Author Archives: Michael Willems

How I rate photos in Lightroom

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It occurs to me that it may be helpful to share my “rating”-workflow in Lightroom. I go through the following sequence:

  1. Import everything as 2 stars
  2. Go to grid view and step through them, and reject any that are technically bad (e.g. out of focus or badly exposed, or the subject is blinking). They get an “X” marking. I exclude X from my view.
  3. Go through them again and rate any that “could possibly be used” as 3.
  4. Go through the threes again and rate any that are “great in this shoot” as 4.
  5. Go through the fours again and give any that are “great and can be used even outside this shoot as portfolio shots” a five rating.
  6. Then I select just the 4 and 5 stars rate them all as PICK.
  7. Then I step through the 3 stars and decide with of them I want to use; I rate those as PICK also.
  8. Then I check for doubles and unpick those.
  9. Then I do any post on my picks.

Done.

Here’s a couple of (unedited)  4-star images from yesterday’s Toronto Island model shoot:

MVW_2386-2

MVW_2360

(70-200 f/2.8 IS lens on 1D MkIII, manual exposure -2 stops from ambient and key flash though umbrella, fill flash on camera.)

What time is it?

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When photographing a watch or clock, it is always nine minutes and 31-and-a-half seconds after ten. As in my watch the other day:

MVWS0101

That way, watches look most appealing. Look for it. Almost every watch is photographed at this “rule of time” position.

yet another one of the ten thousand tips that make a photographer!

And can you see that I used a 35mm f/1.4 lens in available light?

Context

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One trick when you take a picture – no, make a picture – is to tell a bit of a story. One way to do that is to provide both a subject and context. And to separate them. By position, or by distance, or by size, or, as in this picture, which I took for The Oakville Beaver in April, by blurring out the background – which then becomes the context.

Studio wide

In fact as you see I used size as well: the ultra-wide lens (16mm) makes the distance look far away, because I am so close to the foreground object.

For a shot like this I use my 16-35mm f/2.8 lens on my Canon 1Ds MkIII camera. That great lens gives me the ability to get close, go wide, and yet to blur out backgrounds, which at wide angles is not easy unless you have that kind of wide aperture. Of course “getting close to your subject” is a way to enhance the “blurry background” effect.

Assignment "snap"

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Here’s an interesting assignment for pros, emerging pros and enthusiasts: Shoot in Program mode for a day.

That way, for once you are not thinking about Aperture, DOF, drag, motion blur, and such. For one day, you will be thinking about your subjects, instead of about technology. And this makes some sense; One famous wedding pro even shoots in “P”mode, I am told.

MVWS1292

You might try this assignment in the city, for some street photography. Or at some event. Either way, it’ll likely reset some of your thinking. And perhaps even open your eyes a bit more in familiar environments.

MVWS0962

Have fun!

Not Neye-kon.

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The following press release tells me several things:

September 9, 2009

Nikon Corporation (Michio Kariya, President) is pleased to announce that as of August 2009 total production of NIKKOR lenses, interchangeable lenses for Nikon SLR cameras, reached fifty million. Total production of NIKKOR lenses reached forty-five million in August 2008 with production of an additional five million over the past year.

Nikon (then Nippon Kogaku K.K.) released its first NIKKOR lens for Nikon SLR cameras, the NIKKOR-S Auto 5cm f/2, in 1959 along with its first SLR camera, the Nikon F. In the fifty years since then, NIKKOR lenses have been extremely well received by a great number of photo enthusiasts and professional photographers.

The current lineup of more than sixty NIKKOR lenses for Nikon SLR cameras offers a wide variety of lenses, including fisheye lenses, super wide-angle to super telephoto lenses and micro lenses.

The NIKKOR brand

As the brand name for Nikon lenses, NIKKOR has become synonymous with high-performance, high-quality SLR lenses. The NIKKOR name comes from adding “R”—a common practice in the naming of photographic lenses at that time—to “Nikko”, the Romanized abbreviation for Nippon Kogaku K.K. In 1933, the large-format lens for aerial photography was released with the name Aero-Nikkor, making last year the 75th anniversary of the NIKKOR brand.

First, a trivial one. Americans (and Canadians, who seem to follow Americans all too often) say “Neye-kon”. Elsewhere we say “Nikkon”, i.e. with the “i” pronounced as in “women”. And since the derivation is from Nippon (Japan), I can now finally see that that latter pronounciation is correct. (If you do not know Nippon, it is the official name for Japan, as my father learned during WW2 when he and his family were a guest of the emperor). So anyway: Nikon as in “Nikkon”, “i” as in women”.

Second, a more important one, 5 million lenses since Nikon was born in the same year I was born in, and 10% of them made in the last year. A recession year, to wit. That is huge, and shows how amazingly popular photography is becoming with digital technology.

Good times ahead for the makers, and good times for all the people who will have more pictures of their families than I have of mine. Take pictures while you can. Or one day it’ll be too late and you will wonder “why do I have so few pictures of my kids growing up, or of my parents or friends”.

Charge!!

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Nope.. not the command of the Light Brigade commander to his men.

Well, that too. But in my case, advice.

Unlike the old “memory effect” NiCad or NiMH batteries, modern Lithium Ion (LiIon) batteries like to be charged every day. Like your car battery. They do not suffer from being topped up all day every day – rather the reverse. They like it.

Charger

And your modern camera battery is the same. Which is great news. It means you never have to leave home without a fresh, 100% full battery.

So here is my advice: charge your battery daily. Yes, every day. Every time i get home, my battery gets a topup. That is good for LiIon batteries, and no they do not suffer as a result. The charger will stop when they’re done. And doing this daily is good for LiIonbatteries.

Sometimes, technology gets better. Actually, often it does. It is rare that it gets worse. Concorde is one of the very rare examples of the opposite.

Real Estate

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When I was in Montreal a few weeks ago to bring my son back to school, my eye was caught by this closed-off street.

block

And then I realized what it was.

You see that missing concrete block three floors from the top, on the left? That is what killed the poor woman who was having an anniversary dinner with her husband in the sushi bar at the bottom. Bet you read about that in the newspapers. Terrible tragedy.

And a reminder not to have dinner under a building in Montreal, where bridges and buildings do have a tendency to keep doing this.

And a reminder -as if I needed that – to always carry my camera. My wide angle lens (20mm on my full-frame camera) allowed me to capture it all, from the missing block to the “sushi” sign below.

Another reason I was glad to have the camera: so I could photograph the mold on the ceiling of Jason’s new apartment’s bathroom. Mold that that landlord says does not exist, and he resent my implications and thinks I have ulterior motives and so on. Yeah right: bathroom ceilings and walls are supposed to look like this:

mold

Feel free to zoom in. We’ll see about your protestations, M. Fattal!

Balance light

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You know the problem. You shoot a living room with large windows and what do you get?

OK outside. A bit light but OK. But dark furniture. Like, silhouettes.

Ah no – you went to a photo course, so you know about “exposure compensation” – the “+/- button”. So you turn that up to, oh, plus two stop (to make it brighter) – and yes, now the furniture looks light. Nice.

But uh oh – the window is now all white. Nothing visible. Like a gateway to heaven in “heaven can wait”.

Fortunately, you have also done a “mastering flash” course. So you know to:

  1. Turn exposure compensation down to make the sky nice and blue
  2. Then turn on the flash (and turn it around so it lights up the wall behind you)
  3. Then take a test shot
  4. Then decide whether to use “flash exposure compensation” – the “plus minus with flash next to it”. This turns the flash power up or down. You decide you need some more light on the furniture so you turn this to plus one stop.

Now here’s your picture:

MVWS0145-2

Nicer, no? Try this technique if you haven’t yet. And you can compete with the best interior photographers.

Chili chicken.

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I have always thought that for clarity, “white balance” should be called “colour balance”.

White balance means “interpret the red-blue-green respective channels to match the colour of the light hitting the subject, in order to neutralise the colour cast”. Your camera does this every time (Auto White Balance, or AWB).

When it gets it wrong, which sometimes happens, you see a red, or blue, or green cast to the light. In that case, you can correct this by manually telling the camera the colour of the incident light. Setting the white balance, in other words.

So you go from this (tungsten light):

MVWS0116

To this (corrected).

MVWS0117

That was the chili chicken I had with Baz Kanda, a very talented Ottawa/Mississauga photographer, just the other day. Or rather, it was the remains after we had eaten the chicken. And a photographer plays with his camera even when eating dinner. And when you use a fast lens, like the 35mm f/1.4 I was using here, available light is enough.

TIP: if you shoot RAW (which I do 99.9% of the time) you can leave your camera on “auto” at all times and do it in Lightroom or Photoshop later, on your computer. By clicking on a white item (e.g. the place) with teh white balance dropper. Yes, that’s a bit more work while editing – but it’s also a lot less work while shooting. Guess what I prefer, so I can concentrate on the Chilli Chicken?

Straight light

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You know about Rembrandt lighting, loop lighting, broad and short lighting, and so on? If not, you will. But today a note about simple lighting for models, women, in general anyone who wants to look their best and show youth and beauty rather than experience and character (which can be a euphemism for age).

That is straight, flat lighting. Like this:

IMG_0162

As you see, that is nice, flattering light.

Whenever I shoot anyone where the main emphasis is on this person looking young and attractive, I draw an imaginary line from their face straight up at 45 degrees, i.e. not to either the left side or the right side. Where that line straight from their face hits the wall or ceiling, that is where I aim my flash. (An external flash – please, you don’t use the on-camera popup flash, do you?)

And when I do that, pictures like the one above result – when the model is as pretty. Even when the model isn’t as pretty, this light is best if you want to minimise wrinkles.