Adobe Lightroom 4 Beta – Initial Thoughts
Yesterday Adobe announced the availablity of a beta version of Lightroom 4, the next version in it’s line of photo cataloging and RAW conversion software. As daily user of Lightroom, a new version is always something fun to mess around with.
First things first, this is beta 1 people, which means that it installs separate from earlier versions of Lightroom and uses it’s own library. Don’t be an idiot and go messing around with your real data here, it’s too early for that. Duplicate some raw files and import them to play with. I for one have only installed it on the Air to play around. You have been warned.
Ok, so new features I like:
The Develop Module has been moved around a bit and has a new 2012 engine underneath. Gone is the ‘brightness’ slider which I never used much anyway and they’ve added new ‘Whites’ and ‘Blacks’ sliders which lets you move the white and black points respectively. These two along with the remaining ‘Highlights’ and ‘Shadows’ sliders giving you finer control over the bottom and top end of the luminance range. You end up being able to control the curve at both ends better. More like a parametric EQ for pictures. Very cool.
They’ve also added a few options to the adjustment brush tool. Now you can paint in noise reduction, moire removal, mess with local shadows and highlights. And perhaps my favorite of the bunch, local color temp and tint. So when you’ve had to shoot in mixed lighting for some reason and need to have part of the picture as tungsten and another as daylight for instance. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it’s a relative thing, so paint in +/- 100 temp instead of having it be a normal kelvin scale. Very neat idea though and something I’ve wished for before.
They’ve also added per channel curves adjustments for color correction adn such. Basically, you can do more of your work in Lightroom before or without taking it into Photoshop.
There are new additions to the DNG spec too, including a new lossy compression option. Almost all of the advantages of RAW while using much less disk space. They suggest it for outtakes that you want to keep around but don’t need to be obsessive about. You can also now lower the resolution of a RAW file without losing the ability to mess with the data later. Another way to save space.
Another neat addition is the ability to email a file straight from Lightroom without having to export it and then attach it in gmail or whatever. Soft-proofing in the Print module has also been added, I tend to get good results from stock profiles and a well calibrated monitor, but I’m sure some people will be quite happy with that one.
Oh and the video features are huge. Playing video for one, and having the ability to use most of the Develop module controls on them. Setting in and out points, etc. I don’t mess with video much and if I did, I’d be doing it in Premiere or FCP, so I’m not sure how useful this stuff actually is.
All that stuff is super, now the additions which made me groan:
There’s a new Maps module which will grab GPS data from your pictures and let you find photos by location. This is obviously a cool use of the metadata for people with tagged photos, but most cameras don’t have GPS, so now there’s a whole new module up top that I will never use just like the current Web module. If you’re going to keep adding these Adobe, have some check boxes in the preferences to turn them off.
Another new module is Books, which lets you layout and upload a Blurb book straight from Lightroom. This is also very neat and I wish I had it when I made the 365 Portraits book a few years ago, but alas. Some people are complaining that it’s only Blurb. I’m sure Adobe made a deal and in my experience it’s a good choice. Blurb does a pretty good job all things considered. Also a module I wouldn’t mind having the ability to turn off most of the time.
Oh and one omission which has been driving me nuts lately. Many of my .psd (PhotoShopDocument) files end up getting too big, especially with the no flate plugin, over the max of 2GB so I have to save them as .psb (PhotoShopBig) format. However, despite the fact that .psb is an adobe creation Lightroom doesn’t see them so they don’t show up in the library. I just have to remember “Oh, I had to make this a .psb, I guess I have to go find it in Finder). Annoying. I’ve put a post on the beta forums but no answer yet.
So there you have it, I’m sure there’s more in there I haven’t discovered yet. Good start so far. The interface is a little buggy right now, a number of times I’ve had to click a pic a few times before it shows up in the main Develop window for instance, but I’m sure they’re on it. Let me know what you think below.
Setup Notes on the December Portraits (Part 3 of 3)
Part 3 of the ‘behind the scenes’ notes from my December Portrait series. Here are parts One and Two if you missed them.
21: Minx
Pretty basic setup. Three speedlights. One up and to the right of Charity as something like a key light. Another slightly behind to her left and the last next to the camera for fill. Overall not too difficult to shoot a pretty lady lounging on a couch. Slight crop and light shaping in post.
22: Birthday
One of my favorite in the series. My friend Kecia on the evening of her birthday sitting and blowing out candles on a toy birthday cake with my adorable nephew Bert. Not the kind of thing you can make an 18 month old do. Luckily he was interested enough to sit down and play with Kecia for the 30 seconds it took to get the shot. Composited together a shot of him and one of her in the end.
23: Escape
24: Late
As I was down with my family for the holidays in DC, I had a couple volunteers to help me out while I was down there including Adrianne. Who climbed up the chimney of an abandoned picnic house in the woods down the trail of a park near her house. Felt very fairy tale so I thought it would be fun to have her trying to escape her captors and then climbing too high. One speedlight through a diffuser as I recall, camera left aiming up.
My sister and her husband Kevin, who you might remember as the crazy man with the knife in the shot from December 2nd. Since it was Christmas Eve and their 2nd wedding anniversary, I cast them as the wife waiting for her husband who’s late for the party. One speedlight through an umbrella. Composite of two shots to get the expressions right.
25: Together
Christmas Day. Perfect time to do an homage to the Rockwell painting of the family at the table. It was dark out by the time we ate though, so light is from a speedlight bouncing off the wall camera left to mimic window light.
26: Espionage
Youri is a friend of mine from NYC who’s family lives in northern VA, so we met up in town and shot her as a spy stealing from the national archives. It’s got a distinctly Boris and Natasha feel, but it was fun. Shot in the daytime with a speedlight through a diffuser to the right. A bit of post to darken the whole thing and make it look more like a headlight on her as well as turn on the streetlights.
27: Wrestle
My little redhead friend Mary is always game to take some pictures and had an idea about arm wrestling. Her idea was to be a dame watching two men wrestle, but I thought it would be more fun to have her be one of the contestants. Her mustached friend Tad played a good shill. Held a speedlight with diffusion panel over the two of them with a lightstand and a reflector underneath. Added a little lens flare and stole smoke from the Capcom shot earlier in the month to complete the mood.
28: Blustery
Crazy windy day gave me the idea of having someone actually picked up by their umbrella. Had Annie jump off a foot stool and then later comped her into a plate shot taken a few minutes later. Available light on a cloudy day. Had to shoot at 1600 ISO to get a fast enough shutter speed to catch her in mid air.
29: Bathe
Zed (the on with the razor) and I talked a few months ago about doing a shot with her washing her girlfriend’s hair in a big old bathtub. My friend Dave has one which I shot him in during my Drabbles series a couple years ago and he kindly volunteered it again. There was windowlight but not quite enough of it for the aperture I needed so I ended up bouncing a speedlight off the ceiling which in a white tile room just bounces it everywhere. Wished that I could have backed up and used a slightly longer lens, but the space is quite cramped so I had to go wide and try to minimize the distortion of the size of her leg for instance. Though I think it makes the razor and her hand more interested and 3D.
30: Gaming
My buddy, frequent assistant, and podcast partner Dan is a Words with Friends nut, and plays with a number of people at any one time. So I thought it would be fun having him playing everyone at once in a virtual blackness. Overhead softbox and additional gridded strobe straight onto the game board. Moved the camera in relation to the board and took several shots which I composited together.
31: Boudoir
Eleanor is one of my favorite people. So on the morning of New Year’s Eve I went round to her place and spent an hour shooting her rolling around in a sheet on her bed. It’s a tough job people, it really is. I wanted the bright sunlight but wasn’t getting enough so I put a monolight out on her fire escape and then laid a big 4×6′ diffuser right outside the right window, effectively mimicking as much sunlight as I wanted.
Setup Notes on the December Portraits (Part 2 of 3)
Here’s the second in a series of posts explaining the how of the December Portrait Series. If you missed the first 10, here’s the post from yesterday. Enjoy.
11:Evergreen
One speedlight with a 36″ shoot-through umbrella camera right. I wanted to do it all in one shot, but with 4 people you often have to composite together the best of each. For this one it was three pics. The men in one and the girls from the other two. The chaos of tree branches actually makes that composite a little more forgiving.
12: Multiplicity
This shot is almost exactly how it looked in the camera so I didn’t even bother showing you the before. We shot in Times Square and during a long exposure (1.5 seconds as I recall) my assistant Dan popped the flash 3 times as I panned Pat’s head across the frame. Not really the kind of picture I’d normally take, but projects like this are for experimentation, so there’s an experiment.
13: Cupcake
Two big soft sources, one on either side of her. Camera actually in the oven on a timer. Was a real pain in the neck to setup after each shot and required a lot of post to bring her our in the picture. Not as successful as it could have been. I realized later that it would have been better if she also had her palms on the glass in panic, or one hand on the window and the other pulling the bottom hem of the apron up to her mouth or other such exaggerated reaction.
14: Newspaperman
Tony Ortega is the Editor of The Village Voice and my idea was to make a homage to Charles Foster Kane complete with snow globe (which I shot and composited in separately). Four speedlights. One with a 12″ softbox above and to the left to act as a keylight on his face. One bracketed to the window frame to the right as a rim light along his back and head. One snooted down aiming at the bar in the back. And one really low power on camera pointed to bounce off the wall behind me for fill and to trigger the rest of the lights with optical slaves.
15: Twisted
The original idea was to do something with refraction through the water in a fishtank, but it didn’t gel, so Craig and I went outside and I shot him walking in both directions in order to composite the top and botton half of him together. Lit by a 46″ umbrella on a Profoto AcuteB
16: Reformation
Neal is a recovering heroin addict who I shot for my drabbles series a few years ago. He is in a better place than he was before and I wanted to play with the idea of baptism and redemption. So I shot him in his bathroom with the crazy shower curtain. Two speedlights, one inside the tub and another handheld above with the diffuser panel down. Then in his hall an artist neighbor had drawn a ghost on the mirror, so I took some pictures and composited Neal into the mirror as if the camera was looking through his eyes.
17: Princess
Lux is the editor of Fleshbot.com and she and I had talked a year ago about taking a picture like this. The original idea was to shoot her from above laying on a pile of writhing bodies, but it’s surprisingly difficult to get that many volunteers and then also next to impossible to get her laying across them with any grace. So instead I used the naked bodies to frame the shot along the edges and made it less raunchy and more glamorous. Two big octabanks, one top right the other bottom left. The subjects were laying down on a slightly satiny curtain I picked up at the corner store on the way. Shot from above in a friends loft which was perfect for the concept.
18: Rescue
Emily, the girl lifting the car, is tiny so I though it would be fun to exaggerate the fact by having her doing something superhuman like lifting a car. I didn’t have access to the car’s jack and it was too cold out to get that involved anyway, so I instead composited a shot of her, one of the car shot at a lower angle so I could make it look lifted, and one of me on the ground as the victim of a horrible accident. The AcuteB shot through an umbrella to soften it was used in all three shots. Also comped in a prettier sunset.
19: Keys
Relatively simple one. Shot Abby outside her apartment door, one speedlight from above with a green gel through a diffuser to match the fluorescent lighting in the hallway.
20: Kick
To have Aga kicking me onto the tracks we shot her in the studio kicking up a storm. Then took some pictures from my chest’s perspective and leg/arms flying forward. Then we headed to the subway and shot the from of the train as well as some pictures of the platform that I could comp together into a space. Lighting in the studio was one strobe with just reflector camera left to mimic the headlight of the oncoming train and another strobe with umbrella above and camera right to fill in shadows and give overall illumination.
Setup Notes on the December Portraits (Part 1 of 3)
A few people have asked me how I pulled off a number of shots from my December Portrait series. It’s my birthday today and therefore I’m in a good mood and have decided to write down some quick notes on each one and perhaps a small ‘before’ shot lest I forget the details. I’ll do 10 a day over the next three days. Let’s get started!
01: Birth
Subjects acting out the birth in the back of their SUV in a parking garage. Megan had the baby at a hospital a few days later, by the way, and both are healthy. 3 speedlights. One coming in the sunroof through a diffuser to mimic the cars interior dome lighting. One on the platform camera right shooting through a crumpled up diffusion panel from a softlighter and one light with an umbrella to the right of James and a reflector to the left just out of shot. In the end I made a composite of the best shot of each of them.
02: Horror
Basement of my sister’s house in Arlington, VA. Friends daughters as the victims, my very accommodating brother-in-law with soot on his face. One speedlight bounced off the wall/ceiling corner camera right as I recall.
03: Bookin’
Gary shot in the studio. Two strobes, one softbox above and in front as well as a second umbrellaed strobe behind the camera at low power to fill in the shadows a little bit. Grain and trees/sunset were separate shots taken in Prospect Park earlier in the day.
04: Theft
Composite of 3 separate shots. One of Heather and the pan shot with one hard strobe with grid and a reflector to fill. Another of Derek climbing in the window with softboxed strobe out on the fire escape and same gridded strobe indoors. Final shot of statue on podium with overhead gridded spot.
05: Mirror
An attempt to play off a painting I saw at the Met. Main shot of girl and mirror was shot with a 48″ octabox camera right facing her back. I then shot the frame in the adjacent room with the same setup shooting through the door to give enough light. Two shots composited.
06: Party
Nothing fancy on this one. Friend’s apartment for dinner and that’s what it looked like. Lindsay put on a party dress, Chris handed her a drink. Lit with a speedlight bounced off the ceiling camera left.
07: Dance
Two shot composite of course. Went to Eran’s house and shot the 7′ tall room from 3.5′ up. Two speedlights in 16″ softboxes a couple feet off the floor aiming at the ceiling. Went back to my place and shot Eran dancing with the same lighting setup coming from above. Marmo was stuck to the ceiling with glue, just kidding.
08: Capcom
I wanted to recreate a scene from the Apollo era. Shot Chris on black background with overhead softbox and an umbrella on either side to give him some rim lighting. Shot smoking cigarette separately and brought it in in post. Headset comped in from archival photograph. Background desks and ceiling build from scratch in Photoshop.
09:Vivisection
Brinkworth and I met up at the lab and shot her with a taped up scalpel and a little fake blood. One speedlight with diffuser panel held up camera right while I was taking the pictures. Later comped in found public domain shot of dissected cadaver arm.
10: Bounce
Shot Cisco on the roof jumping off of a chair. Then brought up a couple of yoga balls which we then moved around and shot in different locations. Composited and colored the balls in post. Added Cisco in bouncing about.
What I Use
A lot of people ask me what gear I own and use. There’s nothing particularly special about my setup. I’m a pretty straight ahead Canon user with mostly nice L glass. All of the pictures I make could be made with similar stuff from other companies, but I figured I’d make a list anyway for those of you who don’t believe me and want what I’ve got.
Each link points to the product on Amazon. So if you plan on purchasing this stuff, please do it through my links so I can buy a can of Coca Cola. Thanks.
Digital
Canon 5D Mark II
Lenses
Canon 28mm f/1.8
Canon 35mm f/1.4L
Canon 50mm f/1.2L
Canon 50mm f/1.4
Canon 85mm f/1.2L
Canon 24-105 f/4L Zoom
Computer Gear
NEC 30″ Monitor with Spectraview Calibrator
Wacom Intuos Tablet
Apple 13″ Macbook Air
Kensington Expert Mouse
Western Digital Green 2TB Internal Hard Drives
Software
Adobe Photoshop CS5
Adobe Lightroom 3
Lights
5 in 1 Reflector/Diffuser
Canon 580 EX II Speedlite
Alien Bees B400
Alien Bees B800
White Lightning x3200
Profoto AcuteB Pack and Head
Photek Softighters – all 3 sizes
Avenger A420 Stand with D600 Boom
Film Cameras
Leica M4 with 50mm f/2 Summicron
Hasselblad 500cm
Cambo 45NX 4×5″ Large Format
Preferred Films
Kodak Portra 160, 400, 800 NC
Kodak E100 chome
Fuji Provia
Ilford 3200 b/w
Pointing Device Menagerie
For those of us not sold on the promise of touch computing, the method with which we move the cursor around the screen tends to be a very personal thing.
It all started with the mouse of course. Invented way back Douglas Engelbart at Stanford way back in the early 1960′s, but as really probably used first as we know it by the team at Xerox Parc who made it work using a ball and not direct rollers. By the way, the mouse was so named because the first one had the wire coming out the back which made it look like an actual mouse with it’s tail coming out. And of course the Apple Mac (and Lisa before it) brought all this into the mainstream.
I think my first Windows computer with a serial mouse was probably in 1990 or so? I had used an original Mac and some PCs with other windowing environments like GEM desktop (I think that’s what it was called), but Windows 3 was the first version I actually played with on my own machine. First it was two button, then the cheap mice they gave you with computers became 3 button, all of them connected to a 9 pin serial port (COM2/COM3 represent!) on the back of the computer. The one everyone wanted to use was the two-button Microsoft mouse though. It was well built, fit your hand (assuming you were right-handed) and seemed to track smoother than the crappy ones. Which brings me to cleaning. Since these mice had a ball which rolled on the surface, all this gunk got rolled up into the mouse mechanism and much of it attached itself to the rollers inside. These got nasty and you often had to open it up, pull the ball out, and clean them with some alcohol. At least that’s what the nerdy people did. I never liked mice however. You had to have room on your desk to use them, they didn’t track reliably and I found that constantly using the same pointer finger to click gave me repetitive stress problems in my hand and arm.
This lasted up until college and I think until I met Keenan. Keenan was a webmaster at a big software company at the time and I’m pretty sure he’s the one that introduced me to the trackball. And not just any old trackball like ones with a ball the size of a golfball which you’re supposed to use with your thumb. Yuck, those are terrible. No, I mean the big Kensington Expert Mouse. You’ve got 4 buttons, a big ass ball which apparently fit a standard size billiard ball if you were so inclined. You control the ball itself with your fingers, slowly rolling over it from the top, or flicking and catching it to zoom across the screen. Then your thumb was naturally sitting right on top of the normal left click mouse button. They weren’t cheap, I think $100 or so, but they were build like tanks and totally worth it ergonomically. To my mind, they were ergonomic before it was a computer users buzzword. And the design is still a classic to my eye. My first begat a new one when USB came around, then a dead-end model which was wireless and had extra buttons up and a scroll wheel up top. The main problem with them was the same as with ball mice, the rollers got crudded up with dirt, requiring cleaning every few days if you were sensitive to such things. Finally about 5 years or so they released the latest revision which was optical and black, and added a scroll ring around the main ball. Almost perfect. This has been my main input device on my desktop since it’s release. The paint on the main button is getting a little worn away and you do occasionally have to pop the ball out and blow dust off the sensors, but it’s nothing like trying to keep physical contacts clean. Plus it’s quieter.
Before I got serious about photography, I used the trackball when retouching. I had played with some cheap tablets from the late 90′s on, but it never felt quite right to me. I was never a trained artist after all, so it’s not like I was yearning to hold a pen. That changed back in 2006 or so when I got a small 4×5″ Wacom tablet and forced myself to use it when in Photoshop. Once you’ve gotten used to the control of a pen, trying to do retouching with anything else is like drawing while wearing boxing gloves. When I moved to a 24″ and then a 30″ screen, I upgraded to the Intuos3 6×11 widescreen tablet and have used that ever since. For the kind of work I do, the size and shape of the tablet is related to the size and shape of the screen. In the normal 1:1 mode I use, the tablet is mapped to the screen, so the upper left corner of the tablet is mapped to the upper left corner of the screen, etc. So moving around to a specific part of the screen becomes second nature. This is unlike a trackpad where you might have to push-push-push in one direction to get the cursor across the screen. Because of this 1:1 relationship, if you’ve got a 4×3 ratio screen you want a more square tablet and if you use a widescreen display like most of us do now, you’ll want a wide tablet, so that an inch in the vertical gives the same amount of movement on the screen as an inch in the horizontal. The one problem with doing this 1:1 stuff is that if you use multiple monitors, you’re kinda screwed. This is actually one of the reasons I use a single big screen. Sure, you can make it so that it maps across two screens, but then moving the pen a half an inch to the right will move the cursor on the screen the same amount as moving the pen an inch up or down. And that kind of inconsistency is a deal breaker for me and totally defeats the purposes of the tablet in my opinion.
This brings us to trackpads, which is the reason that I originally started to write this post. Trackpads, especially the newer glass ones on the apple laptops, are great on a laptop. They integrate into the design, they work smoothly, and they allow advanced gesture support. All perfect for the laptop. I found myself using the four finger up and down expose gestures on my new 13″ Air so much that I started thinking about the Magic Trackpad for my desktop. That way I could unify the way I scroll pages, reduce wire clutter, and look cool to boot. As luck would have it, B&H had them for $10 less than the Apple store and I had a $50 gift card lying around since last Christmas, so I figured “why not?” Well I’ll tell you why not. The Reality-Distortion-Field strikes again! I don’t like it on the desktop at all. Sure the gestures are all there, but I find moving the cursor around on such a big screen to be very inefficient and hard on my hands. On a laptop, you can rest your hand along the side of the trackpad and edge of the case and flick around with your pointer finger, but on the magic trackpad, it’s raised on the back edge to be more like the wireless keyboard (and to house the batteries) which means your wrist either has to over-extend upward if you want to rest it on the desk, or you have to levitate your hand above the trackpad the whole time. Thumbs down. I think it’s great on a laptop, but it just feels silly on a desktop. Plus I think it’s a tad to big. Maybe it’s a great option for the Apple TV or something, but it’s not going to replace my Expert Mouse.
I’m sure there are lots of people out there who may disagree with me on this one. My friend Michael swears by his which is why I got one in the first place, but to me it’s just RSI waiting to happen.
Hot Mess Shoot – Behind the Scenes
Ever try to wrangle 7 pretty young actresses in black dresses? It’s not as easy as you would think, and I’m sure you weren’t thinking it was going to be easy. A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post about an upcoming shoot to take the promo shot for season 3 of a web series series run by my friend Amy Kersten which is due out in January. Well, here are the results of that shoot. My friend Claude was nice enough to do some BTS filming so you could get an idea of the scene. Be sure to play it at 720p to see some detail.
For those interested in the technical aspects, I shot with my 5D2 tethered to Lightroom on my new 13″ Air (which worked great by the way, far better than my old unibody Macbook) with a 50mm lens. In the end, I changed the lighting setup I was considering in pre-production and swapped out the ring light for a beauty dish up front. A softbox up a bit on each side were used to get some separation from the background.
This might be a good time to mention something about white, black, and grey seamless paper backgrounds. Under the right conditions any one of these could show up on camera as white, black, grey. It’s all a matter of distance. Distances between the subject and the background and the lights. In my particular situation I would have liked to have more distance between the group of girls and the background, but the laws of physics and the long dimension of my space thwarted my efforts. So in the end what I got was less of a black background than I had intended, which is some ways was a blessing in disguise because it made it easier to cut them out of the background when I decided to do a composite. More on that in a bit.
So I was all set up when they arrived. The best girl ever brought some wine and cheese to feed and relax them while they got ready. All told, that part of the evening was a fine flurry of people. As a general rule I prefer one-on-one shoots, no let me rephrase that. Shoots with one person are a completely different animal than shoots with a number of people. The latter is more an exercise in shepherding than interaction. Or at least it can feel that way, so I had brought along a couple of people to assist me in the endeavor. Once we figured out the best way to group the girls so that we could see all their faces, Cisco spun them up in caution tape and we were ready to get started.
I shot about 150 pictures in total. Not many at all compared to some shoots like this, but ultimately we were looking for one main shot, so as long as I had the raw material to work with, I was good to go.
When we were all through I sent Amy about 50 pictures to look through. The final shot choice was pretty painless, she chose one shot of all 7 and wanted two specific faces replaced from a couple of consecutive shots. Easy stuff because the shots were almost identical anyway. With that bit of trickery done I started on the post production. When we began I had vague ideas of just having them look like they were caught in a police searchlight on a black background. Thus shooting them on black paper as opposed to something on white or similar light color like we used for last year’s pin-up shots. So here is what I started with:
First step was to clean-up any rogue hairs and odd dress straps and misguided makeup. Then I went in and darkened the background a bit to make them pop and used some masked curve adjustment layers to add local contrast.
Not bad, in fact it’s just fine, but it didn’t get me excited. I wouldn’t put this version up as the main image in my portfolio. Too dark, too unfinished. I had to do better. So then I was thinking, ‘what if they were out late one night, had a few too many and were discovered like that in an alley or on the street?’ So I went out and took some images to use as a plate background. There is an empty store a couple blocks away that looked perfect for this concept, so I came home with this:
Yes, it was shot in the daytime, but it was hazy that day so the sun wasn’t harsh coming straight down. In fact there are some advantages, because at night you’ve got the scene lit by a number of different street and store lights, all at different color temperatures with lots of spectrum peaks. Not what you want if you’re looking for a plate that you can mold into your vision. Darkening is easy, and if you do it right you don’t notice that it wasn’t shot at night anyhow. Hollywood does this all the time by the way, when they shoot night scenes in the daytime with the exposure way stopped down. Once you get the background in the ballpark, the next stop is to drop the girls in from the original picture and do a really rough mask just to see if the overall perspective and sizes are right. I took care in shooting the door a bit wider (35mm lens) than the girls themselves, so that the field of view would be bigger and everything would match up more easily. Because I filled the frame i both shots to give me as many pixels as possible, I had to grow the background a bit to make the ladies fit into the background properly. Alternatively, I could have made the girls smaller, but why throw out pixels from the most important part of the shot? The background being a little soft only makes them stand out anyway. In the end the full size image is 4500px square, which is way bigger than it’ll ever be used.
The next step is the tedious part: masking. Ugh. I’ve tried every plugin and technique I can find to do this kind of work. Some of them look like magic in the demos, but at 100% I always find myself going in and working over the final line with a paintbrush anyway, so now I just mask the whole thing manually. In a situation like this where it’s not obvious where a black dress ends and the black paper begins, it’s massively time consuming and headache inducing. But that’s how you make sure it’s done right I guess. There is an advantage to of the kind of work I do, my final product is usually an image or a few images, not 300 like an event photographer would have to churn out. So I take my time until it looks perfect (or at least perfect to me).
With them all masked out like this, you can see that while they’re in the right position and the right size, they feel like they’re floating in the scene, but you still need more layers. That’s because there is nothing connecting them to the background, depth is needed, and shadows are the answer. The first and in my opinion the most important shadows are the smaller sharper ones right where their shoes meet the sidewalk. Adding these alone adds a layer of realism.
Next of course, are the shadows the girls are casting on the background. The main key light up front is going to darken the area right behind the girls. I usually start with a copy of the layer with the girls, move it behind and then fill them with black. Blur and distort it to taste. Then maybe go in with a very soft and light brush to add a little extra shadow where needed.
I got to this point and started to think that maybe I was finished, or very close to it. Then I realized it needed more electricity. For example, where were the side lights coming from? I might as well make them volumetrically visible in the upper corners, and perhaps a lens flare or two to blend it all together. So after a couple hours of shooting and many hours of editing, here’s the final result.
Why Street Photography Isn’t for Me
Some photographers just love going out on the street with their camera. Living in the world, shooting the world, going on photowalks with other photographers where they all walk around together and shoot the world. In the process of shooting every day so far this year there have been days where I didn’t have a shoot, or an idea, or I had a shoot for a client but couldn’t use the pictures for my blog etc. Days where I had to go out for a walk with the camera slung by my side. I’ve come to realize that I don’t really like doing it very much.
Granted, there are a smattering of random street pictures from the first half of the year which I’m really happy with, but most of them were pure happenstance. Literally something I tripped over, or a split second where I saw something and was able to get my camera up in time. I understand that this is the point and that some people feed off of that idea that they may come home empty-handed or perhaps having bagged the proverbial big whale. But that excitement stresses me out. It removes all sense of control from me. I understand that I have to notice whatever I’m going shoot and be good enough technically to get the shot, but still it feels more like gamble than a skill. I want something more deliberate. I’m most definitely not a hunter, especially with portraits.
There have been plenty of times in my life where I’ve walked up to someone cold and asked if I can take their portrait. Not a lot, but I’ve shot so many people that even though the ratio is low the number is high. And I’m a friendly guy so they tend to say yes, but if you’re in this situation the person is usually going to give you a minute or two. Which is fine for a couple of snaps, but no time to really dig deeper and get something special. I want it to be a partnership not a competition. Which is another thing, I don’t like taking people’s pictures without their permission. I try to be non-confrontational and I’m not a voyeur. I’ve done it a handful of times but I always felt like I was doing something wrong while doing it. Even with the tilted shot of an old man from a couple of days ago that a lot of people seemed to like as an example, that was taken from the hip because I didn’t want the guy to yell at me for taking it.
I had a chat with my friend Jeffrey over at Faded & Blurred the other day and I was talking about this subject and he mentioned a quote, I think he said it was Avedon. Something like, “I don’t want to wait for things to happen, I want to make them happen” Which gets somewhere closer to how I feel.
Also, from a technical perspective, I don’t think that dSLRs are good street cameras. Too big overall, too noticeable. I’ll put my hat in with the people that say this is where a rangefinder really shines. Smaller, less obvious, quieter shutter. Overall far more discrete. The iPhone4 actually does a decent job for photos of still objects in good light, I’ve found myself using that more than I thought I would, and with good results.
So, is there photographic gold in them there streets? Yes there surely is and I’m sure there will be times when I go for a walk with my camera with me. But most of the time I’m going to leave it to other photographers to find. You can’t do everything well, sometimes you’ve got to pick your battles. I’m sure there are plenty of landscape photographers out there who would think of nothing to sit and wait for 2 hours for the light to change in their favor, but who would go into a cold sweat with the very thought of spending 2 hours taking portraits one-on-one with another human being. And I’m glad they’re out there, because when it comes to landscapes if the light’s not right when I get out of the car I just shrug and drive to the park lodge to buy the postcard.
Mindset
The human mind is a funny thing, especially so in those of us who, shall we say, don’t always see the glass as half full. There is a rhythm to the swings as well. Sometimes I think that I can take over the world while other times I quite honestly can’t get out of bed for fear of failing even at being awake. There’s an irony in the fact that when I was a kid I liked going on the swings during recess, but as an adult my mental swings are my nemesis. The funny thing is that this cycle of how I see myself is largely independent from the perception of me by the world at large. As far as most of you are concerned you generally either like my work or don’t. I highly doubt that my fan base swings from tens of thousands of people down to zero in keeping with my mental state.
And of course I’m not the first person to have this problem. History is littered with stories of people like me, especially artists it seems. Or maybe it’s just the depressed artists that get the column inches. To the end of coping with what I’ve come to see as an immutable part of my life I’ve read and I’ve talked and I’ve tried to figure it all out, or at least make some rational observations which I could remind myself of when I’m down to try to wrench myself out of it, but it doesn’t seem to work. I’ve encumbered myself with personal projects and daily tasks in order to keep my mind busy thinking about anything but itself. Lately I’ve been going to the gym almost daily as well. I’m certainly an idle hands kind of person. Those kinds of things help a little bit. They at least soften the valleys, but sometimes I feel like they may often soften the peaks as well. That’s the problem, the up times are highly addictive. When you’re at baseline or flying in manic-ville the depression almost seems like a worthwhile trade. Days of despair for moments of enlightenment. However I often wonder if the inspiration is all that inspired at all. They feel that way of course, but so does the brilliance of people on a good acid trip. Only when they come down do they realize the true mediocrity of their ideas.
I’ve also tried to predict the swings but it’s proved closer to trying to prognosticate the stock market. But just like the stock market, rationality often has little to do with it. People, in this case me, get spooked. Or they get scared, or they get inspired, or they get frustrated by those things out of their control and a shift starts. Like a change in the wind or like an avalanche or a stampede of bulls, there’s a certain inevitability to it all. As if I don’t have a choice; as if I’m just along for the ride.
Don’t know where I’m going with this or the point that I’m trying to make. Just thought it could be useful to put fingers to keyboard in yet another attempt to figure it out. As if it’s just that I haven’t figured out the puzzle yet. Maybe the trick is to surrender to it instead of fighting it. You know, something like ‘How I learned to stop worrying and love the depression’. Somehow I don’t think it’s in me though. The fight is one of the only constants in my life and I can’t just let it win.
Macbook Air 13″ (2011) First Thoughts
My 2008 unibody aluminum Macbook, yes that one that they only made for about 5 months, was getting a little long in the tooth. So I gave my partner Heather my unibody as a replacement for her black Macbook and started looking at the upgrade options.
First off, I’d like to point out that at no point is my laptop my main machine. I’ve got a very powerful Hackintosh with 24GB of ram and 9TB of drives with which I do serious work. My laptop is usually just sitting next to me with my email up, or for skyping with the family, or reading the news on the bed. Occasionally however, I travel with it and use it to backup my cards and do some basic Lightroom adjustments and minor Photoshop before posting an image or two online.
An iPad was ruled out immediately. I had bought and sold one a few months ago when the iPad 2 was released. I was largely unimpressed. I like having a keyboard and create more than I consume, so I needed to move further up the chain. I knew I wanted something light, and I don’t need the juice in a Macbook Pro. Again, this isn’t my main machine. This left me to consider the new Airs.
With the i5 processors and 128GB SSD for a reasonable price, I was mostly sold from the start. The main question was deciding between 11″ and 13″. I love the idea of the 11″. Little tiny thing not much bigger than an iPad that you can run actually software on. However, in the end I went with 13″ for a couple of reasons. First, when working with pictures, the extra pixels make a difference. Especially the 144 extra vertical pixels, especially in Lightroom where the filmstrip takes up vertical space along the bottom. Secondly, the 11″ stock configuration has a slightly slower CPU, 1.6GHz vs 1.7GHz, which may not sound like much, but modern Intel chips do this neat trick where they overclock themselves when not using all the cores. The 1.6 chip overclocks to 2.3GHz where the 1.7 overclocks to 2.7GHz, and that extra 400MHz can make a difference when you’re rendering a couple hundred RAW previews which generally happens on a single thread.
So I stopped by the Apple store down on 14th street, and picked myself up the bottom of the rung 13″ with 4GB of Ram and 128GB SSD with my ASMP Apple discount. Came to about $1325 after tax. Just for a minute consider the amount of computing power in a chasis less than 3 pounds which costs so little. That’s about half what a decently set up original IBM PC would have cost, and that’s not even taking inflation into account. Moore’s law is your friend.
I brought it home and then agonized with myself for a couple hours over whether I should even open the box. $1300 is not a lot for what you get, but it’s certainly not pocket change. And how often do I NEED a laptop anyway? Shouldn’t I just save the money and take it back? I constantly get buyer’s remorse after large purchases. It’s like my father is constantly behind my shoulder making me feel guilty. Well, I won’t build the suspense any longer, I opened the damn box up and here are a few of my thoughts based upon less than a day of use.
First off it’s fast. Like really fast. But this is to be expected, it’s got a fast SSD in it. My first in a laptop. So not only is everything nearly instantaneous, even the boot time isn’t more than a few seconds really, but it’s also almost completely silent. The only thing I’ve found to get the fans going so far is skype video, but that’s to be expected. I would say that if you weren’t doing serious photo or video work and instead using the computer for what other people use their computers for,( i.e. web, email, facebook, calendar, music) that this would make a fine primary machine as long as you can live within 128GB of drive space. You would probably want to get an extra external drive. That said, it would probably be the fastest feeling computer most people have ever used. It’s that zippy.
Let’s talk about the screen. It’s got a nice resolution for the size (1440×900) and it’s plenty bright, but it’s still a TN panel, so there is still some color shift in both the vertical and horizontal axis. And I suspect the color depth is 6 bits per channel at best. There’s some serious dithering going on in the radial gradients on the login page. It’s better than my last Macbook though, and considering the size of the machine it’s in I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. It wouldn’t work as your primary monitor, however, and sadly, Apple’s stock profiles suck. Whatever white point they use is way off from the 6500k that I work in. Also as it turns out, the software that is used with my i1 Display 2 colorimeter is PowerPC based. So without Rosetta in this new OS, I’m up the creek on pulling this screen into shape. So I’ll have to find a way around that profiling issue before giving this the seal of approval from a color point of view.
Battery life is impressive so far, I’ve not used it past 70% or so, but it looks like it’s between 5-6 hours of my normal use. When I was on Skype earlier it quickly dropped the estimated time down from 6 hours to 2 hours. So be warned that it’s not limitless. I have still not tried pulling some RAW images in to see how they’re handled. On my old machine, loading in 150 images from my 5D2 and letting it build previews would quickly leave me with half my battery in only 15 minutes. Hopefully this will be a bit better.
It’s obviously a light laptop, though somehow it doesn’t feel as light as it is to me sometimes. Pick up my old one in one hand, and the new one in the other and there’s difference, but it’s not the night and day difference that the thickness of the machines would imply. Maybe that’s just more of my lust for the 11″ which is another half pound lighter still. Also I’ve found when sitting on the couch typing, like I am right now, it’s almost too light in the base. Not quite enough to counterweight the screen to keep it stable under your hands. I’m certainly not asking for it to be heavier, but it’s an interesting unintended consequence.
Overall, so far, so good. It’s fast, light, relatively small and does everything it’s supposed to do well. I’ll give it 100 RAW files to chew through tomorrow and get back to you on how it acts as a travel photo machine. My guess is that within the limitations of the screen and battery, it’ll do just fine. By far the nicest laptop I’ve owned when you average everything out. But then as technology improves, that’s exactly how it should be. Better, faster, cheaper. Keep it up, guys.
UPDATE:
Ok, so I’ve imported 206 21MP RAW files into Lightroom 3 and rendered standard previews. The battery went from 48% to 42% in the 12 minutes or so it took, and the laptop fans didn’t sound like they were trying to take off for Madrid. All a huge improvement on my old unibody Macbook. Part of this is due to the more efficient/lower voltage CPU I’m sure, but I’ll give some credit to the SSD as well. No spinning means faster disk access and less juice used.
Now if I can just figure out a way to profile this screen without buying a new puck and we’ll be in business.
