Category Archives: Photography

Related to Photography and taking or dealing with pictures.

Digital Pro Talk Links

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I was reading Digital Pro Talk today, and came across a couple of things of note. First up, David pointed out a series of 50 photoshop tutorials at Smashing Magazine. I don’t have time to look at them right now, but I looked over the topic list, and they seem pretty great.

David also had a post a couple of days ago on presenting your images to clients. This was very interesting. He has posted other thoughts on the idea, and I am starting to come around. Before I started into photography, it seemed to me that photographers would want to meet with you to up sell the heck out of you. Some still do, but the way David approaches this appears genuinely with his clients needs/wishes in mind. Yes, he has a product to sell, but the customer has a desire to get beautiful memories. That is why he was contacted in the first place.

The senior photo’s I took of Gavin could have benefited from this. I didn’t sell any pictures at all. I talked to his mom about a few options, but never heard from her. I think next time I will try to take more time to whittle down the selects, and look at how they are presented.

Sold my first print

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Window Poster I had created this picture as a poster a while back. My sister liked this image, and I had this poster printed up for fun on standout. It looks really great. My sister does’t like the standout style though, she likes regular frames better, so I brought it to work to show off. A coworker really liked it, and thought she might buy it, poster, standout and all. Well, it didn’t quite happen, but she did buy a print of the poster in 8×10 that I had up on my wall at work. So there you have it, my first print sale.

Vision Driven Workflow

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David DuChemin over at the Pixelated Image has a great post. I am a couple of days late on this. Being sick put me behind on my web readings. Anyway, this is the kind of post I really like from David. Practical info on putting vision to work. I struggle with getting a vision into my photography, and his post on post-processing with vision is very usefull. If you can’t name the mood in a couple of words that a picture was trying to convey, then you won’t be able to get it there in post. This seems so obvious, but it was one of those “Ah Hah” moments for me. Like he warns, I spend too much time trying to make my pictures “not suck” instead of bringing out the mood that I saw of felt at the time.

Christopher Ward Photography

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Well, I finally did something with the domain ChristopherWardPhotography.com. This will be where my “portfolio” will be. It is a start. I only have one album out there right now, and really, it is just some images I have pulled from flickr. They are not really a cohesive album. I need to spend some time to get some images out of Aperture. I need to get some thumbnails too. The thumbnails you see are just browser scaled versions of the larger images.

Another Book!

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David DuChemin now has a book on pre-order at Amazon. It is going to be called “Within the Frame, A Journey in Photographic Vision”. I am starting to get a list of books I want to read going, and this will definitely go on that list. In his post about the book, he mentions that he still doesn’t have the pictures. This is interesting to me for a couple of reasons. One, I would be scared to have a book promised with no pictures. But that is one of the things that sets the amateurs apart from the pros, they can produce great pictures on demand. The second is that he appears to have the writing for the book mostly solidified. This isn’t a “picture book”, or a “how to get this shot” book. This should be a window into Davids vision.

I have been following his blog for a while now, and have tried to understand what it means to have a vision for what you want to convey in a picture, and how he does this. I still feel like I come up short in understanding this, especially when I try to reflect on what I want to say with my pictures. I hope this book will help sort more of that out. My only wish is that it was available now, instead of the spring.

Get your new McNally

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Hot Shoe Diaries by Joe McNally

I have a copy of Joe McNally’s “The Moment it Clicks” sitting by my bed. I read a couple of pages most days. Now that I have a SB800, it has me even more psyched. The really good news is that there is a new book coming. “The Hot Shoe Diaries” is in pre-order right now at Amazon, but it is supposed to ship before Christmas. This should be on anyone’s list that has a flash. I came across this announcement recently at pixSylated. I had heard of this book coming (on Joe’s blog) but not that it was in pre-order. One other interesting thing that I found on pixSylated is this post on pimping your McNally. He takes Joe’s book and puts a spiral binding on it. What makes this idea really interesting is that I have the coils, the punch and the laminating machine to do this at home, from the cookbooks Annie used to do. I hate to “wreck” my books, but I might need to try this.

South Dakota Panoramic Shot

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I finally got a panorama that I liked. I took some images I took when we were out in South Dakota at the Badlands, and stitched them together in Photoshop. I was surprised to see a couple of seams. I needed to nudge it together a bit. Then I had to get out the healing brush and fix up a couple of hot spots that were left over. Anyway, I then adjusted it with a curves layer to bring out some more contrast. I also round tripped it back into camera raw to adjust the white balance on the jpeg, but I am not sure that was the way to do it, because I had to save a jpeg a couple of times. Anyway, here it is:

South Dakota Panorama

Understanding Exposure

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I have just finished reading Understanding Exposure by Bryan Peterson. It was a pretty good book. Nothing earth shattering in it. There are some good tips on how to set aperture and shutter speed for different shooting conditions. It was definately written in the era of film, when DSLR’s were not really an option. He pushes using manual mode, and setting both aperture and shutter speed your self. Nothing wrong with that, but it seems like the built in light meters are better now. My D40, and now D90 do a good job in most situations. I prefer to shoot in aperture priority, or shutter priority and have the camera set the other. With digital I can then chimp the screen, and then adjust the exposure override. That just makes sense to me. I suppose that going the manual route would push understanding of exactly what is happening light wise. Maybe.

Anyway, I would recomend this to a beginner especially, and as a good “oh yea, I forgot that” type of read for those that are a little more advanced. It is not very expensive. I picked up mine with a Borders coupon a few days ago.

I have space again.

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I have spent most of my photography time the last two weeks or so recovering from running out of space on my iMac. I got a warning from Aperture during an upload that I was in danger of corrupting my library. Scary.

What I did first was to go through and delete images that were crap. I have been lazy – space is cheap right? I had not ditched pictures that were extremely underexposed, or out of focus, or had people heads chopped off. I went through most of the pictures of the 2007/2008 and got rid of them. That was time consuming.

Next was to migrate my referenced images to external drives. I decided to reformat my two FreeAgent 320G drives to HFS+ and move all my images that are stored as reference over. It took longer than I thought. I couldn’t find a way to do it other than to “Relocate Masters” one project at a time. I couldn’t select more than that.

After a couple of days of doing that, I was able to copy all the images to drive #2. I then created two new vaults, and put the first on drive #1, and the second on drive #2. I now have complete duplicates of my images and my library on two separate drives. Drive #2 is off site at work.

I haven’t done any big uploads since to know if that process will be any slower, now that the images are on a USB connected external drive. We’ll see.