Cyberward.net

The eh? is my Canadian showing through. Zack Arias has been doing some critiques of people pictures and web sites since March 10. Here is the link to the first one. He has 8 of them as of this morning, I have seen 4 so far. They are really worth the time to watch.

Theses are really amazing on so many levels. First of all is how well he can do a critique in 5-7 minutes of someones work. Now granted, it looks like he spends some time before hand looking at a site before doing the video. Zack has a good eye for photographs, and a good understanding of web presence.

I have been taking notes as I watch. Some of the most useful information in the first few episodes has to do with how you present your work, more specificly how you present it on your web site. Some of the things that come up over and over are:

• Show me who you are. Only post pictures of the type that show the type of photographer you are and the type of work you want.
• Only post one version of a given picture (not color and B/W)
• Only post a picture of any given model once. Pick the best one.
• Don’t use the same building, boat, object more than once.
• Only use your BEST work. Your best work will not pull up your weaker stuff, your weaker stuff will pull down your best work.

One of the biggest take aways so far is going to be the most difficult for me. This is the “show me who you are” part. I have a hard time with that. I really like shooting my kids – no money in that,¬† landscapes – you have to be really good at that (and travel), flowers – how do you sell that, and portraits – I have just started. So, if I want to take pictures of people, seniors, weddings, engagements, etc, I need to have a site focused on that, but I don’t have many pictures like that yet. I’ve got to put in the work. Funny about that eh? Until my pictures of people are better than my pictures of flowers, I am not going to have a great website to show people my “work”.

I have some lighting stuff coming. I need to be more agressive about getting oportunities to take peoples pictures to both get better at it, and to build my portfolio.

To switch gears, I feel bad for some of the people. The girl that shot the wedding with her camera on auto, direct on camera flash, crooked pictures and poor cropping made me cringe. I sure hope my first wedding doesn’t go like that. He also has people submitting their flickr account with ony pictures of their kids on it and asking what they need to do to make money at this. Yeesh.

I feel that my pictures are squarely in the middle of what he has seen. I don’t take as good of pictures as the ones he has praised, but I sure don’t take as bad of pictures as the ones he trashes. My web site on the other hand would be trashed. I really need to work on my web presence.

The other think that is interresting is that I don’t always agree with him on the shots that he thinks are amazing. I almost always agree with his “chuck” pile, but some of the pictures he like I find my self scratching my head. One thing that appears to be a trend is to shots that are very close to blown out. There are lots of pictures that look overexposed to me that he thinks have great lighting. I am new to the whole being critical of photography/art thing, and I suppose that we might just have different tastes.

It would be interresting to get a critique of my photo’s. He already has a billion submissions, and my I need to work on my site before I would want to have that part looked at.

I really need to look at where I am going as a photographer. Where are you going?

I have a few more pictures of Sam. Thanks Sam for coming to our shoot. You were great to work with.

I really like this shot in the elevator with the alien bees ring light. I would love to have one. Anyone want to gift one my way?

I have a few others that were from the studio. These turned out pretty good too. I don’t like how we had the background light. When it is really close to the background down low, a lot of light is reflected back, and yet the upper part of the picture when he is standing is not white. For the half face shot I needed to “erase” some of the pinkish beige that was in that part of the picture.

So this is the new light toy. It is a 2 million candle power rechargeable flashlight. It is used for light painting. Most people think of light painting as using small colored lights to make abstract drawings or neon sign type things.

Check out Dave Black. This is the type of light painting I want to do. We will have to wait and see if I can get anything close to this, but it should be fun to try.

Anyway, when I took this picture I was hoping to get some light from the flashlight in the picture. It put out so much light it lit up the room. It was hard to turn down the exposure to just light up the light with my SB800 which I wanted to do. I guess I needed something to make dust in the air, but I didn’t want to work that hard I guess. I tried briefly to add something in photoshop, but that looked really bad.

I have blogged before about the eye-fi card. Today I am going to use it to post a “live” picture shoot of Kate’s birthday party. The party is from 1-3. I have a couple of pictures up here already, and as I take them today, more will show up.

This is a cool concept. The eye-fi card is a wi-fi SD card with 2gig of memore. I put the card in my camera, and it connects to the eye-fi servers and uploads the pictures. Then the pictures are sent via web service to our web site, and the pictures are automaticly sent to iPhoto as well.

So goes the last studio lighting class I took with Gil Digden. It was a lot of fun. Mostly I think that was because I connected with several of the others in the class, and we got along well.

 

Rich is the photographer, using an alien bees ring light. I wasn’t sure I would like it when we started, but I¬† do now. The dang things are expensive, unweildy, you have to mount your camera to them, and can’t hand hold, but the light has been great for our more environmental type shots. It has worked great with the elevator.

 

 

So after touting the bees, these were taken with no flash. They are not tack sharp, I was down¬†around 1/15 sec territory with a 50mm lens.¬†I like them though, but can’t decide which one I like better.

The next thing todo is decide¬†on and actually purchase lights. It is tough, because Gil has a bias toward the big lights, and doesn’t think much of speedlights. He pretty much sold the whole class on getting Photogenics strobes. I am not sold. If I get strobes, I will get¬†Alien Bee’s lights. Lots of professionals better than I are using them.

I want to make some Big Light with Small Flashes before I move to the big guns. Joe McNally and David Hobby make some killer shots with speedlights.

I got it a couple of weeks ago now. I have been working my way through “The Photographer’s Eye: Composition and Design for Better Digital Photos” (Amazon) There are many things about composition that I just didn’t think about before. This is a great wealth of information. Not a gripping thriller, but tons of information.

Digital Photography Outdoors by James Martin. (Amazon) I found this in the library, and it is pretty good. There are lots of good landscape pictures in here that illustrate the concepts he is presenting. I haven’t got to it yet, but there is a section on “workflow” that presents some photoshop techniques for landscape shooters. It reads well.

The Hot Shoe Diaries by Joe McNally. (Amazon) I finally got my copy from Amazon. Too many books, too little time. I have just flipped through it, reading a couple of pages, but it is clasic Joe. Very funny, a little rambling, telling it like it is with no pretense and a handful of photog words that send me scrambling to Google.

Do I read the books, take pictures, or edit my recent pictures? Oh right, none of the three. Back to making a paycheck…

Ugh. It¬†took a week to get to my shots from last Wednessday’s studio shoot. Well, not quite true. On the weekend I did the collage of Alex and the poster of Whitney. Last night I got through the rest of the images. I had to get the images onto CD’s to give back to people today. Here are some of the images from that shoot.

 

 

 

There are more in my portrait flickr set.

So today is the last of these classes. They have been a lot of fun, and I have learned a lot. I need to keep this up. There are some more things that I would have liked to have looked at more. We didn’t play with lighting ratio’s much. I would have been nice to set the lights, take a picture, change the lights, take a picture, etc. I might need to just spring for my own set to be able to do that.

The Hot Shoe Diaries by Joe McNally has shipped from Amazon, and it is killing me that I picked the slow shipping option.

Joe McNally is also the guest blogger on Scott Kelby’s¬†blog tomorrow.

I found my star washer for my Black Rapid strap. I am pretty sure it is from the 1st time I lost it. It was on the sidewalk in the backyard after the snow melted.

Photoshop World has started. The expo is on, the training classes start tomorrow, and I am pouting about not being there. But then again, the $599 fee to get might have been a factor…

David du Chemin has a video¬†of his backup strategy on his blog. Sigh. Makes me think about how my NAS is still not operational (equivalent-ish to his drobo) and how I haven’t made an off site backup for a long time. I like his idea of the pelican case with the smaller drives per year. Get on that Chris!

Matt Brandon is featured by Photoflex. They have a softbox for hot shoe flashes. The one that Matt used for his shoot is on sale for $79 right now. I think I may have to spring for this.

I got through the rest of my shots from last Wednessdays studio shoot. I need to weed a little bit more, and get them on CD’s for people for tomorrow’s class. I will try to post some of the images too. Last class tomorrow.

Abstract classes are an interesting piece of Java. They can’t be used on their own, and they have a unique place in our code. They are often confused with interfaces, but they provide a great way to prevent code duplication and ensure consistent structures when building an application.

 In this tutorial we want to look at what Abstract classes are and when to use them. We will take a look at the previous Interfaces lesson and see how we could refactor our code from that lesson to use an Abstract class.
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Last week at my studio class I had the chance to shoot a family of three.  Once the little girl got tired, I was able to do some head shots of Alex. Turns out, he does improv, and has some great expressions. I put some of them together.

He was a pretty funny guy. Anyway, we had pretty typical lighting for what we have been doing. Two photogenics strobes in light boxes. As typical, I don’t think the hair light was positioned correctly.¬† They worked pretty well, but I think they are stronger as a group.

I exported all the images out of Aperture, scaleing them down somewhat. Then I created a new document in photoshop.  I opened all the head shots, then dragged them over to the new one. I created some guides to help me position the images.

I then used the fx layers to create a stroke (middle I think) around each image, and the shadow fx too. I also decided to make it look like all the images were sitting on a page. I expanded the canvas, then created another layer I filled with white. Then I used the shadow fx on the old background layer that was now our inner page to make it stand out.