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I did a photo walk yesterday, in Mississauga. And after that, a group shot of the people I did the walk for. Arrange the group nicely and I get:

Not bad, and it’s what a competent photographer might well do.

But wait. There’s more. I want modelling; less flatness. Saturated background light. And I want my subjects to be the bright pixels. So that they stand out.

Meaning I need light and control over that light. Meaning:

  • A flash for key light. I used one studio flash (a Bowens 400 Ws flash)
  • For power, a Bowens battery pack).
  • A modifier (umbrella, here).
  • A sand bag to stop the light from falling.
  • Camera settings that make my background go darker (ideally, –1 to –2 stops below ambient).
  • And do not forget,  shutter speed less than my camera’s fastest flash sync speed (1/250 sec for me).

All that looks like this:

So the resulting picture is:

(Canon 1Dx, 24-70 lens, 1/125 sec at f/6,3, 100 ISO)

Compare that final shot with the one at the very top and see if you can see, and appreciate, the differences. Then, you are on your way to lighting professionally.

 

KISS

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Photos are good when they contain what’s needed, and no more. Often, that means they are simple.

This was outside my front door an hour ago:

Nice and simple. But I can make it simpler.

I could even remove some of those distracting things on the roof:

Since I do not think the stuff I removed was essential to the photo, the simpler ones are better for me. I say “for me”, because after all, it IS art, and you cannot argue over art. (Doesn’t stop people though.)

Now Google the most expensive photo ever sold. $4m. Look and tell me what you think.

 

When.

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In a forum I visit, a photographer just asked:

Hey friends! I’ve got an external hard drive which is giving me some problems and I can’t seem to pull files from it. My computer recognizes it, but doesn’t let me access the files. There are about 200 that i don’t have backed up elsewhere and I would love to figure out how to get them. Does anyone know any file recovery service which may help?

I am so sorry for her, but on the other hand I wonder why there are still people without backups. EVERY hard drive will fail. It’s not IF—it’s WHEN.

A student in my new Sheridan College course, which started tonight, a student told me she had previously lost two years of her young son’s life in pictures. We have all had this thing happen: please, please learn from these experiences of others, and

  1. Go get a new backup drive or two. Now.
  2. Make backups, perhaps using simple scripts like the one I have described here.
  3. Keep one backup off-site.
  4. Print as many photos as you can.

Then you can sleep, as well as enjoy your photos!

 

Tip!

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Tip for flash users.

When you use a flash off camera, like here, you often use Pocketwizards. Which means the flashes are on MANUAL mode. Like here, wedding organizer Jane Dayus-Hinch, whom I photographed at the Wedding Show today:

Off Camera Flash 1/8 power. Canon 1Dx, 1/80 sec at f/4.5, 1000 ISO

Those camera settings let in enough ambient to act as fill light.

So anyway… if you use an off camera flash, there is one problem. Every 60 seconds or so, the flash goes to sleep and turns off. Meaning you get a shot like this… fill light only:

The solution: You have to set a custom function on the flash to disable the timeout. C.Fn 01 on Canon (set to “1”); menu driven on the Nikon flashes.

Done!

 

 

 

 

 

Are you a pro, or committed amateur?

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…then you may want to ask me to be added to the Speedlighter’s Forum on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/SpeedlightersForum/.

Please only ask if you are indeed a pro or committed amateur, and you know all about aperture, shutter, ISO, lenses, and so on. This private and closed Facebook forum is going to be high level, not for simple beginners questions. I welcome those, too, here. Speedlighter.ca is for everyone, from complete beginner to 20-year full time pro.

So pro/almost pro: discuss things with equals on https://www.facebook.com/groups/SpeedlightersForum/. And everyone from beginner to pro: come here daily to read a tip, trick, mini lesson, shoot explained, etc every day. And here, too, I welcome a lot more discussion that there is. I know thousands read here; now also contribute by asking questions or leaving comments. First comment needs to be approved by me; after that, you can comment as much as you like.

Pricing, and.

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The and: Lightroom is hard to buy; harder than I was told by Adobe just the other day. A friend and client tells me:

Unbelievable.
So, I decided to purchase lightroom, rather than use the trial version. Every link on the page either takes you to the creative cloud version with the subscriptions, with the one exception to buy, but that is only to buy an upgrade version for existing customers. I unfortunately purchased the upgrade version only to find out that it is useless to me and so I have to get that refunded.
Anyway after calling adobe and talking to three different people, I found out that the only way to buy a new standalone version is buy calling adobe and ordering it over the phone with them. They really are trying to make it hard to buy anything other than the subscription model. Anyway, I did manage to get the full standalone version, but it certainly took a while.

So persevere, and buy it today, before you have to go to the cloud.

And on an amusing note: here are the world’s 16 most expensive photos. How I would like to be Mr Gursky. http://www.businessinsider.com/andreas-gursky-photo-record-most-expensive-2011-11?op=1

 

Lightroom: Upgrade to 5?

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Yes. Yes you should upgrade to LR5, and I mean now. For the vignette tool, but also for the healing tool, and especially for the lens correction tool. Corrections are “one click” now: both lens as well as architecture correction. Look: original on the left; corrected with simple click on the right

My 16mm lens is perfect, except of course it does introduce a little barrel/pincushion distortion: barrel on the left. One click and it’s gone. Those clicks are here:

“Enable profile corrections” checks if it knows your camera/lens combo, and corrects for vignetting and distortion. “Auto” corrects for the perspective distortion that exists when you aim the camera slightly up or down. Two clicks and perfect: that alone is worth Lightroom. That way I get verticals that are vertical, im images like this:

Any idea how much time that saves me? 100 times the 2 minutes (if I am very quick) that it would otherwise take me in Photoshop, os that is three hours saved on just this one aspect of my photos. Lightroom 5 is the way to go.

 

How you think: an example

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Often. it’s not the “what”, but “how”. How do you decide what settings to you in your cameras? What to shoot?

I shall use myself, and today’s shoot, as an example. I shot a house, for a real estate agent:

When shooting something like this, my camera is in manual model. So I need to make many decisions. And I need to be quick: cannot afford to hang around, for the home-owner’s sake, the realtor’s sake, and my own sake.

So before the shoot I decide :”outside, tilt-shift”. Arriving, I had my tilt-shift lens on the camera already. Using the sunny sixteen rule, before even starting I set my camera to 1/100 sec, ISO100, and started at f/11. I looked; that was a little dark, the meter told me, so I went to f/8. Perfect. Then came the fine tuning: I wanted a faster shutter for hand held, so I used 1/200 sec, which necessitated f/5.6. (shutter gave me one stop less light, which I fixed by aperture giving me one stop more light).

Then I focused manually, held the camera straight, and shifted the lens up. Click. Done. Time taken: Seconds.

Now inside. I already knew I would want the wide angle lens, so I put it on, the 16-35mm f/2.8 lens. Inside, I saw mainly simple white ceilings, so I decided simple flash bouncing with one flash, and combining that with ambient, would be fine. Then the sequence was:

  1. I set my camera to 400 ISO: that is my starting standard for bright indoors.
  2. I selected f/5.6: with a wide lens, that will give me sharpness from “near me” to “infinity”.
  3. Then I selected 1/50 second, which, I was sure, would give me visibility of inside light fixtures.
  4. I selected flash exposure compensation of +1 stop, and turned the flash upward behind me at roughly 45 degrees.

I got:

And that confirmed what I wanted: outside not too crazy bright; light fixture visible, room well lit. Done. Now for the rest of the shoot all I changed was the shutter speed:

  • I first tried 1/50 second.
  • Where “outside” was important, I went up to as much as 1/250 second. This gave a colder inside but better outside.
  • Where “inside” was important and outside could be a little blown out, I went down to as little as 1/20 second.

Once the basics were taken care of, now I started to think about what to shoot:

  • Diagonal into each room; straight-on in the kitchen.
  • I shot from slightly below eye-level (but not below cupboard level if that meant seeing the bottom of cupboards).
  • Of course I went wide, very wide… but I resisted going TOO wide: over-promising and under-delivering is not a very good strategy.
  • I ensured that all the lights were turned on in the rooms I shot.

And of course I avoided this error:

Can you see the error?

Yes, you need to be extremely cautious in a house with many mirrors.

I estimated an hour for this shoot. Time taken: Exactly 56 minutes. A good job, if I am allowed to say so myself, and it feels good to do a good job. This is a beautiful home, and I trust my photos (103 of them) will help secure a very quick sale for list price; perhaps even list price “plus”.

 

Cloudy

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As you all know, Apple Aperture is end-of-life. And with that, end-of-competition: Lightroom is the only game in town.

And with that, Adobe is flexing its muscle; it is trying to get everyone to use their “Cloud” subscription model. That way, they get a fee (like $9.99) every month, instead of one payment of $150 for Lightroom forever. Clearly, they are interested in this.

Clearly, I am not interested.

  • First, I would pay much more (In five years I’d pay $600, as opposed to $150 for the app, and even with upgrades perhaps double that over that period).
  • Second, I want nothing with auto upgrades. This is mission critical. I am still using CS3 (very occasionally). If it ain’t broke…
  • The price is $9.99 per product per month, I think. But that is today’s price… subject to change.
  • Third, I want nothing to do with a product that has to go online occasionally to check if I am allowed to use it. No way. What if I lose my password? What if their authentication system fails? What if my Internet connectivity fails, e.g. because I am travelling? No, that just will not do. This is company critical: I need an app that is mine to run without authentication, permission, whatever.

Adobe is making it almost impossible to buy Lightroom today. But the key is “almost”. After a long while online with support, I was today given the “BUY AS A PRODUCT” links:

Normal Users: https://www.adobe.com/products/catalog/software._sl_id-contentfilter_sl_catalog_sl_software_sl_mostpopular.html?promoid=KLXMI

Educational Users: https://store1.adobe.com/cfusion/store/html/index.cfm?store=OLS-EDU&event=displayProduct&categoryPath=/Applications/PhotoshopLightroomSTE

For as long as possible, I shall go on using Lightroom as  a normal license rather than a monthly subscription, and you all may want to do the same.