Food in the Studio

I have finally started a bit of a push on my stock photography catalogue. This is something I have always wanted to do, but was just a bit daunted by the whole process of uploading and, above all, getting my pics accepted. It's not that my pics totally suck, rather I used to do just a little too much in the land of levels which led to a whole host of little baddies, like posterization.

Here is an image which was denied for that very reason. Posterization is when you get blocky pixels in a typically dark area. This is due to not having enough detail to bring out the colors or shadow transition you desire. You can see, if you look closely around the belly, that the shadowy bits are quite blocky, and the only way to fix this is to go back to the original and be more careful when trying to recover some of that detail.

Baby on the Horizon

So, I've gone back over that image and will be trying to upload again. Hopefully my eye is a bit better for these things now.

One of the areas I'll be focussing on now is food, because it never gets tired of you taking its picture and it's tasty! Thanks to The Strobist I have learned a whole ton about studio lighting and the whole process is going a lot easier than I thought. Here is a glass full of pomegranate seeds I did the other day.

When I go online and see some people's stock catalogues I crap myself thinking about how far behind them I am, but then I remind myself they all started somewhere. If I don't kick myself in the ass and get going now I'll never do it.

On Assignment - Lindsay Parfitt

I went on assignment with my American buddy Chadd yesterday to take some pictures of Lindsay Parfitt for the Sur in English. Lindsay is the wife of Rick, rhythm guitarist and singer for Status Quo. We were lucky enough to get to meet Rick as well as Lindsay in their beautiful house in Alhaurin el Grande. Chadd is doing a story on Lindsay for a piece about having babies and living abroad (they have twins), but he spent most of his time talking to Rick about music. HA! Go chadd.

Anyway, when we arrived, Rick seemed a little weary of what were really there for, but once he found we were so chill and just wanted to go with the flow he soon opened up. We ended up doing the shoot in their cinema room in the basement with all (or most of anyway) of his gold records hanging on the wall. I shot a few of Lindsay in front of the records, a few of the two of them by the bar, then wrapped up with a quick one of Chadd for posterity.

I was going all out with the beauty dish and a bare strobe on the records for the portrait of Lindsay and showing them to her as I went. Then I did one no flash so she could see the difference and she says to me, "Oh, I actually like that one more!" So this is what we got, and I think she's right. Sometimes you have to just leave the strobes out and go with what works best, in this case the natural sunlight coming from a door camera left. The door really acted as a huge soft box and bounced off the gold from the records to make a warm picture.

Then we moved to the bar. Rick wanted a cool picture of himself and his wife in a relaxed setting. Here I did use the beauty dish, as the door was now about 15 feet further away from this setup. Beauty dish was camera left, up high and I had a strobe stashed under the bar shooting up and back towards the green plant. I dragged the shutter just enough to get the warm glow from the bar.

All in all it was a good session and I learned a few things, such as, don't be to petty to listen to your client. Lindsay called the good shot and it made me realize I just may have been "over lighting" the scene. Happy days.

Expose to the Right, Don't Trust your Luminance Histogram

So, I just read this great post on Luminous Landscape about noise and posterization and why you should expose to the right. I decided to test this out with a sunset shot, which is where I usually tend to get posterization with even the lightest hand in post. I wasn't surprised to find that I could do much more with my colors, since I used to encounter problems when exposing my sunsets to the left to "saturate" the sky. I was surprised to find how little you can actually trust your luminance histogram.

Why expose to the right? You should really read the link the the Luminous Landscape post, because they explain it much better than I do, but it goes a little something like this.

Your histogram shows you how much light you have in your dark, mid and light tones. Anything on the left side of the histogram is black, anything on the right is white and anything in between is red, green, blue and a mix thereof. What I didn't know until I read that post is that an image with the histogram peak sitting to the left has less detail compared to one sitting to the right due to the way your camera's sensor records light. The shadows get roughly 1/16th of the available data space compared to the highlights. That, therefore, means if you make your image a little brighter instead of a little darker you'll have more headroom when you start pushing your pixels in post, and less noise to boot. You just need to be very careful not to go too far to the right, or you clip your highlights and then you just loose all detail to the point of no return.

This is where you need to be very weary of what your luminance histogram is telling you! Yes, expose to the right and keep an eye on that right hand slope, but if you don't know what it's really saying you may be clipping one of your RGB channels.

The image at the top of this post is a perfect example of when you need to keep an eye on your channels. Basically, in a sunset image you have a dark blue sky and some glowing orange highlights. This puts your blue channel somewhere near the bottom of the histogram, your green near the middle and the red all the way up at the top. If you just look at the luminance histogram, which is an average of your RGB histograms, you could be clipping your reds and still think you have some room to spare. I thought I had at least another 2/3 of a stop I could have gone to the right, but when I loaded this into Aperture I found my red channel highlights went right up against the wall. Luckily, shooting in RAW gave me the capability of reeling those highlights in. If I would have gone that extra 2/3 stop, though, I would have had some really obvious red clipping in form of a big orange spot at the hottest part of the picture.

Before I go, just let me say that exposing to the right works especially well with higher ISOs to avoid excessive noise and in images with color detail in the shadows which you might want to recover. It's not something you always need to do though. You camera's auto exposure probably does a good enough job in most cases where you can trust what your meter is telling you, but if you ever find you're getting really blotchy or noisy pictures, just give this a try.

My First Big Expo

This weekend was the Mother, Baby and Toddler Show in Estepona, at which Ellie launched her new business, www.ecobebes.eu. Just so you know, we have so many nappies in our house now it's not even funny, HA! And, by the way, her launch went very well. There weren't as many people as were expected, but it was good for Ellie as she was able to spend a lot of time explaining "the new" cloth diapering to each individual.

As Ellie was going, we decided I should look into exhibiting some of my maternity and baby shots as well. I got the entire corridor at the main entrance for 150€ and was able to get my name out there for the first time. Everything was a bit last minute for me, and I would have liked to have had flyers, but in the end I was able to make some good contacts and set up a few potential portrait sessions.

Here's a couple of the pics I displayed and what the corridor looked like...

I'M FREE!!!

Today was my last day at work, and tomorrow is my first day at work. That might not make sense, but it will in a minute. Just hold that thought.


When Ellie spurred me on to get the job at the Marbella Apple store I was a little apprehensive. My Spanish was so/so. I knew a few cool tricks with the Mac, but honestly didn't even know how to change the memory in a MacBook. Pitifully, I didn't even know how to reinstall a system, or even start from the install disk for that matter! These things had never occurred to me as necessary or interesting, but that didn't matter to the man who hired me. He was looking for someone passionate and interested in Apple. I was hired, and I jumped in head first. Before long I was learning everything from the most basic diagnostics to how to solve kernel panics and replace components. My job was getting interesting and I was learning and growing.

I met some really interesting people in the following months, some of whom I have become friends with, and some I will collaborate with on future ventures. The most interesting characters I met in my two and a half years at Benotac were the ones who make their living from what they see in their viewfinder. Every week some photographer would come into the store asking me about some program, or a memory upgrade, or to invest in a new workstation, but for every question they asked me I would fire back two more. What did they shoot, how did they do it or if they'd seen 'x' photographer's work. It became clear to me that, although I really loved (and still do love) the Apple scene, my real passion was for creating images. Apple computers and the Mac OS are fun and a joy to work with, but holding a camera in my hands inspires me to seek new boundaries. It's not that I want people to see what I see, but to see what I can shape though my lens using light, reflectors, depth, aperture, shutter speed, angles, point of view and texture.

Taking pictures has become my new mission. Work can be anything you make of it. Taking the fucking rubbish out is work. It's what you make of that work and how you present it that matters. I want what I create to matter. I want my work to influence. I want people to see what I do and laugh and smile and think, "That guy has a great job!"

That job starts now.

Messing with Reflections and Light

Here's a little macro type shot caught with the 18-55 kit lens. I found this little guy hanging out on the window inside the Apple shop on a lazy Saturday morning and just happened to have my camera and strobe with me. I didn't have the radio triggers on hand, so I just whacked the flash on the camera (GASP!) and it actually turned out just fine.


In this image he looks like he's just hanging out on a glass table, but I actually am shooting from above down towards the ground. Lucky for me he was just chillin and I was able to get about 30 odd frames. Here are a couple more to help put the scene into perspective.

And this is the pick before edit. As you can see, I flipped him over to make it look more natural.

Cross Lighting on Ice

So I've been reading quite a bit of the Strobist web site and I must say, David Hobby is one solid dude. I have learned so much over the last year. Here is an example of some cross lighting using a flashlight and a strobe.

Pentax K10d with Pentax FA 50mm/1.4
1/4 second, ƒ/3.5, ISO 100

Basically, I set up the LED flashlight to shine through the swans from camera right. I was getting some distracting background light so I grabbed a bit of black construction paper and set it up behind. This is when I noticed the shadows and said to myself, "Why didn't I think of that?" So I got the positioning just right, popped a couple tests and decided I needed some more defining light. Call in the Pentax 360FGZ on 1/32 power! I set it up to shoot almost directly back towards the flashlight for a nice cross effect. The most important thing, though, was to control the spill. I laid the flash on its back and used the built in deflector to keep the light from grazing the glass table. I also made sure it was not spilling onto the background and placed a gobo between the light and the camera to avoid flare.

So, what would I do different? Well, I could have place the swans in a way that they formed a heart on the backdrop, but, maybe I'll save that one for Valentine's Day. I guess I could have used a smaller aperture to make both the doves as sharp as possible too.

So, after months of waiting, I've finally purchased the K10D!  I was planning on waiting till the middle of Jan so I would have a couple of weeks to look it over before sending in the rebate (I won't be home to pick it up until the beginning of Feb), but as the stock started dwindling and the prices started climbing I had to get on my horse and ride.

To go with my sweet new baby I have ordered the 360 Pentax flash, B + W circular polarizer, the Pentax FA 50mm ƒ/1.4, and too many other little accompaniments to count.  I also have some Cokin ND Grads to get.  I hope they don't put a hold on my card!

When I first started my search for a DSLR it was a toss up between Canon and Nikon.  Then, once I'd seen the light, I realized that instead of blowing my wad on one piece of kit I could get the entire package for about the same amount of money.  I can finally give the little Canon a rest and bring out the big guns.  I'm looking forward to my new toy, and hopefully, if all goes as planned, I can start making a bit of a living from something I really love.

Another attempt at a decent calling card

Ok, I've taken some of what I learned from my earlier calling card attempt and tried getting a little creative.  I used one of my photos from a shoot here on the Marbella seafront to add a nice little textured background and played around with the colors a bit.  I'm not sure if the text is quite what I'm after, but I'm just messing about really.  I don't think these cards will ever get to meet the printer so I'm not gonna lose any sleep over it.

One style I did implement from my previous card is the way the lines follow each other from front to back.  I like that effect for a card because I think it gives it a bit of flow.  Makes it a bit more interesting.

See the retouched original here

Squatters

I love this photo.  This Catamaran has been parked off the front of Marbella for the past few days and I keep having to take pics of it.  I know, it's a sickness.

Canon PowerShot S50, ƒ/8, 1/80, ISO 50, focal length 15mm.  Some levels, exposure, highlights and colors in Aperture, then in Photoshop I used a white to transparent gradient color dodge from the ground up on the rocks and a reversed gradient from the sky downward applying a color burn.  These last two steps really brought out the highlights.  I exported from aperture using BorderFX.