One light portraits — Photography podcast #38

February 22, 2008 By 6 Comments

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #38 talks about cre­at­ing dra­matic por­traits using only 1 light. Using 1 light cre­ates very harsh shad­ows which is PERFECT for a dra­matic por­trait. The fol­low­ing 2 shots illus­trate this dra­matic effect. In the first shot Lorne and Boog are being lit by 1 light located 45 degrees toward the right. The sec­ond shot is side­light. Both these shots use no reflec­tor to bounce light back into the sub­jects’ faces. Note that the light in the sec­ond pho­to­graph reveals a lot of skin tex­ture, so this type of light­ing would not be good for a ‘fash­iony’ shot in most cases. Thanks to Lorne and Boog for being the mod­els. I Love how lit­tle Boog is star­ing me down in the first shot. You can click all the shots to make them tastier on the eyes.

One light portrait

1 light portrait - side lighting
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You can down­load this pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast directly by click­ing the pre­ced­ing link or lis­ten to it almost imme­di­ately with the embed­ded player below this image.

Photo of the week
This week, the pho­to­graph is by Zseike and I com­ment in the pod­cast on why I think this pho­to­graph is fantastic.

Photo by Zseike

Thanks as always for the com­ments by‚Gary H, ‚Andre, Tom, Yves Janse, David and Mikael. We LOVE com­ments and sug­ges­tions so please send more.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: , , , ,

Freezing and Melting

February 20, 2008 By 3 Comments

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It’s funny how‚various pho­tog­ra­phy tech­niques can resur­face at any moment depend­ing on what you are look­ing at.…Given the infi­nite vari­ety of things to see, it means that there is never a lack of sub­jects to photograph.

I guess this shot was inspired by the macro on the cheap pod­cast but it’s not a macro shot at all. It’s a sim­ple lower angled shot of some melt­ing ice but for some rea­son its shape intrigues me. When‚I first looked at it, it‚seemed like a mini model of some­thing larger. It was pho­tographed using the long end of my 70-200mm zoom. There was actu­ally water mov­ing through the ice that unfortunately‚I was unable to cap­ture because‚I needed a slower speed and it was too bright…and oh yeah, I for­got my fil­ters like a bone­head. Still, there’s some­thing here that pleases me.
Exif Data — ISO 100 — F-32 1/6. You can click the image to make it tastier on the eyes.

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries

Stairway to Heaven .….…nope

February 15, 2008 By 3 Comments

What is going on here?‚

Where does the lad­der go?

Are there treats at the end of the ladder?

This pho­to­graph is an excel­lent exam­ple of lens com­pres­sion. For those that may not know, longer lenses tend to com­press the fore­ground and back­ground while wide angle lenses tend to do the reverse. I shot this scene on 1 frame from about 50 feet away. The white in the back­ground is actu­ally a mas­sive con­tainer filled with oil and the lad­der is part of that con­tainer. The tree is actu­ally about 20 feet in front of the container.

I shot this scene from my car while snow was lightly falling. Exif data — Shot at ISO (The light was quickly fading)‚1000 F-16 at 1/400 at the long end of my 70–200 zoom lens. You can click the image to make it tastier on the eyes.

Filed Under: Photographs, Photography blog entries, Photography tips

Macro photography on the cheap — Photography podcast #37

February 13, 2008 By 13 Comments

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #37 focuses on cheap macro pho­tog­ra­phy setups. In this pod­cast we talk about using revers­ing rings, exten­sion tubes, close-up lenses and cheap macro lenses in order to achieve good macro results for lit­tle cash.‚Special thanks to ‚Yves Janse who sug­gested this podcast.

The fol­low­ing images describe the dif­fer­ent inex­pen­sive tech­niques used to cre­ate macro photographs

macro photography

1 — Shows my shot with a zoom lens only
2 — Shows shot with cheap close-up lens #1
3 — Shows shot with cheap close-up lens #2
4 — Shows shot with cheap close-up lens #4
5 — Shows what close-up lenses look like
6 — Shows what exten­sion tubes look like
7 -‚Shows what a lens mounted back­wards using a revers­ing ring looks like
8 — Photo by Yves janse (Thanks Yves) show­ing how you can stack close up lenses and tubes
9 — Shows a Plamp for hold­ing macro subjects

Links men­tioned in this pod­cast:
Revers­ing rings on Ebay
Close up lenses on Ebay
Exten­sion tubes on Ebay
Phoenix AF lens review (A cheap ded­i­cated macro lens)
Plamp clamp for hold­ing macro subjects

Thanks as always for the com­ments by‚Al, Tim and Yves Janse who also sug­gested this. We LOVE com­ments and sug­ges­tions so please send more.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

Filed Under: Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: , , , , ,

2 old bananas huddle for warmth in the snow

February 7, 2008 By 2 Comments

Much to my delight some­one tossed out 2 old bananas. Then I came upon them and decided “hey bananas in the snow, cooool”

The first shot‚shows the real bananas and the sec­ond shot‚shows the bananas after hav­ing frozen to death. OR… the sec­ond shot shows still­born oxy­gen deprived bananas.

Kid­ding aside all‚I did to get the deep blue in the sec­ond shot was push the hue/saturation slider all the way to the right in pho­to­shop. Shot at F5.6 at 1/200 ISO 100. Click the images to make them big­ger, and of course…you are invited to comment.

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Backup your photos — CLONING your hard drive

February 4, 2008 By 9 Comments

There is no com­puter mal­func­tion as dev­as­tat­ing as los­ing the con­tents of your hard drive. This can hap­pen due to a virus, or a hard­ware or soft­ware mal­func­tion. Back­ing up your com­puter reg­u­larly is a must and there are sev­eral ways to do it. The most com­mon way is to use a pro­gram that breaks up the con­tents of your hard drive into chunks and save it on another exter­nal hard drive. In case of hard drive fail­ure, you can rebuild your old drive with those chunks.

Thatžs not the way I like to do it as my first line of defense. I con­fess, I still do backup that way as well, but itžs not my pri­mary way. Call me neu­rotic or squea­mish but I donžt like chunks.

If my hard drive fails and I have some­thing impor­tant to do, I want to have an EXACT COPY of my hard drive already saved. I donžt want to have to rebuild any­thing or look for a disk to reboot my com­puter with the saved chun­ked data. It should still work of course (as long as the inter­nal hard drive is not irrepara­bly dam­aged) and even­tu­ally you have to deal with the com­put­eržs prob­lem inter­nal drive, but who wants an ulcer? Frankly Ižll pay a wee bit for piece of mind.

The answer is to make a clone, a copy, or an exact intact image of your hard drive. That way, I can just take my exter­nal drive (which is a clone of my desk­top) attach it to old 50 dol­lar lap­top via USB and boom ‚” my whole com­puter shows up as a new drive on my lap­top. No need to look for any disks or reassem­ble chunks and ZERO down­time and zero lost files.‚

Herežs how I do it. I buy an exter­nal drive that is the exact same size as my com­put­eržs inter­nal drive. That way when I clone the drive, I clone it exactly. You should know that that backup exter­nal drive can ONLY be used for backup in this way. You canžt save other files on that exter­nal drive, you can only save the clone of your inter­nal hard drive. Each time you re-backup your com­puter onto that exter­nal, it deletes the pre­vi­ous backup. My 500 gig inter­nal drive takes about 1.5 hours to clone onto the West­ern Dig­i­tal 500 gig exter­nal drive (which costs $130.00 dol­lars 3 monts ago) via firewire (you can of course use USB).

There are many pro­grams that can do this but the one I use and like best is Acro­nis True Image 11. It costs about 50 dol­lars and you can try it for free. When you load it up youžll see dif­fer­ent choices on how to backup. To clone your hard drive DO NOT CHOOSE BACKUP AND RESTORE. That option backs up your hard drive in chunks. Instead choose DISK UTILITIES and then Clone Disk. I use man­ual mode after that and fol­low the prompts care­fully and I MAKE SURE TO ‹“KEEP DATAž WHEN IT ASKS HOW I WANT TO MODIFY MY OLD DRIVE AND I CHOOSE ‹“AS ISž (because both dri­ves are the exact same size) when it asks how I want to move data from the old to new drive.

The other pro­gram I am some­what famil­iar with that does just about the same thing is Nor­ton Ghost. Again to make an exact copy of your drive (non-chunk) donžt choose Back it up now, instead choose Copy My Hard drive (advanced) and fol­low the prompts very carefully.

Using either of these meth­ods gives you the peace of mind that even if your hard drive crashes in a ter­ri­ble way, you can still work from a new com­puter by plug­ging your exter­nal into it. Obvi­ously, youžll need to copy or clone your inter­nal drive reg­u­larly to have the fresh­est copy. If you have irre­place­able pho­tos and other files on your inter­nal hard drive, it is also safest to burn them to CD or DVD.

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: , ,

Lighting round faces — baldness — blemishes — Photography podcast #36

January 29, 2008 By 4 Comments

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #36 focuses on think­ing about how dif­fer­ent types of light suit dif­fer­ent types of faces. We talk about how both short light­ing and side light­ing are good for rounder faces. We also talk about blem­ishes and baldness.

Many thanks to Mark McCall for allow­ing me to use this image (and expla­na­tion below the image) clearly show­ing the the slim­ming effect of short light­ing and the broad­en­ing effect of broad light­ing on a model’s face.

Broad Light­ing vs. Short Light­ing
Broad light­ing refers to light­ing up the face from the “broad” side, (widest part of the face from nose to ear from the cam­era angle).
Short light­ing refers to light­ing up the face from the “short” side, (side of the face turned away from the camera)

Short light­ing makes the face appear thin­ner in the image, and is the best choice for most sub­jects. Broad light­ing works best for thin faces.

Thanks as always for the com­ments by Yves Janse and Mikael. We LOVE com­ments and sug­ges­tions so please send more.

Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load

Filed Under: Photography podcast transcripts, Photography podcasts, Photography tips, podcasting Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Wacom Tablet — anyone got tips?

January 24, 2008 By 6 Comments

So I just pur­chased a new Wacom tablet. I heard they rock and make photo edit­ing so much eas­ier. So after wast­ing 1/2 hour installing the fUC@**&%$en!!!!!! dri­ver which did NOT eas­ily install onto my Vista machine…here I go. My first instinct (to be fair after 10 min­utes of use) is that it is NOT as easy to use as every­one raves.

There seems to be an unnat­ural dis­con­nect in my brain between the size of the fixed nib on the pen and the brush size that you choose in pho­to­shop. I guess i will need to play and even check out the tuto­r­ial on the disk. If any­one has any tips or pointers…I’m all ears. Thanks!

Added on Feb. 18, 2007‚ — This com­ment and pic­ture by David Red­ding was really infor­ma­tive so I added it to this main post. Thanks David!

Here is a side by side of one of my touch up jobs. Now all of this could
have been done with a mouse, but I find I can be quite a bit more pre­cise
with the styl­ist. for exam­ple, if you take a look at the fore­head in the
retouched image, even at this web size you can make out skin details (good
luck doing that with a blur mask…I could never fig­ure out how). I am
able to do the touch up and main­tain skin tex­ture by first doing a round
of Cloning and Heal­ing at about 100–200% mag­ni­fi­ca­tion. Once I have
removed all the rather large blem­ishes and skin imper­fec­tions I use the
Brush tool in CS3 with a soft edge, the Pro­tect Tex­ture option in the
brush tool kit selected and an opac­ity of around 20%. I then sam­ple the
skin for colour and just paint on the skin correction.

the biggest dif­fer­ence between the mouse and the styl­ist when doing
edit­ing jobs like this is with the mouse, when using the Brush tool, if
you set the Opac­ity to say 30% (or what ever set­ting) that is what you
get. But, with the styl­ist that same set­ting of 30% is just the max­i­mum,
you can achieve less with the pres­sure of the stylist.

Like I said in my response to you post­ing, the styl­ist does take some
get­ting use to.…How long have you been using a mouse for? But, once you
do get the set­tings to your lik­ing and actu­ally train your brain to use
the styl­ist instead of the mouse you will see how accu­rate you can be with
your editing.

Also, a graph­ics tablet can be a waste of money for some peo­ple. Really,
if all you really do in your edit­ing is crop­ping, curves, colour bal­anc­ing
(in RAW I hope) and sharp­en­ing, then a graph­ics tablet is really a waste
of money. But, on the other hand. If you do a fair amount of touch­ing up
skin, dodg­ing and burn­ing or even cus­tom graph­ics like paint­ing on
pat­terns in you images, then a Tablet could be your sav­ing grace.

Filed Under: Photography blog entries, Photography tips Tagged With: , ,

Even at the end of the day the ‘machine’ keeps working

January 18, 2008 By 5 Comments

Now that I’ve resolved to take my cam­era with me more often, I’m likely to shoot more city scapes…like this one. This is just a small part of the enor­mous Shell refin­ery on the east­ern part of the island Mon­treal. It was a quick shot since the light was fad­ing fast. It was shot at ISO 1000 at 1/80 at F.2.8.

Shots like these tend to bother me some­what. There is a sense of indus­try here. Things are hap­pen­ing. Machines are work­ing. Machines are polluting.

.…..and yet the colours and the con­trast seem intrigu­ing. What do you think?

photograph of refinery

Filed Under: Photographs Tagged With: , , ,

Even at the end of the day the ‘machine’ keeps working

January 18, 2008 By 5 Comments

Now that I’ve resolved to take my cam­era with me more often, I’m likely to shoot more city scapes…like this one. This is just a small part of the enor­mous Shell refin­ery on the east­ern part of the island Mon­treal. It was a quick shot since the light was fad­ing fast. It was shot at ISO 1000 at 1/80 at F.2.8.

Shots like these tend to bother me some­what. There is a sense of indus­try here. Things are hap­pen­ing. Machines are work­ing. Machines are polluting.

.…..and yet the colours and the con­trast seem intrigu­ing. What do you think?

photograph of refinery

Filed Under: Photographs Tagged With: , , ,
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