Photography Video Podcasts

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I am a little bleary eyed at the moment. I was taking some time to catch up on some video podcasts. Which ones? Glad you asked.

First up would be Photoshop User TV. I thought there was a new one, but I had watched it on my laptop. I think they are often released on Tuesdays. Scott, Matt, and Dave and often special guests natter on about mostly photography related things and throw in several photoshop tutorials each week. If you like any of Scott Kelby’s books, you will like this.

Scott, Matt and Nikon have a new podcast up at DTownTV. This is mostly pretty basic stuff, but I have still learned a couple of things. They are doing a short series on wireless lighting using CLS right now. I am trying to absorb any and all things light at the moment.

I watched several of the Aperture 2: Quick Tips via iTunes by Rich Harrington. He has other stuff on his website, but you can search iTunes for Aperture to find them. I was going through a bunch of stuff he posted in 2008 on using Aperture 2. Anyone know how to edit an import preset? Mine is stuck with my name spelled wrong, and it is driving me crazy!

Ok, I didn’t hit these sites today, but I also watch video at a couple of other sites by the Davids: Strobist, and DigitalProTalk.

The Strobist has lots of great tutorials on setting up and using small flashes. Several series in fact. I started watching them before I even had a flash. I need to get back and see these again. And again.

At DigitalProTalk David has several videos up. He doesn’t do them every week (I don’t think) but the ones he has done have been great. They are usually about lighting and portraits and or weddings. Look at the right side of his blog, and you can see links to his most popular ones.

Site Was Down

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Sorry if you tried to get here and found the site down. It was up last night, but at 10:00 this morning when I tried it was down. Not sure when it when down for sure. I called 1and1 right away, but it took several hours before the site was up again. If it is slow for you this Friday, it is not your imagination. It is dog slow right now. Maybe 1and1 is using less servers while somthing is rebuilt. Frustrating all the same.

Are you a PCITW or a TCOOTW shooter?

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I hate all the silly acronym’s that the computer industry comes up with. It feels like people try hard to be the first to make thier acronym for some new process or technique stick. I don’t try to hard to remember them. Luckily photographers don’t have so many.

On the other hand, I am trying to figure out good prounciations for PCITW and TCOOTW. What the heck is that you say? You are probably doing alread. David duChemin posts about his new photography acronym’s here. Put Crap In The Way, and Take Crap Out Of The Way. (t.coot.wa maybe?)

I find the PCITW very interresting. I don’t do really do that on purpose. I usually try to clean up my compositions, and Zack Aries has been getting on people about haveing crap in their pictures too (in some of the critiques). Mostly the issue is when the crap is in focus. That is not what David is talking about. It is about using a (usually) out of focus element to help frame and provide depth for the photo. I like this idea. I hope I can remember to try it (on purpose).

So you want a Critique by Zack Arias eh?

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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?

More Pictures of Sam

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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?

Sam3

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.

Sam4

Sam5

Sam6

New Light Toy

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2 Million Candle PowerSo 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.

Live Birthday Party Pictures

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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.

Last Studio Lighting Class

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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.

Shooting Sam 

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.

Sam2 

Sam1 

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.

What am I Reading?

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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…

More Studio Shots

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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.

DSC_6951 

Whitney2 

DSC_6901 

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.