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Category Archives: Photo Editing and Digital Workflow
Tips on Fashion Photography
My most recent work has been focused on Fashion and Food. Fashion photography is relatively new to me, but several colleagues of mine use models regularly to support their portfolio work. After recently winning the local Frederick, MD Scott Kelby Worldwide Photowalk and reading his “Light It, Shoot It, Retouch It” book I was inspired to work on my portrait lighting. Because I love to mix things up and challenge myself by taking the lovely studio lighting out of the equation, I chose to see what I could do with the sun’s harsh light. It sounds strange, but I learn better this way. Take images in all types of lighting scenarios and play with exposure and aperture. You may want to try this approach to understand how best to find the light you want in your images.
I also didn’t have a model with experience or the patience for me to go through multiple lighting adjustments. Go figure. The image of my daughter with makeup was setup in window sunlight. No other light source was used on my model. I applied all the makeup (I am no makeup artist either, so had to have some fun with this one) and no digital manipulation of color was used. The photo was taken with a Nikon D90 in RAW. The settings included:
Exposure 0.004 sec (1/250)
Aperture f/8.0
Focal Length 105 mm
ISO Speed 200
The image was imported into Lightroom 3.6. I cropped the image in tight and added more exposure (+4) because I wanted the blown out white effect. From there, I softened the harsh light with an adjustment brush , reduced tint, and also added some minor saturation to the eye color and dramatically reduced temperature (original RAW had more skin warmth/yellow), then I did a lot of spot removal because some of the makeup didn’t blend into her skin well. Finally, I reduced the sharpness of her cheeks/nose a touch because I didn’t want to see pores or tiny hairs. Done. Give this a try with various models and makeup. YouTube has a plethora of videos on makeup application to give you some ideas. This process gave me great ideas for more fashion makeup shots using ambient as well as studio lighting.
As an amateur photographer of three years, Joelle Herman loves it all and typically spends a week to a month on a subject. She also finds that being a part of a local camera club (Frederick Camera Clique) helps in networking, learning and exploring your passion.
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jneo/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/#!/joelleherman
Google+: Joelle Herman Photography
The Future of Photography Technology at Stanford
If you want to see where Photography Technology is headed, watch this (very long) video from the ScobleShow
Marc Levoy, Stanford University Professor, who is jointly appointed in computer science and electrical engineering. But that’s the geeky way of explaining this dude is doing some radical stuff with cameras. He shows us a camera that can refocus the image AFTER you shoot it! Talks about other research to stitch images together, digitize statues, among many others.
Some stuff you will have seen or heard before, but seeing it demonstrated and in context with all the other research is very very cool.
Personally I think the video could have had the same interesting content in half the length with some editing but if you have time, definitely take a look!
Added: It looks like the Podtech people heard us 
Virgin Mobile Flickr Photo PR Disaster
I just read this fascinating story over at Gillianic Tendencies
What it seems to have happened is that Virgin Mobile, or an advertising agency they hired, decided to save lotsa moola and attempt some good PR (backfiring, obviously) by using Flickr photos with Creative Commons licenses (specifically, the ones that allowed commercial use) in a recent ad campaign. Which, fine, is legal, though, perhaps, cheap-assed. What’s getting people especially crazy over this (and this doesn’t include me, thankfully) is that they’re using these photos without the models’ permissions
It seems some random person has spotted Gillians Flickr photo of a smashed car used on an advertisement. No problem there, it was CC licensed in a way that meant only attribution was necessary. Notification to these Flickr users would have been the polite thing, but ok it’s not a requirement.
The crazy thing though is there are people in these advertisements. Without model releases. Being insulted.
There is more coverage here and over at Flickr.
Tags: flickr, virgin, copyright, cc, license, pr, disaster
Vista Considered Harmful to Photographers
What is it they always say, “Never use version 1″. Good advice, particularly when considering upgrading an operating system. I switched to Mac but I still need to have one foot in the Microsoft camp. It turns out Windows Vista Destroys Photo Metadata. This news doesn’t add any incentive to upgrade.
A bit of bad news about Vista if you’re a photographer. Apparently if you tag a photo’s metadata in Vista, it destroys other important metadata used by image editing apps such as Photoshop. Microsoft’s gotten reports of RAW files generated by Nikon cameras being unreadable after being tagged with Vista or Microsoft’s Photo Info tool.
Now before the anti-Microsoft crowd start foaming at the mouth or the pro-Microsoft guys lynch me, this is not all Microsofts fault. If only the camera manufacturers would produce a standardised format perhaps cockups like this wouldn’t happen?
Adobe Photoshop Elements 5 Announced
Photoshop Elements users might be interested to hear Adobe has upgraded their product. Not wanting to spend the kind of money required for the full CS package I bought Elements 4 and have been reasonably happy with it so far. I had to patch it up to be able to use layer masks in elements, after that it does everything I need I think. The new Elements 5 upgrade seems to be mostly consumer-oriented features as far as I can see, stuff like scrap book style layouts and mapping (as you might expect).
They have added some editing functionality, not sure of the detail as info is patchy right now at the Adobe Site
Make good photos great with superior editing tools. Fine-tune color, brightness, and exposure using new color curves adjustments; create rich black-and-white conversions; easily correct camera lens distortions; and sharpen blurred edges.
Personally I will be looking out for reviews before upgrading, and even then there will need to be something very compelling!
More Photoshop Elements 5 product info here and the press release is here.
Technorati Tags: adobe, photoshop, elements, elements5, photography, software, news
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Flickr Photo Editing Live
Flickr has now launched the joint-venture photo-editing feature with Picnik. This allows you to do basic tweaks to the pics in your photo stream. While not Photoshop, the ability is welcome, particularly when you have uploaded your pics on the move, for example from your phone camera.
When you first hit the edit button you are asked to allow Picnik into your account.
After that the editing interface should load. On my Mac’s Firefox it doesn’t, boo! Luckily I also have Safari.
Strangely even in Safari I found I had to click through twice or more to actually get to edit. When it does work though it is a welcome addition!
More info at the Flickr Blog