Another Answer
April 21st, 2011
After all that stuff about techniques to fix photos taken in “challenging” light, there is really a very different approach that is the one I most often use and that is much more likely to succeed, if I can manage it. It’s much better to simply find the place where the light I’m struggling with is doing something that looks good anyway. When I can do that there is no special processing required for the photo and the result is almost always much more the kind of photo I am looking for in my work.
Sometimes the location doesn’t allow this, as was the case with the waterfalls where I was shooting Angie. But other times I get lucky. That’s what happened when Char Rose and I went to a little stream to see what we could find. I think we found something quite beautiful, despite another day of sunshine. Thank you Char for a great shoot and a great location.
This is a very busy week in a very good way. Brooke is visiting and we’ve been shooting and having a great time. You’ll see the results here soon. It will be worth waiting for.
Software Alternatives
April 18th, 2011
I’ve been working on finding better ways to post-process photos done in bright sunlight. I think I’m beginning to improve the results. I talked with my old friend, Tim Black, about my problems and he suggested I try the Nikon software to process the RAW files. I’ve had bad experiences with Nikon’s software in the past, so I generally have a rule not to even load it on my computers. Nikon makes great cameras and really shitty software. That’s my opinion and the opinion of many reviewers.
In the past when I did load Nikon software I found it very difficult to use, very buggy, very slow, just really crappy. But at Tim’s suggestion I went ahead and loaded the ViewNX2 software that came with my D7000. I have to report that I still don’t find it to be a very good program. It’s hard to use and really stupid in some of the ways it operates. But it does seem to do a pretty good job of processing the RAW files once you struggle through the shitty interface.
So I started over with these two photos and I’m a lot happier with the final result than I was before just processing them in Camera Raw and PhotoShop. For these files I first opened them in NX2 and worked with the tools there, including Nikon’s D-lighting control, which works very well. Then I saved them as TIFF files and opened them in PhotoShop to work with them some more, using layers to make more localized adjustments.
I’m reasonably satisfied with the results. Not the best photos I’ve ever taken, by a long shot, but fairly acceptable quality given the difficult lighting situation.
Of course, Angie is her usual beautiful self here. She did a great job. I wish the light would have been more cooperative, but that’s the luck of the draw when you work outdoors. As I like to say, there isn’t good light and bad light, only easy light and challenging light. This was challenging light and I’m afraid I wasn’t quite up to the challenge that day. But I’m learning skills to help with this kind of light and maybe I’ll be able to make something better in this kind of light one of these days. Thanks Angie for helping me work on this and for being the first frozen naked model of the spring.
By the way, the photo below was taken with my 8mm fisheye lens. I like that it doesn’t look all that “fisheye-like.” It’s straight out of the camera with no distortion adjustments.
Spring Has Sprung
April 15th, 2011
I know it’s spring here in Ohio because I’ve already shot the first frozen model of the year here. Thanks to Angie we slipped out to our favorite local waterfall for a shoot earlier this week. We got a later start than we had hoped for, and, of course, the sun was out full force, so I got to play around a bit with the ways my D7000 can deal with high contrast.
I’m still learning the ins and outs of this new camera, but it does have quite a bit more capability when it comes to difficult light. It’s amazing in low light, as I’ve seen when shooting dance performances. And it’s much better with direct sunlight than any past digital camera. I’ve learned things I can do in the camera and others in software after the fact to get more control of the extreme contrast that direct sun creates. But I don’t think I’ve got it quite right yet. The tonal range in this photo is pretty good. I don’t think there are any blown out highlights or empty shadows, at least none that are a problem for the photo to work well. But I’m still not quite happy with the overall look of the photo. It has a sort of “digital” look that is not quite what I’m after.
I suppose if I actually took a class on PhotoShop, or even finished reading the book on it that I’ve had for more than a year now, I might be able to do a little better job. I’m completely self-taught with PhotoShop and all I generally do is minor adjustments similiar to what I’d have done in a wet darkroom in the old days. Plus occasional cleanup of minor distractions that I would not have been able to deal with in the past with film. But situations like this require more work and I think a bit more skill than I currently possess.
One thing I’ve started doing with all photos like this is starting in Camera Raw before moving to PhotoShop itself. I do that even with jpegs, though I’ve started always shooting RAW files when I find myself in a difficult lighting situation like this one. The tools in Camera Raw allow a lot of adjustments that are very helpful with high contrast. And I’ve also used the highlight/shadow tool in PhotoShop. But I still don’t think I’m there yet. Maybe I need to take a trip up to Minneapolis and get my friend Stephen Haynes to try to teach me a thing or two about PhotoShop. He knows more about it than I can ever hope to learn.
I’ve done three shoots this week and been busy with other, non-photo things. Lots more shooting planned for the coming week. You’ll soon see results here.
Another of Char
April 10th, 2011
It’s way too nice a day here for me to spend much time at the computer. I need to go clean up the yard and I might even mow part of it for the first time this afternoon. It may get up to 84 degrees today, which will set a record if it happens. This won’t last, of course, but it is a nice taste of warmer days to come.
So, here’s another photo of Char Rose to tide you over until I have time to do some shooting outdoors and start posting those photos. Enjoy.
More Char…and a Movie Rant
April 6th, 2011
Wow, there must be a lot of Char Rose fans out there. I don’t follow all that closely how many people visit my blog, but I couldn’t help noticing that visitors almost doubled after I posted that last photo of Char. Since I’m not really saying anything of note here, it has to be Char that is drawing all the attention. No wonder…she is certainly a beautiful woman. So, I figured I’d pander to the crowd and offer up another photo from that shoot. Enjoy.
But, I’m also going to take this opportunity to write a rant that has been building up for some time:
This is to all you photographers out there who now own a digital slr camera that has video capability:
The fact that your camera can shoot video does not make you a filmmaker. Really. Please. Stop.
I started out in TV. I’ve done TV news, both behind and in front of the camera. I’ve made 16mm sound movies back in the old days when editing was done with a film splicer and a bunch of strips of movie film stuck to some masking tape above the light table. Long ago I decided that I prefered doing still photography and that is what I do by choice. My D7000 has video capability that I doubt I will ever use.
But, for those of you who are making “films” with your digital slrs, I have a few words of advice. Film and still photography are different. They are different media and they require different skills. You can’t make a good movie by pointing your camera at a still subject and having it move. There’s just a bit more to it than that. And just because you like to go to the movies doesn’t mean you know how to make a movie.
There are skills to be learned. There are conventions that must be understood before you are ready to violate them. Study is important and so is shooting. So go ahead and shoot lots of bad movies with your new camera. But for the love of God, stop posting them on the internet and proclaiming them as the greatest films ever made. Please. They are shit. Total shit. You need to shoot this crap to learn the craft, but please stop subjecting us to them. You really should be ashamed. Don’t show this crap to anyone. Especially don’t put it on the internet where it will live forever as testimony of how bad you were. You might get better and then you will really be sorry you ever posted this crap.
So, please, do some reading about the craft of filmmaking. Practice and learn some skills. Make a bunch of bad movies and throw them away. Then, maybe…just maybe, you’ll have gotten good enough to work on a movie being made by someone else who actually knows what they are doing. And maybe then you’ll be where you need to be to make your first bad movie that is actually good enough to show other people.
But until then, please keep your shitty movies to yourself. Please.
Statuesque
April 4th, 2011
Here’s another studio photo of Char Rose. I don’t shoot this sort of thing in the studio very often because, in general, I’m just not interested in this kind of classical figure study photography. It’s pretty much been done. I have a studio and a bunch of lights, so creating a setup like this isn’t a big challenge. But I find I’m just much more interested in watching what the sun does coming in my east-facing windows at the studio than I am in what I can do with a few strobe lights and reflectors.
But, on the other hand, Char is beautiful and graceful, so it is fun to light her to show that off. I don’t really call this sort of thing art, at least when I do it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t beautiful. And beautiful is good. So when it’s too cold to go outside and the sun isn’t cooperating to create something interesting for me to play with in the studio, I sometimes do things like this. There are certainly worse ways I could be passing my time in my old age. No bingo for me, please.
The weather is miserable today, but the spring warm-up is underway. I’m hoping to do at least one outdoor shoot this week and a bunch more by the end of April. It will be so great to be back to shooting outdoors again and I’m looking to try to get the feel of this long-awaited Spring in some of the photos.
But for now enjoy the statuesque beauty of Char.
Softness
April 2nd, 2011
As I’ve said before here, I’m tired of winter and bored with working in the studio. One of the things I do when I get bored in the studio is bring out my old soft-focus lens and shoot with it. I’ve had this lens, a single-element lens in Nikon mount, for more than 30 years. It’s an early ancestor of the Lensbabies that are so popular these days. I like what it does with highlights, blurring them into the shadows in a way that can’t really be recreated in PhotoShop.
So when Char Rose was in the studio a couple weeks ago doing some figure work, I got bored with what we were doing and stuck this old trusty lens on the D7000 and did a few shots. Thanks, Char, for putting up with me.
There were a few snow flakes in the air this morning, but that didn’t last long. It’s April now. I’m setting up shoots for later this month on the assumption that I’ll be able to work outdoors. Spring is here at last. So it won’t be long until some spring photos will start showing up here. I can’t wait.
Indoor Beauty
March 30th, 2011
I’m so tired of this winter. I know…we all are. It’s been an awful one. And it just doesn’t seem to want to go away. It’s almost April, but March, after teasing us with a few warm days, is still doing its best to keep us cold and miserable. When I left home this morning to drive to the studio it was snowing hard. It didn’t stick and stopped in the afternoon, but still it just seemed like another affront, denying the approach of spring. But spring is here and soon I’ll be outside shooting the kind of photos I most love to shoot.
Meanwhile, I’ve been doing a few shoots in the studio. I’ve confessed to the models that I’m about out of inspiration and ideas for studio work. But when someone as beautiful as Artistic Physique comes around and poses, it’s hard to not pick up just a little bit of inspiration.
But I’m thinking about outdoor shoots…planning things for the coming warm months. There are some new models who have contacted me and want to work with me…and some that I’ve been working with, but haven’t taken out into the wilds yet to get them cold and wet and dirty. And, I’m talking with a couple of my long-time favorite models about some shoots this year…so it’s looking like a good year…if it ever stops snowing, that is.
Dance and the D7000
March 25th, 2011
One of my major motivations for getting the Nikon D7000 was the improvement I thought it would make in what I could do with dance photography. But I really had no idea how huge an improvement it would be over my D200. Now I know.
I’ve been shooting dance since the 1960s. Back when I started it was Tri-X developed in Acufine. We pretended that Acufine would give us an ISO (ASA back in those days) of 1600. What it really gave us was blocked up highlights and empty black shadows. But it gave us something on the negative that we could try to make a decent print from. Most of the prints were barely passable, but since there was nothing better, they were good enough.
The D200 was incredibly better than Tri-X in Acufine. But the D7000 is so much better it is almost as big a leap forward. The D7000 has made major changes in the way I can approach shooting dance.
Because 3200 and even 6400 ISO are completely usable speeds with the D7000…6400 is better than 1600 with the D200…I’m now able to shoot with my 35-70mm f/2.8 zoom lens instead of being limited to my 50mm f/1.4. That lets me do much more work at actually framing a photo while I’m shooting instead of just capturing what’s there and cropping later. That also means better quality on single dancers, duets and smaller groups because I can zoom in instead of cropping later.
That’s what I expected. But there were some surprises as I worked with the new camera and figured out what it could do. The autofocus system on the D7000 is amazing. I was able to leave it on auto and it found the right focus point and nailed the focus almost immediately. A big improvement over manually moving the focus point around on the D200 to match what the dancers were doing…and missing focus a lot because the D200 was just too slow to focus.
But the best surprise was the auto exposure system on the D7000. Always before I’ve shot dance with the exposure set manually. The contrast of the stage scene was just too much for the meter to manage in any auto setting. But not so with the D7000. I quickly learned that I could set the meter on Program (or, as some have noted, that “P” on the control dial might just stand for “Professional”). I found that if I dialed in 2 stops of underexposure compensation the meter would give me perfect exposures every time as the light changed throughout the dance pieces. That was a huge improvement over my past practice of noting each lighting change and making a note of the required f/stop and shutter speed and then manually making those changes while shooting the dance. Now I could just concentrate on capturing the action. The only exposure adjustments I needed to make were to move to 6400 ISO when the light was very dim and back to 3200 when it got brighter. I was able to shoot at 3200 ISO nearly all the time, with just occasional moves to the higher ISO at dark moments.
Once again I’m very happy with my new camera. It is making things possible that were not possible before.
These photos are from the concert I shot at Ohio University at the beginning of this month.
Variations
March 22nd, 2011
It seems that many of my favorite models are also talented photographers. I think that has more to do with my liking to work with models who understand what I’m trying to do than with anything else. Charlise is one of those “modelographers” and is very good on both sides of the camera.
One of the fun things about how I work with models is that they will sometimes do their own editing from our shoots. I share copyright with my models and they get all the photos we do together. They have full rights to do anything they want with the photos. So sometimes I get to see what photos they chose and how they edit them in PhotoShop.
That’s what you are seeing here. These two photos were edited by Charlise. It’s interesting that they are both photos that I also choose, independent of her, and had included in my first edit as what I label as ‘selects.’ But my editing was very different from hers, particularly when it comes to color. You can compare the photo below with my version which I posted a few posts back.
One thing I was freed from many years ago is the idea of ‘correct color.’ There simply is no such thing. The color in a photo is dependent on so many variables such as the viewing light, the materials used to make the print, the variations in the color vision of different individuals, that chasing ‘correct color’ will only make you crazy. Color is important to me…it is one of the major things I’m interested in as a photographer; the reason I work in color and not black and white. But I look for color that looks right to me…and that may have nothing to do with whatever the ‘correct color’ might be, if you could find a way to know that.
Clearly from these two photos, Charlise has a different idea of how she likes color to look. I find that interesting and enjoyable to look at and think about. I prefer my version of the color, but I also like what Charlise has done with these files. There is no correct, there is only the different artistic interpretations of the photos.
Thanks for sharing your vision (and your beautiful body) with us, Charlise.
