JLykinsphotos

Change in Direction

2010-10-26T10:52:00.002-04:00

Today marks a turning point in this blog's life... Up until this point this blog has been geared at Photographers. Photoshop tutorials, photo tips etc. After spending some time with commercial photographer Don Giannatti and talking about the direction of my photography etc. the aim of this blog is going to focus more on my images, and why I did what I did with them. So without further adieu... I present to you Tarah.

Tarah is one of my favorite models to work with in this area. She's naturally beautiful, fun to work with and is fearless. I setup this shot for my commercial book. The goal was to tell a story, or show something different than just a pretty face. I wanted to highlight not only the model, but the vehicle as well. Lighting the two planes separately did a good job of accomplishing my goal.

Hit the Jump to see an outtake and hear about the lighting setup...

I didn't like this shot as well because the posting and the look on her face just didn't nail what I was looking for. Another beautiful picture to be sure, but just not quite as good as the first one.

For this setup I used a White lighting 1600 with a gridded beauty dish for a main. The kickers were sb800's on either side of the car. For The light on the car, it was just a touch from another sb800.

So a big thanks to Don Giannatti for pointing me in the right direction, and a big thanks to those of you reading. If you want to see more work from myself or my studio please visit http://www.rdphotos.com and look at the portfolio section. See you next time, Jason

Shooting for Social Media

2010-10-07T08:18:00.006-04:00

Hey everyone. Glad to see you back! The image you see above is of my brother Garrett. He's a producer for Clear Channel radio here in Cincinnati, specifically the AM sports side. As such he tries to have a pretty good social media presence. He has a blog, a couple of twitter accounts, Facebook etc. His problem was that he didn't have a consistent picture across the accounts, and branding is all about that, consistency. So the other day he was over to watch some football and I grabbed him for 5 minutes to do some quick shots for his profiles. Hit the jump for the rest of the shots, as well as a lighting diagram

This is what I did for lighting. I had a single SB900 camera left shooting through a shoot through umbrella on manual 1/8 power. The umbrella was roughly 2 feet from the subject and feathered to the left so that just the edge of the light was hitting his face. On camera right, I had a tri-grip white reflector held by an assistant. The settings on the camera were ISO1600 112mm on my 70-200 2.8 f/5.6 1/80th of a second. Here's a diagram:

Simple enough setup but highly effective. In the diagram you'll notice that the subject is a good distance away from the background. This is important. It's the inverse square law at work here. The further away the subject(and the main light source) the darker the background gets. In this case we wanted totally black, so we moved him as far away as was practical. Here are a few more from the shoot:

I took 12 shots total and these are the keepers. Social media is a huge part of every business now, take advantage of the need that has been created by and for this market. Thanks for stopping by, See you next time!

The best camera is the camera that you have with you

2010-10-01T10:05:00.006-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad to see you back. We've been a little busy as of late with model portfolio's, senior pictures, and of course wrapping up wedding season. I've been away for a little while. There have been a few interesting things that I wanted to let you know about though. First, this blog has been accepted by Alltop.com which is a popular service allowing you to follow all of your favorite blogs in one spot. You can find this blog by clicking HERE. It's a great way to follow your favorite content. If you want to see what/who I follow, click here: WHO I FOLLOW. Also, we at RedDoor Photography have been busy updating our website to allow for iDevice viewing. If you haven't checked it out recently, head on over now to see the site. On that note, I have been doing a lot of guest blogging for Adobe Evangelist Terry White over at his application website BestAppsite.com. If you have an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch, be sure to head over there for some great reviews including all of the photography apps you could possibly want.

Speaking of photography apps and iPhones, I want to say a quick word today about something that has become really important to my creative process. When I see something that inspires me, I use whatever camera I have with me. Usually that's my iPhone which admittedly has a pretty nice camera built into it, but the point is it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what camera you have, it doesn't matter if it's a point and shoot, a film camera, a DSLR, etc. It's all about capturing the moment. There are entire Website dedicated to using cell phone camera's. Most of that revolution was brought on by commercial photographer Chase Jarvis. The point is, you don't need a special camera, or a special lens to capture great images. Hit the jump to see some of my favorites that I've captured, and edited right inside of the phone.

Thanks for stopping by. See you all soon! Jason

So you want Low Noise at High ISO

2010-09-21T11:42:00.004-04:00

Hey Gang! Glad to see you're back. I'm not entirely sure what the image above has to do with high ISO and low noise... It was shot with a D300 in studio conditions at ISO200. I wanted to share this shot with you all though. It's my friend Heather, who after a horrific traffic accident used Yoga to regain mobility. She's an inspiration to anyone who has to overcome an obstacle.

On to some high ISO low noise goodness! I had a friend on twitter(by the way if you're not following on twitter, why not? it's @reddoorphoto)ask me about the noise capabilities of the D700 because he was considering buying a new camera and wanted better noise reduction/capabilities. I asked him if he had thought about a D300s instead. At half the price, it comes really close to the quality of the D700 in the noise department, plus it shoots video! To prove this to him I set out to do a little experiment... More on that after the jump:

We had an engagement session last night, so I took the opportunity to grab Shad's D300s and his D700 and do a quick, unscientific test. Same lens, same ISO(3200)spot metered off of the guys back in the shadows. Take a look at the results:

To view it larger click HERE

The D700 is on the left, D300s on the right. I Spot metered for the back of his shirt that was in the shadows, so the background is blown, but that's ok. You can see the noise(what little there is) on the zoomed in section. I think the D300s file looks as good, or better than the D700 file. I'm pretty sure that both are perfectly acceptable. Is there a $1300 difference between the D300s and the D700? I don't think so. Unless you need the full frame for an ultra wide lens like the Sigma 10-24 FX, I can't see a justification to go with the D700 instead of the D300s. This was of course a real world test, not a scientific laboratory test, but the proof is in the image above. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below.

Thanks for stopping by, see you next time! Jason

Content aware Fill and when to use it!

2010-09-18T17:38:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad to see you made it back. Today I want to show you one of my favorite features of the New Photoshop CS5 and when I would use it. Content aware fill was introduced in the latest version of Photoshop (CS5). Basically you select an area, select fill, or press backspace (on the background layer) and Photoshop does it's best to fill in the selected area with what it thinks should be there. I was skeptical about how well it would work when I heard about this feature, but I have to tell you, it does a wonderful job. Above is an image from a recent wedding. Beautiful image, but what you don't realize is there was one of those big Rainbow playsets in the background that had to be removed. It literally took 20 seconds to remove, start to finish. Hit the jump to see how...

So that's the original. You see in the upper left hand corner there is a bright, ugly playset sticking out like a sore thumb. In the past I would have added a layer, selected my clone stamp tool and gone to work. It would have taken at least 5 minutes or more depending on how difficult the background was, and how precise I needed to be(dependent on how large of an image I thought they might make). Here's how we roll in CS5.

First we're going to select the area we want to remove. In this case I used the Elliptical marquee tool. You don't have to be really exact. As a matter of fact in this case, I wasn't precise at all.

There are two things to note in this image. First, I have the background layer selected, so all I had to do was press Backspace on my keyboard to bring up the fill dialog box. If you have any other layer selected you would go to EDIT-FILL and when the dialog box came up, you would select CONTENT AWARE FILL. Once you have the selection, and the content aware fill box up, press OK. This will fill the selected area with what CS5 thinks should be there. It does this by looking at the pixels around the selection and using a special algorithm it recreates the area.

After you press ok, it will take a few(varies depending on the size of area being filled) seconds and as you can see in the image below it fills it. I didn't go back and do any touching up of the area. This is exactly how it came out of Photoshop.

Use content aware fill to your advantage. Reduce your editing time, and do a better job with this great improvement. Thanks for stopping by, see you next time. Jason

Creating a Panoramic With Photoshop CS5

2010-08-30T15:56:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad to see you made it back. Today I want to show you my method for taking a standard image and creating a panoramic using Photoshop CS5's Content Aware Fill feature. It's a pretty simple process that will have you creating panoramas in no time flat! So watch the video, and let me know what you think! Jason

Learn to Sharpen in CS5

2010-08-20T08:05:00.002-04:00

Hey everyone, thanks for stopping by! Today I wanted to show you a brief tutorial on the Sharpen Tool in Photoshop. The sharpen tool has been around for quite a few versions, but finally in CS5 Adobe has made it usable. They've added what they call the protect detail control. This is a control that preserves the details, and limits the artifacts when sharpening. This improvement has made a tool that was previously unusable, one of my go to sharpening methods. So watch the short video, try the tool out, and tell me what you think! Jason

Spot Healing Brush with Content Aware Fill

2010-08-18T00:46:00.000-04:00

Hey Everyone! Glad to see you here! Today I want to show you another of the wonderful improvements to Photoshop CS5, Content Aware Fill. Specifically where it applies to the Spot Healing Brush. This has been a godsend to Photographers the world over and I use it on almost every image that I take. So watch the video, and let me know what you think. Jason

Creating a Fireworks image

2010-08-17T00:52:00.000-04:00

Hey guys! Glad to see you back! With the upcoming Labor day weekend just around the corner. I wanted to take a little time and explain how to get a really nice fireworks image. It's part Shooting, and part post processing. The image you see above is from last year's WEBN Fireworks show here in Cincinnati. This shot is featured in the United Way Promotion for this year's WEBN fireworks promotion HERE. So hit the jump to see how the shot's were taken and then how they were put together in post.

The key to creating a really good quality fireworks image is the background. Get to your location early. Get a good position that doesn't have anything obstructing your view, and setup your tripod. These things should all be a given to you, but just in case I wanted to spell them out. The next thing is to get a really nice frame of the area without fireworks going off. For the image above, I took several just so I would have quite a few to work with, but here's the one that the image is based on.

Once the fireworks start, usually the air fills with smoke and the Background starts to look awful. Getting a nice background image is important so we have something to add the actual fireworks to later.

The next thing is to concentrate on the fireworks themselves. I always shoot in manual when shooting fireworks because the camera will see all of the blackness in the background and usually create an exposure way too long for the actual fireworks. Remember the fireworks themselves are very bright so we need to expose accordingly. There is no set exposure to shoot fireworks at, but I generally start around f/5.6 1/125th. See what that looks like and adjust accordingly. It's really a matter of trial and error with fireworks, so play with the settings until you get shots that look nice to you.

So now you're home, the fireworks are over, and you have all of these images of exploding color, and some shots of the background. What now? Open your background(pre firework image) in Photoshop. Start deciding how many fireworks you would like to add to the image. Start to visualize what will look good; what will fill the image with color, but won't be overkill. Now sort through and find the individual fireworks that will fill this frame. For me I chose the following shots:

Now we're going to start by doing a rough selection of the first firework to be added to the frame. You can use whatever method you would like to select the firework. I happened to use the Elliptical Marquee tool for this image.

Once you have your explosion selected, you are going to copy the selection either by pressing CTRL+C or by clicking EDIT-COPY. Now you are going to select your background layer that is currently devoid of fireworks and paste anywhere in the image by either pressing CTRL+V or clicking EDIT-PASTE. This will create a new layer over the background layer. The new layer will have the single firework that you had selected and copied. You may have to resize your firework to make it fit into the new image. To do this press CTRL+T to open free transform. Grab one of the corners of the transform box with your mouse and drag in until you are satisfied.

Now, once you have resized, you need to mask out the area surrounding the firework that you copied. Chances are the sky will be slightly different in color than the sky of your background(as you can see in this image).

You will create a layer mask by clicking the third button from the left of the layers box(it looks like a circle inside of a box). This will create a layer mask for your layer, as shown here:

Select your brush tool from your toolbar on the left. Make sure your foreground color is white, and start to paint over the offending color right on the image. When you're using a layer mask you are actually paining away the layer almost as if erasing it, but what's really happening is you are just hiding it.

You are going to repeat this process for as many fireworks as you would like to add to your image until it's full. That's all there is to it! Simple enough! You will have a beautiful shot of the fireworks as you saw them, minus the smoke and haze! I hope this helps you get beautiful fireworks shots! See you all next time. Jason

Refine Edge in CS5

2010-08-16T00:15:00.001-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad to see you made it back. Today I want to show you one of my favorite improvements in Photoshop CS5, the refine edge control. Now the refine edge control isn't new to Photoshop CS5, but there are some great improvements introduced with CS5 that makes it feel like a whole new feature. So watch the video, and let me know what you think! Jason

Studio time just for fun...

2010-07-30T09:52:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone. Glad to see you found your way back. It's been a typical week for us over at RedDoor. Studio shoots, on location corporate work, and tonight we have a wedding. All in all it's been an eventful week. Last Sunday my good friend Frank Tuttle of Tuttle Images came down to shoot and brought along a few models with him. We spent the day working our way around the studio, shooting different themes, and sets. It was a good day. It's nice to have time to shoot just for fun. No real purpose, no one to please but yourself(although sometimes we can be our own hardest critics). Above is Grace. She is a wonderful model from the Columbus area. Such a pleasure to work with. She had many, many different looks, and the ability to "turn it on" on command.

For this particular shot, Frank did the lighting setup. I think he did a wonderful job. The main in this situation was a gridded strobe camera right about 2 feet from the subject's face around f/5.6. Fill was from a brolly box camera left and feathered way up roughly f/4. Below is a diagram showing the setup.

Hit the jump for more lighting setups, shots, and even a little video showing Franks workflow(and dancing that day)!

Like I said, Grace was wonderful to work with, and she had so many different looks that we were able to move around the studio quickly. Here, we did what's commonly referred to as Clam Shell Lighting. We placed a 5foot octobox above grace set to roughly f/5.6. Just below her face we had a strip box set to f/4. This gives us a high key, almost shadowless "glamour shot" of grace and her wonderful skin. Notice the two distinct catch lights in her eyes? One from the lower strip box, and one from the upper octobox. There was about a 2 foot gap between the two boxes in the front that we shot through.

A helpful tip for shooting this setup: The idea is to get a high key, bright image. To do this, we often times "open up" our aperture by one stop. For example, this setup metered at around f/5.6, but to get the brighter look, we shot at f/4. This made the image 1 stop brighter than it would have been at f/5.6.

While Grace was a wonderful model, it was Casey that took the "prize" for best outfits. First she came out in what I would call "50's housewife attire" and had the attitude to go with it. It was great. She posed on several different sets, one of which being the "industrial area" of the studio. The idea for a shot like that is to make her look as out of place as possible. It puts an emphasis on her, drawing your eyes in. She was a wonderful sport, shooting the below shots even though getting her leg up that high with heels on was difficult.

and of course what 50's housewife would be complete without her "Betty Crocker" cookbook:

Shad even talked me into stepping in front of the camera for a shot or two:

But not to be outdone, Frank shows us his great interaction with the models, and of course his dancing skills:

Thanks for stopping in and checking out my latest work. See you again soon. Jason

2010 World Wide Photo Walk Cincinnati

2010-07-26T12:04:00.004-04:00

Group Photo By Wendy Ramsey

Hey everyone! Glad to see you're back! Over the weekend I had the privilege of leading the World Wide Photowalk organized and sponsored by Scott Kelby. This is the second year that I've led a walk and just like last year, it was a blast! There were 50 Photographers signed up, but I think because of the temperature being in the 90's(with a heat index in the 100's!) some people didn't show up. Some emailed me in the days leading up to the walk to tell me that they weren't going to be there. All total we had about 25-30 photographers show up. We still had fun!

We ended up at the Hofbrauhaus in Newport Ky where everyone enjoyed all of the beer cheese and bratt's they could eat!

They even had live entertainment:

Hit the jump for some photos from the walk...

Many thanks to the photographers that joined in the fun this year! If you didn't make it out this time around, be sure to look for it again next year! Jason

Shooting Tethered with Lightroom3

2010-07-23T09:17:00.004-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad to see you made it back! It's my goal to provide useful, easy to understand content that helps you with your photography. The fact that you're here, reading it, lets me know that I'm doing a good job.

That's Reverse From Zero pictured above. They're a Cincinnati based rock alternative band. They were over the other night for some updated group shots to go with their new EP. These guys are a blast to work with! Fun, outgoing, "willing to try anything" type of guys. They were happy with the outcome, and so were we. I took this opportunity to try out Lightroom 3's new tethered shooting option for the first time in a live situation.(note: I never try out something totally new with a client. I had already played around with the tethering feature just to get the controls down.) Previous to this latest version of Lightroom, we were using Nikon's camera control 2 for our tethering needs. This worked "ok" but was slow, and there were a bunch of steps you had to go through just to get it up and running. Lightroom 3 eliminated those steps, and has made the image playback almost instant. So hit the jump to see how it works, some sample pictures, then some more from our Reverse from Zero shoot...

I don't know about you, but I'm a "freak" when it comes to eye sharpness. When I'm shooting portraits, I want the eyes to be so tac sharp that they're the first thing that you see, and the area of the photo that you keep going back to. That being said, it's a real pain in the butt to use the display on the back of your camera to see if they're really that sharp. Sure you can zoom in, and get a pretty good idea but to really see what it's going to look like you need a large monitor. I prefer something 24inches or larger. When we're shooting in the studio, we have a 24inch monitor hooked to a laptop so we can see the shots as they happen, and then zoom in to certain areas if we want to check sharpness etc. To do this you need a tethering program. For the longest time the only option we had was Nikon's Camera Control 2. With this program you could set your shots to come into the computer, save in a specific folder, then have Lightroom "watch" that folder and automatically import the images into Lightroom etc. It was a process to say the least. With the introduction of Lightroom 3 Adobe has done away with the need to use a third party program and allows you to tether right into your catalog strait from your camera.

Setting up Lightroom to tether is simple. The first thing you want to do is attach your camera to your computer via a USB cable. Turn your camera on so that the computer recognizes it. Launch Lightroom 3. Once your catalog has loaded go to FILE-TETHERED CAPTURE-START TETHERED CAPTURE. As shown here:

When you click on Start tethered capture, you will get a dialog box asking you for some input. It wants to know what you want to call this shoot. For this particular shoot I named it the band's name "Reverse from Zero". You also have a file naming option. Which I set to Session Name-Sequence. There's the destination to be imported to. I keep all of my images on an external drive, so my location shows that. Then there is the information. Just as in Import, you can add metadata, as well as keywords. Here's a snap shot of that dialog box so you can see what I'm talking about:

Once you fill out this info and click OK, you will get a control bar at the bottom of the screen that looks like this:

This bar shows the basic information coming from your camera. It has your shutter speed, aperture, ISO, and white balance. It also shows the camera model you're shooting with. On the right side of the tool bar you see an option for Develop settings. This allows you to add whatever develop settings you want as the image is brought into Lightroom. For example, if you take the first photo, and you see that you want to give it a little more midtone contrast, you can make your adjustment to your first image, select the develop settings button on the tethering tool bar and select the "Same as previous" option at the top of the flyout window as shown here:

As you can see, there are a whole bunch of options to choose from when it comes to the develop settings. If you want a certain look to be applied to your image immediately when it comes into Lightroom, this is the way to do it.

When you start shooting, you will immediately(especially if you ever used the old method) see how fast the images show up on the screen. I'm using a relatively mediocre laptop(dual core processor, with 3 gigs of ram), and the shots show up almost instantly. If you've never shot tethered, I urge you to try it out. It is one of the best ways to see all of the detail in the images, as well as catch problems while you're shooting and can still fix them, instead of after the shoot when it's too late. So that's it. That's the new tethering option in Lightroom 3 in a nutshell. It's a simple strait forward approach to managing a shoot and making sure that the images are in focus, where you want them to be.

As promised, here are some more shots from the same shoot. Thanks for stopping by, see you next time! Jason

Gel that light

2010-07-19T10:40:00.007-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad you made it back to see us over here! Busy, busy weekend for us at RedDoor. We had a great workshop on Saturday that went off without a hitch thanks to the wonderful Jill(pictured above). The theme of the workshop was "Inked", and let me tell you Jill WAS INKED! As always we had a few setups in mind going into the shoot, but we're fluid. We like to flow with things, and do whatever comes to mind. That is what happened for the shot above. We have some industrial equipment in the back corner of our studio left by the print shop that was in there before us. We haven't used it(up until this point) for any photo shoots, but with Jill's look, and the theme... I couldn't resist. Hit the jump for some behind the scenes looks at the lighting setup for this shot, plus much more from the workshop!

I like gels. Scratch that, I love gels! With the simple addition of a piece of colored "film" you can turn a blah photo in to a WOW! photo. Case in point,if I had just added a flash in the background of this image to light the industrial equipment, you wouldn't get near the effect. The addition of the green(actually 3 pieces of full cut CTG) sets the mood for this shot.

The setup is pretty simple. We had one Sb900 speedlight camera left behind a piece of equipment and the subject. This was set at 1/4power on manual mode. The Main light for the subject was a Sb900 on a boom shooting through a 24X24inch soft box. The fill was a 3foot by 6foot silver reflector camera right just out of frame. Below is a diagram showing the setup.

Also I have a setup shot showing everything(minus the hidden flash for the background).

As you can see everything is triggered with Pocket wizard wireless transmitters to ensure consistent firing.

The addition of the green does two things in this situation. First it sets the ominous mood. When I see a background lit with a really strong green, blue, or red gel my mind goes back to Dick Tracy, or theatrical crime scenes. You know the alley way, or the abandoned factory that the damsel in distress shouldn't have been in, in the first place. You see the moody, colored background and you know something sinister is about to take place. That's what I was going for here. Second, and equally important is separation. When you have two different "light planes" that is, two areas of the image that are lit differently you give your subject a more 3 dimensional look. That's our goal as photographers after all right, to take a 2 dimensional photograph and have the subject feel like they were there. Lighting different areas of the image separately helps us accomplish this.

On that note, lets take a look at another image from the workshop. This time the model is out in the open. She's about 10 feet from the boiler room door and the industrial fan. Equally She is 10feet away from the graffiti wall to the right. Again we used a gel(this time a red one) to add some dimension to the boiler room, and let you(the viewer) know that it was supposed to be hot back there. We didn't stop there though. We added a gridded strobe to the graffiti wall camera right. It was set about 25degrees from the wall with a 1/8 honeycomb as to just "skim" the wall with light. We didn't want full on POW blast of light. Just a subtle touch, again to separate the model and give her some dimension in the room. The model was lit by a Strip box on a boom above her an camera left at around f/8. We filled the opposite side with another strip box camera right feathered forward a touch and set to f/4. I wanted a large transition area between the model and the background. So the model is lit, then shadow, shadow, shadow, then the background is lit. This creates clear and concise areas of light.

(Click on the image to make it full sized)

Again I have a setup shot of the whole thing with one of the students(I say students, but in reality these are quality photographers that do wonderful work) shooting the model.

(Click on the image to make it full sized)

(note: the octobox above the camera pointed at the subject is not firing, it is just on a boom above the model)

Here are a few more from the shoot with the same lighting setups just a little different angle or crop:

These next two were done first actually. I always, always start on white seamless with the models. It gives me an opportunity to work with them, get them into the rhythm of the shoot before we move on to more obscure things.

As for this last image, we laid out some fur that we have laying around the studio. Set a Strip box above and slightly camera left of the subject. We also had a kicker coming from a gridded strobe camera right at about 1 stop over the main light just to add a bit of dimension to the subject.

I had a blast at this shoot! We really got to experiment with some of my favorite kinds of lighting, and really play with some colors and gels. I hope you've enjoyed the images, and the lighting explanations. See you all again soon! Jason

Scott Kelby's Photo Recipies Live

2010-07-16T09:26:00.005-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad to see you back. If this is your first time here, welcome! Many of you know that I'm a big supporter of the iPad as a tool for photographers. I did a post a week or two ago about the benefits of owning an iPad as a photographer, as well as ways that it can make you money. Now I want to show you how it can make you a better photographer. Scott Kelby, (author of many, many popular and highly regarded photography and photoshop books)just released his first iPad application. This application is based upon his series of books entitled The Digital Photography Book. It gives you a behind the scenes look at what goes into a photo shoot, and what he was thinking as he made the shots. Hit the jump to learn more about this app, and where you can find it for you iPad or iPhone...

Terry White did a wonderful review of this app over at his site bestappsite.com, and true to Terry White form, he did an awesome job of reviewing it, so you should definitely check that out when you get a chance.

For me, this app was a no brainer. I'm a NAPP member, long time follower of Scott Kelby's work, and pretty much follow what's going on down at NAPP headquarters on a regular basis. Terry wrote in his review that the size startled him initially. 1.3GB's is a large App but I was pretty sure if it was that big, there would be lots of useful content. Boy was I right! There are 14 categories to chose from. They are:

* Window Light Portrait
* Couples Portrait
* 3-Light Setup
* Clamshell Lighting Parts 1 & 2
* Shooting Food
* Shooting Flowers
* Location Shooting
* One Light Overhead
* Hard Lighting
* Ring Flash Adapter
* Pano Shots
* Portrait Lighting
* Dramatic Portrait Look
* Product Shots

They're organized in an easy to navigate menu:

Once inside the category you select, you have a few options. First you can just watch the entire caegory(which I highly recommend). Here you will see the shoot from start to finish. Scott does a good job of explaining the scene setup, the lighting, the camera settings, posing, and much, much more! He doesn't hold anything back.

You can view certain clips(this would be helpful if you wanted to see a certain part of the segment). Then there's the behind the scenes option. This is a really cool section because he adds additional information that he was thinking and didn't say at the time of shooting, or stuff that came to mind later.

At $9.99 this is a really good deal. $9.99 is cheaper than most photography books with far less content. I recommend this application to anyone that is interested into photography. Newb to Pro, everyone can learn from this information!

You can find it in the APP STORE.

See you all next time! Jason

At the pool!(again)

2010-07-15T10:23:00.004-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad to see you're back. It's been a really busy few months for us at RedDoor Photography. We expanded our business model when we moved into our new studio to include workshops/organized shoots. That has taken a life of it's own and now includes nearly 200 members, a team of dedicated models, as well as multiple shooting locals. If you're interested in joining us for these shoots you can click on "Glamour Club" from our main website or go directly to the Glamour Club website by clicking HERE.

Our latest shoot was at a private residence in Fairfield Ohio. We wanted to do a water shoot, specifically a swimming pool shoot. Hit the jump to see some of the images, and talk a little about the lighting setup.

We started out the day shooting in the hammock with the lovely Jessica. The ambient light was 1/125th of a second at f/8. We wanted to make the sun our fill so we underexposed our background by roughly 3/4 of a stop and set our shutter speed to 1/160th of a second. This made the background a little darker. Then, we moved in a strip light camera left just out of frame and set it to f/8. The result is a beautifully lit model with nice catch lights in her eyes.

We quickly moved to Kelsea where we kept the lighting the same, but moved the strip light around a little more towards her face to keep the eyes lit, as well as make sure that we didn't get deep shadows in the eye sockets.

The key here was to keep the light the same distance from the subject as we moved it. By doing this, we didn't have to re-meter the strip box, it stayed at f/8.

We moved into the pool from the hammock. This is one of those situations where we break the "rules" and still have a beautiful image. We placed the main light coming from the same direction as the fill. The sun was setting to camera left, but it was behind the trees. We still wanted to use the sun/ambient as the fill light and set up a strobe as the main. What we did was place a beauty dish on a boom extended to about 2 feet from the models left side. Now even though the main and fill source were coming from the same direction, the fact that the sun was behind the trees allowed us to actually use the entire sky as the fill. We determined that the ambient exposure was f/8 1/125th of a second at iso200. again to darken the background we underexposed, but this time we underexposed by an entire stop to 1/200th of a second. This made our settings f/8 1/200th of a second. We lit the model with the beauty dish as the main, the sky(and water) as the fill. This brings up an interesting point. When you're shooting in water, you have a natural fill card/reflector there. Water will reflect light really well, so when you light the subject from above and left like we did here, the light will cross her face and body, hit the water on the opposite side and reflect back filling in the shadows naturally.

This brings us to my next image.

Again we used the water as a fill. One light(sb900 speedlight) through a 24X24inch softbox camera right. When we were testing for this shoot, I actually got a similar shot that I liked much better found HERE.

Needless to say we had a great time. The models were wonderful to work with, and everyone left with tons of portfolio quality shots. If you'd like to join us for the next shoot, be sure to visit the site to see when our next shoot is.

Thanks for stopping by! See you all next time. Jason

iPhone4 Tripod holder

2010-07-14T20:05:00.004-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad you all made it back to see us here at the blog. The image you see above is from our latest shoot, which happened to be with our Glamour Club. The model Kelsea was wonderful to work with, and we got some wonderful images. I'm going to do a post all about the shoot, and the lighting tomorrow but I thought I'd give you a sneak preview of one of the shots. Today I want to tell you all about what the UPS guy dropped off at my door today, the G Design tripod holder for my iPhone4.

This holder allows you to place your iPhone4 on a tripod to shoot pictures or better yet, take advantage of the new iPhone's HD video capability... You know what that means right? Expect video content on the blog very soon... Hit the jump for the review and some more photos...

The first thing that I noticed when I pulled it out of the package(and noted on the G Design site) is that this holder is just the G3 version with the addition of small inserts to hold the thinner iPhone4 tightly. Check out the shot I took of it:

The holder is made out of quality ABS plastic with a tripod mount at the bottom. I plan on using it for video blogging, and with the orientation of the iPhone's camera as well as my screen width on my laptop I need to turn the iPhone horizontal to capture all of my screen without excess background. Because of this, I would have liked to see a tripod mount on the side of the unit as well as the bottom. My gorilla pod wouldn't hold my iPhone in a horizontal position without tipping over so I will have to attach the iPhone to a larger "standard" tripod to do the blogging. Still, this holder is the best product I've found on the internet for the money for any version of the iPhone, and the only unit(that I've been able to find) that works with the iPhone4 without some "rigging". Here are a few more shots of the unit with the iPhone in it:

Here I've got my buddy Terry White's iPhone app open. This is to show appreciation to Terry for turning me on to the 3G version that he reviewed HERE. After seeing his review I contacted the people at G Design about the iPhone4 unit and(to my knowledge) I'm one of the first to have and review it.

Here's another showing the iPhone4 in the vertical position and the video camera in action. (Note that I'm not getting the entire screen in the vertical position on the iPhone)

So as you can see the unit works really well, is built well, and looks good. If you're a photographer looking to take photographs with your iPhone4 or if you're someone looking to use the iPhone4 for video, this is the unit you want to hold your phone.

Thanks for stopping by, see you all soon! Jason

Shop Bellevue and hanging with Zack Arias

2010-07-07T08:44:00.005-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad to see you made it back to visit today. Been kind of busy as of late, spent the past week or so shooting like mad, so not much time to blog. The good news, we've hit mid summer and things are really starting to get busy. The bad news, we've hit mid summer and things are really starting to get busy... Last Friday was Shop Bellevue, that wonderful time of the month that we use as an excuse to have a party and invite all of our friends down. This month was no different. All of the usual suspects showed, and a few new faces as well. The beautiful girl you see above is Rachel an up and coming makeup artist in the Cincy area. No one is immune to being a model during these parties. I think you'll agree though that she holds her own in the modeling department. She has a nice look. Hey they even made me stand in for a few shots:

Photo By Drew Daughtry

Last night we went to one of Zack Arias' One Light Mixers to hang out and have a beer or two with Zack and Meg. It was an awesome time...

I have to say that Zack is one of the most humble laid back easy going guys ever. If you haven't heard of Zack or you're wondering what all of the fuss is over check out his website HERE and his one light workshops HERE. Zack doesn't hold anything back. He tells you what it was like for him, how he made it, and what he's going to do to make it better. He brought up an interesting conversation about shooting for free, and how that effected his business. I'm going to do a post tomorrow all about that whole conversation because it deserves it's very own post. for now, check out the shots from the mixer and be sure to check back tomorrow:

Zack and I testing out the rear camera capability of my new iPhone

Zack hadn't played with the new iPhone yet so he grabbed mine and started shooting away. (In this photo Damien Tepe)

Of course I wasn't going to let him get out of there without Taking a shot with me.

All in all it was a great time. If you haven't heard of Zack, or if you haven't been to his site lately I suggest checking it out. He's a hell of a photographer, and a hell of a guy.

See you all tomorrow. Jason

My Top 5 Favorite Plugins!

2010-06-22T09:05:00.005-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad to see you here again! Today I want to show you some of the best plugins (in my opinion) for Photoshop. I have to tell you, I'm a huge fan of plugins because unlike(most) actions, they are totally adjustable and allow the artist to really push the boundaries of creativity, while still maintaining a low average time per image number. In general at my studio we try to spend an average of 60seconds per image. Anything we can do to maintain a quality product but lower our editing time is just increasing the profit margin. So hit the jump and see my Top 5 Plugins for Photoshop!

I have a host of plugin's that I use for different reasons. There is one that I use more than any of the others though and that's Nik Silver Efex Pro. This is part of a plugin package from Nik that includes quite a few other plugins that I also use just not as often. Silver Efex is used to convert to black and white. The reason I love it so much is that it gives you many options that mimic techniques used in the dark room. When you click on it, you get a display panel with many options. Here's an example of what it looks like:

Notice the slider on the left hand side of the panel. That is where you chose your style of black and white conversion. There are options from neutral, to soft focus, to high contrast and many in between. On the right side of the panel you will see there are areas to fine tune these styles. You have the ability to adjust brightness, contrast, structure, as well as shadows, and highlights. This is a feature packed plugin that is the best b&w conversion method out there in my opinion.

The second plugin that I use often is Noise Ninja. Just like it sounds, Noise Ninja removes noise. You can find Noise Ninja HERE. I think it's one of the best programs out removing Noise going right now(disclaimer: Photoshop CS5 has new Noise removal software built in that kicks butt. It actually does it's noise removal to the raw file as opposed to the Jpeg like all noise software out right now but I haven't used it too much yet). Noise Ninja has a separate panel that comes up just like other plugins. It auto profiles the image and shows you where the noise is with small colored boxes. It also gives you a preview box that shows what the "after removal" image will look like. There are sliders that allow you to vary the amount of removal. Here's what the control panel looks like:

As far as plugins go, Noise Ninja is one of the most automated. I rarely use the sliders to very the amount of reduction. I find that the Auto Profile function works 99% of the time for me.

Another plugin that I have been using a lot lately is Vertus Fluid mask3. It's a masking program that works wonders. If you've ever had to mask something, or if you've ever wanted to remove a background, sky, or any particular part of your image and found it hard, this is the plugin for you. Get a free trial copy or download the full version HERE. Even with Photoshop CS5's new refining brush sometimes it's a lot easier to us the fluid mask. There are a couple of great video tutorials found HERE that explain in a lot of detail what all of the controls on fluid mask do. I find that the algorithm for fluid mask does a better job of detecting color and contrast change in an image than the quick selection or magic wand tools in Photoshop. Fluid mask allows you a lot of finite control over your masking that is second to none in the industry. If you have a lot of masking to do, you should definitely get Fluid Mask 3.

Along with the ones listed above, I use the Nik Color Efex pro which is similar to the Silver Efex pro. It has a similar display as the Silver Efex but it adds different color effects instead of black and white conversions. There are literally hundreds of effects to chose from inside of this panel, and just like the Silver Efex panels each style or effect, is customizable and able to be adjusted. Instead of showing you the display again, here is an example of my favorite color effect contained in it, glamour glow:

Before:

After:

Last but not least is Portrait Professional. Out of all of my Plugins I use this one the least but I still keep it there for when I really need to remove a ton of skin blemishes quickly. Unfortunately I don't have a screen shot of this plugin because it's actually on the fritz right now and I'm waiting on an email back from Anthropics, but you can download a copy of it HERE. What portrait professional does, is allows you to set predetermined points on the subject's face, then the program looks for skin imperfections, as well as areas that need "sculpting". It is infinitely adjustable, and best of all they provide you with software updates for free when a new version comes out. It really is a wonderful piece of software.

I think I'd like to try out some of the alien skin plugins but we'll see if that happens. I have in the past used On one's focal point, and it is a fun plugin to play with but I wouldn't use that for anything I was delivering to a client, just not my style. What are you guys/girls using? I'd love to hear in the comments section.

That's about it for me today! See you all next time! Jason

CS5 Goodness!

2010-06-21T09:06:00.004-04:00

Hey guys! Welcome back! Hope everyone had a wonderful fathers day weekend. The twins and I floated around the pool all day which resulted in an awful sunburn for me... Guess I should have applied a little more sunscreen and a little less time tossing the kids ;~) All in all we had a great time though!

I have a confession to make.... I LOVE Photoshop! I don't think a day goes by that I don't open Photoshop to do some sort of editing or manipulation. When Adobe released the latest rendition named CS5 I had to have it the first day, and let me tell you it's a huge, huge improvement on an already (almost)perfect product. There are many improvements and refinements added to CS5 but today I want to show you the one that I use the most. It's called Content Aware and it's used in many different places throughout the CS5 platform. Hit the jump and read on...

Content aware is a new algorithm Adobe added for CS5 that changes the game. This new algorithm looks at the surrounding pixels and attempts to reconstruct the selected area with what it thinks "would have" been there. Photoshop CS4 had content aware scaling that allowed you to adjust the size of the image without distorting things, however the content fill in CS5 is a whole new level.

Even though it's used in numerous places throughout the CS5 platform, the place where I use it the most is under the SPOT HEALING BRUSH. The spot healing brush in previous versions of Photoshop did a pretty good job of "healing" blemishes and filling in other types of area for you. You usually had to return with the CLONE STAMP to smooth the edges or touch up some rough areas left by the SPOT HEALING BRUSH. No more! With CONTENT AWARE FILL the SPOT HEALING BRUSH automatically and seamlessly fills the selected area perfectly almost every time. Take a look below at a quick run through of how to use it.

As you can see, the groom has some cuts and bruises on his knuckles that need to go. In the past I would have selected the finger with the lasso tool(to constrain the cloning) and used the CLONE STAMP tool to remove the blemishes. We don't have to do that anymore. You're going to select the SPOT HEALING BRUSH as shown below by the red arrow, and you want to make sure that CONTENT AWARE FILL is selected at the top of the screen(again shown with a red arrow).

There is no need to select the finger with the lasso tool anymore. No need to worry about new layers like you would have with the CLONE STAMP. You are going to select your brush size(make it slightly larger than the area to be "HEALED") and simply paint over the area as shown here on the large cut on his ring knuckle:

I "painted" over the cut, the area went black for a brief second while Photoshop was rebuilding the area, then MAGIC, it was healed. That's all there is to it. This works not only on skin and blemishes, you can remove almost anything with this method. Below is the final result.

Now all of this new technology doesn't come without some drawbacks. When you add features like this, it requires resources. When I say resources I mean system RAM. Photoshop CS5 is a very resource hungry program. I have a dual core processor with 3 gigs of RAM and it works fine, but just be aware that you may need to add RAM or upgrade components to use all of the features of CS5.

I posted this link before, but I think it's such a great resource that it needs re posting. You can see a bunch of the new features, and how to use them(including the Content Aware Fill) for free Here: FREE CS5 TRAINING Presented by Adobe's very own Terry White. If you have or plan on buying CS5 I would recommend this video to you.

That's it for me today folks! Thanks for stopping by, and I hope this helps you with some of your editing.

More TK.....

Jason

Move your Butt!

2010-06-15T08:10:00.007-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad you made it back here to see us at JLykins Photos. I thought today we'd talk about camera angle in relationship to the model/background. I'm going to show you what a little tweak or change in camera angle can do for your photographs. This of course falls under the broader category of COMPOSITION, but today we're going to be really specific about camera angle. Hit the jump to see what I'm talking about...

You want to know a photographers secret? It's a really, really closely guarded one that not many are willing to share(kidding), move your butt! Seriously... If you take all of your images at eye level, as you would normally see the subject, you are limiting yourself to mediocre images. Not to say that there haven't been some wonderful images taken at eye level, but more, many many more have been taken at off or different angles. For example look at these two images below. The first was taken at eye level. The second, was taken on a ladder slightly above the subject. Which do you think looks better?

Now the model here is by no means fat, but notice how the first image makes her look heavier? See how her chin/neck area looks chubbier? When you have the model looking up at you, it elongates their neck, slimming it. Who doesn't want to look slimmer? Not that Alex(the model here) has one, but if the subject has a double chin, shooting from above them will reduce if not eliminate it.

Here's an example of when getting down low makes all of the difference in the world. Can you imagine if I had taken this shot from eye level looking down at her? The perspective would be changed, the "feeling" of the image would be bland. Getting down low makes sense in this instance because the model is close to the floor, and thus just skimming across the floor gets you what I call the dogs eye view. If you were a pooch running around my studio that day, this is the view you would have had.

Now that's not to say that some images can't be taken from eye level. For example, the image below was taken at eye level. changing my shooting position wouldn't have made a difference. Usually when it comes to tight in headshots like this one, the only thing that could be effected would be the elongation of the neck but in this instance I didn't want to do that.

So there you have it. When shooting images, MOVE! Move your butt up, down, left, right. The more variations you get, the better your chances that you'll have a happy customer and the happier the customer, the better the chances that you'll get repeated business.

See you all soon. Jason

iPad and what it means to Photographers

2010-06-09T08:18:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad you made your way back to JLykinsphotos. Today I want to tell you a little about the iPad and why we think it's a revenue generating machine for our business. I was assuming that everyone had heard about the iPad up until a few days ago. After all, like any Apple product, it's been hyped, marketed, and talked about for months now. I was wrong. I was at a local restaurant the other day and was asked by guy(not to much older than myself), what the iPad was. When I told him it was an iPad he had no idea what I was talking about. For the purpose of this blog, we're going to assume that everyone that has made it this far, knows what an iPad is, what it does etc. For myself and my partner at my studio, we immediately saw the benefits of it, and how it was going to make us money.

Hit the jump to see how the iPad can produce revenue for you...

At it's core the iPad is a big ass iPod touch with a kick butt display. Photographers have been carrying iPod touches around since there inception as a way of showing off their images to clients. Their mobility and ease of use made them perfect for this. The problem is, the display on the iPod touch is small, and you can't see all of the detail(because it's so small) on the iPod. This is where the iPad shines! The large display is perfect for showing off your images to potential clients. The built in slide show feature allows you to control the slide duration, the type of transition from slide to slide(fade, dissolve, etc.), and allows you to add music from the built in iPod. We made a slide show of wedding examples to show potential clients when we meet them at an off site location for wedding consultations. So far it has been well received by all of our clients. They not only enjoy seeing the images on the large, well lit display, but they appreciate the fact that we are forward thinking enough to have the iPad at all. It gives our clients the feeling that we're always looking for new and better ways of doing things, and that we will bring something fresh to the table. We even added our logo to the slide show at the beginning and end so that it starts and ends with our logo.

So there's one way that you can make money with the iPad. You can use it to increase the customer experience. The second way that we see this as being able to make us money is in the mobile event photography. We shoot events(class reunions, navy reunions, proms etc.) We provide people with price sheets well before the event, and prefer that people bring cash or check, but even if you spell it out on the price sheets, there is always someone who doesn't read it, or forgot, and all they have is a credit card. We want to be able to accept credit cards anywhere we are. We don't want to be limited to just our studio with a credit card machine attached to the wall. There are many, many "mobile credit card machines" available that basically have a cell phone built into them, but they are expensive. The solution, GO PAYMENT by Inuit. This allows us to accept credit cards anywhere. No more telling clients that you'll send them a paypal request, or "sorry, we don't accept credit cards". You have your iPad ready and punch in their number, or use the optional blue tooth card reader to slide the card. People are more likely to buy, and buy MORE when using a credit card.

So there's two reasons, but that's not all. The next way the iPad has allowed us to make more money isn't necessarily from OUR iPad, but from ALL iPads. To date, Apple has sold 2 million iPads world wide. This is great for you as a business owner, and the owner of a website... as long as you're not using flash. Apple mobile devices don't work with flash. Flash is the fancy code that allows certain types of moving images, certain types of video etc. Because there are so many people that have iPads and even more that have iPhones, if you are using flash on your website, you're cutting out a large chunk of your potential clients. More and more people are accessing the Internet on their phones, and now iPads. If you want this group of people to consider you as a choice for their photographer, you had better have a website that they can view. People don't have patience to wait for slow loading websites, let alone sites that they have to "come back to" on their computers because they wouldn't load on their new fancy iPad. They will just skip to the next photographer who ISN'T using flash, and that they CAN see their content. All of this to say that the purchase of the iPad showed me that when I tried to load our website. I hadn't though about this fact, thus hadn't removed the flash from our site. Now, our site is flash free, opening us up to a larger percentage of the potential clients! It may seem like a small thing, but the small things add up.

There are many more ways to make money with the iPad. You can add it into your wedding package and provide the images to the clients on an iPad for them to keep. You would have to of course figure this price into your package, but it would set you apart from others. I have seen contests where businesses are "giving away" iPads. That is a wonderful way to get potential clients to submit their info to you. We haven't used any of these tactics as of yet, but that's not to say that we won't. There are some great things to come for the photographers and their iPads. In the months to come I suspect that there will be a plethora of apps designed or in some cases redesigned for the iPad. You'd be smart to get on board now, and become familiar with the platform because it's not going anywhere...

More TK.... Jason

New Processing with CS5!

2010-06-05T21:24:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone! As you can see I've been on hiatus for a long time. There were some complaints and I decided to end my blogging. Recently some people have asked me to resume my blogging, and here I am! I do enjoy it that's for sure!

As my first post in a while, I thought I would talk about the biggest news for designers, retouchers, and well, just anyone in photography... Photoshop CS5! Now there are plenty of blogs, tutorials and general how to's to be found on the Internet. If you are new to CS5 do yourself a favor and check out Terry White's FREE 45 minutes of training found HERE. Terry is a Photoshop evangelist, and general promo guy working for Adobe. He has some good stuff on there. Since there is so much good info out there already about CS5 I'm not going to do another "what's new" about CS5, instead I'm going to give you my new workflow, and how CS5 has changed it!

Let's get started! Above you see the final image, but lets take a peek at the before image here:

As you can see I did my normal stuff. I tweaked the eyes, adjusted color and saturation and did a nice three step portrait action on it. Want to see how to do all of that, and how CS5 makes it easier and faster? Click below, and read on!

As any of you that have read this blog for any amount of time know, I bring my images out of lightroom as part of my workflow. I could do all of these things in Photoshop, but I like the speed of Lightroom for certain things... So to begin with we're going to adjust the Clarity, Tone curve, and bump up the eyes.

With your image open in lightroom, go to the clarity slider and slide it to the positive side. I find that somewhere in the 60's is usually where I set my Clarity. You can see that below.

Next we're going to adjust the tone curve. Scroll down to the Tone Curve panel and change from Linear to Medium. Simple as pie.

The last thing we're going to do in Lightroom is the eyes. I have some great brushes that I have downloaded from HERE. From these brushes I've used the Whiten Eyes brush. I'm not going to go into how to use the brushes in Lightroom here. If you want to see all about those brushes refer back to my post HERE on brushes in Lightroom.

Once we're done with all of our Lightroom edits, we're going to take it out to CS5(I know what you're thinking, "bout time" but honestly the Lightroom edits don't take more than a couple of minutes to do. So now we have it out in Photoshop CS5, what do we do first? let me show you!

The first thing we're going to do is set our white, and black points in the image. To do this we need to create a new Threshold layer. To do this click on the threshold icon in the adjustments as shown here:

This is going to allow you to pick out just the white and black points in the image. To do this you're going to slide the threshold slider to the right until there is just a little white showing. Like shown here:

Now you should only have small spots of white showing on your screen. To set your color point, select your Color Sampler tool from the left tool bar. To do this right click on the Eye Dropper looking icon and select the one that says Color Sampler Tool. Now locate the small all white area on the image(it will be obvious), zoom in and click one time inside of the white area as shown here:

Now, you are going to go back to the Threshold control panel and slide the slider to the left until there is just small areas of black showing. Again you're going to click inside of the small black area to set a second point. Once you have set your two points delete the Threshold layer, you don't need it anymore. Now, to take advantage of those two points, you need to create a Levels layer. Go again to the Adjustments panel and click on the Levels icon as shown here:

Once you have done this you want to make sure that you have your Caps Lock on This is so that your cursor will be a precision cross hair instead of the icon(trust me you will want it for the next step). Now that you have the Levels panel open, click on the White Point icon as shown below, and then line up your cross hair with your #1 point as shown in the same image below:

Once you have done this, you will see that your image will lighten slightly. Now you're going to click on the Black Point icon(just above your white point icon) and line this cross hair up with your #2 point. You will see a dramatic difference when you click on the second point.

Once you're done with this, we're going to do utilize one of the new features of CS5, the Content aware for the healing brush. The healing brush isn't anything new to Photoshop, but the Content Aware option is new to CS5. What it does, is look at the pixels around what you're drawing over and fills the painted area automatically and quite well. I used to remove fly away hairs, imperfections, etc. in Lightroom because it was easier and faster than using the old healing brush, but now, I use the Healing Brush exclusively. Here's where to find it:

After I remove any blemishes, fly away hairs, unwanted objects in the image etc. with the healing brush, I run my three step portrait action on the image. I did a whole post on what that action is, and how to create one yourself HERE, basically it creates a nice vignette around the image, also does a bit of sharpening.

That's it for this image. That's all I did! Of course these aren't the only things that are added in CS5 that I use, but these are the things that I used for this image. You can see all of the new things that were added by checking out the link at the top of this post.

I'm interested to hear what you think about CS5, and about how it has changed your workflow in the comments section below. This will again be a regular thing. See you all next time!

More TK Jason

The "Right Light"

2010-02-04T10:22:00.004-05:00

Hello everyone! Glad to see you made your way back again. The shot above was for one of our clients that wanted to do something special for her boyfriend for Valentines day. She came down to the studio, and we took a series of photos for her to box and give to him on V-day. While there were some risque shots in the mix, I really enjoyed this image more than any other. I think it's my attention to eyes that draws me into this image. Eyes seem to tell a story, more than any other feature of the body. Looking into someones eyes is like looking into their soul.

To create this shot I used a beauty dish above the camera a soft box camera left, and a couple lights to knock the background totally white. Hit the jump to see a little more about this setup....

So here is a diagram showing where I had things:
Click on the image to see it full screen

As you can see, the subject is sitting square with the camera, what you can't see is the posing table that she is resting her elbows on. There is an adjustable posing table just out of frame below her elbows that gives her something to relax on.

I mentioned earlier that I was using a beauty dish. This isn't a new modifier for us, but I really haven't spent a whole lot of time working with it. Either it didn't work for the look I was after, or it just didn't happen to be my choice of modifiers at the time. In this shot I had it on a boom above my head and thus above the camera. There are a couple of things that I like about the beauty dish. First, it puts a beautiful catch light in the subjects eyes. It really makes them POP. Second is the softish quality of light that it puts out on the subject's face. It isn't quite as soft as a softbox, but it still isn't as hard as a strait on flash. It's somewhere in between, and I like that.

The other lights in this setup are equally as important to this shot as the beauty dish. I had the softbox to the left set as fill. It was one stop less than the beauty dish. This creates shadows on her right cheek.

The background lights are set two stops above the main(beauty dish) This makes the background go completely white since we are exposing for the beauty dish.

Not much in the way of post processing, just a little smoothing and sharpening.

More TK

Making a reflection in Photoshop

2010-01-21T12:29:00.004-05:00

Back for more punishment I see... Glad you're back. I am just happy that anyone wants to read what I have to say at all. Today I thought I would show you a technique that I learned not too long ago for making a reflection in photoshop where one wasn't to begin with. So if you're into that sort of thing, hit the jump to see how it's done...

The first thing that you need to do is have an image to reflect. For our example I took an image that I shot of a client, Patrick on white seamless. Once I had the image opened in photoshop I selected the white area around Patrick by using my magic wand tool as seen here:

Once you have the white area around your subject selected, press CTRL+SHIFT+I. This will inverse your selection and select just your subject. Now go to your layers panel and create a new layer or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+N. This will create a new blank layer above your current "background" layer. Now making sure that you have the new layer selected press CTRL+V. This will paste a copy of your subject on that new layer.

The next step is to clear the subject off of the background layer. This is simple to do in our case because the background layer is white. All you have to do is select the background layer. To do this press CTRL+A. This selects the entire background layer. Then make sure white is your foreground color in the bottom left hand side of your tool bar as shown here:

Once you have done these things, press ALT+BACK SPACE. This will fill the background layer with white covering the original picture up entirely. You won't be able to tell because the copy you made is above the background layer so you will still see your subject.

The next thing we need to do is make a duplicate of your subject layer. To do this we need to select your subject layer(in our case named LAYER 1). Press the button CTRL+J. This will create a duplicate layer above layer 1. It will look like this:

Now lets Free Transform our new layer by pressing CTRL+T. you will see a box appear around your subject. What we're going to do is flip this layer upside down so we can create our reflection. To do this we need to right click anywhere over our subject. When you do, you will get a dropdown menu. You need to select "FLIP VERTICALLY" as shown here:

Now don't lock in that transform just yet. click inside of the box and drag it down so that the feet(in our case feet) of the "reflection" just touch the feet of the subject. Don't worry about getting it perfect, we'll fine tune later. Once you have the photo set where you want press and hold the CTRL button and click on the little square in between the corners near the bottom of the picture and drag up. This squashes the reflected image somewhat and makes it look a little more realistic. Once you get it the size you want, press the ENTER key to lock it into place. Now we need to fine tune where our reflection is placed. To do this, we could use the move tool and hold the CTRL button while we moved it little by little, but I think it's easier to use your arrow keys. To do this just select your move tool(upper left corner of your tool box) then press the down(or up depending on which way you need to move it) arrow until it looks right to you.

The last thing we're going do is make that reflection look a little more like a reflection instead of what it really is(a copy of the top picture). To do this we're going to go to the opacity slider shown here:

and decrease it to around 50%. Sometimes I go a little more, sometimes a little less. Adjust it until you like what you see. After that, you're done...

So that's it. A down and dirty way to make a quick reflection. This trick can be used on people, cars, fonts, etc... That's all I've got for today. I hope this helps some of you with your post production. More TK

The "Dave Hill" look

2010-01-19T10:38:00.004-05:00

Image by Shad Ramsey

It's been a while... Ok a long while since I put anything on here. I really didn't feel like I had anyone that cared, or read about what I was posting, so I stopped. I have in recent months talked with people that expressed their interest in me writing again, so here I am. For you. Today I'm going to show you a studio lighting setup, and the associated post processing to create the look you see above. So lets get right to it.

The "Dave Hill" look is one of high contrast and heavy post processing. It can be shot as a "headshot" or a full length, although the lighting diagram you see will only provide for a headshot, not a full length. So if you care to learn, hit the jump to see what it's all about. The first and most important thing with this technique is the lighting. If you don't have the lighting right, the post processing won't make the image look right, and you'll get an image that looks funky. This lighting is fairly Simple. You have one main, light(usually on axis, and usually a beauty dish or soft box) and two kicker lights coming at a hard angle. The lighting ratio is usually a 1:1. I like f/8 main and f/8 kickers. Here is a diagram of what the lighting setup looks like:

Now on to the post processing aspect...

Let me start this tutorial by giving credit. I learned this process from one of Scott Kelby's books. Also even if you don't know anything about layers, or if you're new to photoshop, you can do this. I will walk you through step by step. So lets get to it!

First thing's first, you need to either shoot in RAW for this image OR use photoshop CS4(because it allows you to open jpegs in camera raw). Also you need to click on WINDOW at the top of your screen and make sure that LAYERS is selected. However you workflow goes, be it lightroom first, bridge first, or Aperture first, you want to open the image into Photoshop as a smart object. You can do this from Photoshop by clicking FILE-OPEN AS SMART OBJECT. Once the file has been opened into photoshop as a smart object you will be able to tell it's a smart object by looking at the thumbnail in the layers box. You will see a small "page" icon in the bottom right corner of the thumbnail like shown here:

The next thing we need to do is to make a copy of this layer. Now because it's a smart object, we can't make a copy of the layer the traditional way with the keyboard shortcut or even by dragging the layer to the new layer icon. What we have to do is right click anywhere in the smart object layer other than where the small thumbnail is. So basically right click where it says the file name in my case I right clicked where it said JRL_6227. When you right click here you'll get a drop down with choices. You want to chose the one that says NEW SMART OBJECT VIA COPY. This will duplicate your layer without linking the two together. It should look like this:

Now you want to double click directly on the thumbnail of the top layer. That will open just that layer in camera raw. Once opened in camera raw you have some adjustments to make. First we're going to take the FILL LIGHT slider all of the way to 100. This will make it look washed out but don't worry we'll fix that. Now grab the BLACKS slider and move it into the 30's around 33 or so. Next slide the CLARITY slider all of the way to 100. And last but not least slide the SATURATION slider all of the way to the left which is -100. The screen should look like this:

Click OK. Now your image will look like a black and white with a lot of contrast. To get the color back click on the black and white layer and then change the layer blend mode to LUMINOSITY as shown here:

Now we're starting to get there! Ok now we're at a fork in the photoshop road. You have to decide if you want this effect applied to the entire image or just certain parts of the image. Normally if I do a "location portrait" with this look(meaning there is something other than a solid background) I apply it to the entire image, however since this was shot on a plain black background, I just want to apply it to certain parts of the image. To do that make sure you have your black and white layer selected. Hold the ALT key and click on the ADD A LAYER MASK ICON in the layers panel. The layer mask icon is the third from the left. It looks like a small box with a dot in the middle.
your screen should look like this after you add the layer mask:

Now your image just lost all of its contrast(which is what we're trying to add here) so we need to bring it back. Select your brush tool and pick a medium soft edged brush. Make sure that white is the foreground color down in the bottom left of your screen, if it's not press the letter X. Paint directly on your image where you want the contrast to come back through. Don't worry, it won't be white, you're actually painting on the layer mask not the picture itself. Here's what mine looked like after I painted the layer mask:

The biggest "trick" to this look is dodging and burning. So what we need to do is make a top layer that combines everything that we've already done. To do this hold down CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and press E. This will make a layer on top that combines everything we've done so far, but doesn't flatten the image(in case we want to go back and make any changes later). Now select your BURN tool. This is the hand shaped tool near the bottom of the tool bar on the left (if you don't see it you may have the DODGE tool in front. It looks like a black sucker, just right click on it and a flyout window will have the BURN tool in it). Now at the top of your screen you will see two drop down menus. One that says RANGE and one that says EXPOSURE. Click on the range dropdown and change it to SHADOWS. Click on the EXPOSURE dropdown and change it to 20%. The menus are shown here:

Ok, with the burn tool you want to "paint" over all of the shadow areas of the image. Anywhere it's dark, we're going to make it darker. It may not look like a lot is happening while you're doing this, but trust me it's happening. Once you've painted over the shadows, it's time to switch to the DODGE TOOL. Again right click on the BURN TOOL icon(the hand) on the tool bar to the left, and select the DODGE TOOL(looks like a black sucker). On the menu bar at the top we want to change from SHADOWS to HIGHLIGHTS, and make sure that the EXPOSURE IS STILL AT 20%. "Paint" over the hightlight areas of the image. Again, I know it doesn't look like it does a whole lot, but it really is doing an important job.

When you were doing your DODGING and BURNING you probably noticed that you were starting to get a little color showing up in the form of orangeness. To remove this click on the layer blending mode and chose LUMINOSITY again.

The next thing we want to do is HYPER SHARPEN this image. Before we do that though, we need to Duplicate the top layer. To do this we press CTRL+J . Select your newly copied layer, go to the FILTER menu and select OTHER then HIGHPASS. When the window pops up to set the radius, slide the slider to around 110 as shown here:

Click ok. Now change the layer blend mode of this newly sharpened layer to SOFT LIGHT. When you do, it should look like this:

Through all of this, we've started to develop a tint. Usually a red tint to the image. To remove this we're going to add and adjustment layer. Go to the LAYER menu at the top of the screen, then select NEW ADJUSTMENT LAYER-HUE SATURATION.

Now depending on the version of Photoshop that you're using, the placement of the HUE/SATURATION BOX may differ. I'm using CS4 so it's on the right hand side of the screen. Wherever the box is, you need to click the dropdown menu that says MASTER and change it to REDS. Once you do, click on the SATURATION slider and drag it to the left.(how much depends on how much red you have in the image.

The finishing touch to this process is adding a multiply layer. To do this you again hold CTRL+ALT+SHIFT and press E to create a top layer that combines everything done so far. Once you have done this press CTRL+J again to duplicate that top layer. Now chose your topmost layer and change the blend mode to MULTIPLY. This will create a dark looking image on top. Next you want to add a layer mask to this image, but this time don't hold the ALT key when you click on the layer mask icon. This will create a layer mask that is filled with white for the top(dark) layer. Once again get your brush tool and this time make the brush large. Really large, big enough to cover the entire head/face(don't worry if some of it hangs over into the black). Now set your foreground color to black by pressing the letter D. Once you have done that, click over the head. It may take two or three clicks to get it bright enough. I also "painted" over the left area of the shirt on this image as you can see by looking at the thumbnail of my layermask.

That's it! Simple enough. I hope you like this technique, and I hope that you can apply what you've learned here to your workflow. Jason

Weddings vs. Seniors

2009-09-19T21:33:00.006-04:00

Hey gang. Glad to have you back. It's late Saturday evening and I just got home from our latest wedding, which went great! Yet I have this unfinished feeling...

Let me explain. We shoot like mad before, and during the wedding. All of it is basically a visual account of the day. There really isn't a whole lot of time to be artistic while the bride is walking down the isle. You do your damnedest to get the lighting figured before the ceremony, and have things work just so, but that's about it. After the wedding is really the time to be creative and artistic with the bride and groom, but even then you don't have much time. You try to schedule in time to spend with just the bride and groom to do those beautiful show piece, for the portfolio shots. You know the ones that you plan on blowing up huge and taking to the next bridal show... But alas the schedule always changes, your hour and a half turns into 20 minutes, in which time you're supposed to get all of the group shots done as well. This leaves you with about oh 3 minutes to pick one great spot, figure your lighting and go with it... Hope for the best and pray that the photo gods are with you that day... But with seniors, it's a whole different ball game...

I've recently decided that seniors photos are by far my favorite type of photography to do. There's creative freedom abound. Everyone there is usually stress free (unlike a wedding), and you have time to spare. With a senior, they are usually excited to be there. They have usually (especially with the girls) spent hours gathering their favorite shoes, clothes, and accessories to make their photos turn out great. There isn't a time crunch(in our case at least), so there isn't the stress like there is in a wedding with keeping to a schedule. You have more time to explore some creative poses, places, and lighting with the knowledge that if it doesn't work, you can scrap it and move on to a different idea.

Don't get me wrong, I like shooting weddings. I love the tender moments, the excitement, and of course the good food, but sometimes you just want to be a little more creative. Sometimes you just want to spend a little more time making sure that the frame is perfect. Every shadow, every highlight, every thing is perfect.

So that's it. Off my soap box. Enough wining and crying about being creative from me... I just wanted to share my thoughts on that with someone and who better than my friends... See you all soon. Jason

Self Projects....

2009-09-15T07:33:00.003-04:00

I want to tell you all about my creative struggle. Ever since we opened the studio and really started getting busy, I have found it increasingly harder to be creative. It used to be that I would have a shot in my head for weeks, sometimes months before I actually had time to try it, and/or found some poor sucker to stand in and model for me. My children became tired of seeing the camera, and my daughter would run, hide, and cover her face as soon as she saw the flash come out... Now, I am so busy with paying jobs that I don't have time to experiment with different lighting setups, or out of the ordinary shots. I stick with the tried and true posing, lighting, shooting... It's new to the customer, just not to me. So here's what I'm doing about it....

A personal project. I started a personal project last week, and it's going to run for a couple of months. I haven't really decided on a "due date" for myself, but we'll play it by ear. I found a while back that I really enjoy one softbox, high "butterfly" lighting. The shot you see above is just that. One soft box (in this case a 12" by 36" strip light) as high as I can get it above the subject pointing down at about a 75degree angle. It produces razor sharp shadows on the face, and is something different. Here's another example:

Admittedly, this doesn't look so good on women, but I'm going to try anyway. This is my assignment for a while. I'm going to grab anyone I can and take one light butterfly style photographs of them. I may end up putting them all in a coffee table style book, I may not do anything with them at all. I don't know...

All of that to say this.. Get out and shoot. Take some photos. See what peeks your interest. See what makes you happy. Go out and assign yourself some project whether it be photos of buildings, or cars, or different types of birds. Just go do something. Try to be creative though. Don't just do random shots of birds or cars. Really put some thought into it. Think about what works best, what doesn't. Try some things that you may not normally try. If you always take your car shots in nice even daylight, try going back at sunset, or better yet, just after the sun has dropped below the horizon. Try to take photos that you wouldn't normally take. You may surprise yourself in the end.... When I'm done, I'll share my project with you all. I'll show you what I've done. Until then Keep shooting, have fun! Jason

FP Revisited

2009-09-01T06:40:00.007-04:00

Hey guys! A week or two ago I did a post on FP and the benefits and troubles with it. To be honest, the few times that I have used FP, it hasn't worked out so well for me. My subjects were always dark, I couldn't get consistent results, and I just wasn't happy. That is until Megan's senior session. As you can see above the results were astounding. I tried a different technique, and viola! it worked. Like I said when I started this blog, photography is ever changing and therefor a continual learning process. I'm always learning(or trying to learn) something new. So since I learned something new, I'm going to share it with you. I'm not the master with this, rather a humble(ok sometimes humble) pupil that does what he can to make great photos. Want to learn what I figured out with FP? Read on...

Before I go any further, look at this photo. See how she is in total focus, but the background is that nice soft out of focus bokeh? That's because this was shot at f/4.0 at 1/3200th of a second and I used flash! Like we talked about in the previous post on Auto FP found HERE, Auto FP lets you shoot above the rated flash sync speed of 1/250th of a second by pulsing the light instead of one continuous pop of flash. The trade off of course is power. This is where I was getting hung up...

The amount of power that you loose when switching to Auto FP is considerable. With one SB800, it is conceivable that under normal circumstances and at a normal flash sync speed, I could light a group of say 4 people with one flash. This is do-able. I would set the light on a stand above my head and behind me, through a large(50inch) umbrella and have no problem. When I switch to auto FP however I wouldn't have a chance in... well you know where, at lighting the group. In fact, if I'm in auto FP mode, I need to bring that flash in close to the subject and remove the umbrella. How close are we talking here? Well, for the photo above the flash was about 1 foot from her face to the camera left. We took the domed diffuser off to get as much power out of the unit as possible, and just went with strait flash. The Nikon System should be able to adjust the power to shoot through a diffuser(say a small softbox), but we just didn't have one with us. All we had was a Trigrip diffuser and that was too large to work effectively. Back to the group shot, if I wanted to light that group shot I was talking about a little bit ago in auto FP, how many flashes would I need? I don't know for sure, it would depend on the amount of light I was combating, but suffice to say I would need a few. My best guess would be in the range of 4 or 5 flashes to light that same group.

So why go into auto FP at all? I mean, you could in essence close down your aperture, or put a neutral density filter on the lens, or go into spot metering mode... These are all good options, if that's the look you're going for. Lets look at the first suggestion, what if instead of shooting at f/4.0, I shot at f/11 on that shot above. What would happen? I would be able to shoot "normal" flash. I would be able to shoot at a reasonable shutter speed, and sync normally with the flash. However, I would get everything in focus. The house back behind the trees would be in focus, the trees themselves would be sharp and clear. I didn't want that. I didn't want the attention to move away from the subject. I wanted all eyes to go to Megan. So then, what about the neutral density filter? Couldn't I have put a 4 stop neutral density filter on my lens and lowered the light enough to shoot at f/4.0? Yes I could have, and that's not a bad idea. The only thing I don't like about that idea is actually carrying a neutral density filter around. I have enough stuff hanging off of me, and in my pockets that if I can eliminate something, I like to. Also, not all of my lenses have the same filter size. some are 77mm but one is 67mm. What to do there? Two filters? Maybe, but that gets expensive. So then how about spot metering just the subject? What happens if I meter for just Megan, and take the photo off of the light hitting her? She'll be rendered beautifully. She will be properly exposed, and look wonderful, but the background will be totally blown out. It will look like a large swatch of white behind her. I could do that in the studio on white seamless. The reason for coming out here to do the on location stuff was to add the environment, not blow it to oblivion with light. Spot metering is out, not an option here. So in hindsight would I change my approach? No I think I'll just stick with the Auto FP option.

When is Auto FP going to benefit you? Bright, sunny days. When the sun is out, and either falling on your subjects face or lighting your background to oblivion, you would use FP mode. When you want to keep that blurred out of focus background, but to do that you have to shoot at 1/2000, use FP. Want to read, and learn more about auto FP, or flash in general? Pick up This book, or visit The Strobist. Both have more information than any one person could take in at one time. Just because I'm really happy with the way they turned out, and because she was a beautiful model, here are a few more of Megan.

And my personal favorite:

Have a good one. Jason

News and some new products!

2009-08-27T06:38:00.002-04:00

I love food... As if you couldn't tell that by looking at me... When they brought this to me at the wedding last weekend, it looked soo good I had to take a photo of it. This folks is the REAL reason I'm a wedding photographer, the free food! :~) In all seriousness, the folks at the BrookSide country club did a wonderful job of taking care of us while we were there. Thanks!

On to a little bit O' news....

The Nikon D700 has been listed as Discontinued at Best Buy... I got word this morning(in the form of an email) that there will be a new D700s available soon. Like the D300, it will have dual slots, and video capability. We'll see if it is true in the weeks to come.

According to a friend at Best Buy, the D300s will be available starting today(body only). If you've been holding out, or you just have to have the newest thing, get there today when the doors open at 10AM.

CNN reported this morning that Microsoft appologized for swapping the head of a black man for the head of a white man in an ad being distributed in Poland. If you want to see the before and after shots click HERE. Funny stuff.

If you haven't had a reason to get an Iphone up to this point, THIS is the tipping point. I am seriously considering getting an Iphone just for this app...(kidding) I would however appreciate it if someone would send a little note to the Chipotle people and tell them not to forget about us Blackberry users... I mean I want to order a burrito from my Storm too...

Last but not least, I told you all about a photo contest a couple of weeks ago over at

Kelby's Blog, where one lucky winner was going to get a plane ride to Florida, and shoot a FSU Game... Well the Tools over at Sports Shooter made such a stink about it, that FSU took back the field pass. I (along with many others) wrote a letter to the FSU athletic director expressing my displeasure. Don't know if it will do any good, but at least I tried.

That's all I've got for the day. Talk to you later. Jason

Making small flash big

2009-08-26T06:52:00.003-04:00

I love this picture! It's my attempt to create an interesting reception photo by changing the viewers perspective, and do something a little different. I'd like to be able to tell you that I took this photo, but I'm not sure. You see to get this angle, I had my camera on a monopod extended all of the way out. There was a SB900 flash on top and a 12-24 wide angle on the camera. Triggering it all was done with a Pocket wizard. I was holding the mono pod up in the air above the group, and Shad was firing it from across the room with a pocket wizard... So I didn't actually press the button on the pocket wizard, but my idea, my composition...

Sorry I've been on hiatus the first half of this week. I was working on updating our website. It needed a face lift. I think it's getting there. I'm working on adding a blog to it now which should be active in a few days. Check it out by clicking Here. Many people have told me that they appreciate the posts about small flash and things that go along with it so I thought that today I would talk a little about some of the modifiers that we use.

Where to start, whew boy there are so many different types of modifiers available to the photographer that it's hard to know what to talk about first. Lets start closest to the flash unit itself. The domed diffuser or the small Tupperware piece of plastic that fits atop the flash unit is where my diffusion usually starts. This little piece of plastic is a semi transparent piece that spreads the light from the flash as soon as it leaves the flash head. It does a wonderful job of scattering the light right at the beginning of the lights journey. Anytime that I am looking for soft light, even if I'm using another modifier, I leave the domes on. In this game of flash, I want as much diffusion and soft light as I can get so I leave it on. A couple of things to note though, first putting this diffuser on will drop your available power by at least 1 stop. That's a given though. Anytime you diffuse or place a softener whether it be a domed diffuser, softbox, or an umbrella in from of a light source, it will loose it's potential power. With the high ISO's available to us now, I don't worry too much about it. I would rather have a soft beautiful quality of light with a little less power than a super powerful harsh light source that has absolutely zero quality to it. The second thing to note about these domed diffusers is that when they are attached to the flash head, the flash is zoomed to it's widest angle possible. This only applies to the SB800's and the SB900's. All of you folks working with the SB600's and have the sto-fen aftermarket diffuser, you don't have to worry about it. Some guys will notch out their domes where it makes contact with the little switch on the flash head so that they can zoom the flash while leaving the dome on.

A little further out from the domed diffuser you have a huge selection of modifiers. There are no less than 100 different major manufacturers producing all sort of modifiers, not to mention the knock off versions. I can't possibly tell you about all that there are out there, so I'm going to just give you a rundown of what I use. My diffusion system starts with
David Honl. The Honl system is comprised of multiple pieces of modifiers that work seamlessly together.

At the core of this system is the speed strap. It is a piece of Velcro that has a non slip material on the side that comes in contact with the flash. The strap gets wrapped around the flash head and secures to itself. Once you have this in place you can attach any of the accessories easily and quickly. Probably the most used piece in the collection is the the speed gobo. It has a white side and a black side to it. The gobo can be attached and used as a bounce card, or as a gobo. You can attach two of them and use them as barn doors. They are very versatile. The next pieces that I use from the set are the snoots. They come in two different versions, the 5inch and the 8inch. They work very well, and fold down flat for storage. The next piece that I use is the Speed Grid. The Speed Grid is a honeycomb shaped piece that is placed on the end of the flash and it directs the light in a more linear fashion. Great for a hair light, or when you want to spotlight just an individual. There is also a gel kit that is offered from Honl, but I still have a ton of gels left the I cut down myself. Maybe when those gels wear out, I'll order the ones from Honl.

The next modifier that in our arsenal is the Gary Fong Lightsphere. This little Tupperware looking unit is amazing. Most every wedding photographers that I know, uses this unit at some time during a wedding. Usually at the getting ready stage, and at the reception where things are happening fast that you don't want to miss. The unit itself is a dome that reflects the light in all directions allowing you to move from vertical to horizontal quickly without changing the flash orientation as with a stroboframe. Handy piece of equipment that I suggest for anyone doing events, or weddings.

On to the larger units. Shoot through umbrellas are the tried and true units for small flash photographers. If you want to soften the light and don't care where it scatters to, get an umbrella. They are cheap, and can be found at any camera store worth their weight.

Lastolite has two products that I really have been enjoying using lately. First the Tri-grip is a diffuser/reflector that is roughly triangle in shape with a sturdy handle at it's base. These units are easy to hold and manage with one hand and work great as either a reflector, or a shoot through diffuser. They are large so your flash becomes as large as the diffuser when firing through it. The second product I've been using lately is the Lastolite Softbox. This is a smaller softbox designed to be mounted on a monopod, or a light stand and have a small flash run through it. The quality of light coming from these two different modifiers is wonderful.

So that's it. That's the major collection of modifiers that we carry with us. Of course we have the standard round reflectors that most photographers carry. They work well, I have just fallen in love with the Trigrip so that's the unit of choice for me right now.

Alright, gotta run. Hopefully I'll see you all here again tomorrow. Jason

Some new stuff....

2009-08-20T09:10:00.003-04:00

Isn't she beautiful? Can you believe she's only 3!? She's growing up soo fast that her mom and I are doing everything we can to keep her "young". Anyway you don't come here to read about my family : ) That shot was taken as a "test" shot to check lighting ratio's at my studio. It turned out to be the best photo that I've ever taken of her, go figure.... It's amazing how a great photo will turn up when you least expect it. You can spend hour or days planning a shot, get what you think is the shot of a lifetime and everyone else just shrugs their shoulders, then take a quickly composed, spur of the moment shot and everyone hails it as your best shot ever. It's crazy this thing we call photography. So on to some new products and news....

Drobo has a new(new to me anyway) business unit to go along with their traditional unit. The also have a rack mounted unit for server racks. If you are in need of easy to use backup hardware, Drobo is for you.

Midwest Photo Exchange has the new Elinchrom Ranger battery in stock. They don't have them online yet but I was talking to a friend there yesterday and he confirmed that they have the 1 head kits in stock for $1500.00. This may sound like a lot, but when you consider that these units have 400watt/second rating and are the size of a SB800, you'll see the value.

There is a contest going on to win a free ticket to photoshop world in Las Vegas! over at NAPP News. The contest ends tomorrow(Friday) so if you want a shot at it, better get over there. I entered my submission for the contest, so good luck! ; )

Terry White has a pretty good review of the Lastolite "Uplite". Click to read all about this great little product that is sure to make your life easier.

That's all I've got today. Busy day today. I'm working on a project that may lead to quite a few orders. See you all tomorrow! Jason

HighSpeed FP blessings and curses...

2009-08-18T09:55:00.005-04:00

Hey Everyone. Glad to see you back. Lots going on at the studio these days. Wedding season is in full swing so that yields a shoot every Saturday, along with a couple of thousand images a week to edit. Along with the weddings we have multiple projects going on at once, as well as the normal portrait work. To say we're busy would be an understatement, so if I miss a day or three on here, please bear with me and keep checking back for more content. I didn't forget about anyone, I promise. The shot you are looking at is from a wedding we did at the Aston country club. It's a beautiful golf course, and banquet facility, that can accommodate 300+ people. The shot was taken outside of the Downstairs facility next to the beautiful stone work they have there. It was a wonderful setting for a wedding. Also as you can see our bride was beautiful and photogenic so it made our day that much more enjoyable. However the day didn't go without any hiccups. We have been playing around with Auto FP mode lately and it almost bit us in the butt. For those who don't know Auto FP stands for Auto High Speed Focal Plane mode. Never heard of it? Read on...

Auto FP or Focal Plane mode is a mode that allows you to sync your flash at up to 1/8000th of a second. This is great for working in bright light where you want to blur the background with a lower aperture or f/stop. Before we get into how it does that lets take a look at how a normal flash sync works.

The maximum flash sync speed of a camera is the fastest shutter speed that can be obtained while still firing a flash. Most cameras sync speed is between 1/125 and 1/250(reference your manual to find out for your models sync speed). What this means is 1/250th is the maximum period that the shutter will be fully opened so that it can register the entire flash. If you go above that you will start to get a dark line on either the top or the bottom of your image because the shutter was closing as the flash fired. Now if you're inside, or under an overcast sky, this isn't a problem. You can still have your aperture set at f/2.8 and be below your sync speed, but if it's a sunny day(like we had Saturday for this wedding) your shutter speed will increase beyond what the camera can sync at. So how do you still blur the background? Highspeed FP.

Highspeed FP or Focal Plane mode will allow you to sync your flash up to 1/8000 of a second and blur the background. It does this not by increasing it's output, but rather making a series of short flashes throughout the entire shutter cycle. The trade off is power. You have to be extremely close with the flash when you are using FP mode. It's almost a necessity that you have the flash off camera and close to the subject. For this photo:

The flash was just out of the frame literally 6 inches from her face. If it hadn't been that close, there wouldn't have been enough light output to illuminate her face and it would have been underexposed. Notice the nice creamy bokeh in the background? That was possible because of Auto FP. I'll explain. The settings for this shot were ISO200 f/4.0 at 1/800th of a second. Now if he hadn't been in FP mode when he took this image, and he tried to us f/4.0(to blur the background) the camera would have said HI. This means that the maximum flash sync speed(1/250 normally) wouldn't be fast enough, and the photo would have been over exposed. With FP mode he was able to take the picture at 1/800th and get the proper exposure while still using a flash to light the bride.

So auto FP sounds great right? I mean you can shoot faster shutter speeds and lower aperture while still using flash. It's great when you use it on purpose. The Nikon D300's and D700's that we use have a setting in the menu to adjust the maximum flash sync speed. You can have all of the way up to 1/250, but then there's a little option that says 1/250*. The little star means that you're in Auto FP mode. This means that as long as you're shooting at 1/250 or lower the flash will function normally. If however you go above that the camera will automatically switch to FP mode. We shoot in aperture priority mode which means that we select the aperture we want(because we like to control the depth of field) and the camera sets the shutter speed for us. This is bad in Auto FP mode. What happens is you set your aperture for the desired depth of field, and the camera will adjust the shutter speed. Sometimes that depth of field requires a shutter speed higher than 1/250 to make a proper exposure. When that happens, the camera automatically switches to Auto FP, and cuts your flash output dramatically. You have to keep an eye on your shutter speed when in this mode, otherwise you will end up with severely underexposed images. This happened to us on Saturday. Luckily we caught it quickly and corrected the problem by taking the camera out of Auto FP mode.

So to recap, Auto FP is awesome! Just make sure you keep an eye on your light/subject distance, and your shutter speed. Before I go, one more great image from Saturday:

Image by Shad Ramsey/RedDoor Photography All post processing by Me. Have a great day guys! Jason

Light up the room

2009-08-17T07:01:00.010-04:00

Welcome back everyone! Glad to have that brutal weekend behind me. We shot an outside wedding in 90+ degree weather. As always we wore all black, which didn't help things. We were there until 11 or 12 Saturday night, then back up and to the American Legion for a second round of directory photos by 7AM... Somewhere in between all of this madness I found time to work on a self project for The Strobist. Above is the end result. The whole idea behind the project was to photograph an architectural space in your house. The idea came from all of the houses for sale on the market these days. What is going to separate your house from the millions of others that are up for sale? When people are browsing houses online looking for their next home, what's going to make them stop and take a second look at your house instead of skipping over it like the 20 previous? Good photos. If you make your home look warm and inviting in the photos in the online ad, then you have a better chance of people taking a closer look. So read on for how to accomplish a photo like this...

I decided that the cleanest lines I could find in my house to demonstrate this type of shooting were in my twins room. The whole idea is to light the room nicely without being able to see the flash units. It takes some ingenuity and a couple of well placed clamps to make that happen, but here's how I did it.

The first thing I like to do when setting up a shot like this is to figure out the camera position. That's the most important thing. Figure out what the composition is going to be, then build the lighting around that. I started in the middle of the one wall. You can see here:

I just pressed the shutter button and took a look at what came out. This gives you the ambient light picture as shown above. An accurate representation of the scene to be sure, but we want a little more out of it. Everything seems too Asymmetrical. I didn't like it, lets move to the doorway and shoot from there.

Again, it was alright, but the main thing that I didn't like was the glaring highlight from the photo on the wall. In the end I chose the right corner under the window. So that's step one, figuring out where to place yourself in the room to get the best shot.

Next is to figure out how to light that room. Nice even FLAT lighting is just that, nice even and flat. I didn't want that. I wanted to create some contrasts in the room to make it look a little more appealing. The first step for me was to get the window into play. There was an abundance of light coming from the sky outside, but unfortunately it was boring empty 2 in the afternoon sky. Even when I tilted the blinds to create a shadow on the wall it was boring. There was no shadow because this window never gets direct sunlight. It is just getting that great big even softbox type light coming from the sky. Great for portraits, bad for crating hard edged shadows like I was looking for. So what to do? Make your own sun.. In this photo:

you can see that I placed a flash on a magic arm out the window of the next room over. It is zoomed to 200mm and has two full cuts of CTO warming gel on it. You can also see in the photo that there is a pocket wizard triggering the flash. Now if you are in a lower room, you don't need to clamp the flash to a magic arm, you can just place it on a stand outside of the window, but since I was on the second floor I had to do it like this. You can see in the main photo above that the results are dramatic. There is a nice contrasty shadow of the blinds on the wall just above the bed on the right.

Next I wanted to light the bed on the left a little bit because the bed on the right was getting a lot of extra light from the window light. I put a GRID on an SB800 with one full cut of .CTO Warming gel on it, and hand held it above my head to the camera left. It was pointed towards the bed and large bookcase to the left. Next I wanted to highlight my wife's wonderful art that she free handed above the bed, so I placed another SB800 to the Camera right with an Eight inch snoot pointed directly at the painting. After a little adjustment I got it positioned correctly to just put an oval of light around the name.

Here is a look at where I was sitting as well as the two flash units I was using to light the room:

The flash attached to the window ledge is the one that I was holding over head. I just clamped it there for this setup shot. So that's it. That's all there is to taking a nice photo of an interior room of your house. Hopefully some of you can take this idea an run with it. Hopefully some of you will be able to either sell your house faster, or help a friend sell their house faster. All because of some nice photos taken by you.

So that's it for me today. I've got over 2000 images to get edited. See you all tomorrow! Jason

Keywords get under my skin

2009-08-10T08:05:00.003-04:00

Keywords get under my skin. They are so perfect but such a pain in the ass. Anyone that is using Lightroom knows that you can keyword your images for easy distinction and sorting later on. You can keyword your files individually, or you can do batch keywording. You can have Lightroom do it as they're being imported so that every file coming in gets that particular "tag". But what's the rub? What's the catch, and what bothers us about keywording so bad that most of us rarely use the feature? I'll tell you what I think... I think most of us don't use keywording because it's a pain in the neck. Sure we can batch keyword like I said above, but to truly make use of this feature, we have to give individual images keywords. Not just "family photos" or "Smith wedding". We have to go in and select a group of shots within that folder that get not only "Smith wedding", "wedding", "bride", "groom", etc. But they also get "formals" or "Candis", or "ceremony"... To truly use this great image database we have called Lightroom, we have to get very fine and precise about our keywording. If not, why bother. Why bother at all if we don't have them correctly keyworded. If we can't go to the search bar and type in "food photos" or "wedding formals" and have a list of all of the images we've done show up, we're wasting our time. To be quite honest, I don't do that half of the time either. I don't keyword most of the time, because I've got way too many other photos to upload. I'd never be able to get the rest of the images edited. I'd spend all of my time organizing and not enough time editing. Anther thing that bothers me about keywording, well Lighrooms "keyword as you import" feature to be exact, is that sometimes I forget to remove those keywords from the keyword box and all of my images that get imported after that get the wrong keywords. An engagement shoot will end up with the keywords "United Way Executives" or something like that. It's a really bothersome problem. I complain, but I don't have a solution for the problem. In theory the keywords work. You label an image with a "tag" or "keyword" and that's it, but sometimes the most well thought out plans don't work out right...

Thinking of getting into Microstock? Check this guy out:

That folks is your competition in the microstock field. He has 2000 of his images a day downloaded... 2000 a day! I don't know about you, but I can't compete with that.

Ok, that's all I've got. It's Monday, I'm super tired, and staring at this screen isn't helping in that department. See you all tomorrow. Jason

Make your objects Smart

2009-08-05T12:16:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone. we've finally recovered from yesterdays storms. They were working on our electric until almost Midnight... The shot you see above is the product of a new technique that I first saw Dave Cross demonstrate on Photoshop User Tv, although he used it for a different purpose. The whole idea is to create "smart objects" in a template so you can quickly and easily swap out the source photos and have them appear in the pre-made template. We are working on a directory for a local American legion post, so I needed a way to make a template that would allow me to place multiple photos in a grouping and have them constrained to a specific layout. Here's how I did it...

Here is the template that we are attempting to make:

The black boxes at the bottom are just empty spaces that we don't have pictures for yet. Every image in this template can be swapped with another image in about 5 seconds flat without manually resizing the photo once in the image. Here's where we start:

Create a new document in photoshop by going to FILE-NEW. Make the page whatever size it is that you want. For my particular application I needed 8.5X11 inches so that's what I entered into the document. Now go to your layers panel and create a new blank layer by pressing the new layer icon at the bottom of the panel or use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+N. I named my layer MASK(you'll see why in a few minutes) So now we have a document that measures 8.5X11inches with a blank background layer and a blank layer on top of that which I have labeled "mask". It should look like this:

Now grab your RECTANGLE MARQUEE tool and draw a small rectangle in the document, like so:

Now as you can see in this image my foreground color is set to red. I want it to be black so press D. This will change the foreground color to black. Now press ALT+BACKSPACE to fill the rectangle with black. Now press CTRL+ALT+T to bring up the free transform around that box. While holding your shift key(this keeps it strait) click and drag the black box your just drew to the right. You will see that you are dragging a copy of it. Drag it until you are satisfied with the distance between the boxes. When you are satisfied release the mouse and the shift key and press ENTER. this will lock your move in, and take it out of FREE TRANSFORM. Now press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+T. This will copy what you just did and keep the spacing exactly the same. Do this until your document is full of your small black boxes. It will(or should) look like this:

Now, you have a nice row of evenly spaced black boxes, but we want to continue that on down the page so what we have to do is this: Press CTRL+A this will select the entire layer. Press CTRL+J. This will copy your entire layer. Now select your move tool in the upper left hand corner of your screen or just press the letter V. Click on your row of black boxes and start to drag it down. You will see that you are again dragging a copy. Now drag them down until they are properly spaced from the top layer.(Properly according to what you think so there is no right or wrong)

It will start to look like this:

Now keep pressing CTRL+J to copy your layers until you fill the page up. Once you do we need to align the entire set of boxes on the page. To do this hold the CTRL key and click on all of the layers you just made in the layers panel as shown here:

Do not select the background layer, REPEAT DO NOT SELECT THE BACKGROUND LAYER. Once you have all of the layers selected press CTRL+E. This will merge the selected layers. So now you will have two layers, background and layer 1 copy. Now press CTRL and select the background layer. Press V to select your MOVE tool. On the upper menu bar you will see some little icons appear. Press the one that is second from the right, it is the color red in this photo directly under the word WINDOWS:

This will align the black boxes on the background page.

Now select your layer 1. Go to FILE and press PLACE. Select the image that you would like to put in the first box and press ok. Now the image will appear on your screen over your black boxes. It will probably be too large so move it over your first black box. Hold the SHIFT button down and click on one of the free transform handles in a corner of the image. Drag that handle until the image is covering over the black box with a little hanging over the edges. It should look something like this:

Now with that layer selected still press CTRL+ALT+G. This will create a mask from the black box below the image. It will clip off the parts of the image that are hanging over. Now click on the layer 1 layer again. Repeat the process of going to FILE-PLACE and resizing the images just as you did for the first image. Continue this until your are finished filling the boxes.

Now we're almost done. Actually if you are happy with the images that are in the collection, you are done. If however you want to change any of the images for any reason, just find the layer for the image that you want to replace in the layers Box. Right click on that layer and click REPLACE CONTENTS. You can then select a different image to fill that space. Pretty cool huh?

Save this document as a PSD or photoshop file when you're done with it so that you can come back at any time and use this as a template to just drop your images into by clicking REPLACE CONTENTS. Ok that's all I have for today. It's about time to go home. I'll see you all tomorrow! Jason

New Format

2009-08-04T07:53:00.002-04:00

I couldn't help it... I was going through my Lightroom catalog looking for a nice photo to post today and I ran across this one. When we setup for a shoot we have to test the lighting. One of us has to stand in and play the "model". He should have known this was going to end up on the web... : ) So today is the first day with the new format. It's going to allow for a lot easier searching for particular articles. You'll see the first paragraph then click on read more to, well read more. This will make a big difference when it comes to the longer tutorial posts. So on to more exciting things that you actually care about!

Nikon just released a new line of point and shoot cameras that have built in projectors. They are supposedly able to project an image up to 8x10 on a wall/surface. Doesn't sound very exciting to me, but if you want to check them out click Here

I found a great site with tons of Lightroom video tutorials that are all free. The Digital Photography Connection offers free Lightroom video tutorials in a step by step manner that are easy to follow along with. Great stuff go check them out.

Also go to The Photoshop Insider to check out the new contest they have going on over there. They are offering a chance to shoot alongside Scott and Mike Olivella on the 50 yard line of a FSU game! Only amatuers are elligable so get over there and enter.

Well I have to cut it short today folks. Power went out and my battery is running low on my laptop. See you all tomorrow! Jason

Test

2009-08-03T20:59:00.002-04:00

This is a test to see if this new coding I have been doing tonight will work.
The idea is that I will include a paragraph under the photo, then you will be able to click in and read the entire blog post. This will help with the tutorial posts because they seem to run on forever and take up the entire page. I hope you all enjoy this new format better. Jason

Back to the Basics...

2009-08-03T06:03:00.005-04:00

I love my job. Well not my normal full time job, but my second full time job. I mean as a photographer (specifically a wedding photographer) I get to spend time with couples that are genuinely in a good mood. They're happy to see me, and we have a lot of fun together. That is exactly what the atmosphere was like for the engagement session you see above. We all were having a good time. We took a ton of photos(like we always do) but this was one of my favorites because I love the wide angle so much.

Another that I really really like is this one:

This was taken by Shad under the pavilion at the top of the hill at Ault Park. What I really like about this image is how nice and soft the background is with the beautiful bokeh but the foreground and the couple are tac sharp. This is due to the wonderful construction of the Nikon 85mm f/1.4. Some (Tom Bryan) call it the "magic lens". I like to think of it not as magic, but rather a quality well made lens from a manufacturer of fine imaging products. Whatever you attribute it to, there is no denying the beauty of the photo.

Everyone read(or should have read) a few days ago when I talked about Mpix Pro, and how they will send you 5 free 8X10's to check monitor calibration. Well a couple of people have asked me about sizing your images to send to them. Lets take a look at how to do that.

This is a simple technique that we're going to talk about here. Just cropping, but you want to make sure that when you crop your image, you make the resolution the correct count otherwise you will have a fuzzy image. So open your image in Photoshop. Click on the crop tool in your tool bar on the left side of the screen. When you do this you will see a couple of boxes appear on the menu bar across the top of the screen. The first one is width, click in that box and type 8. Next is height, type in 10 in that box. The third and final empty box is PPI or pixels per inch. This is where the confusion lays. For sending images to the printer you can get away with any resolution from 240ppi to 300ppi. Mpix Pro requests that you make the resolution 300ppi, but most printers suggest 240-300. That's for printing, but what if you are just resizing an image for the Internet? The setting most used for the Internet is 72ppi. This does two things. First it keeps the image small enough that uploading doesn't take an extended period of time. Secondly it somewhat, prevents people from stealing your images. If you try to enlarge a 72ppi image much larger than a 4X6 it begins to get grainy and unrecognizable. So for the web my settings are usually this: width 4inches, height 6inches, and resolution 72ppi. There you have it. You should be resizing like a pro... Have a great day everyone. See you tomorrow. Jason

Nikon News

2009-07-30T06:32:00.003-04:00

Here's another shot of Matt and Tomi. They were so much fun to work with that I can't resist sharing them with everyone a little more. For this shot I use an 85mm f/1.8 Nikon prime lens. Keep the aperture wide open and blur the background. Great stuff. Speaking of Nikon, as predicted(by not just me) They released the new camera's and lenses today. You can read about them HERE. All of the things that I predicted a couple of days ago came true. D300s with video, extra card slot, and not much else. D3000, 70-200VRII, and 18-200VRII. Nothing earth shattering out of any of them. Look for a D700s soon that will add the benefits of the D300s. It will have an extra card slot just like the 300... Pre order them from places like ADORAMA or B&H. It'll be mid August before they're shipping.

The specs on the D3000 look kind of blah. It's basically the same specs as the D40x. It adds 11point AF, dust removal system, SLOWER flash sync speed... Get a D40 you'll be happier.

The D300s adds a SD slot, 1 extra FPS, video, 1 button live view(because we all shoot in live view sooooo often right...), it does add the Virtual horizon that is standard in the D700 which is nice. That's really it on the D300s. Nothing that's going to make me run out and sell my D300 to buy one.

Ok, that's all I've got today. I have to get to some editing. See you all tomorrow. Jason

The Kelby Three Step Portrait finishing made easy

2009-07-29T06:59:00.006-04:00

Hey everyone, hope you all had a great day yesterday. We presented the umbrella photo to the client yesterday. She didn't like the dark sky, or the size of the logo. Made the changes right there for her, she was happy. We are licensing the image to her for use in advertising but for prints, customers have to come to us. So if you live in Bellevue and would like a photo/poster etc. of the umbrella shoot, let me know. We are printing them with and without the logo. The shot you see above was taken last Sunday during an engagement session with a bride and groom for one of our upcoming weddings. I didn't take the photo, Shad did. I only took a hand full of photos that day as I was playing reflector boy(we alternate who does the reflector/light holding from shoot to shoot). Anyway, I have been reading Scott Kelby's book on Photoshop CS4 and in there he discusses his Three Step Portrait Finishing technique that I thought would work well for this particular portrait. Any of you that know me though, know that I'm not one to leave well enough alone, so I did a little automation and made this process into an action that I am going to share with you today. To start here is the beginning image:

Open the image in Photoshop. Then before you do anything else select your actions panel and click on create a new action at the bottom of the panel. The create new action icon looks like the small post it note and is the second from the right at the bottom.

The first thing you want to do is go to IMAGE-MODE-LAB COLOR. This will convert your image to LAB COLOR mode. Once you have done that, click on your CHANNELS tab in the CHANNELS TOOL BOX(if you don't see CHANNELS in your tool boxes selection go to the top menu bar and select WINDOW then click on channels). Once in the CHANNELS tool bar select the LIGHTNESS channel. When you click on LIGHTNESS it will change your image to black and white(don't worry the color isn't gone). Now click at the top of the screen on FILTER-SHARPEN-UNSHARPEN MASK. A dialog box will pop up. Here are the settings you want:

When you are done, click OK. Now go back to IMAGE-MODE-RGB. Now duplicate your background layer by pressing CTRL+J. Now select your copied layer which should say LAYER 1 in the layers box(again if you don't see the layers box, click on WINDOW and select LAYERS). Go to your top menu and select FILTER, then GAUSSIAN BLUR. Set your radius to 20.5 then click OK. Now in the LAYERS dialog box, select the OPACITY and reduce it to 20%. The next thing you're going to do is merge your layers. You do this by pressing CTRL+E. This will merge your visible layers.

Now duplicate the layer that you have by pressing CTRL+J. Click directly above the new layer in blending mode. It will say NORMAL. Change this to MULTIPLY. This will make your image appear dark. Don't worry, we're going to fix that. This is something that isn't in Scott's book, but is very important when making the action. The next step in the process is to select the rectangle Marquee tool and draw a box in the image. Every image is different so you will want to change the size of this box depending on the image. To do this in an action, you have to insert a STOP. To do this you right click on the small box in the upper right hand corner of the ACTIONS box. Under that menu, you will see the command INSERT STOP. Click on it.

When you do you will get a small box that pops up and allows you to insert some text. Here is what I put in my text box: "Press stop and use the Rectangle Marquee tool to select a box roughly 1/2 to 1 inch in from canvas edge. Once you have completed the selection Press the action button again to continue". Do not click on the little box that says Allow continue. This would allow you to bypass this step, and you don't want to do that. Now, since you are making the action currently, you will have to go to the bottom of the actions box and press the stop button so that you can actually make your selection. The stop button is the little square box on the far left of the actions menu at the bottom.

Once you have pressed that stop button, select your rectangle marquee tool(like the text in your box says) and draw a box inside of your image. This box should be roughly 1/2 inch to 1 inch from all of the sides but it doesn't have to be perfect. Now go back to the bottom of your ACTIONS box and press the record button. It is the second button from the left and is a small circle. Once you have done this click the small box above your image in the tool bar that says REFINE EDGE. When you do, you will get a pop up that looks like this:

Use the settings shown here. Make sure that you have the blue box at the far left of the pop up selected. Once you have done this, click ok. Now press the DELETE OR BACKSPACE button on your keyboard. This will delete part of the MULTIPLIED LAYER. Once you have done this, press CTRL+D to deselect. Now all that is left is to press CTRL+E to merge the final layers and you're done. Press stop once again at the bottom of your actions box. You are done.

When you run this action on a photograph, a pop up will appear when it gets to the point in the action where you placed the STOP and the dialog box. When it does, there will be a button that says STOP on it. Press that button, then make your selection with the marquee tool. Once you have made your selection, press either the play button again at the bottom of your ACTIONS box, or if you are in BUTTON MODE for your actions, just press the action again(it will be colored in red until you press it again). That's it. Simple, automated portrait finishing. Puts a nice vignette around your image, as well as gives the image a dreamy look while still keeping thing sharp. Great stuff!

Enough from me. I have some editing to do. I'll see you all tomorrow! Jason

Sneak Peek

2009-07-28T07:10:00.004-04:00

Good morning all. I thought I would give my blog readers a sneak peek at the image being delivered to the City Of Bellevue today. This is the final version of an image that was taken by Shad. Here is the original:

As you can see I spent hours duplicating the umbrellas, adding cloudy sky, and pumping up the colors. There are over 60 layers in this composit! Look for this on your local news channel in the next couple of days(if you live in Cincy) as they will be sending out a press release to all of the news agencies.

New Nikon Gear! Thursday Nikon is going to be releasing some new gear. I have a "contact" per-se at Nikon that confirmed for me this morning via email that this Thursday Nikon is going to release two new bodies as well as two new lenses. We will have the new D300s, D3000, 18-200 VRII, and 70-200 2.8 VRII.

The improvements on the D300s over the original D300 will be the addition of video capability, added SD card slot along side the CF card slot, and a few other minor upgrades. To me it's not Earth shattering. Not enough to make me dump my D300's and go buy these...

The D3000 is going to be a replacement for the D40. Entry level SLR. I look for it to have one of the key features of the D40 missing. I expect that the flash sync speed will be 1/250 instead of 1/500 which is one of the great features of the D40. Also I expect that it will have no AF motor like the other Consumer SLR's offered by Nikon.

As for the New lenses, we'll just have to wait and see. The AF motors will probably be faster. The lens elements will most likely be coated with the Nano Crystal Coat that all of the new Pro lenses have been shipping with. The real question is going to be whether or not the price of the used 70-200 2.8's goes down or not. It is such a great lens, that I am expecting the price to stay the same for a used model. Somewhere in the neighborhood of $1400 to $1600. So there you have it. My expectations and predictions for Thursday.

Ok that's all I've got for today. I have an awesome photoshop tutorial lined up for tomorrow as well as how to create the action to automate it so make sure you stop by tomorrow to check that out. See you then! Jason

Wide is the Way to go

2009-07-24T16:36:00.004-04:00

Hey everyone. I'm glad you made it back to read a little more from me. Lots has been happening in the past few days of the photo world. Mpix has a new service aimed specifically at professionals. They have all sorts of added products and offerings that professionals will appreciate. To apply for their pro services click Mpix Pro.
Nikon has had some issues with the D5000. If you have one read their latest press release Here. They are recalling some D5000's with specific serial numbers. Hopefully you read my post all about this camera and didn't buy one anyway. They're not worth the money.

You know what is worth the money? This great little lens right here:

This is the Tokina 12-24 4. Now I have raved all about their 11-16 2.8 for over a year now, but I have just had a chance to test, and subsequently purchase this wonderful lens. So what's so special about this lens? Read on...

The Tokina 12-24 f/4.0 is one of the sharpest, well made third party lenses that I have had a chance to use. This thing is awesome. It is has great build quality, and an affordable price. Just under $500 HERE. Ok so we know it has good a good build, and a cheap price, but why do you need a 12-24mm range? Because wide is gooood. Who doesn't like to see a nice wide shot, with no distortion... I love it. I love getting close to people and getting them, as well as a nice background in the image. I like getting My son from feet all the way to head as well as the clouds in the background in this shot:

I love the fact that I was only a couple of feet away, so that meant that my SB800 on the stand, camera left was only a few feet away. This made the power required to light him very minimal. This is great for recycle times, as well as strain on flash. Less power usage equals less strain on the flash.

So what about the numbers... This beautiful little lens has 13 elements in 11 groups. Internal AF motor so it will work on for you guys with the D40's and the D60's. It has a "Pro" 77mm filter thread as well as a nice supplied lens hood. It has 9 diaphragm blades so there will be a nice bokah on those small DOF shots. Great lens! Sharp from side to side, and minimal distortion. I'm happy to have it as an addition to my lens selection. Get one. Rent it or barrow it to try it out. I promise you'll be hooked on the wide angle stuff. Your significant other will be cursing me for turning you on to it. : )

That's it for me today. I have to get back out to the pool. Have a good weekend. See you all Monday!

Jason

Taking your settings with you

2009-07-23T06:40:00.004-04:00

Hey everyone. Glad you made your way back. If you read yesterdays post I told you that I just upgraded to Photoshop CS4 a few days ago. It's better than I could have ever expected. Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to cover some of the new features included in this new version, but first we have to get all of our settings, actions, and brushes converted over from CS3. If you haven't been using Actions, keyboard shortcuts, and specialized brushes, why not? These are all things that make life a whole lot easier when working in Photoshop.

As a side note, even if you aren't upgrading at this point, you may want to read about how to do this stuff and do a backup of all of these settings, just in case something happens to your computer.

Open photoshop. Got to EDIT-KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS this is what will pop up:

Now if you don't have any specific keyboard shortcuts, then you don't have to worry about this step because the same "default" shortcuts already come pre-loaded in CS4. I have changed my shortcuts to make my life easier. So once in shortcuts, click on the small "disk" icon in the upper right hand side of the box. I have my cursor pointed directly over it in this photo. By default it will open up the Keyboard shortcuts file under the Photoshop folder in your program files section of your hard drive. I have a folder that I keep all of my external photoshop files in under the My Documents tab. So I selected that folder and named my file Jason's Keyboard shortcuts. Click ok to save and you're done with that. Now in your Actions panel click the drop down menu in the upper right hand corner of the box. If you are in button mode, uncheck that selection and then move down to your actions set. (if you haven't made a custom actions set to save your files in, you need to do that first by clicking on "create set" in the ACTIONS drop down menu) Click on the drop down for the ACTIONS box again and click "save actions". It will look like this:

Again I have the folder in "My Documents" where I keep all of my photoshop external files. I saved the actions set there.

Last but not least for me was to save my brushes to transfer to CS4. I have acquired a pretty good collection of different brushes and I wanted to take those with me to CS4. So click on the brush tool over on the left hand side of your screen. When you do a dropdown box will appear on the menu bar at the top of the screen. Click on this dropdown where it says BRUSH. Now on the right hand side of the screen you will see a small arrow inside of a circle. Click this. It will bring up a menu similar to the Actions menu we saw earlier. It should look like this:

Click on save brushes. At this point you should know where I'm going to save the file for this(in my documents). Save the file there and close CS3..

Once you have CS4 installed, you will repeat the above process, except instead of clicking on save brushes, you click on load brushes. Easy and simple.

I'm done for the day. I need a nap so I'll see you all tomorrow! Jason

Bellevue Umbrellas

2009-07-22T06:32:00.004-04:00

Hey everyone! This is a setup shot from our photoshoot on Sunday. We arrived around 6AM to the city of Bellevue to start preparing for the morning. Bellevue decided to change up some of their promotional materials and wanted to get the word out. Since our studio is located in Bellevue, naturally we wanted to be part of it. They printed their new logo on a bunch of bright yellow umbrellas to pass out to people during the "Shop Bellevue" event. Shad had the great idea to get a bunch of people out there in the street with the umbrellas and get some shots from up high. The city arranged a "cherry picker" and we got to work. We got some great stuff that morning including this shot of the people that showed up to hold umbrellas:

Now this is a fine shot. It shows the umbrellas, the shops, etc... But we were hoping for about double the turnout of people to hold umbrellas. I went to work...
Using photoshop CS3, and the magnetic lasso tool I selected different "umbrella groups" and copied them to new layers(50 in all). I then used the free transform(CTRL+T) to rotate, resize, and position the umbrellas where I wanted them. Here is what the shot should have looked like from the start:

Unfortunately since we didn't have enough people to hold umbrellas I had to spend 4+ hours in photoshop adding content. Worth it in the long run because that image along with the shot below and an HDR image got us on channel 12 news Sunday evening. Always love free advertising!

So I just upgraded to Photoshop CS4 last night. Not that there was anything wrong with CS3, but there are some added features in CS4 that I could just not pass up. I'm not ready to give any tutorials on these features yet, but I would like to give you a quick summary of what they are, as well as what they do.

Content Aware-Scaling This feature is HUGE. It allows you to "stretch" your image to fit whatever proportions you need, without distorting the image. If you have ever taken a digital photo, and said wow, that would look great as an 8X10 but when you tried to print it as an 8x10 things got cropped off, you'll love this feature.

Clone stamp preview This feature allows you to see what your clone stamp is going to look like before you stamp it. This is especially helpful if you are trying to clone along a strait line. You can now match up your lines before you actually stamp it.

Tabbed documents This allows you to have multiple open documents and keep them organized like never before.

Camera Raw improvements This is almost more like a complete overhaul of camera raw. It's interface now opens every type of photo file not just RAW files(similar to Lightroom) with white balance, clarity, as well as tone curves adjustment and a whole lot more. If you are familiar with working in lightroom's develop panel, you'll feel right at home here.

3D capabilities I don't really know exactly what they are, but I know that RC over at Photoshop User TV goes on and on about them. When I learn more about this feature, I'll pass along the info.

I'm sure there are some that I'm forgetting/don't know about, but these features alone are enough to justify the upgrade. Tomorrow I'm going to talk about how to transfer all of your preferences, brushes, actions, etc. over from CS3 to CS4. See you all then! Jason

Monday, July 20th

2009-07-20T06:24:00.005-04:00

Good morning everyone! Let me Start by Saying that if you attended last Saturdays Photowalk, Thank you! I had a great time, and met a lot of cool new people. If you haven't already checked out the Flickr group you can view it HERE. I can't wait to see what everyone got! I didn't take a whole lot of images because I wanted to spend my time conversing with everyone and thanking them for attending. What I did get was a couple of really cool HDR shots. Here is my favorite:

I'm not normally a big fan of HDR. I feel like it's kind of cheating, but then again some say the same thing about photoshop. For those who don't know, HDR stands for High Dynamic Range. Basically you are taking a group of shots, some over exposed, and some under exposed, and combining them to make one photograph. So here's how you do it...

First you have to take the images. Many cameras these days have what's called a bracket function on them. This is a setting that will tell the camera to take a series of photographs and make each one a different exposure. The way to set the camera to do this varies from model to model so refer to your user manual to set the camera to do this. What you get will be a series of images that look something like this:

What this does is it captures the entire image from the darkest darks, to the lightest lights. Once you have these images you need to open them into an HDR program. Photoshop does have an HDR feature. You can access this by going to FILE-AUTOMATE-MERGE TO HDR. This works... but not very well. I have found that the best program on the market for creating HDR's is Photomatix Pro. I have photomatix pro 3.0 and I love it. The program is really simple to use, and it does a wonderful job. You can download a free trial of it HERE Here's a quick rundown of how to use it. When you first open the program it will look like this:

Click on "Generate HDR" in the upper left hand side of the screen. A box will come us that tells you to select your images. Click browse, and then find the images you want to use for the HDR. Click ok, then click ok again when the pop up asks you if you want to create an HDR. At this point a small box will pop up that gives you the option of changing some settings around, I don't, I just click OK. Then it begins to create the HDR. It usually takes a few minutes then it pops up a photograph. That photo doesn't look that great. You have to click on Tone Mapping on the left hand side of the screen and you should get something like this pop up:

On the left hand side you will see an option called "Light Smoothing". This is basically the level of "HDR" you want. The further left you click, the more it looks like a cartoon. The further right you click, the closer it gets to reality. Once you select your amount, click "Process" at the bottom of the page. This will get you back to the main screen. Once there you can click FILE-SAVE AS to save the newly compiled image.

That's it! That's all there is to an HDR. I hope this helped some of you who had some questions about HDR, and how to shoot, and process it. I have a ton of editing from the weekend to get to, so I'll see you here tomorrow! Jason

Thursday, July 16th

2009-07-16T07:17:00.004-04:00

Hey everyone! Good morning to all. It's Thursday, and you know what that means... yeah I don't know what it means either. :~) There is however only one day left until the photowalk. 29,000 people signed up to participate. We're going to be in the Guinness book of World Records. USA today had an article about it yesterday. You can read it HERE. Also for those of you attending, I will be sending out an email tomorrow with some pre-walk tips, and suggested things to bring along with you.

Holy Cow! Bogan Imaging has a new portable strobe system on the market. Well, it's on it's way to the market(probably in stock at B&H by the time you read this). Two flash heads that are small enough to fit in your pocket, with a battery pack that will give you a ton of flashes with almost instant recycle time. 400watts/second power and a super bright daylight balanced modeling light. These things rock! See them in action HERE. To place your pre-order click HERE. These things are perfect for anyone who wants to travel light, but pack a lot of power.

You all know I'm into Photoshop, and Lightroom. I have been following a blog about the disasters that get printed in magazines or in ads. It's a really funny showing of all of the stuff that just slips by. Read all about it here: Photoshop Disasters.

Ok. Short and sweet. That's if for today. I have some editing to do, as well as some of the less fun promotional side of things. See you tomorrow. Jason

Wednesday, July 15th

2009-07-15T07:49:00.004-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad you found your way back over here, or if this is your first time reading this blog, welcome. I've got a little news/info to give you before I get to today's tutorial.

Many people may already know about Flash Zebra, and honestly I had heard about them before last week too. I just never really paid that much attention to the site because I never needed anything that they had. Flash Zebra is a website/wholesaler of camera components. They carry all of the odd ball cables, and connectors that you could want. The also carry the generic version of many popular cables like the motor drive cable to go from a Nikon to a Pocket Wizard. I went there searching for a cable to attach the Vivitar 283 flash I wrote about last week. I ended up making my own, but they had the best prices I found anywhere, so if you are looking for an odd ball cable, check them out.

Have you ever been on Flickr and saw an image that had some effect you liked? Ever said to yourself, "I wish I knew what they did to make it look like that." Well now there is a tool to extract the info from the metadata of the image. Mike Wiacek wrote a program that will extract the info for you and make a preset in lightroom to achieve the same effect. Here's the link...

The shot you see above is of Tomi, and Matt. It was taken right after we finished showing them some of our wedding samples. This is something we like to do when a couple comes in to discuss wedding photography. We take a few shots of them together and burn them a disk to take with them. It not only gives them a little glimpse of how we work when posing, but it's a little something that separates us from the competition. Something that makes us stick in their mind. Anyway, the shot you see above is the finished product. Not that they needed any major touch up work, but every portrait we do gets a little treatment to make it "pop". Here's what I did..

The technique I'm about to describe was done in Photoshop CS3 but it could have just as easily been done in Elements. The first thing we need to do is open the image into photoshop. Here is what I started with:

Now like I said before, this isn't a bad photo. The both look nice, and the lighting is good. They probably would have been happy with it. I wanted to make it a little better.

Most people, whether they smoke or not don't have perfectly white teeth. From drinking dark colored pop/tea or whatever they just have a slight tint to their teeth. Tomi, and Matt actually have pretty white teeth but I still wanted to lighten them just a little. So get your DODGE tool from your tool bar on the left. It's the tool that looks like a black sucker. Adjust the size of your brush until it's as large as the mouth opening. You make it that large so that you apply the dodging evenly over all of the teeth and you don't end up with some areas lighter than others.

So I applied this lightening to both subjects being careful to not go too far making them look unnaturally white.

Next we want to make the eyes really stand out. Now Tomi has beautiful eyes, that truthfully don't need any enhancement, however I feel that I can always make them stand out just a little more with a few adjustments. Sometimes the whites of the eyes need to be lightened. Again you can do it with the dodge tool like you did with the teeth, but on this particular image I didn't have to do that because their eyes were very well lit. What we do want to do is sharpen them. Select your Elliptical Marquee tool by right clicking on the square tool at the top right of your tool bar on the left hand side of your screen. Now you want to select the eyes. To do this you need to make sure that you have the correct setting for your tool. Under the word image on the top of your screen there should be four small boxes. If not, then you haven't selected your Elliptical Marquee tool yet and you need to do that first. When you see the small boxes, make sure that the second box from the left is selected. That will allow you to make multiple selections with the tool instead of one at a time. Now when you have done that, zoom in so that you can see the persons eyes. If you have more than one person in the image, zoom in on one of them, we'll do the other ones in a minute. Now select just the eye. You may have to make a couple of selections to get the entire eye without going outside of the white. That's ok, just take your time and if you make a mistake and go to far press CTRL+Z to undo what you have done. Once you have both eyes selected go up to the FILTER menu, then to SHARPEN then SMART SHARPEN. You should have a screen that looks like this:

Set your Radius to 1.3 and your amount to 175%. Then click Ok. Now we need to go to the top and click on SELECT then down to DESELECT. We can now move over to the other subject in the photo and repeat the same process again. You can play with the amounts on the sliders because not all eyes will need the same amount of sharpening. This is why I do them separately instead of selecting both subjects eyes at the same time.

So now our image is looking pretty good, but we need to add a little something to make sure your attention is where it should be, on them. Go to FILTER-DISTORT-LENS CORRECTION. You will get a box that pops up like this:

Near the bottom of the screen there is a box that says SHOW GRID. Remove the check mark from that box. Now under Vignette drag the slider to the left until the image has some slight Vignetting, then click OK.

You're done. You have just spiced that image up to make it stand out. The eyes pop, the teeth are white. The customer should look at it and think/say wow you made me look good! That's the goal. To make them happy.

Alright, enough from me. Get out there and take some pictures. Before you do that though. Go back up your images. If you haven't done it in a few days, now is the time. Don't want to loose all of those great shots! See you tomorrow. Jason

Tuesday, July 14th

2009-07-14T05:41:00.003-04:00

Good morning everyone! What a weekend! I was covering the National championship AAU basketball tournament all weekend since we didn't have a wedding scheduled. I got to take lots of photos of some of the best female basketball players from around the country, and for the most part it went great. There were a couple of unfortunate accidents, and injuries but all in all it was a good tournament. Unfortunately, this type of photography doesn't lend itself to creativity very well. I mean, you're looking for an action stopping shot so that people can see the player and what's going on. With the lighting I had(which was pretty good) I was in the neighborhood of ISO 1250, 1/400th of a second, f/2.8. Positively blahhhh. I was bored. So I backed my lens all of the way out to 17mm, sitting right under the basket during a "free throw", and drug the shutter to make the shot above. Now normally to get anything in focus when you drag the shutter, you have to hit the subject with flash, but not here. This was a special circumstance because I knew that the shooter would stay still for slightly longer than the rest of the pack. As soon as the ball left the shooters hands the other girls attempted to "box out" each other in order to get the rebound, but the shooter was following through with her shot so that kept her in the same basic position for a fraction longer. This creates the illusion that she is frozen but that there is movement all around her. the exposure was this 17mm ISO 1250, 1/15th of a second shutter speed, f/11. So how you ask do you accomplish this look? read on....

First thing's first, you have to determine how you want to control your camera. You can use any setting(manual, shutter priority, or aperture priority) but the key is to get the shutter to be longer. My suggestion would be to use shutter priority if you don't have a solid grasp on the elements that go into an exposure yet. So in shutter priority you would set your shutter speed. The speed you want to choose is going to vary depending on how fast your subject is moving, and how much blur you want behind them. For the girls that were playing basketball, 1/15th was fast enough but they really weren't moving "that fast". If you were taking a picture of someone that was say dancing you could probably get the same effect with 1/30th of a second. You really need to play around with the shutter speeds to get down what speed works best for you. Next you have to be able to hold the camera still for that period of time. 1/30th isn't too hard, but if you're doing an exposure of 1 second or more, you may get some camera shake. Now the next part is simple, press the shutter... What'd you get? Too much blur, not enough in focus? Make the exposure a little faster. Too much in focus, not enough movement, or blur? Make the shutter longer. Now, how do you keep anything in focus but still get the blur to show movement? Flash.

The first thing that we need to talk about before we talk about anything else is your "curtain" setting. By this I mean the setting on your camera that places it in either Front, or Rear curtain sync. You want rear curtain. I live in rear curtain, here is why. When your camera is in front curtain, the flash goes off as soon as the shutter opens. At higher shutter speeds(say 1/250th) this is fine. You won't even notice a difference. When the shutter gets slower (say 1/30th) it is very noticeable. What happens with front curtain when your shutter gets that slow is trails of blur, but in the wrong direction. You "freeze" the person with flash at the first part of the exposure then in the rest of the frame they are moving out of that frozen spot and creating a blurred trail where they're walking to instead of where they're walking from. With Rear curtain, the exact opposite happens. The shutter opens, and right before it closes the flash "pops". This will create a blurred trail behind the person and then "freeze" them in their final position. This is what you want. It looks more natural, and it creates a sense of motion. This is why I live in rear curtain. I want the subject to look natural, and show movement in a natural way, not like they are in the Matrix.

So now, how do you do this. Well basically you set your shutter speed, make sure you're on rear curtain, get a firm "correct" hold on the camera, and snap away. This is a fun way to show the movement of a bride on the dance floor, or a flower girl coming down the isle. It's also something that you may want to play with doing when you've been shooting basketball for 6 hours solid and are bored with action stopping shots. :~)

Have a good day everyone. See you back here tomorrow for some industry news, and a photoshop tutorial. Jason

Thursday, July 9th

2009-07-09T06:41:00.003-04:00

Good morning all. I spent the better half of the morning working on this and other shots for the contest that I talked about yesterday. I was then browsing everyone's submissions, and I realized that I was in trouble. Check them out HERE, but be warned that you'll suddenly feel very, very hungry. The beauty of my shot though is my setup. I shot this entire thing with about $50 worth of gear(minus the actual camera)that includes the flash! I have a small "light box" made out of PVC pipe that I made myself with a large sheet of construction paper as the background. Have a look:

You can see the stand behind holding the vivitar flash(I plan on talking about that in a few minutes), the 5in1 reflector with the outside removed so that it is just a diffuser panel, and the piece of aluminum foil in front. The food was lit from slightly behind and on top(best way to light food) through the diffuser(white panel on top), and the front shadows were filled in slightly with a small piece of aluminum foil on the front. Nothing to it. The best part... We ate the prop! :~)

This little beauty is a Vivitar 283. It was at one time the workhorse of every photojournalist... back in the late 70's early 80's. Because it was so popular, there are a ton of them out there. They can be had for as little as $20(which is what I paid for this one). What makes it ideal for someone like me though is the addition of the small dial on the front. You can see it in the picture. That is the variable power dial(which was sold separately so look for it if you buy one). This lets you set the power manually from Full, all the way down to 1/32. That is a lot of adjustment. Since this is an older flash you can't use it on the newer digital cameras without an adapter, but who cares? We have our new fancy flashes that do TTL metering and power adjustment on the fly to attach to the top of your camera. This flash is for just what I use it for, off camera Strobist style lighting. Notice that I have a pocket wizard attached to it to trigger it:

You don't have to do that. You can run a cable to it for triggering, but I happen to have the pocket wizards, so that's what I use. This flash comes with a specific cable to trigger it off camera. The cable has a special end on it that is specific to Vivitar, and if lost they cost around $20 to replace. $20! That's all I paid for the flash. Nope, not me. You all know how I am by now, I took it apart and made my own. Here's how:

The first thing you have to do is determine if you are capable of soldiering. If not, find someone who is. If you don't know anyone, you know me... I can do it. The bottom of the flash(called the foot), is held on with two screws. Remove them. When you do this is what you'll see:

The red wire is the triggering wire, or the "hot" wire. Remember that. The blue is the ground. Next you need to procure(buy, barrow, steal) a headphone cord. I happen to have one laying around:

Now cut one of the tips of the cord off. Doesn't matter which one, just cut one. Strip back the outer insulation, and then separate the inner wires. Now if you have a wire from a pair of headphones there will be three wires. If you have a "mono" cable there will be only two. On the three wire headphone types the red is your tip or "hot". The black is the first ground in, and the silver uninsulated is the third ground. You won't need the black. Now on my flash I didn't care about keeping the function of the foot, so I just cut the wires off of it. If you want to retain use of the foot, just tap into them. Now you hook the red of the flash to the red of the headphone cable, and the blue of the flash to the silver uninsulated wire. Solider them together. Tape them off and you're done.

Now you can trigger this flash off camera. easy as pie.

That's it. That's all there is. Now you can set yourself up an external flash and bring light from a different direction for your portraits. If you want you can get a couple of these things and setup a mini studio in your house to do portraits and such.

That's all I've got today. Hope you all enjoyed looking at my dinner from last night, as well as my old flash. See you all tomorrow!

P.S. a word to my wife: Honey, I didn't just buy that flash, I've had it. I just now got around to messing with it.

Have a great day all! Jason

Wednesday, July 8th 2009

2009-07-08T09:58:00.003-04:00

This moment brought to you by the Helton Newly Weds, The Nikon D300, and Gary Fong Light Sphere. Congratulations to Nick and Lindsay(pictured above). We did their wedding two weeks ago, but I didn't want to share their images until they had their copies and a chance to view them. Lots to talk about today. So much going on in the world of photography.

First and for most if you have been following me for any amount of time you know that I am a huge fan of David Hobby and the The Strobist. That site will teach you everything you need to know about small flash units, and using them manually off camera to achieve beautiful light. Well David is doing a photo contest/assignment right now that is designed to get you shooting different subjects, and trying new techniques. The first assignment was shooting headshots. If you want to read more about exactly what was involved click HERE, but we are on to the second assignment now. It involves doing a food photo. Read about it HERE. The deadline is this coming Saturday, so if you want to get involved you better get to it.

Next is a little news that comes from Rumor sites. Nikon Rumors reported last week that the 70-200 2.8 that is the "go to lens" for just about every photographer that I know, is being discontinued. Read that report HERE. Nikon is supposedly replacing it with a newer 70-200 2.8 with the "N" classification. The rumor is that there will be added lens assphericals to help with softness encountered on full frame sensors. We shall see.

If you aren't following the Photoshop Insider, you should be. There is a special guest blog today by Deke McClelland about how to do a proper mask in photoshop. See it HERE. Learn to do a mask like a pro!

That's if for me today, but check back tomorrow. I have a great how to post along with a review on the classic Vivitar 283 flash. Great little flash. Cheap to buy, and great for Strobist style work. See you tomorrow!

Monday July 6th

2009-07-06T06:54:00.003-04:00

Good morning everyone. It's been a week since I last checked in, sorry about that. It's been a crazy week for us with a wedding, two sets of engagement pictures,and three sets of portraits to edit. 4000+ images to go through right there... The shot you see above is from the wedding. Just one of the pre-wedding shots of the dress. Used a Pocket Wizard attached to an SB800 sitting on a table behind the dress to light it up from behind. Converted it to black and white in Lightroom, and cloned out an extra hanger in photoshop. Beautiful dress, for a beautiful bride. Later this week I will show some of the images from the wedding, but I haven't delivered them to the bride and groom yet, so I want to wait until they see them first.

We were in Columbus last Thursday for some engagement photos and while we were there we had to stop at Midwest Photo Exchange just to say hi, and peruse the store for great stuff. We came upon a great little light modifier that just hit the market. It's a mini "beauty dish" made specifically for speed lights. it's manufactured by a company called Interfit, and branded under the name Strobies. If you follow The Strobist David Hobby, you may have seen this little beauty a while back when he first got to try them out at a trade show. They are basically a small beauty dish that fits on your hotshoe flash and creates a "high glamor" style lighting. Not to be used for every portrait for sure, but in certain situations it will work to create a look that is a little different than normal. Here's a picture of the unit that I got from their website:

As you can see it's a reflector ring with a small white center reflector in the middle. How it works is this; the flash fires, hits the small center reflector and is bounced back into the main "large" reflector ring where it is again reflected onto the subject. This essentially makes for a larger light source. The trade off seems to be around 1 stop of power so you'll have to play with it to get the feel for how much + or - you need on the flash compensation to get a proper exposure. Shad used it during the engagement session, but we haven't had a chance to use it in a controlled environment yet. I suspect that this will be best used on a boom directly over the face, or slightly off axis as a nice main light. I don't think this is an attachment do use directly on camera all of the time, but rather a nice addition to the modifying arsenal to make our lighting different. I can't wait to see what we get with it. Shad bought this one, but the next time we head up there (in August) I'll more than likely pick one up for me.

Some bad news about the Pocket Wizard Flex units for Nikon. Pocket Wizard has pushed the release date for the Nikon version of it's popular Flex units until the fall siting some re-engineering issues with the Canon units as reason. Apparently when they started developing the Flex units over at Pocket Wizard for the Canon's they were using "off the shelve" brand new units. The feedback they got from customers was that the many people were experiencing intermittent connectivity issues, as well as range problems. What they found the problem to be was IR interference. The older(pre 2009) flash units were emitting varying and sometimes powerful IR white noise. This wasn't happening in the newer models that they had used for design. They had to pull most of their engineering teem off of the Nikon project to fix this Canon Problem. This folks is why I shoot Nikon. When it comes to cameras, and lenses, you really can't go wrong with either manufacturer, but when it comes to the flash technology, specifically the wireless interface between them, Nikon wins every time hands down. I'll keep you posted as more information comes out, but as of right now, we have to wait till the Fall.

The second part of the Strobist BootcampII is going on now. This weeks contest is food. Visit his blog to get the info. There are already over 100+ submissions and it just started yesterday! They've got some great prizes over there, you should check it out.

That's it, that's all... All I got today. Hope you all have a great day! Jason

Thursday, June 25th

2009-06-25T08:31:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone! Glad you found your way back over here for some more great content and news. First I want to do a quick update on the post from yesterday. I got a great link from a guy on Flickr on where to get the remote that I chopped up for $4.80. Go HERE to purchase that. With the Remote and the 1/8inch mono plug, that brings the grand total to under $10.00 US. Not a bad deal considering Nikon wants $90.00 for this thing.

Are you signed up for the photo walk yet? If not you better get going. Only 15 spots left. Also I just started a Flickr Group for this blog. View and join it Here. I'm going to start some photo contests very soon and similar to other blogs contests, you will need to submit your entry via Flickr to the group pool.

Many people may have already heard this,(I guess I just missed it somehow)but Pocket Wizard has pushed back the date of the release of their new Flex units for the Nikon's until the fall. The main hangup was a diversion of resources to fix a problem that was ultimately found to be a result of poor quality control at Canon. It seems that there was an Infrared noise issue found with the older(and by older I mean not brand new off of the shelf) Canon Flash units. They noise varied from very high to just mild, but it was effecting the distance and reliability of the pocket wizard units. I'm not one of those people that will only shoot a certain brand, or that just automatically hate a product because of who manufactures it, but come on Canon, get it together. This has delayed the release of the Nikon units, which by the way aren't having any QC issues during Pocket Wizards beta testing... When it comes to cameras and lenses it's really a push between Nikon and Canon. Really one isn't better than the other, but when it comes to the flash units, Nikon has them by a longshot. Ok, gotta run but don't forget to join the Flickr Group, and the photo walk!

Wednesday, June 24th

2009-06-23T18:16:00.003-04:00

I'm on top of things today... I actually got this blog done last night so I didn't have to worry about it when I was groggy and sleepy. I have a great little tutorial for every Nikon shooter out there that wants to be able to trigger their camera with a pocket wizard, but doesn't want to pay $90 for the official pocket wizard cable. So here it is:

You may already know how to do it, and I may the only one that didn't know about this, but here goes. If you are a Nikon shooter and you have Pocket Wizards you may want to control your camera with the drive motor cable that Pocket Wizard offers. The problem is, the cable is $90+! There was no way that I was going to pay that price, so I did a little research and made my own.

Disclaimer first: If you don't know how to solder, or you don't know how to use a digital multimeter, don't try this. I'm not responsible if you screw up your camera or pocket wizard.

The first thing you will need is a 10 pin connector that plugs into the Nikon camera to control the shutter. I got mine from an off brand corded release that I had laying around. I just cut it in half. It looks like this:

Next you need an 1/8 inch MONO plug that looks like this:

I used the small cable that came with my pocket wizards. I just cut off the PC end.

Now once you have those two plugs cut and both the outer and inner insulation stripped from the wires you will need to test them to see which wires are which. First test the 1/8 inch plug to see which wire goes to which part of the plug. In my case, the red wire went to the tip of my 1/8 plug, and the white wire went to the ground or ring part of the plug. Write this down, you will need to remember it.

Next you need to test out the 10 pin to see which wires are which. Look at this diagram below to reference:

When you strip back the insulation on the 10 pin's cord you should see three wires. Set your Meter to Continuity, and attach one of your meter leads to one of the exposed wires. Now test the three pins labeled above and write down what the wire is. Do this for all three pins marked above.

Once you have this information, attach your Auto Focus, and shutter release together and solder them to the wire on the 1/8inch plug that led to the TIP. Solder the third wire to the remaining wire from your 1/8inch plug. Tape them all up and you're in business. Here is a finished shot of mine:

I didn't have any heat shrink left, but the next time I make it to the store I will be getting some to encase the connections.

The reasons that I wanted to be able to control my camera with a pocket wizard are these; first I want to be able to mount the camera to a tripod and stand next to it and converse with children and make faces and such to get them to smile. I think it's easier to get good smiles when you're not right behind the camera. If I can just hold the pocket wizard in my hand and snap without them knowing I'm about to, that would be great. The second reason is for weddings. We are going to start placing a camera on a clamp high up, maybe in the rafters if we can access it. We plan on having a wide angle lens and just snap away during the ceremony as well as do the same thing during receptions. This will give us some interesting shots I think. The pocket wizard makes that possible.

I had all of these pieces laying around, so it didn't cost me anything to make this cord. If you had to go buy the remote and the 1/8 inch plug you may have $40 or $50 invested in Thanks for reading! Jason

Tuesday, June 23rd

2009-06-23T09:25:00.003-04:00

Good morning everyone. I've already sent out emails about this promotion we're doing so you probably already know about it, but I figure it's worth repeating. Starting tomorrow Wednesday 24th we're going to be doing 4th of July photos. we will be doing two different backgrounds. One white, and one Red. The Shot taken above is the red background. The package is $55 dollars for two printed poses. You get 3 8X10's, 4 5X7s, and 8 wallets. If you would like an appointment, please call or email myself or Shad to do that.

Today is the last day to submit your photos to the Strobist's Bootcamp II assignment. If you want to participate, better do it today.

If you are planning on attending my photo walk on July 18 better hurry and sign up. There are only 18 spots left. To find out all of the details click Here. Nikon just joined in on the sponsorship side of things and has thrown in a D700 with a lens to the prizes.

I thought today I would tell you all about one of my most used actions, actually 2 different actions that accomplish the same thing in the end. I call them web vertical, and web horizontal. Real creative names I know. I post images on the Internet almost every day, and if not, I am at least sending an image through email every day, and using the full size images is almost impossible with my slow blackberry connection for Internet here at work. This is what I do:

Open the image you want to re size for the web in photoshop. Go to your actions tab and create a new action. Name it either Web vertical, or web horizontal depending on which format of image you have open. Now go to IMAGE-IMAGE SIZE then change the highest number(width or height) to 800. The opposite of the one that you changed will change automatically to keep the correct proportions for the image. You can now stop recording by pressing stop on the actions tab. Now you have an action to change the image size. I know it doesn't sound like much, but when you are resizing a bunch of images for the web, it's nice to be able to open and re size each image fast. Make sure you change your actions tab back to button mode when you are done recording the action. Now whichever version you did first, now do the opposite. Now you have a resizing no matter what the orientation of the image.
That's it, that's all. I'm outta here for the day. I have to finish editing photos from Saturday so I'll see you all later. Jason

Monday, June 22nd

2009-06-22T07:11:00.006-04:00

So what do you do when you are trying to take photos in a dark candle lit gym where the lighting is no better than this shot above? You make the sun come back via 4 1200 watt Strobes...

Good morning everyone. Hope everyone had a great fathers day. I Started mine off watching Little Mermaid with my twins, then enjoyed a great cookout at my wife's aunts house. Then over to my moms to lounge around the pool. By the end of the day I felt like a beached whale. The shots you see above are from a wedding I shot Saturday night. Worst two images of the night, but they show you the lighting situation and my remedy for it. By the end of the night the guests were so tired of having their eyes adjusted to the dim candlelight and then getting lit up by all four strobes firing at once, that they were sneaking up with disposable cameras and taking pictures of my face just to pop a flash in my eyes.

I was thinking that we should get into some kind of routine. It would allow you to know what was coming on a particular day, and it would help me by giving me topics to write about. So from here forward(or until I get bored with this format) Mondays are going to be "Back to the Basics" day. Starting today, every Monday I'm going to cover things that may seem simple, or second nature to many, but to many others it might not be something that they know. Many of these topics have been covered before, so if it seems like something that you already know, read it anyway you may learn something that you forgot. ;~) On to today's post!

Lets start at the beginning. I mean way back. Lets start with the different options you have on your camera for shooting modes, and why/when you would use them. On the top of many of your cameras you will have a command dial that looks something like this:

If you are familiar with point and shoot cameras you will be familiar with the little running man photos, the mountains, the small face button, and the little flower icon. What you may not be familiar with , are the P, M, A, and S. These stand for Program mode(P), Manual(M), Aperture Priority(A), and Shutter Speed Priority(S). Avoid the settings with the pictures on them. Stick with the P,M,A,and S. They will get you the best quality, and if used properly you will have far more creative control of the image. After all, that's the goal right? Being creative?

Lets start with Aperture Priority since that is the most commonly used setting. The reason it is the most commonly used is because it allows you to control the amount of focused area in the image. The larger the aperture(the smaller the number) the smaller the area in the image that is in focus. Conversely, the smaller the aperture(the larger the number) the larger the area of the image that will be in focus. So for example in this image below I used a very large (small number) aperture. It was shot at f/2.8 making just the rings in focus and everything else go sort of fuzzy or out of focus.

The same applies in reverse. If you use a lower(higher number) aperture, you will get everything in the image in focus from front to back. As seen in this image:

When you are in Aperture Priority Mode, you set your aperture according to how much of the image you want in focus, and the camera determines the correct shutter speed for the exposure.

Shutter speed is just as it sounds. It is the speed at which the shutter opens and closes. This is represented (usually) in an expression such as 1/250th. This means that the shutter will be "open" for 1/250th of a second. When you are in Shutter priority you set your desired shutter speed, and the camera figures out the correct aperture for you. Most of the time I don't go into this mode because I like to choose how much of my image is in focus. I generally stay in Aperture priority mode or Manual. That brings us to our next mode, Manual.

In the Manual mode you set everything. You decide the Aperture, as well as the shutter speed. This mode is what I recommend to anyone who is just learning their camera. Use manual, adjust things. See what happens. This will give you a better understanding of your camera as a whole.

Program mode is a best of both worlds kind of mode. In program mode, you can choose the Aperture, or the Shutter speed and the camera figures out the other setting for you. So for example you are in program mode, and you decide that you want to isolate your subject. All you have to do is roll your command dial so that the aperture is larger(smaller number) and your camera will figure out the shutter speed for you. It will also do the opposite though. If you want to set your shutter speed a certain setting, the camera will adjust the aperture accordingly. It really is a nice setting.

Ok I have to run for today. I have a ton of images to edit from the weekend as well as last Friday. See you all tomorrow! Jason

Thursday, June 11th

2009-06-11T06:50:00.004-04:00

Now that's some funny stuff right there! Joe McNally has a new blog and website that, really didn't change as far as content go, but look the same now. It's all about branding these days, so he wanted his website and his blog to look the same. We should think about that... Found some interesting news today about Nikon's next camera release. The rumor is that the updated version of the D300 and the D3 will be released at the same time in the fall. This doesn't matter much to me because the improvements aren't going to be worth the extra money to upgrade so I'll stick with my D300. I hope to upgrade to a full frame, possibly the D3 by the end of the year. We'll see how things go, and whether or not the boss(note: Wife) allow that. I'll definitely keep the D300 as a second body, and backup. On to something that you maybe didn't know before.

The metering system for the Nikon flash and the Nikon camera are different. But you say, "Jason, isn't it TTL or through the lens metering? How could it be different". Well it is. The camera bodies have three settings, Spot, center weighted, and matrix. Spot metering uses the very center section of the lens to meter the scene. It only takes a reading from the center 6mm(or 8 or 10 depending on what you have it set on) of the lens. Matrix metering takes a reading of the entire scene and tries to expose for the entire scene. Center weighted does the same as matrix, only it gives more "weight" or priority to the center 6mm point. Now no matter what you have your camera's metering style set on, the flash only meters like spot. It only takes a meter reading from the center 6mm. This is fine if your subject is smack dab in the middle of your scene, but sometimes we want to compose them to the left or the right in the scene. This can become a problem. If you are shooting a wedding, or an event where the pace is fast, and no one is standing still, you don't have a choice but to go with it and adjust your flash compensation when possible. But if you are composing a portrait where you are using speed lights wirelessly, you can utilize the FV or flash value lock of your camera. It varies from camera to camera so refer to your manual on how to actually set the flash value lock. What you would do in the above situation is first take a quick photo of your subject with them directly in the middle of the scene. press your flash value lock button. The flash is now locked at that output that it just produced. Now you can recompose them to the right or the left of your scene and take another photograph. This time the light on them should stay the same as it did in the first photograph. Don't forget though, if you change scenes, you have to hit the flash value lock button again to "unlock" it. Try this at home for yourself to see what I mean. I think you'll be surprised.

I hope everyone has a wonderful day, and I will see you all back here tomorrow. Jason

Wednesday, June 10th

2009-06-10T06:54:00.002-04:00

Good morning everyone. I've got a few things to tell everyone about before we get into any solid content. First up until recently when I got to work every morning, I would setup my laptop, and start to browse my usual blogs, news, etc. This was time consuming because there were quite a few of them, and I had to open every new page and then decide if there was anything worth reading that particular day. Well no more! After reading Scott Kelby's blog yesterday about Alltop I decided to give it a try. I love it! It follows the blogs that you want everyday so you go to one place to find all of your content. Once there, all you have to do is hover over the content that you think you want to read and it will give you the first paragraph without having to actually click on it. This is great! If you're interested in seeing what I follow click here: Jason's Alltop.

It's back! Bootcamp over at The Strobist. It's free to participate. Great prizes, and you'll likely learn a thing or two. I'm already planning my first shot... I can't wait.

There is something else I want to tell everyone about. Many of you may already know about it, maybe you don't. If you're on Twitter, you need Tweet Deck. Tweet deck keeps track of all of your happenings on Twitter automatically and updates you when someone tweets, or when they direct message you. It also keeps track of your Facebook if you want it to. It will alert you when someone changes their status. It's great. Here's a screenshot of what mine looks like at this particular moment:

Try it out, I think you'll like it.

I finished The Hot Shoe Diaries for the third time last night. I am really glad that I re-read that book. There were things that I missed the first and second time through. There are probably things that I am still missing so I'm sure at some point I'm going to go back through it again. I want to give you all some of the useful information that I gained from that book. These tips are not by any means a representation of all of the content and knowledge that is presented in that book. Rather a series of things that I didn't know before the book that now I do.

Global adjustments verses local adjustments. When you are in aperture priority mode and you make an exposure compensation by pressing the exposure compensation button shown below and rolling the command dial

you change the global exposure for the camera AND the flash. So for example if you are taking a photograph of someone and you want the background to be a little darker and more saturated, you would press the exposure compensation button and roll the dial until you see a -1.0 or however dark you want to go on the background. When you do that though, you are turning the power on the flash down as well. The flash will go that same amount darker because that exposure compensation button is GLOBAL meaning it effects everything. To compensate, and make your subject lit properly you have to adjust your flash back up. You do this with the flash compensation. It differs from camera to camera and flash to flash so refer to your manual on how to adjust the flash compensation. Also, just because you go say -1.0 on the exposure compensation, doesn't necessarily mean that you will go +1.0 on the flash. I generally start at the positive amount on the flash corresponding to the negative amount on the exposure compensation, but I usually go up or down from there depending on what the image looks like. This little trick will give you wonderful, saturated backgrounds and well lit subjects.

To go along with the first bit of information learned, I learned that even though the exposure compensation is overridden on the camera when you go into Manual exposure mode, the exposure compensation still effects the flash. Let me explain. Lets say that you are in aperture priority mode, and you have the exposure compensation dialed to -1.7. Then you decide that you'd be better off controlling the exposure manually so you switch to manual exposure mode(indicated by the M on your camera's control dial). When you switch to Manual, the exposure compensation is no longer effecting the exposure portion of the camera. If you want to adjust exposure now you change your shutter speed and/or your aperture(f/stops). The exposure compensation does however still effect your flash. So in our example if you have your exposure compensation set at -1.7 when you decide that you're going to go into manual, and you don't change that back to 0 before you switch, your flash will be underexposing by 1.7 stops in every image. The moral of the story here is, make sure you set your exposure compensation back to 0 before you switch to manual mode.

There are many many more tid bits of info that I took away with me from that book, but I think from now on, I'll do a random "bit of information" every day. Sometimes it will be from that book, sometimes it will be from my own experience, and sometimes it will just be something I've heard and tried that worked.

See you tomorrow. Jason

One more thing

2009-06-09T07:23:00.003-04:00

Ok so one more thing for today that I forgot to talk about earlier. David Hobby over at the Strobist is starting "Bootcamp2". What is this you say? click on the link to find out. And believe me, it will be worth your time to participate! Jason

Tuesday, June 9th 2009

2009-06-09T06:26:00.003-04:00

Morning everyone! It's a rainy, sleepy kind of day here in Cincinnati, but I'm up and at it so I thought I would do something productive and update my blog (which I should be doing daily). Sometimes people call us and want photographs taken that quite honestly seem a little boring. I mean it may be interesting to them, or it may be the most important thing in the world to them, but to me, it's just kind of boring... This was not one of those times. My good friend Danelle opened a dance studio in Blue Ash and her grand opening was last weekend. She had a bunch of people there doing different dance routines including some pole dancing, hip hop, Zumba, and more... Shad and I got the privilege of covering this event, and I couldn't have asked for a better time. The women were beautiful, the music was good, and the lighting was easy. It doesn't get much better than that! The things that made the lighting SO easy were the large wall of floor to ceiling mirrors, and my Gary Fong light modifier. The modifier is a great little addition to any photographers arsenal, and without a doubt the best way I know of to deal with ever changing lighting situations. More on this wonderful little piece of plastic below. Also if you are interested in learning any form of dance, call Danelle at 513-469-7929 or just click on the "Sway" link on the upper right of this page.

Gary Fong is a genius. Not because of this wonderful light modifier he designed. Not because he took $3 worth of plastic and molded a $40 light modifier; because he used to charge $150 per wedding, but profited an average of $6000 per wedding. Selling albums and prints is where the money is in wedding photography. I want those profit margins, and honestly that's what I'm working towards. But that's not what you're hear to read about. You don't want to know how some jack ass made a killing selling wedding albums. You want to know how I got that wonderful "wrapping" light in that image above with one speed light and a piece of Tupperware. Read on my friends, read on.

Ok so it's not Tupperware, but it sure looks like it doesn't it? Ever been to a wedding and seen a photographer walking around with one of these on top of his or her flash? Ever wondered what it was, or how it's used? Well I'm going to explain. The basic idea of the LightSphere is that the flash hits the top "dome" and gets reflected throughout the sides in all directions. Some light gets through the dome and hits the ceiling(if there is one) and bounces back onto the subject, but the rest of the light exits the sides and bounces all over the place lighting the whole area. Great for wedding photographers, not so great for the guy standing behind the wedding photographer that gets blinded. The really nice thing about the light sphere is the ability to switch from portrait to landscape quickly, again this is really important for wedding photographers. You can watch a small video put on by Gary below.

As you see in the video these units are great for using indoors and out. They work really well when the light is changing because you don't have to worry so much about finding a white wall, or a white ceiling to bounce your light off of, you have a bounce built right in with the lightsphere. At $40 it's something that every photographer can add to their collection of modifiers and use when needed.

Alright, that's it, I'm outta here for today. I'll see you all tomorrow. Jason

Friday, June 5th

2009-06-05T13:19:00.002-04:00

Hey Everyone. It's Friday! I'm down at the studio right now setting up for tonight's Shop Bellevue. Getting the Studio straitened up, and of course testing out the new Pocket Wizards. I hope to see everyone down here tonight. We're going to be here until 9pm tonight, so come down and have some fun with us. The address (for any of you who haven't been here yet) is 421 Fairfield ave. Bellevue Kentucky.

So we hooked up the Pocket Wizards to the strobes today. They work Great! There are no "false fires" or "fail to fires". To test the distance out we went up the street behind a car as shown here:

Didn't work. I was maybe 1000 feet away going through brick. I couldn't get the flash to fire until I was three more cars forward. All in all though they work great. If you don't have pocket wizards yet, and you plan on doing any off camera flash, you need them. Now's the best time to buy them too. Lowest price they have EVER been with the mail in rebate.

Ok gotta run. I have to get this place ready for tonight. See you here! Jason

Thursday, June 4th

2009-06-04T14:25:00.003-04:00

Hey everyone. Nothing exciting about this shot really. Just a high key shot of another photographer at the workshop yesterday. I just wanted to share it with you so you could see a little more of what we did yesterday.

I just got the details all hammered out about the photowalk that I'm leading here in Cincinnati. For all the info go Here. There are only 50 spots available so act quick if you want to participate. There are thousands of dollars in prizes to be won. It should be a great time!

I promised everyone that I would do a review on the Pocket wizards today, so here goes. I picked up a pair of the Pocket Wizzard Plus II's yesterday. I have been putting it off for so long now and I decided to get off of my laurels and get some. The reason that I was waiting was because (as many of you already know) they are due to release the TTL Flex units for Nikon at the end of this month. I have some shoots coming up that I will need them though so I got some "regular" units for now. Don't let that fool you though. These puppies aren't any slouches though. To start with they have a 1600 foot range, will fire speedlights(flash), studio strobes, as well as trigger Camera's(something the new flex units can't do). Really the only thing that it can't do is TTL metering. To be honest, I can work with the Nikon CLS system when I need TTL metering. So what do you get, and how much do they cost. Well right now, for $169 you can get a Pocket Wizard Plus II shown here:

Right now Pocket Wizard has a rebate going for $35 off each unit. This is huge. I've never seen them this cheap before. So here's the skinny, if you want to be able to take your flash off of your camera, and place it up to 1600 feet away and be able to fire it consistently, you need a pocket wizzard. If you have studio strobes and are tired of tripping all over the cords hanging all over the place, you need a pair of Pocket wizzards. They are solid, reliable, all around wonderful units that are backwards compatible. This is important when I go to buy the Pocket Wizzard Flex units to be able to do TTL. They will all work effortlessly together.

Tomorrow night is the monthly "Shop Bellevue" happening in our business district. All of the shops will be open until 9pm giving away things, or giving away things at a discount. We're going to be hanging out with beer and wine if anyone wants to stop down, you are welcome to. see you all there! Jason

Wednesday, June 3rd

2009-06-03T22:05:00.003-04:00

I attended a studio lighting workshop put on by Bob Ebersole of the Camera Club of Cincinnati. He did a very good job of explaining things so that people could understand them. The model didn't show, so many of the attendees "sat in" and this shot above is of John Stuedle. John has an awesome face for a textured photo look. I really enjoy photographing him. Anyway it was a really good time, and I hope to do it again soon.

An update on the Photo Walk in Cincinnati. David Zisers walk filled this morning so that means my walk went live. I'm currently finishing the final details on it and I should have it up and active tomorrow so that everyone can start signing up. We're going to have a good time, and someone is going to win a free copy of Scott Kelby's new book, and maybe a whole lot more!

The price of the D300 dropped today on Amazon to the $1500 mark. The rumor is that Nikon has a "S" version of the D300 coming out soon similar to how they did the D70 and the D70s. We'll see. So far all of the specs that have been rumored haven't been enough to make me want to upgrade.

That's all I have for tonight. Tomorrow I plan on doing an in depth review on the Pocket Wizard Transceivers. See you all then.

P.S. Clear your calenders for this Friday evening. It's that time again. The first Friday of the Month is Shop Bellevue and we're going to be open until 9pm. Come hang out with us and get a free 5X7 shot in the studio. See you all there! Jason

Friday, May 29th

2009-05-29T21:04:00.002-04:00

Don't you just love parades? I took this shot above while on assignment for the local American Legion. There are so many neat vehicles in these parades.

I'm getting ready to head to Chicago for the weekend, then enjoy a week of vacation at home after that. There are a couple of things that I wanted to tell everyone about before I leave for the weekend. First Capture Cincinnati is going on again. If you're not already involved check it out. You can click Here to see my page and vote on some of my images. Or click that link and navigate at the top of the page to set up your own account.

Second next Saturday (the 6th) is the Grand Opening of Sway Dance Studio in blue ash. Don't miss it! You can get more info and directions by calling 513-469-7929. Danelle will give you all of the info. It's going to be a blast, don't miss it!

Rumor has it, Nikon will be releasing the D300s soon. It will have all of the same features of the D300 adding video capabilities, 1fps more than the standard D300, and some minor other things... So look for that soon from Nikon.

Last thought for the day, go back up your stuff. Back up your hard drives, before you forget and before you loose everything. See you all Monday... I plan on getting some nice shots from Chicago but we'll see. Jason

Thursday, May 28th

2009-05-28T06:27:00.003-04:00

Good morning everyone. It's been a few days since I saw you last. Lots have happened since then. My photo walk for theWorld Wide Photo Walk got approved, then got unapproved. It seems that David Ziser was the walk leader last year and he was already "pre signed up" to do this years walk in Cincy. The good news is that my walk will go live as soon as David Ziser's fills up. I don't think it will take long since there is a 50 person limit. I'll keep everyone posted.

We just found out two days ago that one of our designs won the "best comp card" category at a regional beauty pageant. Pretty excited about that. Thanks to Mya the beautiful model that made it so easy to take good photographs.

It seems the problem with the new pocket wizards has been sorted out. David Hobby reported yesterday that pocket wizard has determined there is a quality control issue with Canon's flashes that is causing some extreme IR "noise". This is effecting the range of the transmitters. Imagine that...

There is a new Dance studio in town that I want to tell everyone about. I know that this is a photography blog, but it never hurts to mention it. The image above is Danelle the owner of the New Dance studio Sway. We photographed her as well as did a logo for her signage. If you have ever wanted to learn to dance, she is the one to help. She teaches everything from ballroom, to pole. She has a beautiful studio, and a great setup to make your learning experience as enjoyable as possible. Check her out by clicking the link above, or by clicking the Sway logo on the right side of this blog. That's it for the moment people. I've got some editing and planning to do today. See you all later. Jason

Thursday, May 21st

2009-05-21T06:26:00.004-04:00

Attended a workshop last night put on by Tammy and Tom Byran, well really it was an engagement shoot where they let the camera club follow them around and see how they did it. After that we went out to an Irish pub and talked. I had a great time. It was nice to see what others were doing and how they went about things. No matter how good you are at something, it's always important to keep fresh and see what others were doing. You can always learn. I know the shot above isn't anything to write home about (I took it with my Blackberry Storm) but it shows the people that were there. Glad I could make it!

So yesterday we talked about the basic section of the develop module of Lightroom. We covered what everything was and how to use it(with exception to the gradient tool and adjustment brush). Today we're going to finish the develop module.
The next drop down we come to after the basic is the tone curve adjustment drop down. Anyone that is familiar with Camera raw should feel right at home here. There is a tone map that can be clicked and drug up or down to adjust for contrast. I tend to go to the drop down that says Linear circled in red here:

In that drop down you have three options: linear, medium contrast, and strong contrast. I generally choose medium contrast for Jpegs and strong contrast for Raw files. There are sliders underneath that can be adjusted for fine tuning as well. I generally don't go that route though. There is one more tool inside of tone curve that you may or may not even know is there. It's called the TAT. TAT stands for target adjustment tool. It is circled in red here:

The TAT works like any of the other tools. You click it to "pick it up". Once you do, move it over the spot in the image that you want to adjust, then click and hold your left mouse button. Now drag the TAT up or down on the image and you will see the tone curve adjust and the image change. Once you have gotten the desired result, just return the TAT to it's original place and you're done. Pretty easy huh? That's it. That's all there is to the Tone Curve drop down.

Moving on to the HSL/Color/Greyscale drop down. When you open this drop down you see a number of things(depending on which option is selected. If you have the HSL selected you will see Hue, Saturation, Luminance, and ALL with color sliders below them. These are all just as they seem. You slide them to the left or to the right to increase or decrease that particular color in the image. Kind of blunt in my opinion. Again there is a TAT next to the box that can be used anywhere in the image to adjust these things. This is the best way to adjust the colors because whether you know it or not the color you want to increase usually has other colors in it. So when you use the TAT you can adjust all of those colors instead of just one. It saves a whole lot of time and effort. Click on the color option and again you have some fine tuning options for the colors. Greyscale is exactly as it sounds. It converts your image to black and white and gives you the color channels to adjust so that you can increase contrast.

The Split Toning drop down is next. I don't use it. I haven't had a need to do a split tone, and until I get a client that wants that particular service, or I get the sudden urge to make my photos look like they are from the 70's, I probably won't use it. Since I don't use it, I don't want to send you in the wrong direction with it, so I'm going to say go read Scott Kelby's book if you want to know how to use it.

Detail drop down is very important. This is where your sharpening lives, as well as your noise reduction. I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time here because quite honestly this is self explanatory. You drag the slider to the right to increase and the left to decrease. Now you're a pro in the detail department.

Vignettes has a new feature that is awesome! The first set of sliders we see in the drop down is the Lens correction slider. This slider does the normal vignette adjustment to the image. It will add darker edges by sliding it to the left, lighter edges by sliding it to the right. Simple. The next section down though is really where the power of this control is. The "Post-Crop" is just as it implies, post crop. You can make a vignette adjustment here and no matter what size you crop the image to, the vignette stays with it. I don't know about you, but I think this is great! I don't like having to add a vignette twice(which I used to have to do in PS if I forgot to crop before I added my vignette). This makes things easy.

So that's it for the drop downs. On to the two tools that I left out above. Gradient, and adjustment brush. Lets start with the gradient tool.

You select the gradient tool like you do the other tool in Lightroom(by clicking it and "picking it up"). Once you do, you will see some controls below it appear. The first thing you need to do is select what you're going to adjust. Click where it says Exposure. I circled it in red here:

I also circled what looks like two small squares. These are the "on/off" for the rest of the controls. Make sure that the small right box is selected. This allows you to adjust all of the sliders for the selected area. Now that you have what you want selected you go to the image and start at the top(or wherever you want your gradient to start) and while holding the shift key, drag down. This tool is used mostly for adjusting sky's like in my example image. I usually select exposure as the adjustment that I'm going to make, and I usually decrease the exposure. Now look at this image:

Notice the difference between this one and the first one? You can see that I increased the saturation a little as well as decreased the exposure. If you don't like what it looks like make sure that the dot in the middle of the screen has the smaller black dot inside of it(which selects that adjustment) and hit delete. This will delete the selection.

The adjustment brush works just the same. Select the adjustment brush and you will see the same drop down and list of adjustments below it. Again make sure that the small box is selected on the right so that you can adjust all of the sliders for the selection. In the image below you will see that I increased the exposure on the sand to lighten it up a little. This is apparent by the small "pin" on the left side of the screen in the sand. You will see that it is the pin selected because it has the small black dot in the center of it. Again if you want to delete the adjustment just make sure that the pin you have selected is the one that you want to delete and hit the delete key.

Now here's something nice about using the adjustment brush. You can view what you have "painted" with it by moving your cursor over the selected pin. When you do, the area that you have "painted" will glow red like this:

A couple of things to note about using this tool; first the brush size can be adjusted by pressing the left and right bracket keys ([ ]). Also if you look below the size, feather, and flow sliders, you will see a box marked auto mask. This is the best part about the adjustment brush. When it is checked, the brush will only "paint" an area with similar color to the area that you first clicked on. So in my example image, I just clicked in the sand first and then I didn't have to worry too much about getting too close to the water because it was a different color. This function works really well. Like with the gradient tool, once you have made a selection, you can adjust multiple things inside of that selection by sliding the sliders. That's all there is to it folks. It's pretty easy once you know what everything does.

Well that's it. Those are the major components of the Develop Module. I hope this has helped you have a better understanding of how to use the develop module. I'll be back tomorrow with a guide to the Slide show section. Until then, have a good one. Jason

Wednesday, May 20th

2009-05-20T05:51:00.005-04:00

Good morning everyone. Happy Hump Day to you all. I wanted to take a moment today before we get into the article on the Develop module, to tell everyone about a great resource I found last night. Click Here for a complete list of the lightroom keyboard shortcuts. I will talk about some throughout these articles, but it's a great reference. I have it book marked, I like it so much. Alright then, lets get to some (hopefully) interesting stuff.

After you do your sorting in the LIBRARY module, you will undoubtedly want to do some editing and tweaking of the image. Adjust a little here, crop a little there... You know the stuff that you normally would do in Photoshop, or some other image editing software. Well Lightroom has you covered. Lightroom has what's called the DEVELOP module. It is the editing portion of Lightroom, and it's wonderful. You get there by selecting an image in the library module, then either click the develop tab at the top, or just press the D on your keyboard.

Before we start talking about what everything does, and how to use it, lets take a quick trip through the settings so we have the most efficient workflow possible. First right click on the tools box on the right hand side of the screen. It will bring up a box that looks like this:

Now as you can see in my box "SOLO" is already selected. If yours is not, go ahead and select it. This makes it so that only one of the tools drop downs can be open at once. So when you click from say basic to tone map, basic closes. Now go to the opposite side of the page where you will see History, and snapshot, along with presets. Do the same thing on that side. Right click and select "SOLO MODE". Now that we've got that out of the way let's move on.

Starting at the top of the tools box we have the crop tool(small square with cross lines in it). The spot removal tool(circle with the arrow on the side). The red eye tool(small circle with even smaller black circle in the middle). The Gradient tool(small rectangle with lines on the outside) and the adjustment brush) If we look below that we have 6 dropdowns. Basic, tone curve, hsl/color/grayscale, split toning, detail, vignettes. Lets start with the crop tool.

Click on the crop tool. When you do you see a small box drop down below it, and on all of the corners of your image you will see a little extra grey border on the outside of the image. These are your crop adjustments. Click and drag any one of those corners or the side outlines and move it inward. Notice the height and width change together to keep the original image ratio. You can "free crop" or crop and change the ratio by clicking on the small lock on the right hand side of the dropdown box that came up when you clicked on the crop tool. Next to that lock you will see a drop down button that says Original. Click on that and you can select a specific size like a 5X7 8X10 etc. Or you can make your own size. Now anyone who is familiar with photoshop will be used to the next trick thing that I'm going to show you.While the corners are selected if you go outside of the image you get the small half moon with the arrows on each end. This is to allow you to straiten the image. For example if you shot a landscape and the horizon line wasn't strait, you would do this, or you could use the next too I'm going to show you. See the small "level" next to the word angle? Select it. Then in your image click on a point on the left where your strait line should start, then while still holding the button, move the mouse to the right and when you get to a point close to the right side of the image where your strait line should end, release the button. Lightroom automatically adjusts the image for you. All you have to do at this point is press the enter key and it will be strait. Pretty slick huh? No more trying to figure out if it's just right, or a little off. Just use the angle tool... If you like the photoshop way of cropping, that is, by clicking somewhere in the image and dragging the box around your selected crop, then you can use the aspect tool. The aspect tool will do exactly that. It will let you crop like you do in photoshop. Of course if you do a crop that you don't like, you can either press CTRL+Z or press the reset at the bottom of the crop box.

Moving on to the spot removal tool. Do you have a small pimple or something else that you want to remove? This tool is the one for the job. click on the small circle with the arrow next to it. This will bring up a circle in place of where your pointer used to be. move this circle over the spot to be removed and adjust the brush size until the brush is slightly large than the spot. You can do this two ways, either by clicking and dragging the size slider in the dropdown menu, or by pressing the left or right bracket keys([ ]). Once you have done this just click on the spot that needs removing. Another small circle will appear and have a line attaching it to the original circle. Move this new circle until you find a proper match for the effected area. Once you've don that, click on the circle in the right hand box, and you're done. Pretty strait forward, pretty easy.

The Red eye tool is next. All you do for the red eye too is click on it like you did with the other two tools. When you do, a pair of cross hairs will come up. Click and drag out the circle that it makes around the effected "red eye" and it removes it. Simple as that. When you're done you click back on the red eye tool and "put the tool back".

The next two tools we're going to skip for the moment and come back to because they are specific detail tools. We need to go over the "global tools" first.

Click on your Basic tab. Lots of things appear, but lets start at the most important, white balance. It used to be(with photoshop at least) that unless you shot in Raw, you were stuck with whatever white balance you had. You could do some hue changes but there wasn't an easy way to select the proper white balance. No more. Whether you're shooting raw or JPEG you can "fix" your white balance with Lightroom. Select the small eye dropper tool on the top right of the box. now move that dropper over your image and select a neutral grey point within the image. Not sure where the neutral grey is, watch the Navigator panel on the left of the screen as you move you dropper over the image. The navigator will give you a preview of what the image will look like when you click on that point. When you find a spot that produces the result that you want just click. That's it. That's all it takes to set your white balance. Again as with the other tools you're going to want to "return the dropper home" before you do anything else. I usually check the image after I have changed the white balance to see if it needs a little tweaking. To tweak, you can drag the Temp and tint sliders to the left or the right to fine tune the color.

Once you have your WB set, you can move on to exposure. Now there are a couple of ways to do this. The first is not the way I do it. The histogram at the top of the menu on the right is "live". What I mean by that is, you can click and drag that histogram to the left or the right and increase or decrease the exposure. The problem with this, at least for me is that it's not very precise. I like to have a little more control over it. That is why I use the exposure slider in the menu. I can click and drag little my little while watching the histogram to ensure that I have the proper exposure. I never ever use the auto button, for anything.

Below the exposure slider you see the recovery slider. This slider is used when you increase the exposure and the image begins to look "washed out". This slider will bring back some of the clipped highlights without effecting the rest of the image.

The fill light slider is used to brighten the shadow highlights. This is very helpful when your shadows are just too dark.

Blacks slider increases the total black point in the image. This is very useful if the shadows just aren't dark enough for you.

Brightness and Contrast sliders work just as they do in photoshop or any other image editing software. I don't prefer to use the contrast as I think it's a pretty "blunt" instrument. Instead I use the tone curve, but we'll get to that later on.

The clarity slider increases midtone contrast in your image. I always increase this. It gives images that extra "punch". An increase to 50 or 60 is not uncommon for me.

The next slider down is the Vibrance slider. This slider is a wonderful addition to the image editing tools. It will increase the colors in the image without increasing the colors that are already saturated. This is really important when working on pictures of people. If you have a person in a bed of flowers and you want to increase the color of the flowers without increasing the color of the skin, use vibrance.

Last but not least in the basic menu is the Saturaton. Anyone that has ever used an image editing software knows what saturation is, and in Lightroom it's no different. Increase the saturation slider to increase the intensity of the colors of the image.

I think that's it for today. Tomorrow I'm going to Finnish the Develop module including the adjustment brush and the gradient tool. Make sure to check back tomorrow for that. See you all tomorrow. Jason

Tuesday, May 19th

2009-05-19T06:06:00.005-04:00

Good morning everyone. I hope everyone got a chance to read yesterdays post, because for the next four days we're going to build on that post. The image you see above is my friend Amanda at an event I covered the other night for Pink Productions event company. Everything done to that image was done in Lightroom. I never had to go to photoshop for any of it. Before I get into today's post, I want to give everyone a little background info on my Lightroom experience. I have had lightroom for about 6 months now. I got it because everyone was saying how great it was, and how it improved their work flow etc. I didn't get it at all for the first 4 months. I tried playing with it, adjusting things, and just couldn't figure out how all of the controls worked. The turning point for me was reading Scott Kelby's book on lightroom 2. It is a wonderful book, and I recommend it to anyone that is wanting to learn Lightroom. It's an easy read, and it will have you up and running in Lightroom right away. So with that being said, lets get to some Lightroom!

The first thing you're going to want to do when firing up lightroom is to decide where you want to store your files. Like I said yesterday, Lightroom is a great image management program that can store the actual image file on a separate hard drive, but still allow you to see the thumbnail in lightroom when that hard drive is not connected. I'll show you what I do, and you can decide for yourself if this works for you. I don't want to store my images on my main laptop hard drive because it takes up so much space. Just since January I have over 30 gigs of photos imported into lightroom and we haven't hit wedding season yet. I fully expect to have at least 200 gigs of photos by the end of the year. So, I have two external(portable) hard drives connected when using lightroom. The first is the MAIN drive, the second is the BACKUP drive. When you click the import button at the bottom of the page on the left hand side of the screen when in the Library module as shown here circled in red:

you will be able to select the location to store your images by clicking on the boxes circled in red here:

The top circle is the main drive. So click on the "choose" button and select whichever drive is going to be your main drive. Now before you go any further I suggest making a master folder in that drive called Lightroom photos and selecting that as the destination. This way the images that get imported go into a designated folder not just all over the drive. Lightroom will create a new folder for every new import day, but you need to tell it where to place those folders. This is where you choose that location.

The second box circled in red is the backup location. Again click the "choose" box and locate the drive that you would like to be your backup. This creates a duplicate copy of the files that you import into Lightroom. This is important if your main drive ever goes down. You will have a duplicate copy of the images to rely on.

On that same dialog box you can see the drop down menu called file naming. I like to keep it on the setting "file name". This keeps the same file name that the camera produced. There are different options that you can explore on your own, but for now, just keep it on file name.

Now you can click the cancel button and the settings that you just made will stay.

After you import images into Lightroom, you will have a screen that looks something like this:

As you can see on the left side of the screen is the list of folders by date. This is how Lightroom initially keeps track of the files. It sorts them by date and places them into their own folder, under a main folder with the year as the label. When you click on any one of those folders you will see it's contents on the right side in the image preview area. In the example above, you see lightroom in "grid" view. This is the view where all of the little thumbnails are displayed. To see a larger preview of any one image you can double click on that particular image, and it will fill the entire preview space. This is called loup mode. This is important for the next step.

Once you have your images imported, what do you do with them? You sort them right? You go through and select the ones that are good, and the ones that are bad. Lightroom makes this easy. You can see at the bottom of the screen there is a "film strip" view of all of your thumbnails. When you switch into loup mode, you will be able to look at the film strip and know where you are in the collection of images. Light room lets you rate your images in a few different ways. It lets you assign a start rating from 1 to 5. It lets you set a color rating with 5 different options, and it lets you set the image as a "pick" "no pick" or "rejected". I don't know about you, but at least for my first run through of the images, I just want to weed out the bad photos. The ones that are either out of focus, don't have the correct exposure, or some other flaw. I do this with picks and rejections. The keyboard shortcuts for those are P for picks and X for rejects. When in loup view I use my right hand on the arrow keys to advance the frame that I'm viewing. I use my left hand to select either pick or reject. I do this until I get all of the way through the entire batch of images. Once you do this, you can go to the PHOTO option on the top tool bar and select "delete rejected photos". At this point you will remove all of the rejects from your image gallery so that you have a collection of images with potential. Now what I usually do is go back to the grid view by pressing the G on the keyboard. Then I press CTRL+A which selects all of the images. Then I right click on an image and select the flag drop down and click on unflagged. This will unflagg all of the images so you can do another round of picks later.

Now that we have all of our rejects out, we can begin the dwindling process. I usually go through a second time and select just the ones that I think have the potential to be final products. Once you have made your selection of your final image potentials go back to grid mode by pressing G, then click attributes at the top of the image viewing box. Click on the white flag next to the word attribute and it will hide all of the unflagged images. Now you have just a small amount of images to work with. Just your best ones. At this point I do a couple of things before I move on to the Develop module. I select all of the images again by pressing the CTRL+A then down in the right hand corner you'll see a box labeled KEYWORDS. That lets you add specific keywords that get embedded with the image file. This way if somewhere down the road you want to do a search of all of the images of your son, you can type in "Bobby"(or whatever his name is) and lightroom will pull all of the images that have "Bobby" as a keyword. Pretty cool huh?

After practicing with lightroom a few times, you will breeze through this initial process of sorting your images and wonder "why didn't I do this sooner?".

Ok so that's the down and dirty of the library module and how to import your photos. There are a lot of things that we didn't talk about in that module, but this will get you up and going, and you can play with things and see what they do, or get the book I was talking about above from Scott. Tomorrow we're going to start on the Develop Module. I probably won't get all of the way through it though because it's a pretty large module. See you all tomorrow! Jason

Monday, May 18th

2009-05-18T06:28:00.004-04:00

Ok so I typed this whole blog this morning on Lightroom and the advantages of it and when I went to post it, it was all gone... Now I'm starting over. Let me first start by saying that if you weren't at the Havana club Friday night. The scene above is the kind of thing that you missed out on. Lots of beautiful people, lots of dancing and a good time was had by all. I spent my night in the VIP room with the Amanda's but we still had fun none the less. I have had some people asking about Lightroom and specifics to it so I thought that I would do a series of posts on it every day this week starting with today, and why I love Lightroom.

Let me preface this by saying that I am in no way trying to convey myself as a Lightroom God, professional, guru, master, or otherwise. I am simply a guy who loves it and wants to tell you all why I love it, and what I know about it. Today I'm going to start with why I use lightroom, and why it has replaced photoshop for 90% of my editing.

To start with, Lightroom at it's core isn't an editing program. It's a database. It is designed to import, store, and organize your photos in the most efficient way possible. Whether you're using a Mac or PC, desktop or laptop, you will be able to use and appreciate Lightroom. For the Desktop users, it'll be a wonderful new way to store and edit your photos. For laptop users it will also be wonderful for those things, but also Lightroom will allow you to free up your hard drive space on your laptop by putting all of the images you have on an external hard drive while leaving a thumbnail copy on the laptop to reference. This will do a number of things. First it will put less wear and tear on your primary laptop hard drive, and second it will allow your computer to run faster because of the decreased amount of information stored on the internal hard drive. Along with the added free space on your external hard drive, you will also have the added ability(if you have a second external hard drive) to make a duplicate copy of your photos while they're importing into the primary hard drive. This is great for people like me who are always afraid of loosing their files.

Once in Lightroom you have a number of options. First you can simply place the files into groups or categories as lightroom calls them, and use them the way they are. You can also use the "DEVELOP" module to edit your photos to your liking. You also have the ability to create a slide show in the "SLIDE SHOW" module. These are all great things to be able to do, but the first thing I like to do when I get my files into Lightroom is to go through and get rid of all of the bad files immediately. The shots where the flash didn't fire, or the person was out of focus. The shots that don't have a chance at making the final processed folder. This is made very easy by the selection method Lightroom employs. It allows you to break the files down into "picks" and "rejects". Now it also gives you the power to rate the photo from one to five with stars, as well as assign the photos a color based on it's status.(the user defines what these color statuses mean). I don't bother at this point with all of that, I just say yes it's a keeper, or no it's not. Once you go through and decide that for all of the images, you can then either just remove them from the catalog (Lightrooms term for it's database) or you can delete them permanently from the disk. It's your choice. To go through a couple hundred images it only takes a few minutes. Lightroom makes it that easy.

Next one might move on to the "DEVELOP" module. This is the editing module. I have to tell you that because of this section of Lightroom, I have reduced my photoshop usage by about 90%. I can do most every "normal" edit in Lightroom's Develop module. You can adjust exposure, hue, contrast, saturation, and much much more. You also have the ability to crop, and heal(clone stamp) the images. There are many many more useful tools included in this module but I'll get to those in the Develop module post later this week.

Once you have edited your images, you have the option to stop there and burn them to disk for print or client approval, or you can create a slide show in the slide show Module. This section of Lightroom allows you to take whatever images you have edited and create a nice very customizable slide show that you can present to the customer. It also can include music, file info, etc... Very nice when showing a client their images.

Once you're done with the editing and slide shows, you get back to what Lightroom is really about, organization. You have the ability to sort and group files a number of different ways, which we'll get into tomorrow when I do my first post on the beginning module/functions setup and importing. On the days following I'll work my way into the develop module and then to the slide show module. I hope you'll continue to follow and read the rest of the week to learn about those modules and their capabilities. I hope to teach you everything that I know about Lightroom so that you too can enjoy the increased productivity and workflow ease that comes with its use.

Hope to see you all here tomorrow. Jason

Thursday, May 14th

2009-05-14T07:14:00.004-04:00

Morning everyone. Hope you all remembered to build that ark last night cause it's coming down out there! Man I am sick of this rainy weather in Cincinnati. I got to work this morning and was checking out my usual pages to see what was new, and I came across some interesting information over at KenRockwell.com He says that the D90 is the same as the D300 except that the D300 just costs more. What CRAP! They are two totally different cameras, intended for two totally different users. Read on to see what I mean.

Looking at the spec sheets from these two cameras, one could reasonably say, "yeah they are very similar cameras". But all one has to do is look at the images above to begin to see the HUGE differences between the two. The top image is the D90 and the bottom image is the D300. Lets start with controls. Notice how the D300 has all of the small levers and switches to the right of the LCD? Those are external controls designed to allow the photographer to switch his/her focus mode, and metering mode. You don't get that option on the D90. Look at the top view of the D300. See the three buttons that say WB, ISO, QUAL? Those do exactly as the names imply. They let you change the White balance, the quality(jpeg,raw, etc.) on the fly without taking your face away from the viewfinder. Now the D90 allows you to do this as well with the buttons on the back of the camera to the left of the LCD screen, but they aren't as easily accessed, and they aren't distinguishable like the ones on the D300 are. Also on the top of the D300 you may or may not be able to see that just below the ISO, QUAL, and WB buttons is a dial that allows you to change your shooting mode(continues high, continues low, live view, etc.). You have to go into the menus to do this on the D90. What does the D90 have in that spot? The silly "presets" for amateurs. No professional camera has those features. These things alone would be enough for any professional I know to shy away from the D90, but wait there's more! The burst rate for the D90 is 4FPS, D300... 8FPS! The media used to store the pictures that you just took; D90 cheap plastic SD cards, D300, tough INDUSTRY STANDARD Compact flash cards... No They are not the same. Yes, they have the same sensor in them, but that's it. That is the only similarity between the two. If you want a professional camera, get the D300, if you want a consumer SLR with the sensor of the D300, get the D90. Easy as that.

Lots going on this weekend. Got the Pink Productions Party going on tomorrow night a the Havana Martini Club. Lots of door prizes going to be auctioned off. This will be the third party that they've hosted down there and they just keep getting better and better. If you are in Cincinnati on Friday night, make sure to stop down and check us out.

For anyone planning on attending David Ziser's workshop make sure to get on his website and pre register, You'll save $20.

Also don't forget to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Alright that's all I've got today. Probably won't be on here tomorrow because it's my twins 3rd birthday and I plan on spending all day with them(probably at Chucky Cheese). See you Monday!

Jason

Wednesday, May 13th

2009-05-13T05:43:00.002-04:00

Good morning to all. I know what you're thinking, "He already posted that crappy picture up here once, what gives?". You're right, I did post it up here one time before, but this time I posted it for a reason. I'm going to show you a technique that I learned from Scott Kelby on making posters. He did a blog post about it not too long ago(like last week) but I learned it way before that, I just never posted it up here. It's so simple to do, but adds such a visual impact, that I thought everyone should know how to do it.

Lets start with the before image:

A decent picture all on it's own, but I want to make it stand out! I want it to reach out and slap you in the face and say "look at me!". Ok that's a little over dramatic but hey it's early and I'm trying to be funny. The first thing to do is to open the file in good ol photoshop. Now go to your history panel and zoom out so that the file is not filling the whole screen. Go to IMAGE-CANVAS SIZE. A box will pop up, make sure that the "RELATIVE" box is check marked as shown circled below:

Now in the width and height boxes, type 3 then click ok. This will add a nice white border all of the way around your photograph. Now here's the really really hard part(not really, again I'm trying to be funny) click on IMAGE-CANVAS SIZE again but this time make sure that you click on the top "anchor" box as shown below:

This time we're going to add just 1 inch to the height as shown. By the way sorry about the crappy circles, it's really early and I haven't had any caffeine yet. Ok so now we have our border. Time to add our text. I use Trajan Pro(because I want to be like Scott. JK) because I like the font, but you can use any font that you want. I selected grey for the color from my color pallet, and gave it a name. That's pretty much it. You can add a signature(which I did) by either scanning a signature into photoshop from a written piece of paper, or if you have a tablet, you can just make yourself a signature right in photoshop. Either way works. I added mine to the bottom right of the image. You're done, that's it. Quick and simple, but effective.

If anyone reading this is into film, especially older film cameras you should check out Rocky Mountain Film. They still process, and sell older film. I was recently given a Kodak duoflex that took 610 film. No one makes 610 anymore. As a matter of fact, no one (except Rocky Mountain) processes it either. So if you have a weird format, give them a call, they may have what you need.

Ok unless something crazy happens today(like the D400 gets released) that's it for me. For more useless content, you can follow me on Twitter @RedDoorphoto. See ya tomorrow. Jason

Monday, May 11th

2009-05-11T05:42:00.004-04:00

Good morning everyone. I hope everyone had a great weekend, and a great mothers day. I spent the day at the Reds game with my wife and kids, then we(my 3 year old twins and I) washed my wife's car for her. Great stuff. Friday and Saturday were a different story though. I spent both of those days working with some people one on one to teach a few things about some photography. While waiting for the second person to get there I started taking some photos of some interesting buildings and such by the L&M train station in Lebanon Ohio. This is one of the shots that I got. I actually did a little PSing to it to remove some power lines that I didn't like but I really didn't do that much.

This is my favorite photograph of the day. I took this at Ault park up on the top of the stairs. It was one of a series of shots that I took to show her the difference between No flash and flash. Not that I didn't enjoy working with the other two people that day, but the stuff at Ault park was the most fun for me that day. Besides the beautiful model/student I just love that place. It lends itself well to photographers. As a matter of fact David Ziser uses some shots he took there for most of the media that he's sending out about his upcoming workshops. Great place.

Want to see the largest Nikon lens ever made? Check THIS out!

Check out what else I found. Chase Jarvis is a pretty innovative photographer taking some awesome photos. Check him out.

Ok enough is enough I give in. I'm heading to get caffeine. I'll see you all tomorrow. Jason

Wednesday, May 6th

2009-05-06T06:10:00.005-04:00

Good morning all. It's been a couple of weeks since I did back to back posts, but I think I'm going to try to start doing daily posts again. Anyway, today I want to build upon what we learned yesterday, which if you haven't read is making actions. The action I gave you yesterday was just a really basic one so that you could see how actions worked. Today I want to walk you through the steps of probably my most used action, Brighten Eyes. This is the action that gives your photo(especially close ups) that extra pop that draws peoples attention. So lets get right to it.

This is Mya. She's an up and coming model who came to us a few weeks back for some shots. In this first picture you can see that while it's a nice photo, it could use a little more "pop". Her eyes are beautiful so I want to make them the focal point of the photograph. The first thing we need to do is open a new action in the actions panel(if you don't know how to do that read yesterdays post) The next thing we need to do is press CTRL+J (command+J on a Mac) to duplicate the layer. Your screen will look something like this when you do that:

Now, go to the top of the layers box and select screen as the blending mode for this layer. This will make the picture look very light and "blown out" but don't worry we're about to fix that. Now go to the bottom of your layers box and make a new layer mask. You do this by pressing the small grey box with the white dot in the middle of it. Once you have don't this your layer mask will appear next to your thumbnail on your copied layer. Now go to the edit menu, then click fill. A small box will pop up in the middle of the screen and you can select your fill color. The box will look like this:

You want to choose BLACK from the drop down menu. Click ok. You picture should look like normal again. If it turns all black you had the thumbnail selected and not the layer mask. If this happens press CTRL+Z then select the layer mask and fill it with black. Once you have done this, your screen should look like this:

Now go to the foreground color selection panel on the bottom left hand side of your screen. Click the front box and when the color panel comes up click white. Even if the foreground color is already white, click it and reselect white. You do this because we're building an action here so if your foreground color is black and you run the action you want it to select white automatically for you. Now that you have done this select your brush tool on the upper right hand tool bar. I have circled both the foreground color panel and the brush location in red on this picture so you can see where they are:

Ok now we're going to make the eyes "pop"! zoom in until the eye fills most of your screen. Go to the top tool bar on photoshop and lower your opacity to 60%. Before you do anything else press stop on the action. This is as far as we can go with the action because now we have to paint the eyes. The action will duplicate the layers and set everything up for you now every time you want to lighten the eyes, and all you have to do is select where to make white. Ok now you can start painting over the whites of the eyes as shown here:

Once you have painted over the whites in both eyes, and the catch light(don't forget to lighten the catch light) zoom back out so that you can see both eyes on your screen no further. Now select your background layer in your layers box. Go to your Elliptical Marquee tool(the circle tool). Make sure that you have the "add to selection" box selected as shown here circled in red:

Now draw a circle around both eyes. Go to FILTER-SHARPEN-SMART SHARPEN. Make your amount 175% and your radius around 2. click ok. Now right click your mouse and click DESELECT. Now press CTRL+E to flatten the layers and you can save it as a Jpeg. Here is the before and after shot:

I over whitened just a little bit so that you could really see what we did. I wouldn't normally go quite so bright on them. If you set your opacity to 60% like I talked about above, you should be alright. If not adjust your opacity accordingly. That's all I've got today folks. I hope this helps you. I hope you like it. See you tomorrow. Jason

Making Photoshop work for you

2009-05-05T07:03:00.003-04:00

We all love photoshop. I mean even if you don't know how to use it, you love it. When someone talks about modifying a photograph the default term is just "photoshopped". This is great! I love photoshop. I love everything that photoshop can do. What I love about photoshop the most though, is it's customizability. You can make photoshop perform in pretty much any manor you want. You can set up the displays to look the way you want them. You can add any "plug in" in the world that you want, and most importantly you can automate your most commonly used tasks. This is done in the section called "ACTIONS". Actions is basically a recorder and a player. It will record any task that you perform inside of photoshop then repeat that task whenever you press the play button. This can be very handy at times. Especially when you have a group of photos that you want to do the same thing to over and over again, like resizing for example. So lets jump into how to make an action, and then what to do with it once you have it created.

The first thing we need to do is make sure you have the actions panel open so we can work in it. To do this go to the WINDOW tab on the top tool bar and make sure that ACTIONS has a check mark next to it. It should look something like this:

Now that you have the ACTIONS box showing on your screen you're going to need to open a photograph to create and action on. For example, if you want to create an action that re-sizes the photo for you to put it on the web, just open any photo that you'd like to re size. Now, On the bottom of your ACTIONS box click the small icon that looks like a "post it note". It's the second icon from the right. I have circled it in red on the image below:

Now give that new action a name so that you'll remember what it is when you want to use it again. For our example I'm going to name my action "web re size". Now you click "RECORD". This will start the recording of the action. From this point on, anything that you do inside of photoshop will be recorded as a step in the action. Preform whatever task it is that you want to do. In our case I would select IMAGE-IMAGE SIZE then re size the image for the web. To do this you will want to select the largest side(either width or height) and change that number to 800pixels. Make sure that the box that says "constrain proportions" is checked so that the side that you didn't change will automatically change to keep the same proportions on the image. Now you could go to the bottom of the actions box and click the stop button now and have a fully functioning action, but I prefer to take it a step further. I will click save as, select the file that I want to save it in, save it, then click close on the image. At this point I would click the STOP button(first button on the left of the ACTIONS panel, it looks like a square). Now lets test our new action.

Open a new picture, go to the ACTIONS panel and highlight the action we just created and press play(small triangle at the bottom of the ACTIONS box). Your photo should automatically re size, save, and close. If this works you were successful. Now that's one way of replaying the action. Another way is to go to the top of the ACTIONS PANEL. on the right hand side, you will see a small box with three lines in it(pictured below circled in red)

Left click that box. When it opens, at the top you will see the words "button mode". Click those words and make them check marked. This will turn your actions into buttons so that all you have to do is click on them once, and they perform the action.

You can create actions for a lot of stuff in photoshop. If for example you took a series of shots in the same lighting conditions and they all needed a slight color correction, you could record your steps while doing the color corrections on the first photo, then just run the action on all of the rest of them. Pretty cool huh...

Alright, that's enough running of the mouth for me today. Have a good day people. Jason

Tuesday, May 5th

2009-05-05T06:01:00.002-04:00

Morning all. I have a tid bit of news for my Canon friends(you know who you are). Canon has just started it's rebates again for most of it's popular items. Unlike most other companies, when Canon offers a rebate, it's instant. You don't have to mail anything in, wait for 18 months and pray that you get at least a partial amount back. You get it right off of the top. This is great for anyone that is looking to get some new gear, like say a 430EXII flash... Anyway, click Here to check them out. I'll be back afterwhile with a new tutorial of some sort, so check back later for that. Jason

Monday, April 4th

2009-05-04T06:33:00.003-04:00

Happy Monday morning to everyone. Hope everyone had a good weekend. Mine was good but tiring. I spent all day Friday getting images edited and ready to go for the Mt. Saint Joe people, and then headed out to Indy for a 6:30 meeting with the Brightroom people and pick up my press credentials for the race on Saturday. Saturday I shot all day long at the finish line of the race, and then headed back home for the evening. Did some one on one work Sunday with a wonderful lady that looks like she has some real potential with photography.(If we can just talk her into switching to Nikon from that Canon gear jk) Other than that nothing new and exciting to report for the weekend. However I would like to do a quick review for you guys on the Lowe Pro belt system that you see above. So right to it then.

Saturday (as I said above) I shot a marathon in Indianapolis. My job was at the finish line where we were putting people in front of backgrounds and taking pictures of them with their "finisher" medals. I stood there for 7 hours doing that. All the while I had on the Lowepro S&F Deluxe Waist Belt. This is the top of the line belt offered by LowePro, and it's worth every penny. It allowed me to have my primary flash on camera, a second flash in a pouch as well as a whole compartment full of batteries. I took roughly 700 shots, so I changed flashes once, and then batteries once. All the while keeping my gear on my person and not worrying about my bag like the rest of the shooters there. They had all of their bags sitting behind the backdrops but with 35,000 people coming through it would have been easy to swipe one without anyone knowing. Along with the extra flash and batteries, I had a spot to hold a bottle of water, as well as a large pouch for my 70-200 2.8 to fit in. I didn't end up using it, but I had it just in case. This wasn't my belt I borrowed this belt from my buddy Shad, but if I were to buy one I would definitely go with this one. It has plenty of support for pouches to hold all of your flashes, lenses, and whatever other misc. stuff you take with you on a shoot. The only thing that I wish I had would be the suspenders that take the weight off of your hips. After 7 hours of having 30+ pounds hanging on your waist you begin to get a little sore. Other than that, the belt system works really well. If you want to have your hands free to shoot, but still have easy access to your gear, the Lowepro S&F Deluxe Waist Belt is for you. Price wise, the whole system(belt and 6 or 7 pouches) runs about $200.

A little news/rumors this morning. Nikon seems to be discontinuing the D300. It's no longer available at Costco, and a source at Best Buy says that they will no longer be carrying it either. D400 on the way? It seems like the right time.

Great deal going on from Sandisk. Big rebates like they did back in December. It may be worth it to check out for any of you who have a need for more storage(everyone). Click
Here to get the deal.

That's all I've got today folks. I'm in serious need of recovery, so I think I'm going to take a few hours and catch up on some much needed sleep.(Just don't tell the boss) Jason

Here you go

2009-04-30T18:33:00.003-04:00

Here are the photos that I was talking about earlier. They are the originals from the shots shown lower.

oops...

2009-04-30T15:48:00.001-04:00

So I was just proof reading my post and I realized that those were two different photos. Oops. You get the idea though. I'll find the real original tonight and post it up so you can see. Till then use your imaginations ;~)

Thursday, April 30th

2009-04-30T15:03:00.002-04:00

Hello everyone! It seems like I've been taking a couple of days between posts lately. The reason is, we've been getting busier and busier at the studio(which is a good thing). Plus I'm constantly trying to learn new things so the past few days I've had my nose buried in Scott Kelby's "Lightroom2 book for digital photographers". I was putting off learning lightroom for the longest time, and to be honest, I really really wish that I had learned this program earlier. This is one of the best editing programs that I have ever used. It doesn't replace photoshop for the heavy editing, but for the everyday stuff like a little brightening here and there, sharpening, cropping,etc., it's awesome. On top of that it is a SUPER POWERFUL photo organizing database. I can't even begin to describe how much more organized I am now that I'm managing all of my images through Lightroom. On top of all of this, Lightroom has made it super easy to do some really cool effects, quickly. Here are a few examples of what I did this morning in a few minutes:

Here's the original:

And here's what I did today in literally 5 minutes or less:

I don't have the original of this uploaded but it's fairly bland like the first picture above. Here's the one from today.

These aren't presets or actions that I bought somewhere either, just some that I did on my own.

Lots going on in the news department, but the main thing I can think of that has happened lately is the Pocket wizards are shipping now for Nikon. I talked to Wilma at K&R and she said that she would have some by the first of the month(tomorrow) If that happens, I'll have some to play with this weekend and I'll get you a full review by Monday. I can't wait.

Got a new website for the Studio. Right now it's linked to Shad's site, but that site is going to be transitioning to the studio site in the very near future. The new (and from here on out only) web address is www.rdphotos.com.

We were featured on Channel 9 last night. I have been in talks with Tanya ORourke for the past few days about the state of the wedding industry and she gave us some credit and free advertisement last night on the 5:30 news.

It is getting close to wedding season, as a matter of fact we have a few next month. Time to get geared up for that. If you haven't done so already, check your gear for anything that need serviced and get it done ASAP.

Alright last but not least, be sure to check us out on Twitter @RedDoor Photo. Alright, gotta run for now, see you all soon. Jason

Kingston 8gig CF cards

2009-04-27T15:36:00.003-04:00

A big thanks to AMY BURKE who turned me on to THIS great deal from Walmart. 8gig Kingston compact flash cards for $24.84. Thanks Amy!

Also Best Buy has the D200 back on sale for $599.00. Great deal, get them while they last.

Monday, April 27th

2009-04-27T14:38:00.005-04:00

Talk about your dedication... I spent all day Saturday sitting on the corner of 4th and Baseball Alley in Louisville Kentucky taking pictures of runners/walkers passing on their way to the Finnish line. It was boring. I don't mean boring in that I didn't have fun, but it was ok. I mean boring like I would have been doing just about anything else besides that. I'm pretty sure a monkey could do what we were doing. We sat in lawn chairs, had our camera's on monopods and just shot on continues high all day long. 8000 frames in 4 hours boring. But I digress. There were a few runners that caught my attention, the one above being one of them. He wasn't first, and he wasn't last. He wasn't even the most interesting( that award goes to the guy dressed like Elvis pushing a stroller with a sub woofer in it) but he was by far the most dedicated that I saw. As you can see in the photo, he was bleeding from both nipples. I don't know about you, but just looking at that hurts me. That is dedication right there. Anyway here are a few of the ones that don't scream boring...

This is the guy that won the race. He reminded me of a gazelle watching him run...

I was just diggin this guys style...

This guy came strolling through about 30 minutes before the race started. I hadn't seen anyone carrying a boom box around in so long that I had to take a picture...

On that note, I'm outta here. I gotta head home and Finnish editing the 350+ pictures that a certain photojournalist took yesterday at the Mt. Saint Joe shoot.(Breanna). See you all tomorrow.

2009-04-27T05:49:00.001-04:00

I'm having a busy morning. I'll post some stuff up later on today.