way too saturated in color and would take some work to edit.  Maybe a compromise would be split toning?  If I try this I’ll post the result.  In the meantime, which one do you like better?  (click to see a larger version)

Twitter update

I feel complete again. The wide to mid zoom lens I ordered arrived today.

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