Photo: Light Test

I decided to upgrade my lighting equipment a notch. The photo on the right is the first test with the new equipment - on the patio with afternoon sunlight as hair light, and a beauty dish camera right as key light. Exposed at ISO 100, f/8, 1/250s, and an flash/ambient ratio of 80%.

My original lighting equipment was entry level gear, which was great in terms of learning about lighting, and figuring out what I liked and didn't like. But as with any entry level gear, you do get what you pay for. This new gear is in the middle of the field in terms of lighting equipment and should suite me well for the next few years as my photographic journey progresses.

The flash head on this unit has an output of 2,400Ws at full power. Even with the softbox on the head my light meter read ISO 100 and f/36 at about 5-6' from the head. That is a lot of light. I did want to make sure that my investment into this equipment would give me enough flexibility for indoor and outdoor, as well as larger spaces. So far I think I chose well.

This is very exciting - in case you couldn't tell....

Inspiration: "My God That's Fantastic, Let Me Make a Picture of That"

Via Thought's of a Bohemian, an exceptionally inspirational short film from Aurora Photo Agency. It's a 11 minute short with pictures of some of their photographers showing the beauty in Photo Journalism and commentary by the photographers. The essence of capturing a moment in a still photograph in the times where much is going towards video as a format and traditional newspaper are downsizing in throve. Click on the link below to watch.

Aurora - Jump: 9 Photographers

Blogging: Blogger's New Blog Roll Feature

I use blogger as my blogging platform. Recently they've added a new feature which is pretty cool - a dynamic blog roll. It not only displays the list of blogs I configure, but also shows the most recent entry, when it was made, and sorts by most recently updated. That makes it easier to have a long blog roll without taking up too much space. By make it more dynamic it's also more engaging rather than just some dead space in the right nav bar.

I've just added three of these to my blog: one for the photo bloggers I follow, one for the photo business blogs I read, and one for active photographers I follow.

And in typical fashion, Google always find this little extra to make a feature cool: When you configure the blog roll and you use Google Reader for your reading, you can import all your blogs by simply clicking checkboxes next to the ones you want to include. Well done.

Which brings me to Google Reader itself. I've been reading blogs for a long time, but always found it somewhat cumbersome to stay on top of it with the subscriptions built into the various browsers. I've tried the standalone readers, but they're more added clutter on your screen, when I live most days in a browser. And then the issue of keeping things in synch between multiple computers without double-reading. Insert Google Reader: It's a free and web based news consolidator. That solves the clutter problem. And then the best thing is, that it maintains your subscription list on Google's servers - which means I can log in from my work laptop and read, then jump on the bus for the commute and read from my Blackberry, and when I'm at home at night, continue reading from my home laptop - all one integrated experience, a single blog list, a single view of what I've already read. The only downside: Google has insight into one more piece of my life. But then they pretty much know everything there is to know anyway.

Photo Shoot: From Concept To Result for a Life Style Stock Photo

This post documents the steps I went through earlier today to produce some life style photos for a set of green living images I'm working on. I thought it would be interesting to see the steps from start to finish, in terms of sharing the work of a photographer.

The history of these photos started with me planning to participate in the Shoot! The Day event from Photoshelter. I went through some of the online materials and became interested in the Green Living section of the content. Green Living is a topic that I'm personally interested in. Plus reading the background, it seems that a few standard compositions are well grazed but outside of that the field is relatively unexplored. That translates into higher potential if I can make a meaningful contribution, as I'm not competing against millions of similar images from other stock photographers. From a pure business perspective, finding a niche that has a demand/supply imbalance in favor of demand is always a great opportunity.

After looking through the shoot list and commentary on Photoshelter's site I spent additional time thinking through possible compositions for Green Living. I maintain an electronic notebook for all these things. In the end, after browsing thegreenguide.com, an interesting section of the National Geographic website (which I came across after searching for Green Living on Google) I ended up with about 30 different compositions on my list to shoot. The one I picked for this shoot was the issue of water filters - we had recently switched to using a counter top water filter, and thus I had the prop and everything, I just needed to put together a composition.

I decided to do the shoot in my kitchen during the afternoon. The windows are West facing, giving great light on a sunny afternoon. One of the elements of stock photography, particularly life style is to have bright and airy light. Good window light is well suited for that.

So I cleared the counter of everything but the water filter, wiped down the counter and the sink to get rid of any stains (keeping in mind the production value of a good shot). Then I walked around to visualize the composition to see which angle I wanted to shoot with, and even took a few test shots. It quickly became clear that I would catch more of the background than I had anticipated and more cleaning was going to be required. Move the dog dishes, and also clear and wipe the dining table. I also took a number of shots to see if I could get the main subject (water filter) large enough to stand out as the main subject, yet still capture the nice window light to give it the airy feeling. Shooting with a wide aperture of f/4 gave me a recognizable but somewhat blurred background, which I felt worked nicely. I could have switched to another lens and go even wider, but that becomes almost too artistic for stock.

With these problems solved, I had advanced to the shot on the left. Background clean, and the right perspective. The first few shots were handheld, so I had more flexibility, but now that I knew pretty much how I wanted to shoot this, I mounted the camera on a tripod to reduce variability.

There were still two problems with the light - the water filter was too dark relative to the background light, and I had a couple of distracting hot spots in the window. I solved the latter by tilting the blinds differently so that the sunlight couldn't reflect of the slats but still come into the window.

To solve the lighting on the water filter, I setup a small flash on a light stand, shooting into an umbrella, and triggered with a Pocket Wizard. It took a few minutes of using the light meter, adjusting the flash, and trying different positions until I was satisfied that the flash created fill light, without making the whole scene look unnatural. In terms of a flash/ambient ratio I really didn't want to go above 50% for that reason.

The final position of the flash / umbrella was high up at about 20 degree angle from the water filter, camera left. There's a setup shot at the end of this post that shows the final arrangement of everything.

But the lighting was still not quite right. The upper part of the water filter with its blue plastic looked pretty dull. So I brought in a second flash which I setup bare but with a snoot pointed right at the blue area of the water filter to shoot through the water and simulate additional light as if it came from the window.

I wanted a shot with a person in it, as product use is always much more personal with at least some body parts in the composition. Since for today I had to be my own model, I setup the camera with another set of Pocket Wizards on another channel and with a motor cable, and set the camera to 10s delay on the shutter. Then I got a water bottle, made sure I turned it such that the Eddie Bauer logo was covered by my hands, and took a number of shots. Always release the camera, then grab the water bottle and poor. It took a few tries to make sure I wasn't blocking either flash, and adding a small reflector on the bottom to get just a tad more fill light on my hands.

I shot a total of 44 exposures by the time I was done, between my various composition tests and light adjustments. I downloaded all of them into Lightroom and used my previously described system to quickly narrow it down to the final two candidates for post processing. I applied my standard action in Photoshop to setup my post processing, and the two resulting files are below.

To call out some of the changes - for the second shot (pouring water into bottle), I had to clone out some of the hair on my arm since it caught too much light from the flash. I removed the electric outlet on the wall, and the merged the two tiles on the counter top. All elements which were distracting. I also removed a few minor hot spots. I applied some selective darkening on the counter top and hands, and some selective brightening on the water filter. A bit of color correction and an unsharp mask to finish it off. The overall result was still pretty dark though, so I added an exposure adjustment layer to brighten it up. That added a bit too much noise at the bottom of the photo and I had to do some tweaking to leave it where when viewed at full pixel size it doesn't fail the stock QA procedure. The edits on the first photos are much less complex since it came out mostly clean. Some cropping, some brightness adjustments, and minor sharpening.

As final images of this post a setup shot when all was set and done and a screenshot of the Photoshop layers of the final image. The camera is on a tripod in the hallway, one flash into the umbrellas in the background, and the other flash on the light stand in the foreground with the snoot.

Reflecting on these final result: I achieved the result I was going for, which is satisfying. But there are always things that could have been done better. The overall composition worked, but wasn't great. The gesture of the hands adds life but doesn't harmonize enough for me. And while the subject and window light worked, the foreground/background harmony could have been better as well. A little more styling of the background to look more lively, such as some subtle flowers on the dining table may have given the impression of this being a living space without being distracting. There's a reason professions like food stylists exist. That's one of the balances of shooting in actual living places - they look more real, but they are also hard to keep clear of clutter. On the exposure front I would have gone for higher exposure to give me more leeway in post processing.

Now the images need to be saved as high quality JPEG files, verified to be big enough (> 48MB uncompressed), and uploaded to Photoshelter for submission. The final step is to save the keywords to be used for the image. Using a system that I recently developed to make sure I go systematically through it from visual description (including people detail), the bigger concepts, and technical elements. Sometimes it's easier to structure around questions - what? (key objects and activities); where? (setting); why? when? (specific context).

These are the keywords I came up with for this image:

better taste, countertop, drinking, environmentally friendly, filling up, green products, hands, kitchen, life style, liquid, person, reusable, sunlit, tap water, water, water bottle, water filter.

The photos are now in Photoshelter's queue for review. It will take some 10-12 days before they either accept or reject them, at which point I will finish the keywording and make the image live where it is searchable.

So this is what it took for me to go from deciding to shoot a photo for green living on stock to making it happen. I'm still constantly learning in this process, and I'm sure there are many more seasoned stock photographers who have much more refined processes and workflows, better keywording systems and so on.

It always amazes me how much work has to go into the planning and staging of a shoot. Folks that think they can just show up with a camera and press the button will only walk away with the same snapshot everyone else has. Which is why I think that Photoshelter's move to create the School of Stock is a great contribution to the community.

Lensbaby: New Interpretations

The Lensbaby specialty lens opens the door to new interpretation of old classic compositions. In this case a quick shot of an open dictionary page, but with very selective focus on just a few words.

 

I first got introduced to the Lensbaby lens during the Savannah workshop on Location Portraiture. It's a fascinating, yet very challenging lens. Craig Tanner of the Radiant Vista is a big proponent and expert on its use, and has many examples as part of his light diary entries. In short it's a lens designed for selective focus with intentional distortions - more so than the tilt/shift lenses. But it's manual focus, fixed aperture rings require a lot of practice to to get reliable results with.

I recently added a 3G Lensbaby to my lens selection and started getting acquainted with it. I'll follow-up with more posts as I get more proficient with it, and refine the technique of using it.

Jim Goldstein on the trouble w/ flickr content control

Jim has a good blog post on How Every Flickr Photo went on sale this weekend. Everyone who uses flickr should read it.

There have been numerous cases where flickr photos have been abused. Not surprising given that flickr is one of the biggest photo collections, and it's freely accessible not only via the web but via an API. It's not surprising that it becomes the target of people trying to make a quick buck by bending the rules or ignoring them altogether.

What is less unfortunate though is that it seems that flickr itself doesn't appear interested (at least publicly) in addressing the problem. If they don't, and this becomes a bigger concern among more folks, they might see people delete photos and go to other sites. As with many social networking sites, your success can be short lived if you take a mis-step. As someone put it a few weeks ago at a conference, with a particular view of Facebook, another popular online site, to be successful in this space, you not only have to outperform the competition, you also have to outbehave the competition. Ignoring problems and then asking for forgiveness later is a recipe for failure. The recent departure of both of the founders of flickr from Yahoo, and some of the rumors around them probably don't help on that front. Here's the official Yahoo News story on their departure, and here a bit more background.

Though there's no doubt that flickr will continue on to get pictures from the hordes of 'people with cameras' to use a more PC version of this phrase, because they will less likely care about the usages of their images. In fact they may be flattered to see one of their images being distributed as cell phone wall paper. But it would change the mix of the content on flickr, and a slide towards lower quality of content would eventually make it a less attractive target, and it could quietly fade into history.

As it comes to why Yahoo has flickr as a way to build social content to drive traffic, it's not surprising that Google does it better than Yahoo. Google uses the various image assets they have as part of their network to improve search results, and in turn drive traffic which they can properly monetize. I have yet to see Yahoo succeed on that front judging from the web traffic I see at various places I monitor this data. Considering that running flickr isn't cheap, and pro subscription fees nowhere near pay for it, having a strategy to monetize it is key to success. Yahoo seems to be struggling on that front all around as has been amply covered in recent news coverage.

I do use flickr, but only for sharing some photos with other flickr users who I met through a flickr related event. And I also routinely delete photos from flickr once they've served their purpose. Seems that this isn't a bad practice given the problems Jim describes.

Photographer Web Sites & Design

A major part of photography today is the web presence. A photographer without a web site will have a tough time, whatever the genre is. Everyone you meet, any potential client, and also your peers, and the talent you work with want to see your body of work and judge whether you are the one they should be paying attention to or investing their money or time into. It's like e-mail in today's corporate world. The CEO who gets all his e-mail printed by his admin, and then marks it up or dictates replies is almost extinct. Not only is it an effective way of communicating and showing off your body of work, but it also demonstrates that you're up to date on the tools of the trade, and current marketing trends, and so on. That in itself is a measure on whether you will be as up to date on the equipment and techniques when taking the next big photo.

Having established that having a web site is a must have, the next question is what kind? A survey of web sites from photographers shows one thing that they all have in common: extremely refined visual appearance, dynamic interface, fairly little written content. A short sampling of sites of well known photographers: Vincent Laforet, Jennifer Taylor, Stan Musilek, Platon, JF Rauzier. That is not surprising as any photographer is extremely attuned to the visual impact and so is the client. After all we're in the visual impact business. Having a visually unimaginative web site would not create confidence into our abilities. And with the written word - for one we tend to clone out everything that is distracting and we're not always good with the written word as we are with the pixel - so less tends to be the choice.

Looking at these web sites, many rely on web technologies like Flash and the like to build these highly dynamic sites. The downside however is that they become unreadable to search engines (that is until lately anyway - Adobe and Google have announced that they're taking steps to improve on this, though the jury is still out). That means anyone searching on any of the big search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Live will not be able to find your site.

That's ok if they already know you and who you are. They will get to your site and you will be able to impress them with the visual impact and go on happily with your business. But what if you haven't arrived yet? If you're still looking for new clients, new art buyers? How do you stand out of the crowd and make yourself findable? Well, an SEO friendly web site is a good element of that strategy. And if everyone else has SEO unfriendly sites even better, as you will have less competition with the search engines.

Now in fairness, in many genres of today's photography world the promotions do not involve finding your next client via web search. It's driven of e-mail, promo cards, and good old networking of who you are connected with. You get referred to by a satisfied client. And if I had to choose investing time into networking, keeping my clients happy, or creating the next best SEO friendly web site, I certainly would pick the former. But then ideally we should do it all - multi-channel marketing, right?

So why all this long blog post on web site design trade-offs? Well, I spent all day yesterday, in what started out as a small, "I have an hour, let me see what I should do" project and turned into a significant change on my own web site. Having worked and trained in the field of SEO, I had gone the route of a self-designed web site (rather than a hosted site, or ready-made template), and one that tries to strike a balance between design and search engine friendly content.

My project yesterday involved replacing the top-level navigation scheme which used to be a hard to navigate and not particularly attractive set of links, into a higher touch dynamic menu. After looking through many templates at Template Monster, and browsing the Adobe Exchange I settled on a Flash based menu which was designed in an SEO friendly manner from f-source. While most of my photos are contained in a Flash based slide show, that's ok since search engines don't comprehend images for the most part anyway. The key is the content around the images, your bio, your contact info - that should never be part of the Flash content.

So it is a constant evolution and set of trade-offs. Yesterday's work got me one step further along the path of a more visually appealing web site: http://www.allklier.com/.