Monthly Archives: May 2009

Zack Arias has PDN Presentation Online

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Yesterday I went to PDN’s Virtual Trade Show. It was pretty good. The technology that made it possible is getting there. I think they have some integration pieces to work on, but it turned out fine.

The highlight of the day (for me anyway) was the creative lighting session done by Zack Arias. But I missed it. I was out, and didn’t get back until just after his part was over, and someone else was talking about lighting toys/models creatively. It was interesting, but I had wanted to hear Zack.

Lucky for me, Zack has posted his presentation in PDF form, and has a Q&A thing going on¬†at his blog. At the end of the second presenter, they also said they would put the presentations online, but I haven’t seen them yet.

Rework with a little Ziser Help

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Mike & Kelly & Family

Trust me, it is a whole lot easier if you get it right in camera the first time. A whole lot easier. Anyway, I didn’t. I didn’t get all that good a picture of this family, and it was bugging me. The first problem was that I didn’t have all four of them with a reasonable expression. You gotta love groups! The first thing I had to do was to put a left side and a right side together of two pictures. Lesson learned: Keep shooting until you get a picture with all people looking forward!

The next thing I wanted was that burn and dodge effect. I tried a couple of things that didn’t work, then I remembered that I had seen a couple of things on David Zisers blog. The first one I found was this. This video post was specifically about dodge and burn. I could not quite make it work. Then I looked around a little more, and found this. I had this one bookmarked to look at sometime. It is about pulling people out and putting them on a different background. I didn’t really need something so drastic, but I decided to pull them out so I could textureize the background that was flat beige. I then used the same technique for dodge and burn that he did in this post.

I will briefly tell you, but it is better to just take a look at his video. First make a curves adjustment layer, and pull the right side way down to darken the image. Create a mask, then with a large soft brush swish through the faces to lighten them. Then use different size brushes to do touch ups. I think it worked.

David has lots of information and many many video posts. It is worth checking out.

Worldwide Photo Walk Day

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Harbor Thoughts 1

Scott Kelby is putting together the second anual WorldWide Photo Walk. This year it is July 18. If you don’t know what a photowalk is, you should check out the site. Basicly it is just a bunch of photographers that decide to get together on a particular day and all walk together (more or less) in the same direction. The idea being that you would chat, get to know each other, help others, and maybe learn something from your fellow shooters.

Last year was a lot of fun, and I met some great people here in Minneapolis. I still follow their pictures on flickr a year later. We had that walk on Lake Harriet/Lake Nakomis. The picture above was taken while on the walk. The picture below was my favorite from the day, but it was long after the walk while I was headed home.

I am not sure where this years walk will be. Unfortunately, we don’t yet have a walk leader for Minneapolis. Boo hoo. Anyone out there want to step up?

Abandoned Tender

The Magic of Noise Ninja

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So, I have been thinking about getting some noise reduction software for sometime now. I always feel that my higher ISO pictures from my D90, such as 1600, were not quite as good as I would like, but I always seem to need to shoot at that speed.

Well, I jumped off the fence the other day. The wedding shot that I did had a lot of outdoor shots in the dark with some flash added. Turns out I didn’t hit my bride and groom with quite enough light. Lesson learned. But, I need to salvage this somehow.

I did a bit of web research and decided on Noise Ninja. This plugin has been around for a while now, and there are some really good challengers. In the end I decided based on price, and that they had both a Phtotoshop and Aperture plugin to go with their stand alone app.

Here are the comparison images. First is without Noise Ninja.

pre-ninja

Here is the same image with Noise Ninja applied in Photoshop.

post-ninja

These images are super zoomed in, and I wish that I had hit them with more light, but the second image is cleaned up quite a bit. The noise reduction has made them softer than I would have liked, but it is a good compromise with noise removal. This was done with a D90 user contributed profile that I found on their site. I don’t really know how to use it yet, but it was a good start.

Rasberry Island Dormanen Wedding

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I took some pictures at¬†Gina and Shawn Dormanen’s wedding on May 16. It was a lot of fun. One of the things we did was head outside to get some pictures of the Bride and Groom in this little structure that was build last fall. We were just a little late getting here. I would have liked more blue to the sky, but I think we got some good pictures out of it. I really like playing with flash and trying to combine it with ambient light, especially with some fun colors going on.

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I did some work in photoshop to these images. I needed to darken the stage. It was a ugly grey from too much light spill. The stage doesn’t look quite as dark on my computer. Here they look a little “floaty”. I also did another adjustment layer to get her dress back¬†in the color direction of¬†white.

Nikon Creative Lighting DVD

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Nikon Creative Lighting System DVDI just finished viewing the Nikon DVD called “A Hands-on Guide to Creative Lighting”. You can see excerpts of this DVD from Nikon here. You can get it for around $30. (I got mine from West Photo) This DVD features the host, Bob Krist, and Joe McNally.

This is a pretty good DVD, with something in it for everyone. Probably not for the ripest beginner, or the most advanced flasher, because it covers a lot of ground. A beginner or intermediate photographer with a speedlight or two willing to pause, stop, and rewind this DVD a few times will probably get quite a bit out of it.

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Check out West Photo in Minneapolis

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I have posted before how I was frustrated with National Camera. I have stopped using them. I fugured that I was going to be a purely online buyer until I found out about a store in Minneapolis called West Photo.

West Photo is a whole different deal. For one thing, this is a store for photographers. Staffed with photographers, selling gear to phtographers. They even had a couple of people out at the MN Strobist event I was at.

I have been there a couple of times now, and while I wish they were open later or on weekends, I am glad I went. I¬†was surprised that their prices are right in line with Amazon and others. I am willing to pay a bit more (don’t forget the tax) to buy from a local store, but there are limits to the price difference I can handle. West Photos prices fall in my range.

The staff here also understand, use, and shoot with the photography equipment they sell. They had no problem telling me what they use and comparing it with other gear in their store. Real world experience counts for something.

They have lighting equipment out the wazoo. If you want to look at something and have knowledgeable people talk to you about it without sounding bored, this is the place.

If you drop by, tell Kyle or Jenn I sent you.

More David duChemin

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David seems to be everywhere recently, including the guest post on Scott Kelby’s blog. He talks about the coming revolution in photography where photographers will give up the endless techno-bable and talk about the images themselves. I hope people like David can continue to lead the way adn that people will listen.

David is even in my living room. Well, at least his book his. I tripped over the Amazon box with his book Within the Frame two days ago. I wish I¬†had more time¬†to read¬†it, but I am really enjoying it so far. Reading David’s blog has really pushed me to think about the images. “Gear is good, vision is better.” as he would say. I came at this whole thing from more of a technical geek backbround, and the creative/art process is much harder for me to grab hold of. People like David are helping me get there.

I have only just started the book. It is a great read so far though. It feels like he is sitting in your living room telling you all this info. Just like a conversation on the couch. He has a great way of writing that feel like he is speaking directly to you.

RC (of layers magazine) posted his first impressions, and I can’t believe how similar they are to mine. To the point that I don’t have anything to add other than to suggest you check his post.

Installing Zenphoto on 1and1

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zen-logo

I had all kinds of trouble getting Zenphoto to install on 1and1. None of which I believe are the fault of the Zenphoto project. I am blaming the difficulties on how you need to configure php on 1and1.

What problems did I have. It appears that there were tables that were not created correctly. The way I figured this out was that I was trying to save a ¬†guest user and password to¬†and album. The name wouldn’t stick. When I went in and look under the MySql admin¬†tool (phpMyAdmin), there was no user field in the albums table. Something was wrong right from setup.

So here are the steps that I came up with to get zenphoto installed properly. I can’t say that all of the steps I took were necessary, and some might even be suspect, but in total it works.

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