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Monday, January 31, 2011

“How I Shot And Edited It – Stars, Storm and Basecamp, Nepal” plus 1 more: Digital Photography School

“How I Shot And Edited It – Stars, Storm and Basecamp, Nepal” plus 1 more: Digital Photography School

Link to Digital Photography School

How I Shot And Edited It – Stars, Storm and Basecamp, Nepal

Posted: 30 Jan 2011 10:48 AM PST

I typically don’t edit my shots heavily, yet one that I brought back from Nepal demanded some help and was eye catching enough by itself to warrant an attempt. My hope is in walking through these steps, you might glean a an idea or two on a similar shot if you really like night photography.  Click on any images in this post to see a 3000px wide rendition for higher detail not possible in the 600px representation.

Starting with the original:

This shot was taken at the basecamp for a climb of a remote peak in Nepal known as Kyajo Ri.  Basecamp is situated in a gorgeous 1.5 mile long hanging valley, a valley that has a steep drop off at its terminus.  This photo is looking down valley and is shot at an altitude of aproximately 14,800′ (4,500m).  It is shot with a Canon 7D and a Canon EF 28-300mm L lens at 28mm, ISO 1600, 30 seconds and f/3.5.  I set the camera on a rock as I was without a tripod at this point.

To start with, this isn’t that bad of a photo.  The clouds are fairly well exposed and you can see the tents, lit up by my two partners.  An electrical storm was brewing and I have many, many shots that did not come out while I waited for lightning strikes in the clouds.  30 seconds was about as long as I wanted to go so as to not streak the stars too much.  I also wanted to give some sense of place and that is lost in the fact that the valley wall on the right is missing.

All the edits were made in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, my preferred photo editor.

The first steps where to remove some of the noise I know exists at ISO 1600 and brighten things up a bit.  While this image was shot at +0 for Exposure Compensation, it is dark around the edges because of the brightness of the lightning and tents.  I moved the Noise Reduction Luminance slider to +38 and Exposure to +1.35.

Now the valley wall is more apparent and the huge boulder next to our tents as well.   I then moved Clarity to +30 and Vibrance to +70.   These had little affect but did add a small bit of definition around the tent and the clouds.  Zooming in, I still found more noise than I wanted and raised the Luminance to a total of +76.

Used the Highlight Recovery to help bring back some of the overblown clouds, but not much, bumping it up to +75.  Saturation was given a slight increase to +18 and Contrast was moved to +45 which helped define the clouds more as well as the tents.

I still didn’t like that the tents weren’t grounded.  There was no real perspective to them.  What were they standing on?  We’re they just floating in space?  To fix this I used the Adjustment Brush with at setting of Exposure +2.40.  I then painted in the foreground as seen in the image below.

That rendered just a bit of the spilled light from the tent cast out on the ground in front of them. In doing this, I also moved the Noise Reduction Color slider to +97 to remove just a small bit of red fringe on the tents.

This is the final image as I enjoy it.  It can use some final small tweaks here and there, but I don’t like spending a lot of time in front of the computer with those minor edits.  This, to me, gives a feeling of place for the tents but also shows the majesty of the clouds coupled with the limitlessness of Space.

Post from: Digital Photography School

4 Concepts for Collages, Diptychs, Album Pages, etc.

Posted: 30 Jan 2011 05:06 AM PST

When you assemble a book template, diptych, triptych or collage in Photoshop (or other editing software), do you arrange them so they work together or do you just pop them in? In this post, I want to talk about the things to consider when assembling an attractive collection of images that can work together nicely.

{Colours}

You can compile images into a collage that aren’t necessarily from the same session or of the same topic. They can complement one another through the use of color schemes or even be edited to look similar even if they’re strikingly different for a quirky feel. The image below is taken from a vol25 album template with photography by Jen Johner. The images are so different yet work beautifully together in this collage:

{Looking inward}

I always make sure that my album pages and collages are compiled with the images looking inward. For the viewer, it can be very uncomfortable to see an album page where the subject is looking in a direction that falls off the edge of the page. For example, see the triptych below and you may agree that the boy’s gaze which goes outside of the collage (the right image) doesn’t feel right. He’s not engaged with the other images. At times, I will mirror images in Photoshop by selecting “edit > transform > flip horizontal” to keep all the images engaged with the center of the collage.

{Leaning}

Much like the example above, I love to use images that lean into one another. This gives the sense that they are engaging with one another and just small parts of the ‘big picture’ as it were. I love the example below where every image seems to be (ever so slightly) engaging with the other through body language:

{Progress}

I particularly love using Diptychs to communicate progression or movement. Especially when they are created using images that wouldn’t make much sense if viewed alone (as in the first example below). In the second, combining the two images gives the viewer the sense that the subject is walking towards them.

As you can tell, I love combining images. But I also know when to display my strongest work alone as as not to crowd the image. Experiment with different methods for displaying images together to tell a story or convey an idea. You might just get hooked too!

Post from: Digital Photography School
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Earthbound Light Photography Tips

Earthbound Light Photography Tips

Link to Earthbound Light Photography Tips

Thinking in Color with CHROMIX ColorThink

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 06:00 PM PST

One complaint I often hear from people trying to learn about color management is that it is hard tell what a profile actually does. Use the right one and things come out looking great. Use the wrong one and things look awful. If you've ever wanted to see inside what color profiles are all about, one of the best tools I know of is CHROMIX ColorThink. And they've just released a long awaited new version that improves stability on Windows 7 and Vista....
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Sunday, January 30, 2011

“This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums (23-29 Jan ‘11)” plus 1 more: Digital Photography School

“This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums (23-29 Jan ‘11)” plus 1 more: Digital Photography School

Link to Digital Photography School

This Week in the Digital Photography School Forums (23-29 Jan ‘11)

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 03:11 PM PST

Weekly Assignment

spot of color 2We finished up our Spot of Colour assignment this week. Using a spot of colour can have a big impact on where your eye travels in a photograph, especially though the use of bright or light colours. Our winners this week all successfully, and creatively, used a spot of colour in their photographs. Our winner this week was phillj blue bucket on the beach. This shot had a clear spot of colour, the composition was good with the way that the line of the water almost leads your eye right to the bucket, and overall it seemed to tell a story. Nicely done! Our first runner up was ttyler’s “Don’t Push It”, the shot of the typewriter keys. That red really stands out nicely, and it creates a nice, simple, almost graphical shot. And last but not least was Shutterbugdeb’s bright red lipstick. This shot was very nicely done, and very vivid. The red really stands out, and it’s clear that it’s not selectively coloured from the small amounts of colour elsewhere. It makes it very clear what colour is meant to stand out here. Well done everyone!

don't push itTouch of color Our newest assignment is Still Life: Food. For some of us, it’s a very dreary part of the year. It’s cold, the weather is less than ideal, and that can make it much more difficult to want to pick up the camera. But food still life shots are a great way to be creative without having to deal with the less than ideal weather. Food shots are a staple of still life photography. They can resemble the paintings of years past, or they might be the kind you would see in a cookbook, but either way, we want you to set up a food photo for this week’s assignment. As always, a quick reminder of the rules. First, your photo must have been taken between 19 January – 2 February 2011. Second, your post must include the words: “Still Life: Food” in order to show that that you have given your permission to be included in the contest, and the date that the photo was taken in order to show that it is eligible. Finally, your EXIF should be intact, and it’s useful if you can include some of the main points, such as camera, lens, aperture, ISO, shutter speed, etc. in the text of your post. Please limit yourself to one entry per person during the first week of the contest. Next week we will be looking at still life photos once again. But this time, our subject will be Still Life: Flowers. Flowers might seem like an overdone topic in photography, but we still photograph them. And as much as we love to photograph them, sometimes it is hard to get a good shot. Remember, this isn’t about taking a shot of your garden, this is a still life. So consider the design and placement of your subject, composition, and lighting. Good luck everyone!

Post from: Digital Photography School

The Basics of RAW files {and what to do with the darn things}

Posted: 29 Jan 2011 10:13 AM PST

I was shooting a wedding once and the father-of-the-bride ‘knew a lot about photography’. I was literally laughing out loud (trying so terribly hard to hold it in) when I would adjust the dials and hear him say over my shoulder “mmmm oh yes you’re probably changing the white balance hmmm?” And best of all, “if you’re really professional you shoot in raw.”

Raw. It’s the ultimate test of someone’s acceptance of your status as a professional because it’s one of the first things that a mildly keen just-starting-out-er will pick up on in their search for photography knowledge. But even though it’s one of the first things you’ll likely learn, it’s also one of the most confusing elements for a beginner.

I’m a control freak. I don’t want to work my butt off to pull every element of an image together and then lose control of my colour temp in post processing. I want to control everything about the final product. If it were possible, I would even come to every single one of your houses and calibrate the world’s computer screens to see things exactly the same. Before you can love raw, you have to understand it.

{Basically…}

  • If you’re shooting in jpeg and  you hit the shutter to let all the beautiful light flood your sensor and record the image onto your memory card, the camera collects the information and quickly compresses it down into a reasonably sized file. It judges things like the colour of the sky and the temperature of the light. Even when you’ve taken the image in manual mode and set everything yourself, the jpeg still needs to make some decisions as it smooshes all that information into one little file.
  • But if you shoot in raw, the sensor stays hands-off and says “ok, hot shot. YOU deal with it!”
  • …this means that you have total, blissful control of your entire image.
  • …but not without some work of your own.
  • RAW files need to be imported into a computer program like Adobe Lightroom or Adobe Camera Raw and then either instantly exported as jpegs (yikes!)
  • …or perfected according to your vision for the image with editing and then exported as a jpg or other printer-friendly format.
  • So just to make sure you get it I’ll say it this way: a raw file isn’t an image. It’s information gathered by the sensor and delivered to you on a memory card. It’s totally your job to then do what you want with that information before compressing it into an ‘image’.
  • Also, a raw file won’t usually have included the in-camera sharpening that jpeg compression provides. So don’t fret when you think your image isn’t as sharp as it should be – this also needs to be done by you in the post production editing process.

Here are some links to set you on your path to opening and utilizing your raw files:

  • You can process your raws with Google’s free program called Picasa. This is an article about how to process raw files in Picasa and this is a list of supported file types.
  • This article from Apple is FAQs about processing your raws in iPhoto
  • Bridge is another option and also useful if you're likely to be utilising many different Adobe programs from your computer. Exe: Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. It's a base from which you can spring to any of these programs. If you're only using PS, it's not really necessary, although Helen Bradley has a great post on about the ways she thinks Bridge is useful.
  • This is a tutorial written by me, before I learned how to make videos. Full of screen shots to show you how I import my files into Lightroom and export them out when I’m finished editing.
  • This is the Wikipedia entry for ‘raw image format’. Scroll down to ’software support’ and you’ll find a pretty huge list of software at your disposal for processing your raw files.

Post from: Digital Photography School
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