Moving Ahead...

Greetings everyone... Welcome to a new phase in our journey, and thank you for making it such an interesting journey so far. I hope you'll be as excited about this new phase as I am... This phase is one which sees Photography Tip moving out of this domain and on to a newer, more pleasant one.

Out with the old; bring in the New

Sometime late, late last night (in India), Photography Tip became Beyond Phototips. It was moved to a new domain name: http://www.beyondphototips.com/ with a brand new layout, (it is based on the Grid Focus theme) and blogging platform (we've moved from a free Blogger account to a self hosted WordPress platform). Not everything is as it should be at the moment, links are still pointing to the old website, and some references need to be changed, but rest assured that they'll all be set right in the coming days of this transition.

The old website will remain as it is, for now, and will not be updated. If you have bookmarks pointed to the old site, please re-mark this new domain so that you don't miss out. If you have posts with links to the old website, don't worry they wont become invalid. I'd like to point out to you at this stage that all of the content from "Photography Tip" is also available on the "Beyond Phototips" website too, and if you wish to, you can re-link your posts to the new website.

If you're viewing this in a feed reader, worry not, you don't have to do a thing. Your feed url will be automatically redirected to the new website's content and you should have no trouble in reading it. There may be a delay between the stream being redirected and the time that feed readers have their cache updated, but hopefully this will not be too long. In any case, here's the new URL for the RSS Feed http://feeds.beyondphototips.com/photographytip/

So what does this mean to you as a subscriber / reader of the blog?

I'll be maintaining my old(er) schedule of three posts a week. But it does mean that you have a much nicer interface to look forward to when you visit the website. There is a simpler, less cluttered interface (though the old one was quite simple by itself), making important links very accessible.

The Archives are accessible via all the categories right on the main navigation menu; along with other important information that will make its way there eventually. The center column has links to posts that were among the most popular on "Photography Tip" and which I hope will continue to interest you on "Beyond Phototips". There are also links to the popular categories of posts for quick access.

The third column has links to the home pages of the various Series posts that Beyond Phototips is running. This is so that you can find all of these links in one place.

I guess that's it for now. Do let me know what you think of the new theme in the comments, and please do let me know if you spot any bugs. I'll be ironing out the kinks over the next week or so, and you can also expect a number of new posts to come flooding in.

18 Quick Lessons from on Location

Here are some thoughts that I've had while shooting on assignment during the last 2-3 months...

1. Make a checklist...
2. Check the checklist to make sure you've got everything you need.
   
3. Check that you've checked the checklist. Remember Santa... He made lists too...
   
4. Always take more equipment than necessary for the shoot.
5. Having someone on hand to assist you, and make sure that you have the equipment where you want it, and make sure you don't leave anything behind is a great thing. Take a friend along if nobody else.
6. Stay Professional.
7. Stay Funny. It keeps people smiling, and your models pliant.
8. Things will go wrong. When they do, breathe deeply, think of the problem and figure out how to fix or bypass it.
9. Keep the Client satisfied, this may mean that you'll have to take pictures that you wouldn't take if you were shooting by yourself... Take them anyway...
10. Make sure you get the shots you want, even if they're the ones that client said no to... they may actually like them!
11. Remember to have fun... if you're not having fun, then you've got to change something.
    
12. Plan the entire shoot out.
13. Make a list of shots that you need to take, put down the additional ones to (the ones you think the client may not like, but think that you need to take anyway)
    
14. Get to the location on time.
    
15. If you can't be there on time, blame it on the complexity of the job at hand and the tough choices you've had to make when it came to equipment selection.
16. Don't blame the traffic, most likely your client got there the same way that you did.
17. If you find yourself shooting for one client while you're supposed to be at another client's location shoot, do the same as point 2. But remember to finish off the assignment at hand to the client's satisfaction first.
18. Remember not to take on rush jobs in the first place. They can quickly get messy and will most likely entail more work than you thought they would.

There are a lot more where these came from, but I'd like to hear from you... do you have anything you'd like to add?

Watch Videos for a long and prosperous life...

Yes, I promise you... it's a good thing!

Especially when they're videos that help you learn stuff... Here's a great video of Chase Jarvis' talk at the New York Photo Shelter get-together thingie... Now, I couldn't quite make it, being travelling in India and all that, but the guys at Photoshelter, being the nice people that they are, did put out quite a few videos... Here's my favourite, with links to some of the others. Let me know if you learned anything!



I did... Now check these out too.

Panel Discussion between photographers and photo buyers/editors... info about copyright issues.

Catherine Talese - Photo editor, talks about the buyer's perspective.

Intellectual Property... a discussion.

Ok, Watched the nice videos? Now get back out there and take some Photographs!

Photoshop Process - Edit Brian's Picture

A couple of days ago, Brian Auer posted a project on his blog where he invited people to use a photograph that he would supply and process it in Photoshop (or any other image editing software). The idea was to see how different people take and image and work on it.

Brian was kind enough to give us the option of starting from the original RAW file from his camera as long as we reminded ourselves time and time again that we did not own the photograph, but were only borrowing in for purposes of this project.

I started by working the image in Adobe Bridge and correcting the tones, the slight tilt and the brightness. Personally, I felt that the image was rather under-exposed (though Brian thinks otherwise).

I was looking at creating an evening-ish look by enhancing the inherent magenta colour-cast in the image and giving it a hint of blue/green, but I didn't want it starting out so dark.

I increased the exposure by 1.6 stops, and bumped up vibrance by 23 points. At this point I was playing around, and so I decided to try out the parametric tone curve option. I don't remember what the default settings were, but in the end, highlights were at 60, lights were at -21 and shadows were at -73. Hit me if it was bad of me to play around there... What I was trying to achieve was some degree of detail in the bird's body while keeping the whites - white and reducing the blacks in the image to the real shadows.

I played around with the saturation and luminance in the blue, greens and aqua colours ranges, and bumped up the sharpening a bit (Brian's image is focussed a tad bit in front of the bird, so the bird was softer than it should be. I ended up with this image.

You think it's a tad washed out? Yes, I'd agree with you on that, but this was just the first stage and had taken me only a minute or two of fiddling around... It was time to open up the Grand-daddy program of image editing... Adobe Photoshop.

I almost always start off my Photoshop edits by duplicating the background layer. I saw the image as being all about the bird and thought that the waves were a bit too distracting. I decided to increase the depth of field.

Yup, Photography got a bit easier (or complicated, whatever...) Photoshop has a great filter called 'Lens Blur'. This filter mimics factors that only a lens can produce in low depth-of-field images such as 'circles of confusion' and progressive blurriness. To help the filter, you need to create and Alpha Channel (tech jargon for 'mask'). I entered the Quick Mask mode by pressing 'Q', set up a gradient that would represent the bird being the actual point of focus and the foreground and background going into black (blurriness). I also painted white into the area where the bird was, to make sure that it remained entirely in focus. You see the mask that I used on the left...

Then, it was a simple matter of using adjustment layers. I used 4 adjustment layers in all. I'd give you a screen shot, but for some reason my computer just refuses to do a screen capture of photoshop for me. I'll update this post when I've fixed the problem.

1. Layer 1 was a levels adjustment layer that moved the midpoint way to the right, increasing the dark tones, while retaining the whites. I used a layer mask with a similar gradient to the blurring mask so as to confine the darkening effect to the green and blue waves and to allow it to an extent in the foreground. This ensured that the bird remained un-darkened. You can see in this image that the mild inherent vignetting is enhanced. This is something that I wanted. I tend to like vignettes... So it was good to see this.
2. The next step was to lighten the area in the middle, and to increase the contrast a bit. I did this by adding a curves adjustment layer. This layer increased the contrast, made the highlights blow-out a bit, losing detail... However, the bird's head retained all the detail that I wanted in it. You may not be able to see the difference in the images here, but rest assured that it's there, and will make a difference when the image is printed on paper or viewed large. Do take my word on it... it comes with years of practice with kids books with 'spot the difference' puzzles.
   
3. This step was possibly the most significant one in the processing of this image. I've mentioned earlier that my intention was not to radically transform the image. Rather, it was to change the mood of the image. I wanted it to look like it was taken a short while after the sun had set (as it may actually have been). The image already had a slight magenta-ish cast and I enhanced this. I also increased the greens in the hi-lights and the lower mid-tones. I then lowered the overall brightness, making the shadows darker to a greater degree than the hi-lights. The colour-cast was not quite what I wanted it to be as yet.
4. I knew what I wanted to do as the next step. I used a "photo filter" adjustment layer. I used an orange tinted filter, and reduced the density to 11% as I thought it was a bit too harsh at the default 25%. This more-or-less was the image that I wanted, but there was something missing. I put the image away for a while and came back to it after I'd worked a bit on my bread-earning job. I realised that what was missing was a real 'photoshop' vignette. Here was my chance to put in a vignette... a 'real' fake one...
   
5. I usually don't like harsh, fake vignettes, so I paint them in by hand. This image called for something else though... I was going to use a gradient and use the multiply layer blending mode, when I came across Brian's nifty trick to create vignettes. So I used it. All I wanted was a little bit of a vignette to make the right-hand side look like it had something of a vignette in it. So, those of you with a low contrast setting on your monitors may not actually see the difference. You may want to turn up the contrast levels...
   
6. But there was something missing. Looking at it for a while, it struck me that the actual subject was way too small in the frame and that all this while, I was trying to retain detail in the bird because I wanted to see it in some depth when displaying it. So, what I needed was a crop. I cropped the frame at the same aspect ratio, but tried to keep the bird so that it filled at least one ninth of the frame. I'd have cropped it closer from the top left, but the horizon line was a bit to close to the top of the frame for me to be comfortable with that... So I kept some of the beautiful vignetting that I wanted, and cropped it as you see it now. Now, the left of the frame was light, with a strong shape almost at a third of the frame. There was sufficient detail in the bird and in the sand in the foreground.
7. That's it... I was done...

Don't forget to head over to Brian Auer's Epic Edits Weblog to see what other people have done for this project; Edit My Photo.

If you enjoyed this break down of photoshop processing and the reasons for each of the steps, do let me know in the comments. I'll make it a point to show you some of the processing behind some of my images.

If you really want to see more, and you're visiting Photography Tip for the first time, do subscribe to our RSS feed.

Today I Discovered the Photography of Andrew Zuckerman

Scroll Horizontally for the Photographs. If you can't see the images in your reader, please do visit the website, it's worth the jump.

Andrew Zuckerman at Art Department

Andrew Zuckerman's Website