Day 19, Learning 19: Better Lightroom workflow

Selecting images is one of the more tedious parts of the process for me, so this learning got put to immediate use.  In Lightroom (my first stop for editing photos) you can use the Survey mode to select just the similar images from your shoot.

Now you've got a smaller group of larger images to view.  I delete my least favorite images, and give the others one star:

If I have a lot of images I try not to be too picky.  I go through all of my different sets this way.  And then I use the Filter function (lower right of screen) to view only the starred items.  If I still have too many, I repeat the process, giving the next "winners" two stars.  It's often easier to think in terms of eliminating the worst photos as opposed to selecting the best.  Whittle your way down....

Day 14, Learning 14: Er... squinching?

Hmm.  Okay.  If you're aiming for "cool" in your portraiture this Peter Hurley technique has (I'm embarrassed to say) about a 70% success rate in adding something.  It's Peter's new "thing," and he's been stumping it campaign style for the past month.  If you haven't heard about it yet, it goes like this:

You can add a bit of Hollywood cool or sultry to your look by squinting slightly.  It's really a half-squint: in a full squint you tighten both the top and bottom of your eyelid and it naturally pulls in on the side.  Do this in a photo and you're likely to be mistaken for a perv.  Squinching is really when you slightly tighten the lower eyelid.  This works best when the subject is looking directly at the camera.  Takes a bit of practice to know what you're going for, so grab a mirror.  Or check out this video.

I'm going to point out one of the major drawbacks of this technique which may get me flamed.  It makes everyone's expression exactly the same; it has no real personality, only faux personality.  That doesn't mean squinching doesn't belong in your bag of tricks or photo session.  After all, everyone feels anger, or detachment, or sexy from time to time-- this is a shortcut for conveying those emotions.  It's shortcoming is a woman may squinch at you when she's feeling sexy, but she's probably doing other things as well to convey how she's feeling, things that create a unique dimension to her personality.  Those things are lost in a shortcut.  But it's worth playing around with in a photo session, because sometimes manifesting something externally leads to its authentic emotion internally. Being a theatre director these are familiar techniques; perhaps I'll write a post about directing, acting, and posing....

Day Seven, Learning Seven: Aspect Ratios

Aspect Ratios.  This isn’t a particularly deep or sophisticated byte of knowledge, but I never really sat down to learn it, resulting in some irritation when I enlarged photos only to find the printer has cropped the image, making it unbalanced.  If you’re shooting with a DSLR or point-and-shoot, your aspect ratio is 2x3.  That’s how your sensor captures the image.  Thus your standard 4x6 print always looks right.  If you don’t crop the image in your post processing, this means you should enlarge your prints to the following sizes:

 

 

 

8x12

10x15

16x24

20x30

 

One thing to remember is that if you’re taking a photo for someone else (a client), and they want to enlarge it, they’re most likely to make it an 8x10.  For no good reason, that’s a standard size for photo frames.  So you have a choice: either shoot with extra room on the width of the photo, or educate them on how to buy the right frame.

Day One, in every way

 

This is day one of the 100 Blown Highlights Blog, but also Day One of my 100 Day Challenge.  I started this challenge because as a photographer I realized that I wasn’t growing as much as I wanted to.  Two simultaneous things gave me pause: the first was the realization that I was producing images that were being used professionally-- as CD covers, brochures, corporate headshots, and even the cover of a print magazine.  The second was that I didn’t feel that I could reliably produce a professional image on demand.  I understood the craft well enough to produce the great images, but not well enough to be consistent.  Truthfully, I was better at putting my camera in front of great subjects than creating them myself.  It was time to take my skills to the next level.

I decided that I would learn one new thing about photography every day for 100 days.  And I’m sharing them with you.  That’s the structural skeleton of 100 Blown Highlights, though I’ll probably include bits and pieces of other photography-related stuff.  Whether this blog will continue after 100 days is anybody’s guess.  It’s gonna be a lot of work just getting a 100 posts out there.  On top of the learning.

The skill level of these "learnings" is going to be Intermediate to Advanced.  This isn’t a tutorial-- it’s not going to be a step-wise, highly organized seminar on how to improve your photography.  Because this is about my learning... filling in the gaps and shadow areas in my own understanding and skill set.  But I hope, and trust, that it will be helpful for expanding other people’s skills as well.  So let’s get started.

Day One, Learning One:

The Sunny 16 Rule.  Some folks would consider this a beginner’s concept, but to be honest I’d only heard the term; I never really understood how it was useful.  Maybe it’s the same for you.  So I’ll start with a pop quiz:  it’s a sunny, clear day and you're shooting in Manual Mode in the sunshine.  But you want to shoot at f/5.6 not f/16.  What do you set your shutter speed and ISO to?  If the answer isn’t at the tip of your fingers, read on.

The Sunny 16 Rule states that on your average sunny day, if your f-stop is 16, your shutter speed and ISO will be the same.  For example: f/16 + Shutter Speed 100 + ISO 100 equals a perfect exposure.  Example Two:  f/16 + Shutter Speed 400 + ISO 400 equals a perfect exposure.  The shutter speed and the ISO always match up.  Go outside and see for yourself.

Honestly, this isn’t all that useful a rule, but remember two things:  every professional photographer knows and understands this rule; and it starts you thinking about the relationship between aperture, shutter speed, and ISO.  In order to apply the rule you need to understand how these three work together not just intuitively, but mathematically.  More on that to come.