Access Digital Photography

Because I like to travel and shoot, I often find myself in situations where I need to take along a laptop so that I can stay in contact with the lessons I teach on line (8 digital photography courses at Sessions.edu), friends back in the States, and those I’ve met “on the road” who’ve moved on to other interesting locations.

Then a terrible thing happened. I was stupid enough to loan it to a friend and the lid got cracked, lots of my hard work was erased, and I had to replace the hard drive. Even after I spent $600 repairing it, I really couldn’t bear to use it and didn’t want to carry it anywhere. And being outside the States, I can’t find anyone who can fix the lid.

Then, one day, luck stuck. Doug called me and said he’d just seen an ad that a “going out of business” computer store was selling the 8.9” Acer One Aspire Netbook refurbs on a “close-out” for just a few pennies over $200. I’d been moaning and groaning for something I could take to a café or on a bus trip without feeling burdened. I wasn’t sure it would have the capacity to do what I needed, but for $200, I figured it would come in handy for something…even if I only used it for writing and teaching. Most Internet Cafes have wireless Internet and so do most hotels and hostels. So, at the very least, I could teach my classes and write about my photographic experiences. So I called the company that was selling them only to find out that, in two days, they’d already sold every one of them.

Then, half an hour later, the salesperson called back and said that they had some blue ones with more memory (2GB) and a larger hard drive (160GB) (exactly what I had been wishing I could afford) for only a few dollars more. Easy decision: The order was placed immediately. Now, I figured, if I could just see the screen clearly enough (due to its small size and my old eyes), I’d even be able to download my shoots on the road and do the basic photo editing and image management when I was waiting for a plane or hanging out in the hotel living room after dinner.

Well, about two weeks later, my netbook arrived in Panama. It seemed like a dream come true. The screen was very clean and easy to read. Even photos looked good enough to edit, though it only had a reader for SD/XD-size cards. It does have three USB ports, so I can plug in a card reader for CF cards that one of my cameras uses.

I did have to train myself to use the keyboard and mousepad. Given the small screen, one of the big advantages is that you can use your fingers to zoom in and out on anything you’re working on, in any application. Trouble is, your thumbs are over the mouse pad constantly and an accidental bump could zoom your text to microscopic size or so big that you could only read two words. So it took a few days to train myself to be careful. The other thing I had to train myself to do was save the doc every time I finished a paragraph…especially if it had anything important to say. The most important part is to remember to hit Control + S at least once a minute. Then you can always just call up your document when the whole thing suddenly disappears.

Fixing that was just a matter of re-reading the manual a few times and being careful not to hit more than one key at a time. I also found that if I propped up the back of the computer, so the tiny keyboard was at angle, my typing speed nearly doubled. Then Doug told me there was a 6-cell battery available for another $60-bucks.  It weighs almost as much as the computer, but it’s so big that it perfectly props up the back of the machine. It has pretty close to 7 hours of battery life. If you take any time at all to talk to a friend or read up on what you’re writing about, that really turns out to be about 9 hours because the computer automatically puts itself to sleep. So I ordered the battery, which cost me about another $30 in shipping and duties. It took a couple of weeks of spread-out two hour away from home use to run it down to nothing so that I could “train”it, but now I can re-charge it any time I use it and it seems to regain its full battery life. The best part is, raising the back of the netbook really  made typing a lot easier. Also, I always bring along the original battery, so if I do need a little extra time after the big battery runs out, I can just swap it.

Another thing that made a big difference in “ease of use” was using a mouse instead of the finger pad. At least you know exactly what’s going to happen when you click a mouse button. Optical mice seem to be the only practical answer when working with unpredictable table surfaces and when you don’t want to worry about a mouse pad. The usual long cord, though, was getting in the way of other customers at the same table. I found this amazing mini-mouse from Discovery Labs and the cord automatically adjusts to being only as long as you want it to be:

Then came the big challenge: How to install programs on a computer too small to contain a DVD/RW drive. Well, it so happens that there are some very cool DVD drives that can do everything…including doing all their tasks…even Lightscribe disk labeling…by being powered by the USB ports on the netbook. The one I bought, pictured below, even writes to double-sided DVDs,  so I can get 9.4 GB of photos onto a single disk. So there’s hardly a day’s shoot when I can’t get the whole thing onto one disk. It reads and writes all the DVD and CD formats, too. Here’s a picture of it and the computer. It’s so slim that there’s just no problem at all slipping it into the same bag with the netbook.

Finally, I didn’t want to install the full CS4 version of Photoshop and all the plugins I used with it on the netbook. Photoshop Elements 7 and Lightroom 2.0 do everything I’m wanting to do  during my “waiting times”.  Lightroom does all the “exposure” adjusting, image management, and quick-turnaround slide shows. It also makes it really easy to send a client or compatriot a set of “preview” or quick publishing files, all pre-sized and in JPEG format. When I get back home, I immediately copy the DVDs I’ve made on the road to my big hard drive and it’s twin back-up drive. I even took the whole outfit to a party one night and did all the initial Lightroom work, got some outside feeback at the same time, and then loaded it all up to the iMac in the morning and went straight to work on the final tweaks on my calibrated monitor and did the final retouching and compositing in Photoshop CS4.

The last little part of my “workflow” is to copy individual articles, to do lists, etc, to a flash drive. Then I copy that to my  iMac. When I get a bunch of those on the netbook, I also back them up to a DVD and then erase them from the netbook so that there’s always room to do my next “on the job” photo-editing. Perhaps the biggest benefit of all in all of this is that if your editing work gives you some ideas while you’re on the road, you can probably shoot them while you’re still at that location.

Sunset is an awesome time of day for photographers. The sun is low on the horizon casting warm orange light. Add clouds to the equation, and you have the recipe for great sunset pictures. When you photograph a sunset, the sun is a key player, but you need other ingredients for a great shot. One of them is clouds. Without clouds, you’ve got a boring picture of an orange ball sinking in a cerulean blue sky. You also need an interesting landscape to complete the picture. You can take pictures of sunsets with the skyline of your town in silhouette as the background. You can get an even better shot of a sunset when you have a body of water such as a lake, river or ocean in the picture. The water will reflect the colorful clouds. You can get some great sunset pictures in the final few minutes before the sun sets. After the sun sets, many photographers pack up their gear and head for home. This is a mistake. As long as the clouds don’t go all the way to the horizon, the sun will reflect warm colors on the underside of the clouds for about ten or fifteen minutes after setting. If you want really great sunset pictures, wait a few minutes after the sunset and get ready to take some pictures when the clouds are bathed in giddy shades of pink, orange and purple.

There are a couple of different ways you can photograph a sunset. If I’m going for the grand view, I use a wide angle lens such as my 17-35mm Tamron, and choose the smallest possible aperture for a large depth of field. Sometimes I go the other route and choose a telephoto focal length and a fairly large aperture for a limited depth of field. Recently I photographed a sunset at Caspersen Beach, which is a few minutes from my home. I used my 24-105mm lens and zoomed to 105mm, with an aperture of f/7.1. I focused on some nearby sea oats. The sea oats were in silhouette and in sharp focus, the clouds were a little soft, and the sun was a soft out-of-focus orange orb as shown in the following photo. But due to the telephoto lens, the sun is relatively large in the resulting photo, which makes it clear the photo was taken as the sun was setting.

Placement of the horizon line is another important consideration. Many photographers put the horizon line smack dab in the middle of the picture. This gives a confusing message to the viewer, he doesn’t know where to direct his focus. If you remember one of the rules of composition called the Rule Of Thirds, you divide your image into three sections vertically and horizontally. Place the horizon line in the upper third, or lower third of the image. If the sky is the most important element in your sunset shot, place the horizon line in the lower third of the image, which draws the viewer’s attention to the sky. If the reflection of the clouds in the water is the most important part of your image, place the horizon line in the upper third of the image.

It’s been said that Ansel Adams could predict whether or not there’d be a great sunset in Yosemite by looking at the sky half-an-hour before sunset. Ansel knew the weather patterns of Yosemite like the back of his hand and could predict what would happen. Study the weather patterns where you live. Observe the cloud movement in the late afternoon and soon you’ll be able to predict whether or not you’ll have a photogenic sunset.

A great sunset photo always grabs the viewer’s attention and draws him into the picture for a closer look. Use the information in this tutorial when you’re photographing the sunset where you live. Photograph the sunset often and you’ll end up with a portfolio full of great sunset shots.

I won’t say that this is THE workflow for getting the maximum HDR effect, but it’s certainly an effective one. It’s great for shooting and processing scenics, still-lifes, product photos and anything else that doesn’t move. It gives you complete control over the contrast and detail that can be seen in all areas of the image and the freedom to choose any of several methods for doing so. One end result is shown below:

Your chances of getting perfect exposure and tonal values are pretty close to 100%.  I’m considering “scenics” to be anything from nature to street scenes to long shots that are taken as orientation for an event or story shoot…including night shots. Here’s the step-by-step routine:

1.    Use at least a 4GB, better 8GB, memory card so you’ll have room for all the sequence shots you might want to shoot. Remember, you may be shooting 4-7 RAW files at a time.

2.    Set your camera to shoot RAW.

3.    Set your camera to shoot in Aperture Priority mode. You DO NOT want the camera to change aperture while you’re doing the sequence shots because the same objects in difference shots could have blurred details that wouldn’t register when the HDR is merged.

4.    Set the aperture at f/11, but change it to F/16 if you shoot from a tripod or your basic exposure reading is for a shutter speed of at least 1/50th second when shooting hand-held (1/20th second if you have good image stabilization). If you do shoot hand-held be very careful not to move the camera. Photoshop and most other HDR programs are very good at registering images in a stack, but don’t take any unecessary changes.

5.    Put your camera in rapid sequence bracket mode, with a difference between shots of as much as your camera allows. If that happens to be 2-f/stops, cut that back to 1.5 f/stops. If youíre given a choice of more or less shots in the sequence, take at least 5 unless youíre really cramped for memory. One of my favorite cameras only allows for .7 of a stop difference between exposures, so I have to shoot 5 shots to get the (close to) 1.5 stop difference I want between the first, third, and last shot. Hereís a Lightroom “contact sheet” screen shot of the series that was taken to create the finished image you see at the beginning of this blog.

6.    Set your camera for matrix metering.

7.    Use a tripod whenever possible, which means you should be sure to carry it with you. You’ll always take more time to study the scene and will compose more carefully. That is extremely important in the success of a scenic. You’ll also become independent of shutter speed and IS (Image Stabilization) for keeping your shot steady.

I always process my photos in Lightroom 2.4, so I have the choice of making an HDR image by selecting two or three of the shots (depending on the overall tonal range of the sequence), editing multiple shots as layers in Photoshop (easy way to bring in a sky and a foreground), or simply using the Recover, Fill Light, Adjustment Brush, Graduated Fill, Tone Curve and HSL panels. You’re not restricted to Lightroom, though. As long as you’ve got the detail exposed properly for all areas of the picture and haven’t lost a lot of extra time in the process, you can do much more in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements to fine tune the final result. I find the Exposure dialog in Photoshop especially useful for the final tweaking of the HDR.

Good photographers are always looking for inspiration…ways to make our pictures more impactful on their intended audience by stimulating themselves to see the scene in new way for from a fresh point-of-view.

Making a habit of finding ways to get inspired is a very good idea. I’d like to hear from you, in your comments, about various ways that you’ve found to become inspired.

Look through you’re camera’s menus and manual for things it can do that you don’t ordinarily do, then just go anywhere at all and practice doing one or more of those things to practically everything that you see. Remember, digital photos are free until you keep them. There’s no penalty for shooting bad stuff unless you don’t bother to erase it. On the other hand, if you don’t take chances, you’ll never do anything out of the ordinary.

Here’s a list of things your camera does that I bet you don’t do every day:

Panoramas. All you have to do to shoot a panorama is to be careful about framing so that each time you pan, you keep the camera reasonably level and leave a 15-30% overlap. You’ll generally get a smoother, better-stitched panorama if you use a tripod, but the latest versions of Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and painter do a fantastic job of “correcting for errors.” So give it a try, even if you don’t have a tripod. You’re not limited to horizontal panning, either. You can shoot a group of photos in a column and row matrix in order to create a higher resolution image (Google the technique…there’s not room to explain it all here), or you can pan vertically in order to get all of a tall building, tree, or skyscape into one shot. You can also get some really crazy-looking results just by shooting a sequence while you wiggle, jiggle, and pan. You won’t get anything you’d expect, but if you try it on enough different things you might get some really dramatic or artsy composites. A friend of mine did that while a train was rolling past. Another just shot a series of the windows of passing cars… You might even try stiching together a series of totally unrelated shots.

I made a panorama of the row of windows immediately across the street from my apartment, just to show their variety. The shots were handheld, but Photoshop still managed to do a great job of stitching them together. The challenge came in the fact that some were much closer to the camera than others, so the panorama had a severe curve at the top and bottom. Photoshop’s Lens Correction Filter fixed that easily:

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This morning I attended an early meeting. After the meeting was over, I strolled downtown Venice with my Canon G10. I took some pictures and went on to my next meeting. I processed this image in Lightroom and used a develop preset to make the colors pop. Then I took the image into Painter X and used different auto-painting modes on the image. I finalized the images by adding some vibrant strokes of color with the appropriate brush.

The latest technology taunts photographers with more megapixels, anti-dust technology, live-view, and so on. Pentax, Nikon, and Sony have been upping the ante for about a year. Now Canon’s joined the fray with an updated EOS 5D. The new Canon EOS 5D MKll features integrated sensor cleaning, 21-megapixel captures, live-view, a 3-inch monitor, and much more. I own the first iteration of the 5D. Do I want its big brother? You betcha. I’m sure a lot of other photographers who own the EOS 5D feel the same way. So what do you do when you’re on a budget and can’t afford or don’t want to keep your trusty two-year old EOS 5D, or for that matter, any piece of old gear that you’ve replaced? Can you say eBay?

When my trusty Minolta 35mm camera died, I grudgingly made the switch to digital. After researching what was on the market, I decided to purchase a Canon EOS 10D and bought a couple of EF lenses. I was very happy with the camera except for the amount of time it took the camera to power on. Then along came the EOS 20D. When I read the spec sheet and noticed the start up time had been reduced, I wanted one. So I shopped for the best deal I could find and bought one. But I couldn’t afford and didn’t need two digital SLR bodies. I put the 10D up for auction on eBay. A week later, the camera sold for seventy percent of what I paid for it. Not bad considering I’d used the camera for a year.

I grew to love the 20D. It was a great camera, took sharp pictures, and the camera powered up almost instantly. But I shoot landscapes. Therefore I use a wide angle focal lengths a lot. The Focal Length Multiplier for the 20D is 1.6, which means a 20mm wide angle lens acts like a 32mm lens on the 20D. Almost a year after I purchased the 20D, Canon introduced the 5D, which has a full-frame sensor; no focal length multiplier. I wanted one in the worst way, but balked at spending that much money. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted one. Finally I succumbed to my desire, found the best deal from a reputable online camera store and bought one. I put my 20D up for auction the Saturday after my 5D was delivered. Again I recouped almost seventy percent of my investment after using the camera for a year. It was amazing to watch interested bidders battle each other, driving the selling price of the camera higher and higher. eBay’s is the busiest online auction site; a great place to sell photo gear you’re no longer using.

Now I’m in a quandary. I want the new 5D MKll and I also want to keep my trusty 5D as a backup camera when I shoot weddings. It would also be useful to shoot events with two cameras with different lenses mounted. Even though the list price of the 5D MKll is about $700 less than the original 5D, the economy and sky-rocketing gas prices is causing most Americans — including me — to become very frugal. But the new 5D won’t be available until November. That gives me two and a half months to come up with the money. You can bet I’ll be putting the gear I don’t use frequently up for auction on eBay. My goal is to sell enough to pay cash for the new 5D MKll when it’s available.  In fact, I’m putting one lens up for auction on Sunday.

In an ideal world, a photographer would have a seamless background for every photo shoot. However, when you’re shooting portraits at a client’s location, the luxury of a seamless background is not always an option, especially if you’re shooting in cramped conditions.

Today I did a photo shoot for a medical clinic. My client wanted head and shoulders shots of the doctors and nurse practitioners. The only available place to shoot was a small break room. I set up the backdrop stand and unfolded a very wrinkled muslin background. Read the rest of this entry »