Jan
26
The LCD screen is your lifeline as a photographer. Not that you need to look at it after taking every photo, but you definitely depend on it to spot-check your work from time to time to ensure your exposure is ballpark. The LCD screen is not super critical in the world of ambient light exposures, as you can place a lot of the exposure responsibility on the camera’s light meter. Flash photography, on the other hand, is solely dependent on your peepers, and the light meter built into your camera is beyond worthless for judging exposure. The feedback you get from that LCD screen is priceless for flash photography, you adjust 100% of your capture and light settings based off of what you see on the back of your camera. So, the accuracy and knowing how that LCD screen is presenting your images is critical. If the LCD screen is off, you’ll be unknowingly under or over exposing your images, but for all you know the images look great (according to the LCD).
Did You Know?
Did you know that a lot of cameras have an ambient light sensor which automatically adjusts the brightness of your LCD screen? The light sensor judges the amount of light in the room, and adjusts the screen brightness for the most comfortable viewing experience. I’m sure most of you are familiar with this handy feature on your phones, which I find very nice. So when I’m using the phone in a dark room my eyeballs are not going to melt out of my head from the blast of brightness from the screen. That’s great and all for phones, but for a camera… I would highly advise against this setting. Camera manufacturers thought is was more important to jeopardize the judgement of your photo exposure by dynamically changing the brightness of your LCD screen for the sake of retinal comfort. Um… why?
I hear photographers say, “I know how my photos will look based off of how they look on the back of the LCD.” I really hope that your LCD brightness is set to manual if you are making that claim, because if it’s not you are lying without even knowing it.
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Jan
21
It’s easy to forget about. You use it for just about everything in life, you rely on it more than you know, but might not even know how inaccurately you are viewing and editing the digital world. Out of all of the gear photographers lust over, camera bodies,lenses, and the thousands of dollars spent to acquire these light capturing tools, most forget about one of the cheapest and most important pieces of gear they need. If you are a photographer and have not properly calibrated your computer monitor, you need to stop editing photos and get on this. I repeat, do not edit another photo before taking the steps to ensure proper monitor calibration.
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Jan
12
Reflectors and diffusers are typically the first things photographers buy when they start experimenting with light manipulation. It’s a great thing… you’ve taken the step to start playing with light, rather than just throwing your arms up in defeat when you can’t seem to achieve favorable light conditions in a given shooting situation. A reflector/diffuser combo is a very wise choice, regardless of your existing gear status, as they are useful all the time. I think that at times people feel that “controlling light” translates to blasting a flash in someone’s face and calling it a day. Adding flash lighting or redirecting ambient light with a reflector is a way more delicate process than you might think. It doesn’t have to be a huge, dramatic change in the overall exposure. Just adding a little of spark to your main light, or filling-in shadows to bring some more detail into the composition can make a night and day difference. It’s not a game of miles or even feet, we are talking about inches. Small increments of addition/subtraction of light to make all the world of difference in your portrait work. Here are a couple thoughts, more of a checklist, to keep in-mind when you go out to make this purchase.
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Jan
03
Every photo gig has it’s own requirements when it comes to clothing. Sometimes the choice on what to wear boils down to simple logistics. No-brainers like warm clothes for shooting wildlife, night, or winter photography. Maybe swimsuits and sandals for beach and water shooting so you don’t have to worry about soaking nice clothes and shoes. But most of us photographers spend our time photographing people. Those people hold events they need captured by us, and that is where the major gray area is, as far as selecting attire for these events. So, this article will focus on portrait photographers and my perspective on what makes sense for a few different situations you may find yourself in while working for various clients. That is key… “what makes sense.”
Dress to impress, dress to perform, or somewhere in the middle. Does the event even call for you to fret over this? What’s the weather like? What’s your gear situation? What’s expect of you? Know your client. It always helps asking the client some details about the event, just to get your head wrapped around the basics, get the feel for things, and you can more confidently make a call. There are a lot of other questions that you need to ask yourself, from the perspective of your job tasks, which will drive your attire as well.
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Dec
12
It’s a topic photographers start to tackle as they continue to develop their skills, continue to tackle new subject matter, and continue to tackle the processes in order to capture better photographs. Of course, all of these photographic avenues we try to improve ultimately trickle down to the same solution, much like the branches of a tree to the trunk, and that is – the betterment of capturing light. Each photograph – a simple exposure to light. There are literally an infinite number of situations in which a camera can be asked to best capture that pesky stuff we call “light.” Some of these situations can best be captured by simply fully understanding how to use a camera and how to spin the dials, some may call for the use of a reflector, diffuser, or even an addition of a light source, and some require the introduction of a filter to best capture the moment. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the latter, an in-depth look at the various filters available to photographers, which ones to avoid, correct and incorrect uses, and when to best use them. The importance of using filters in your work will largely depend on the type of photography you capture. They can have a very dramatic or very little effect on your image, depending on your knowledge of how and when to use them.
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Dec
09
A question I posed to Facebook users back in October – How many lights were used in the photograph above? Extra bonus points for taking a stab at light modifiers used on said number of lights.
I created this photo strictly as a visual aid for an article I wrote back in October as well (click here for that post). Taking the little side project further, I was curious to see if anyone following me on Facebook would get close to the light setup used to make the photo. I would have to say Justin was the closest guess, as he went into some pretty good detail on lighting position.
Reproduction of the “real” world is a funny thing in the photo and video field. I guess we have commercial photography and the movie industry to thank for our completely unrealistic view on reality nowadays. What I mean by that, is that artificially lighting most setups as if it were 100% replicating a natural occurrence flat-out looks bad in a final photograph. Walking around in real life, we see things, accept them as beautiful, and we appreciate them and go on with life. However… when it comes to looking at a photograph that was done well, in respect to holding true to artificially re-creating only natural forms of light found in the world, we get REALLY picky. “Oh, I don’t like how that person’s head isn’t edged-out by backlighting and cannot be made-out from the background, ” or “the shadows are not filled-in enough for me.” We don’t know what “natural” even looks like anymore. It’s true, and a comment on the Facebook photo proves it, with a user guessing that only light from the computer screen is lighting this entire photo (not their fault, this is the general public’s view of light and what they are exposed to with every photo and video professional produced). And with today’s overstimulating, commercialized, uber marketing online world, we demand to see the “real world” in a not-so-real situation with perfect beauty lighting on faces, proper rim lighting, and fans blowing a models hair back… now that’s REAL life (I kid)! Every once in a while, we photographers can get away with a “natural” lighting approach, and get away with a people pleasing photo, but not often. We usually have to cleverly light it to ensure all of the visuals in a composition are well-lit for proper attention and detail.
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Nov
19
Here is a video Q & A for those of you photogs who want to start flirting with off-camera flash. This isn’t a video about how to use lighting and everything that goes with it. It’s a simple recommendation on the starting block gear to acquire to start your lighting journey. The good news is that TTL will help you ease into this journey (if you are using hot shoe lights), so you don’t have to be an absolute lighting wizard to pull of simple lighting execution.
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Nov
18
You have to admit, it’s a guilty pleasure buying new stuff. Sure, it sucks having to shell-out moola for the really good stuff, but if you are a legit working professional in your field, it’s a necessity. BUT… as much as you hate seeing a series of zeros in the price tag of pro-level equipment, there is a part of you that is super happy about clicking that “buy” button. Photographers are notorious gear freaks, always lusting after the next biggest, faster, meaner piece of equipment, whether it is a lens, camera body, general accessory, lighting, or computer equipment. We live in a world that is now obsessed with efficient, lean business workflows. On top of that, society in general is always looking at how they can get services and products cheaper, faster, and easier. The same applies to the career field of photography. If photographers are expected to keep their prices lower to stay competitive, they have to find ways to make the price they are charging economical to keep their dollars per hour up at a desirable range. Ex. if you charge $200 for a photo shoot, is your total time invested into that project 3 hours or 30? If this (photography) is what you wake up and do every day, it is a prime example of a high output workflow. By that, I mean it’s not like you are dealing with something on a small scale, like selling cars. You are most likely pumping out photos in the thousands every month if you have a healthy business. So, we are dealing with units in the thousands per month. Don’t you think that is something that is worth evaluating, in terms of process workflow and where bottlenecks might be? Just like any other profession, the longer you keep at it, the quicker you are capable of doing a job, managing the juggling of processes, etc, and hopefully the lack of efficiency in certain spots will become more evident. You’ll most likely continue to reach new levels in your knowledge and experience, and your current gear and approach may begin to keep you from breaking through to the next step. That’s your cue to do something about it.
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Nov
02
Ok, so here we go, the first video Q & A segment. I hope this kind of catches on and people use me to help “fill in the gaps” of all the standard information they can’t seem to find on the web. It’s just one of those things – you can have a really good grasp on a piece of software, while also having a really solid plan for the business end of things, however, there is the cross-section, where the creative/making side intersects the business side. There is this murky middle area where a lot of things are left-up to interpretation and personal preference. Essentially this gray area cannot be spelled out by software makers, and a business teacher definitely doesn’t have any input on these kinds of specifics. You know there are a practices that need to be done in your business to ensure efficiency, redundancy, and so on, but I (and as it seems many others) are left to figure out all the gray area stuff themselves. Sometimes self-discovery of these processes are the best course of action, other times you are left thinking “it’d save me a bunch of time and a handful of headaches if I got a little nugget of knowledge from someone who has been doing this gray area stuff for awhile in my same career field.”
This gray area are the things I would like to focus on in these sessions, because I feel it’s worth my time to address them. The simple, easy stuff that software vendors spell out on countless websites where you can get a lot of information doesn’t need to be beaten to death one more time by me in a video. Rarely, it also seems that tutorials spell out the BIG things and leave these little gaps that desperately need explanation. You also do not need me giving you a lecture on how important is it to ensure you have backups of every inch of your business, how to interact with your clients, etc. It’s that middle part, and how they come together. So let’s piece this stuff together.
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Sep
24
Is this post a little late to the game? For those who already use applications like Aperture and Lightroom (more about these later in the post), yes, this post is about the biggest “duh!” article you’ll have read in a couple years. However… for those photographers who have not had their eyes opened to these savior-like applications, the people who make a living making piles and piles of photos yet still rely on single image editing applications, this post is for you. Why do I STILL have a sense that this post is necessary? ‘Cause I hear of people struggling with photo management on a regular basis, and I feel compelled to write it for them. Most likely, this post is going to help that group of photographers who are at the level where they are just starting to get paying gigs, they are flirting with the idea of taking on photography seriously, or maybe they’ve been doing it for a while and can’t figure out how other working photogs are staying afloat with all of the editing, ’cause they are spending an unimaginable number of hours in post production with a steady stream of clients. In today’s fast-paced world, it’s all about getting the job done better, faster, and cheaper. Streamlining your biz is key, and post production is a giant arena which can be tweaked to really get more time back to invest in other areas.
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Apr
10
It’s a problem we all eventually have no matter how careful you try and be with your equipment. I’m talking about those annoying dust spots that show up in your DSLR photos. They can be a slight issue or a real problem depending on how bad the situation is. I’ve seen some very very terribly dirty sensors, like a shovel of dirt was tossed into camera. It’s really amazing at how poor some people are in their efforts in camera care and/or cleaning. A little effort goes a long way, and I’ll be showing you in the video below. The process of committing to physically touching your sensor to clean it is not a task that should be taken lightly, as you can really damage the sensor, but if you execute with care and use the right tools, it will turn out just fine. We’ll be covering how dust gets there, how to look for it, and how to clean it.
This is the first of what I hope to be many little video tips I put together. It’s nothing fancy, and I really tried to keep it simple. There are too many people trying to sound smart and/or experience when giving advice, using terms or situations that go right over newer photographer’s heads. The whole point of this video is education, so I try to make it as easy to follow as possible, and speak English in relative terms. When I think I cover material that is not exactly general knowledge, I step you through it or give you some kind of visual.
I was also extremely surprised to see how much misinformation there is floating around out there, especially from folks trying to tell you how to do it, and doing it wrong. Rest assured, the methods I discuss in this video are repeated with other legit professionals that actually know what they are doing.
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Feb
04
Life is all about time, or rather the lack of, right? Time is always the most scarce resource, even if you have all the time in the world, others around you, or even mother nature does not. As a photographer, “good light” naturally only happens in small fragments of time, and we counter this by using off-camera light, even when we don’t need to in order to get even “better” light. I think we need to put all our cancer curing resources and task them into figuring out how to extend really nice sunsets to say… twice as long (I kid…. but seriously).
Here is a behind the scenes video I cut together today, it showcases a little bit of the stuff we did while we were running around the island.
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