Nikon School has updated their course offerings for 2009. They're even coming to the Philadelphia area!

PhotographyBB Number 6

This month's PhotographyBB (a free online photography magazine who's quality seems to get better every month) is jam packed full of goodness! It starts off with an article about developing film, talks about black and white, takes you to Australia and then hits the digital darkroom when it turns to an article about Adobe's Lightroom. I think this is probably the best issue yet, and I really haven't started reading.

Everyone's favorite newsletter Photojojo has written an article that should clear up most of the questions about What the Hell is the Unsharp Mask?

New PhotographyBB Issue (Issue 4)

Issue 4 of the online photgraphy magazine PhotographyBB is out and I've promised them I'd read it all this time. The articles in the past issues that I have read have been of great quality and on interesting topics, so when I see stuff like:

Regarding this recent release, Dave Seeram - Editor and Publisher says, “Issue 4 is here and fully stocked on our digital shelves! Although we had to delay this month’s issue by one week, this month’s issue is by far our best issue to date! This month we’re taking it to the next level by including photographic shooting techniques, a trip to Vancouver, and even more tutorials than last month, including Photoshop, Elements, and even a Dreamweaver (for the photographer) tutorial!”

in the press release for issue 4, I know for sure that there is good stuff contained within the digital pages.

Now, if only I had a super fast color printer and ink was dirt cheap, I could start reading it on the bus this morning...

EDIT: Incomprehensible dribble fixed.

David Bergman on Workflow

I recently had the chance to see, renowned concert/sports photographer, David Bergman talk about how he uses Aperture to cull unwanted images and enhance and correct the selects from a shoot. Surprisingly, his daily workflow is not much different than what I have come up with, aside from the fact that I don't use Aperture (mostly because of the fact that it will not run on my Powerbook G4) and he has way more photos and selects to deal with. However, when I had a beta copy of Lightroom (which did run on my Powerbook), it is what I found to work quite well.

Anyway, the basic workflow is the following:

1. Import your entire shoot and add metadata to all the images. copyright info, short summary perhaps of the shoot. This is useful for quick searches through the library later in life. The copyright information, obviously can just save some legal hassle later.
2. Glance at every photo and give it a 1 star rating if it's something that might have potential.
3. Filter out your view to only shots that have 1 star. By this time, you've probably cut the number of shots down by at least half, if not more.
4. Relook at the 1 star images and give it a 2nd star if and only if it's worth spending more time on. You can use a bit more time to decide this, and for similar shots select only the best of them.
5. Filter out your view to only shots that have 2 stars. Now, here is where David's approach is a bit different. He relooks and filters to 3 stars and reserves 4 and 5 stars for exceptionally good photos he wants to use in his portfolio. I on the other hand am not on the same caliber as him and would have next to no shots left if I went to 3 stars, let alone 4 or 5.
6. Correct

After you make your initial selects, which should be a small fraction of the images you shot initially, it's time to make some corrections, crop and perform other edits (in Photoshop or wherever). The next part, for me, is bad because it allows for too much experimenting. For David, his formula works great and it's something I might try when I get some more computing power to power the free copy of Aperture Apple gave me for attending David's talk (Thanks Apple!).

David has sort of a set formula for the sliders and tools he touches and hardly ever strays from it, but makes sure to always correct the white balance first. Then he'll adjust the exposure as needed, possibly warm up the temperature a bit (on the photo, his office is air conditioned) and then turn on the visual display of highlights and black points. He'll then decide what's appropriate for the scene and use the recovery tool to get back some highlights and similarly with the black points.

At this point, the initial image should look pretty good and he'll decide whether or not he wants to use the settings from this picture as the settings for others and if so he'll apply them to the others and continue on. He'll then crop and, if necessary, add a slight vignette.

My correction flow is a lot different, and it's the part of his presentation that I took the most away from. It's possible to get great photographs by doing very little extra work. I used to go through all the sliders and experiment, but I now know it's not necessary, so I'll just not touch them.

You'd never think such a simple flow would work, but it seems to, and I saw him perform it right before my very eyes.

More Dynamic Range in GIMP

Exposure blend is a GIMP plugin which facilitates the process of creating contrast blended exposures. Contrast blending is a popular technique for getting more dynamic range from a set of bracketed images.

(Photoshop users might wanna check here for a few actions and a tutorial.)

Wedding Photography Equipment

Photo.net has a comprehensive guide about what you really need to photograph a wedding. If you're a serious photog you probably already have at least some of it. But this of course isn't all that you need to be a successful wedding photographer—you still need to learn some skills.

Twelve Essential Photographic Rules from PopPhoto.

ePHOTOzine

ePHOTOzine, apparently the UK's largest and friendliest on-line photography magazine, looks like a hit. There are tons of articles, tips, reviews and techniques. Check it out, even if you live in France—they won't mind.

New technique to automatically fix ugly photos. I'd say this is cheating.

A Really Big Show

Vincent Laforet talks about his new found love for Tilt-shift photography for taking sports shots.

You too can fake this technique on already shot images with Photoshop and some know how.

Using Center-Weighted Metering

The Case for Center Weighted Metering, discusses when you'd want to use center weighted metering in your shots.

Open Source Photography

Being a software developer and free software (tidbit: free and open source are not the same thing, but this is a photography blog, not a software blog) enthusiast, I can't help but laugh at Open Source Photography. Not because of it's content, or it's intention, but rather because of it's name. Open Source Photography's goal is to empower photographers to use open source tools to do the work they need to do. The project is promising and I look forward to seeing it's content increase, but I wish the name were different. I don't think their intention is to provide images that you are free to modify and or distribute, as is the normal case in open source software, and that makes their name a bit misleading.

Product Photography How Tos

Tabletop Studio has a comprehensive guide to product photography. Topics include, flowers, coins and jewelry as well as many others.

A short guide on photo composition.

Morguefile Classroom

When I said earlier today that regular posting would resume soon, I didn't expect to find such a great resource within Morguefile's classroom. However, upon checking it out, I discovered Jodie Coston's 10 lesson course.

The course starts off talking about composition, proceeds through to basics and then tackles portraits, studio lighting and product photography. Great examples and illustrations provide you with the a visual guide to the topics being discussed, and to top it off there's a discussion board for each lesson, which I must admit I haven't tested and it seems to be fairly old (2004ish). However, even if the forums aren't active, or disabled the course is still good.

Out of Bounds

When I saw this technique, I was stumped thinking about where it could be used. This morning though, I was thinking about it a bit more and feel as though I've seen similar things on a few web sites as part of their layouts. So, perhaps this link isn't really photography related, except maybe the brief introduction the tutorial gives about layer masks in photoshop.

Digital Photography School's blog shows us 4 Ways to Make Your Photos Pop.

Cleaning Digital Cameras

Not having experience with cleaning cameras, I don't think I'd allow myself at this point to clean my digital camera, but if you are inclined, Cleaning Digital Cameras is probably a resource you can use.

Fred Parker's Ultimate Exposure Computer is a guide for nature photographers (but works in general... ) for computing exposures.

An Insider's Look at Food Photography

An old article, but of course still relevant has a look at Food Photography, and provides insights and tips for producing quality work.

As a side note, "There is a law in the U.S.A. regarding truth in advertising. It requires that advertisements about food show the actual food item that a consumer would be able to buy and eat. " I don't know about the rest of you, but that fast food burger looked a bit better on the menu than my tray.

I wouldn't do this with any camera I loved, but if I had a camera laying around I didn't care about...

I am NOT responsible for broken cameras as a result of tossing.

Creative Shots With Longer Exposures

Dan Heller has some thoughts about longer exposures leading to creative exposures. Slower shutter speeds will obviously blur moving objects, and Heller's article shows some of the creative things you can do with that basic fact as well as introduce a neat piece of equipment-- Neutral Density Filters. Neutral Density Filters allow you reduce the amount of light coming into the camera, without stopping down your aperture.

Update: His tutorial about Fill Flash is also worth reading.

The Non Beauty in Beauty Photography

The amount of post production in fashion photography kind of takes the "beauty" out of creating images with a lens and film/sensor. Fortunately for some, tools like Photoshop and techniques like this (photoshop tutorial on achieving smooth skin) help sell products and make it possible to save money on the costs of making the images used for advertisement campaigns.

Unfortunately for others, especially impressionable young women, the editing and post production sell the idea that we are not beautiful enough, and that we must live up to some unachievable standard.

This isn't to say that I'm not a fan of fashion photography, beauty photography and other forms of photographic expression (even the use of post production techniques). However, it is my feeling that the industry should play a bigger part in making sure that impressionable young women are aware of these techniques so that they stop doing stuff like this.

Though it doesn't solve the "runway model" problem, where models appear in uneditable forms (i.e. live action), fashion photographers have a great new way to take an already good looking model and make him/her look that much better. I'm all for post production in fashion photography because it has this amazing ability to sell products and keep models alive while doing it, but I'd really like to see more ad campaigns and fashion photography that promotes the natural beauty of people.

Polaroid Transfer Tutorial

Sarah Wichlacz's blog has a tutorial about transfering slides to Polaroid to achieve a neat effect.

High Dynamic Range Tutorial

With Adobe's release of Photoshop CS2, many photographer's became interested in High Dynamic Range (HDR). HDR uses 32-bits per channel rather than the usual eight or sixteen bits. However, your camera doesn't just magically take HDR images. Instead you take a series of images and compose them together. What you get from all this are photos with a greater range of brightness values, to which you can edit til you have the holy grail, the perfect photograph. Read Earthbound Light's tutorial on HDR.

Get Rid of Haze with Photoshop

It's fun and easy to take photos out of airplanes, or from high above the ground. However, you normally end up with washed out and unsaturated photos. Michael A. Covington shares with us a way to Process Aerial Photographs with Photoshop.

Ever wonder how photographers make food look so damn good in pictures? 101 Cookbooks posted these food photography tips back in July 2006, but of course they're still valid today.