personal work /twenty four

Lately I’ve been much into improving on my personal photography work. It’s often very neglected as an aspect of the photographer’s growth. Yet, it’s one of the most powerful propellers when it comes to creativity, inspiration and technique. For many months, maybe even a few years now I rarely shot anything for myself and my own satisfaction alone. It was about time to get out and not think about anything else but capturing what I love, find interesting, challenging or simply different.

That’s how Twenty Four was born. It’s a personal project still in the progress and I have decided to not make the whole of it public. I want to stay on the safe side because the trademarks of some of the products I photograph are still visible. At the same time, it’s very interesting to be photographing something knowing that very few other people will see it, yet be very serious and intentional about it. Often we as photographers measure the value of our images by how the public responds to them. I think that there’s more to the whole story. An image ought to hold a strong value independently of what others have to say about it. While inventing, detailing, preparing and photographing the scene I, the photographer have been influenced by the process and then by the results. That’s enough for me to deem the photograph valuable.

Anyway, Twenty Four – it’s a project about the unusual and the unexpected among our daily lives. My challenge was to combine things we’re used to see during the 24hours of the day in ways we’re not. So, here come a few samples and if time permits, later as I progress I might share a few more.

Meanwhile, think of the place of personal work in your own journey as a photographer. It’s much more important than you might think.

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inspiration and tips /Joel Grimes

The people at framedshow.com are releasing some inspirational interviews. Have a full cup of your favorite beverage, sit back and enjoy 47 minutes of inspiration by an upper class photographer Joel Grimes talking about career, passion, technique and composite work. It’s worth it. It’s worth even the second round.

When you’re ready, you can check him out at http://joelgrimes.com

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diy background support/ holder

An important disclaimer: what I have described below is how to use your equipment for purposes it wasn’t designed to fulfill. Doing what is described below is entirely at your own risk and you’re responsible for any damage it may cause to your equipment, people it might hurt, etc., etc. You don’t have to do what I’ve done unless you decide so.

If you’re like me and often have to shoot within limited space and you don’t want to give up your seamless background, I have good news for you. By accident I happened to put together what is now becoming my favorite background support tool. As with the makeshift reflector holder I only used items which were already in my legal possession. Yet, if you don’t have everything, here’s a list with the ingredients…

What you’ll need

• A decent light stand (can also be small and cheap, like mine, if you only use light backgrounds).
• A clamp which can attach to the top of it.
• [optional] A Manfrotto Lite-Tite adapter and a spigot (Manfrotto 013, which I already had from the backlite stand)
• Two [metal] strips which are long enough to sandwich your background in width; mine are aluminum (check the hardware store nearby). You can use other material, but I found these to be most durable, stable and easiest to store… And I already had them.
• Two simple workshop clamps which can be had at any hardware store.

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ten free things – wedding one

Some more samples are coming from the Ten Things for Free in 2011 project. It’s been a very inspirational exercise and has given me the opportunity to give back, this time as a wedding photographer.

Here are some photos from the first free wedding session:

Hit the link below to see the rest of the photos.

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world photography day

Happy world day of photography (if you would like to narrow it down to one day, that is)! Don’t be shy to take a photograph today, read up on some of the history of photography or maybe even pose for a photo.

If you can’t recognize the photo on the left, you might want to start reading right here. In addition, there’s a special site (well, one of many I suppose) which celebrates the day and offers some more inspiration – that would be here.

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scouting photo locations /tips

Whether you’re into photographing weddings, shooting lifestyle portraits or any other type of photography work which doesn’t take place in a studio, selecting your location is crucial. Getting to know your selected location is indispensable.

So, how do you go about that? How do you look for a suitable location? How do you get to know that location?

1. Finding a location. Even if you are shooting completely unrestricted by time and cash – find a starting point to help you determine what you want and put some boundaries in your search. Don’t spend too long jumping from locations which are very different, such as a park and a beach. If you’re at a total loss and simply want a cool location – get out and get lost.

If you do have a general idea of what you want from your location, do some homework… By which I mean – work from home (well, or your office). Get on Google Maps, turn the satellite view on and begin your exploration. If you haven’t yet browsed for an outdoor location this way it might take a few minutes getting used to, but once you begin to feel comfortable you’ll realize the value this tool has to offer to photographers. If your area is covered by Street View – make sure you have a look at it, as well. Neither will always be up to date, but both modes are more than enough to give you a general idea.

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non destructive noise removal /CS5

As good as cameras are nowadays and as much as you try to avoid high ISO you’ll end up in less fortunate environments where you’ll have to produce some images with visible noise. How do you deal with this noise is very important and can save or kill your image. If you’re doing yourself a favor and shooting RAW you have a chance at saving some extra detail. The simple noise removal method I use, however, works perfectly with JPEG images as well. There’s only one catch – you’ll need Adobe Camera RAW 6 or higher (and therefore Photoshop CS5 or higher).

Over the years a lot of plugins have been released for Photoshop which deal with noise removal in far greater detail than Camera Raw 6 (CR6). However, Adobe have done an amazing job with their free extension to CS5 and I personally can no longer justify the costs for an additional solution. CR6′s noise removal is simple, quick and most importantly – delivers great results.

So, let’s see our sample image – shot at ISO800 on Canon’s original EOS 5D with a Sigma 24-27 f/2.8 EX lens at f/2.8, shutter speed was 1/80sec. Originally the shot below is underexposed and I’ve bumped the exposure in CR6 to make the noise even more prominent. Here is an actual size crop of the image with no noise removal applied.

Because the crop is from the edge of the image and the far background it’s not completely sharp, but that’s not really relevant as I’m comparing the same area later on.

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be an observer – look at photos

Lots of photos, actually. Photography is far from only the art of capturing photographs – it involves a lot of looking at photographs.

I recently read or heard it in an interview (if I recall the source I’ll make sure to post it) a statement which reminded me of the importance of gathering inspiration through photos already captured by others. The photographer being interviewed pointed out that throughout the years a good photographer will build up a significant collection of seen photos. Small (or large) elements of these photos will eventually become the source of inspiration for your own work. The more you’ve seen, the more you know what (not) to do.

No, I’m not talking about blindly copying other people’s work… You can do that as an exercise but don’t get stuck on it or allow it to limit your own creativity. And yes, it does mean that you also need to look at not so good photos. Especially if you’re a new photographer, be it for weddings, commercial projects, stock or whatever – you also need to know what to avoid, not only what to aim for.

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a makeshift reflector holder

An important disclaimer: what I have described below is how to use your equipment for purposes it wasn’t designed to fulfill. Doing what is described below is entirely at your own risk and you’re responsible for any damage it may cause to your equipment, people it might hurt, etc., etc. You don’t have to do what I’ve done unless you decide so.

If you also happen to often work with reflectors and don’t always have a handy assistant around this is probably going to be useful for you. Below I’ll describe a quite decent DIY solution/substitute for a reflector holder on the field – it’s cheap, it’s stable and you most likely have (almost) all the ingredients.

What you’ll need

• A good tripod (mine is Manfrotto’s 055XPROB)
• Ball-head to go with it (Manfrotto 486RC2 here)
• A short spigot adapter (Manfrotto 119)
• A clamp which can attach to the above adapter (mine’s some no-name cheap thing, but it’s solid)

So, the basic idea is that you use your tripod as a “do it yourself” reflector holder. Thanks to its wide spread the tripod offers a lot of stability so you probably won’t need to use sand bags or other weights to keep things where you placed them. Because you’ll be “holding” your reflector vertically and not horizontally there are some limitations as to what and where you can reflect. Yet, don’t despair – if you have a tall tripod you can still get pretty decent results at eye height and retain most of the stability.

Below are some photos with brief explanations to help you understand better how the whole thing works. It’s really simple.

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exposure: blasted

In the past couple of years I’m noticing an interesting trend to blow any decent exposure. It seems to be very popular (and not quite well executed) among new photographers. It’s become sort of fashionable – a cool shot is a severely overexposed one. No, I’m not talking about a well done high-key image. I’m talking about wedding portraits, commercial shots, etc., etc.

The proper exposure of a photograph is closely tied to its content and message. Action shots are more likely to look good with a bit of extra light but a static shot is likely to make the viewer confused. Simply overexposing to fix a mistake on the photographer’s part isn’t the right approach… Just as making an image monochrome/sepia toned isn’t.

When a technique or a certain look is introduced into a photograph for no apparent (or supportive) reason it quickly gets old and boring. A bit like HDR – it was a showoff thing the first 5minutes…. and only for the first 45 layers.

Keep those tones visible. Keep the white – white but with texture. I delight in being able to actually see the texture of the model’s skin. It may seem old-school and dated at first, but good lighting lasts much longer in the viewer’s memory than a blast of white throughout nearly the entire frame.

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