We’re on a roll again, and back with another photosode! This time we’re slapping down some more apple gadgetry and apps to create a ipad + iphone tethering device. Also we announce who our winner is from last weeks contest! Just to refresh your brain we are giving away a brand new Black Rapid RS-7, thanks again to Black Rapid for giving us our first give away item. We plan to have more giveaways in the future!
This week’s a short episode, in fact it’s the shortest one, because we realize that not all of you guys have an ipad or iphone, but the ipad+iphone tethering is still a pretty cool concept. We also glance over a couple of cool photography applications for the iphone which we think are worthy mentioning. Even if you may not have an iphone or ipad, there are probably very simliar applications for your type of phone, granted that you don’t have an old bricky nokia (with snake)
We know you’ve been waiting for another episode for a really long time, and so without further ado we bring you episode 8! In this another amazing photosode we cover how to use a flash unit and the different effects you can get with various diffusers. This is also our first somewhat “live demonstration.” Some of the diffusers we cover are Stofen’s omnibounce, Gary Fong’s Lightsphere, and Rogue Flash Bender. We also explore other flash methods such as ceiling bounce, and off camera flash with some creating dramatically different looks, and while others subtly different. The method you pick really depends on your taste and preference, because not every flash technique is right for everyone and every situation
In this photosode our environment consists of a low 8-foot white ceiling with white surrounding walls, and although the photos that we show are results are the products of our surrounding, you may get something different even though you’re using the same settings/methods because your surroundings might and will probably be different.
We’re hoping that this photosode will help you get a better understanding of the seemingly complicated flash, but we believe that the best way to learn about flash is to try it yourself. You might discover something really cool by accident, and maybe you can share that technique with us!
Also, last but not least, we have a sponsor who is giving us a very very very nice gift to give to you guys! Find out who how to win it at the end of this photosode!!!
Do you ever wish you could enhance that crappy photo you took with your iphone, or are you fed up with ipad’s extremely limited photo customizations and nonexistent photo editing. Wish no more, that feature is now available for the Iphone and Ipad (and Android)
And just to update you on the lives of Erich and Nathan, the both of us are still caught in the middle of wedding season which is working us around the clock. We plan to resume our normal photosodes as soon as it slows down a little bit.
Thought we died didn’t you? Or fell apart like a bad band perhaps? We’re still here we’re just extremely busy with our weddings this year. Both of our wedding seasons have been busier than our previous ones (which is good for us) but not so good for you guys, and for that we apologize. We’re taking a short break, but we’re going to continue blogging with useful information.
We found this nice little link that shows you how to hold a camera still without a tripod. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I thought it was quite interesting and helpful.
This week we bring you something a little bit different! We teach you a little bit about the flip side of photography: the editing! Of course we all wish that a perfect photo comes out of every click of the camera, but rarely does that happen. A lot of times there’s a little underexposure, or overexposure, or burned out highlights, or incorrect white balance, and the list goes on. Most of theses problems can be edited and improved in Photoshop, and other photo-editing programs. Without a doubt the majority of all published photographs have some sort of photo correction/manipulation/touching-up. Sometimes even too much. We believe the approach to editing should be tasteful and subtle. Never should photoshop be overdone. Too much of it could create something that looks tacky, ugly, or completely useless.
In this episode we mention a few of the popular photoshop actions that are available such as Kevin Kubota’s Image Tools, and Totally Rad Actions. With those actions and other ones similar to those, you can create really cool effects with a simple click. It’s really good if you are editing more than a few photos, and also if you’re just lazy. Check out their websites if you want to see more amazing before/after photos.
Kevin Kubota Image Tools Sample taken from this page
For those who can’t afford photoshop, there’s always Adobe Lightroom, which is arguably equal in power and usefulness. Photoshop is really good at fine tuning one single photo, but Lightroom works wonders when making changes with more than one photo. Lightroom is efficient, fast, and versatile. Now with version 3 out, batch processing is easier than ever.
In the second half of this episode we take photos of ourselves and demonstrate how to enhance them in photoshop. These photos below are straight out of the camera, and we photoshop them and narrate what we do to make these photos better. (Not that we need any photoshopping since, you know, we’re so handsome and all.)
Lets talk about specific Photoshop techniques, we’re going to go over fill light, color correction, healing brush/patch tool, and dodging and burning. Starting off with fill light adjustments; changing fill light basically adjusts the mid tones of a photo while preserving most of the highlights and shadows. This is important when the subject of your photo very close to the midtones and you want to brighten the subject without affecting the other parts of the image. These situations are common when photographing a person/subject and the person/subject appears underexposed. Note: it is typically better to underexpose an image as to overexpose it because once an image is overexposed (burned out) it is very difficult to retain the details of the image, where as if it’s underexposed there’ still information that’s hidden in the shadows. But too much boosting of an underexposed image could reveal a lot of noise/digital artifacts/crap that you won’t want.
Next lets brief through healing brush/patch tool which is an amazingly useful tool, and every girls best friend. Lets admit that nobody has perfect skin, we all have pores, pimples, scars, blemishes, and etc. etc. Luckily for everybody, in Photoshop we can remove them digitally, and make people look a lot better than they actually do.
Before: Taken by Erich
After: The changes are subtle because the model doesn’t have a lot of blemishes, but theres still a couple under the chin and left cheek that are gone in the edited photo
Color Correction is tricky but definitely a life saver. Anytime you photograph indoors with artificial lighting, there’s going to be different colors of light. Tungsten radiates a yellowish warm tone, while fluorescent gives off a cooler tone, then if you have any natural light its a neutral tone. Its a little bit more complicated than that sometimes, and its really hard to get the right white balance for the camera, so Photoshop/Lightroom has to come in help out. In Photoshop you could play with levels/color balance/curves to try to fine tune the colors, but in Lightroom there the color correction color picker where you click on an area of your photo that is supposed to be white, and it ‘automatically’ fixes it for you. But just like anythings that is done ‘automatically’ its never always accurate.
Finally we’ll talk about dodging and burning, the technique is as old as photography itself. It’s lightening and darkening certain areas of the photo used for emphasizing and de-emphasizing. A lot of dodging can help create a bright photos, where as a lot of burning can help create dark and edgy photos. In the example below the highlights and the shape of the women is emphasized because there’s some slight dodging in the midtones and some obvious burning in the darker areas to really accentuate the figure of the woman’s body and figure. Furthermore, the back half of the woman’s body has completely been burned in to create a slimmer, more dramatic image.
Before: Photo taken by Erich
After:
Thats it for this week! Stay tuned for more tips on next weeks episode!
Time lapse, we’ve all seen them, we’ve all enjoyed them. So with my recent trip to Las Vegas, I thought I’d try one out as I’d never done one before. I learned a lot and I’d like to share that with you today!
Items needed: Camera – I used the Canon 7D
Tripod - something to hold the camera in place, if out a window, in a car, in the field. Different mounting methods are fine as long as it’s all secure and not going to move.
Large Memory Card – I used a 32GB CF Card. You’re going to sometimes be taking 4000 photos possibly, so might as well start with a large one in case you ever decide to do a session over 10 hours. Timer Remote Trigger (Intervalometer)- Not cheap, but worth it for things like this. Also great for lightning photos or other timed photography techniques.
Quicktime 7 – This is what I used to compile the images.
Fully Charged Battery – This is going to take some juice over a long period of time, make sure it’s charged. If you have a double battery pack, even better.
Process:
For my time lapse, I mounted the tripod in the backseat, tied it all down so it wouldn’t move much, and then locked the camera in with a 15mm Fisheye. Because it was on my 7D, it wasn’t truly a 15mm, which helped. I then connected the remote trigger and set the timer to take a photo ever 20 seconds. Now leaving LA, I was going to be in traffic, I didn’t need hundreds of photos of the back of cars. So I changed it to 30 seconds at one point. Then once out on the road, I found I was moving quickly and could have it take photos more often to show more of the scenery that was passing by. This is all trial and error, so feel free to experiment with that timing. I then also had the remote trigger dangling over my shoulder, so if I ever came up to a location that needed more frames, like the bikers, or the Primm Casinos in Nevada, I could press it a few times more and get a slower effect.
Over the next 4 hours, it accumulated only around 1700 photos. I used Automatic settings and ISO, cause I figured the light would be changing over the day and I couldn’t be changing settings while driving. During a sunset or outside time lapse, I might be more particular and do manual settings and change those over time to fit my mood. Again, this is all your own preference.
Once downloaded to my computer, if needed I would adjust any of the photos that didn’t work. There were a few inside tunnels or overpasses that were too dark and didn’t need to be in there. I then exported them as JPG in sequence to a folder. In Quicktime 7 you have the option to “open image sequence.” With that you select only the first filename. It asks how many frames a second you would like, typical is 30, but you can choose less if you want to make it longer or slower. I choose 15 frames a second for these and it worked out perfectly. Then it compiled the entire photo sequence and all you have to do is press Save As movie. Simple and done!
Now I bet you thought it was much harder then that.
Variations:
So you think you wanna try it. Well here are a few things I noticed. First, when shooting out a hotel window, the dirtiness of the window is going to show sometimes, especially if it goes into night. The reflections, the glare, everything will come out more in longer exposures, so if you’re doing it out a hotel window at night, beware. Second, the battery was eaten up pretty quickly as it was taking photos very often. Have backups if you plan on doing more then 1 a day. And thirdly, be creative, I was pretty simple with mine, so I’ll be trying some even crazier ones later. I even heard one person put their system on rails and did time lapse while rotating around an object.
Today we bring you Episode 6, and we bring it to you from San Diego! This episode is a special episode, not that the other photosodes are not special, but this ones super special because it’s about weddings which is what we specialize in. We also we do this show the day immediately after we photographed a wedding. WIth that being said we would like to thank Kim and James for letting us use our photos/video for this special episode. They are such a beautiful couple and had a wedding which was nothing short of it.
In this episode we go over what we believe are our top ten tips for shooting a wedding. Frankly, there’s a lot more to shooting a wedding than our top ten tips, so don’t go out shooting a wedding after watching this episode thinking you’ll know everything there is to shooting a wedding, but this is our attempt to sum up some pointers.
You’ll quickly notice that in this episode we’re not at our studio, but rather sitting cozily in the hotel. Also we’ve implemented some previously recorded footage from the wedding into the video to give you guys an idea of how Nathan photographs a wedding. Erich was the assistant + second shooter + behind the scenes videographer. And of course, Nathan was the main/first shooter.
If you would to know what equipment we used to photograph the wedding…
Nathan was using
Canon 5d mark II and Canon 7d
Canon 100mm 2.8 Macro
Canon 50mm f1.2
Canon 24-105mm f4
Canon 15mm f2.8 Fish Eye
Canon 85mm 1.8
Canon 580exII
Black Rapid Double Strap
Erich was using
Canon 5d mark II
Canon 100mm 2.8 IS Macro
Canon 50mm 1.4
Canon 17-40mm F4
Canon 580exII
Anyways, we hope you enjoy our on-site photosode! And here are some photos that we photographed from the wedding.
Aside from the technical stuff, we would like to explore a few techniques used to capture a good wedding photo. Weddings are without a doubt a very emotionally saturated event, there are people crying, laughing, and smiling all the time. And every single emotion should tried to be captured. When you’re photographing a wedding we would recommend acting like a chameleon in two ways, first you want to blend in with your background you want to act like you’re not there for most of the wedding. Through that technique you’ll be able to get images that are candid and real. Secondly you’ll want to be looking all around you at all times because there’s so much going on at a wedding, and if you only through the viewfinder of a camera you’ll be missing everything on the sides and behind you. Keep your eyes and head moving and your camera ready at all times.
We’ll explain some more. If you are shooting a ceremony and you’re posted at the front of the aisle, you will see the officiant directly in front of you with the bride on the left and the groom on the right. But also behind you you’ll see the parents and family members at around 5 o’clock and 8 o clock. You’ll realize that thats a huge viewing area, and our eyes don’t grow on the side or backs of our heads so you’ll need to keep an eye on all the key players in a wedding by constantly surveying the surroundings.
Furthermore, a wedding is a celebration of the love between two people. Obviously the photos from a wedding should show that as well. The only problem is it’s not that easy to capture the emotion between a couple in front of a camera for many reasons. People don’t normally kiss and show affection in front of a camera, so why would they feel comfortable doing that in front of a camera? Thats where the photographer comes in has to give good direction and make the couple feel comfortable. This would require a photographer to talk to them, make jokes, and direct them in a way that will make the couple feel at ease.
This week one of our viewers Ian Corrigan sent in a couple of photos for a wedding critique, and since we got them after we filmed our show, we’ll critique them here in the blog.
What we like: Good composition with the horizon in the upper third of the photo and the couple in the right third of this photo. The nice background with the water, buildings, and boat gives the photo a nice open comfortable feel. Also, the elements in this photo are simple enough that it doesn’t distract the viewer away from the couple.
What we think could be better: The lighting and angle of this photo doesn’t allow to see who the bride is. We believe that in the case of a couple photo like this one, the bride is always more important than the groom. Actually, we can’t really see the groom too much either because of the shadows. We think this photo could be fixed if you swapped them around so that the girls face isnt covered by her own hair, and also to rotate them a little so that the lighting doesn’t create bad shadows.
What we like: She seems to be a pretty bride.
What we think could be better: The entire photo is in the same depth of field (everything is in focus) so the bride gets lost in all the detail in he background such as the fence and the poles. There’s also some construction going on in the right side of the photo. Another thing, we can’t figure out what’s going on in this photo, the bride looks like she’s either worried or she’s running away from the husband/wedding. Part of that reason is the way she is standing, both her legs are bent exactly the same way, which creates an awkward stance.
To see the video in a bigger size and higher resolution click here
This week marks the beginning of both NBA Finals and the World Cup which is why this week we bring you sports photography! Sports isn’t the only thing we’re bringing to you today, we’re also proud to present our first guest speaker to our show Scott Roeder!
Don’t let his age fool you, Scott Roeder’s skills in sports photography are far beyond his age. Even though he’s in college his work looks like that of a full-fledged professional sports photographer. Originally from the bay area Scott came down to the sunny side of California where he attends University of California, Irvine. The birth of his photography came right at the end of his second year, and considering he’s graduating college this week, you’ll realize he’s learned a lot in just a couple of years. And talk about “jumping right into the game,” Scott was lucky enough to be able to photograph the X Games the very first summer he got his camera. Since then his skills in shooting sports have honed so tremendously that he not only photographs but creates amazing video footage for the sports department at UCI.
In this photosode, we talk about the basics of shooting sports photography, a couple sports photography organizations, but mostly we focus on the amazing work of Scott Roeder. We ask him how captures some of his amazing sports in action, and also delve into his sports feature portraits as well.
We kid you not when we say amazing video footage! When we first took a look at the video, we thought we were watching a commercial from ESPN. It has stunningly sharp video, with epic music, and a legit voiceover. We want to say it’s very similar to the popular NBA videos “Where Amazing Happens.” Check it out for yourself. We’d recommend you opening it in a different window so you experience the HD
For more on Scott Roeder, please visit his website at ScottRoeder.com
