Revised Book
Here’s the collection that’s in the latest cut for my revised print portfolio, though not necessarily in this order. Choosing a collection of images is hard. You can’t just choose your best shots because they might not work together. For example, there are none of my Drabbles series in here; that’s a separate book. It looks like oil and water when I try to jumble them.
Tough stuff. Thought you might be interested. Yell if you see something really wrong or that you know is missing. Click the images to enlarge.
Photoshop CS5 from CS4
I just recently started using CS5 after having been a CS4 man since it was in beta. Most of it is the same, so this won’t be a long post, but there are a few things which I thought some of you might find interesting.
First off a pet peeve from either version of PS. What the hell is the point of the ‘pixel grid’? At the point at which it shows up, you can plainly see the square block of the individual pixels. The extra grid lines only make it more obscured and harder to see. I don’t understand why the default is to have it turned on. Ok, end rant.
Let me say that I didn’t switch from CS4 for any particular feature. Being a Windows user most of the time, I’ve had 64bit Photoshop for years now. In fact the main reason I switched wasn’t a feature of CS5 at all, but rather an annoying feature of Lightroom 3. You see if you’re using LR3 with CS4, when you open an image in PS by using the “Edit in Photoshop” command, Lightroom renders out a PSD file (or TIFF I guess, but I use PSD) to the disk and then opens it up in Photoshop. This is all well and good except I often open a number of images to grab different pieces to use in a composite so I’m left with a bunch of big 16bit PSD files I’ve got to go find and delete when I’m done. This has to do with CS4 not supporting the latest version of Camera Raw. I’d like to point out that I think this is pretty crappy of Adobe. I can’t believe there is a good technical reason they couldn’t make the latest Camera Raw plugin work in the last version of PS, and having to spend hundreds of dollars on an upgrade just for that is annoying. That said, CS5 fixes this issue for me and stuff opened in LR now just shows up as an unsaved new file in PS.
Now that I’m hear though, there are some new features. The main one people point to is this content aware fill. Overall I haven’t had the best luck with it. My results have not been nearly as super as the demos, and besides, most of the time I want a bit more control over what goes in the newly deleted space. For example, using it with the Spot Healing Brush, I found that the old Proximity Match setting works better at least half of the time. There are certain situations where it’s like magic, and I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I certainly wouldn’t say it’s worth the upgrade.
I often use the Lens Correction plugin to add vignetting, and it’s no longer in the Distort menu but rather just near the top of the Filters menu along with Liquify and the rest. It seems like it’s got the same auto controls that now exist in LR3, so not too much new there. Though I’d like to point out that if you fixed the distortion in LR and then open the image in PS and run Lens Correction, be careful because you could double correct and screw things up. It’s not smart enough to know that you’ve fixed the problems already.
The only other thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes my preferences are spontaneously reset, including that damn Pixel Grid and it’s new devil child Scubby Zoom, which is just about the most annoying feature ever. You use the zoom tool (magnifying glass) and click and drag to zoom in and out. For me it’s so fast and uncontrollable as to be useless. I always end up zoomed in so far I’ve got 3 pixels on my 30″ screen. Very disconcerting.
Overall I haven’t noticed any great performance or UI enhancements. Let’s be honest, Photoshop is pretty mature at this point. It’s like getting a new version of Word. Most of us use about 10% of the app as it is. We really don’t need more. Your milage may vary.
Improvised Light
Get the opportunity to take a picture and missing the right light? A nice big softbox would be perfect, but that’s back at the studio. Maybe you’ve got a speedlight, but you stupidly left your diffuser at home? Well where there is a will there is a way. Though there are entire sections of the B&H catalog with all kinds of expensive ways of manipulating your light, you don’t need to spend a lot of money or any money at all really. And in a pinch, your imagination can do good things.
In it’s most basic, light is either diffused or it’s not. And that has everything to do with the size of the source of light. Front of speedlight is small and therefore very directional. Sky is big, therefore diffuse. And where there are a ton of ways to make your light bigger, from umbrellas and shoot through umbrellas and softboxes and octabanks and beauty dishes and parabolic reclectors, among many others; For the most part, they’re usually pretty subtle variations on the ‘make the light bigger’ motif.
So there I was at my friend’s Hardin and Jenn’s this weekend and wanted to take a couple of portraits of them, but didn’t have a diffuser with me. Could have used a nice window of course but instead I tried a technique I’ve read about on the intertubes. So I grabbed a big white plastic bag from under the sink and cut it into a nice 2×4′ white plastic sheet. Had one person hold the plastic and I or another person held the flash pointed through is and voila, basically I had a softbox. 
The light hitting his left shoulder and side of his face was from a window behind him. So, two soft lights for the price of one speedlite.
Is it as soft as a big box with an extra diffusion panel? No not quite. But for free and in a pinch, it’ll do. If you zoom into his eye at 100% you even see what looks like a softbox to his right. This is the same lighting that I used on yesterday’s 365.2011 of Jenn. In that shot I had the panel and light above the camera looking down as opposed to the side, but that just shows the versatility. Sites like Strobist and the like post this kind of stuff all the time. And while I wouldn’t rely on a plastic bag as my main diffusion source on a big ad shoot, it’s handy to know it’s an option.
Print Portfolio Mania
Ideally, being a photographer should be about taking pictures. Sadly however, an inordinate amount of time is spend getting people to ask you to take pictures. Selling yourself through your portfolio of work.
Back in the day this was a matter of carrying a box of your prints around for people to look at. Then it became sending a box of prints. Then sending a book of prints. And then these books got prettier. Much like that scene with the business card in American Psycho, the whole thing got out of control. The books then needed to individualized with fancy papers and bindings and boxes to hold the book when you were done. It’s all very baroque. And in my opinion, annoying as all getup. Mostly because all of this frill and lace has absolutely nothing to do with the photographs inside the book. Don’t get me wrong, I think ‘presentable’ and ‘quality’ are delightful, but this stuff gets over the top. People spend $1000 on their book. It’s all about the presentation and not the work. A state of affairs which really offends me. As you may have figured out, I’m not a big fan of trends and fashion.
When I got into photography a few years ago I made myself a series of portfolios. Nice letter sized prints. Then someone told me that they images needed to be bigger, so I made an 11×14″ book, with most of the images centered on the page with borders. Then I was told that I should do more images full bleed out to the edges of the paper, so I did some of that. It wasn’t that the old fashion portfolios were really that terrible. But printing your own prints for them was time consuming and expensive. So making changes and updating was a bit of a pain. Plus I didn’t like the pictures were sitting inside of mylar pages so you were physically separated from the print. The whole thing wasn’t ideal.
Vignette? Sorry, I don’t speak French.
Vignetting refers to darkening of the image at the corner of your frame, usually when shooting a wide apertures. It’s an optical phenomenon that has to do with the way the lens is designed. Oh and it means ‘something small’ in French. And that’s pretty much all you need to know about it because it’s meaningless nowadays. End of essay.
Ah, if only that were true. Well it is kinda. If you look up lens reviews on many sites they’ll show charts of the light falloff in different corners due to vignetting, and they’ll show how one less is better or worse than some other lens. If what you’re going for is perfect continuity of light across the frame (and agast! Who isn’t?), then hell you better make sure you’re lenses are of good quality. And even those of good quality better be stopped down to prevent the evils of vignetting to bite you in the ass.
What a bunch of horse shit. First off it’s rarely strong enough to even really notice, and you’ve been staring at photographs with lens vignetting your entire life so you’re used to it. Secondly there are a real reasons to stop down your lens, namely depth of field and corner sharpness because those are things you can’t improve once the picture has been taken. Vignetting is not on that list. Maybe, and I really mean maybe, back in the days of film there were times where vignetting was a problem for certain technical photographers. Mostly due to the fact that it’s a pain in the butt to compensate for in the darkroom.
Now however, we’ve got all kinds of things that fix vignetting automatically. On my 5D Mark II, Canon has even added an in-camera feature that does it, with a fancy name and everything! “Lens Peripheral Illumination Correction” is what they call it. So turn it on, and voila! You’re all set, even when shooting jpegs. I’m sure there is a similar setting on other serious cameras. And if you’re a RAW shooter, every converter I know of can to this as part of lens correction. Lightroom 3 for instance has profiles for a ton of lenses and fixes vignetting while taking care of lens distortion and chromatic aberration to boot. It’s a good time to be a photographer. You can buy crappy lenses with all kinds of problems and computers just fix them for you before you can say ‘poof’.
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Why I Like Wide
I’m a portrait photographer who uses wide-angle lenses a lot. These are two things that are not supposed to go together very well. If you’re up close wide-angle lenses can tend to distort and accentuate people’s features for example. And sometimes not for the better. That said, I think they get a bad rap. As I wrote a few months ago, that distortion can be interesting. Let me say here that I’m not suggesting super-wide like some of these 15mm, 17mm kinds of focal lengths. To me, those are special purpose lenses which are so obvious about themselves that they take you out of the image and make you think about how it was taken too much. Ok, end mini-rant.
Megapixels, Who Needs Them?
Well, me for one, though in my opinion most people don’t.
The first consumer digital SLRs were 6 Megapixel cameras. I remember, I had a original Digital Rebel back in 2004 when they came out and I thought 6MP was a world of data. Granted my previous digital camera was a little 2MP digital Elph so it real was a world of data. Then I went to a 20D at 8MP and a 5D at 12MP and finally to a 5D2 at 21MP. Now the average pocketable compact camera is 12 to 14 megapixels, which I think is just crazy.
DigiCams
First off, most of the people using these cameras are coming home from a vacation and dumping their 140 pictures of them and their family at the beach onto their computer. Probably into iPhoto or similar and then onto Flickr or Facebook. Both of which will involve throwing out 90% of the picture’s information to get it down to the 1000px that’ll fit on your average screen. Very few people print anymore. In fact, I don’t think I know anyone other than pro or serious amateur photographers who does. I’m sure there out there, but I don’t know any, and I think the days of having shoe boxes full of 4×6″ prints has certainly come to an end.
It’s not to say that I don’t think people should print. I certainly think they should. Most of the online places will do 4×6″ prints for 20 cents or less. I think people should come back from their vacation, cull the 140 pictures down to 30 good ones and have them printed and put in a box or an album. No one needs to see 7 shots of that same sunset. Pick the best one or two and move on. In fact I think that’s a problem for photographers in general in the digital age. Digital lets you take a lot of pictures, but that doesn’t mean you should and it doesn’t mean you have to keep them all. It’s all about editing.
And even if people are actually printing; How big are they printing at? I printed a couple shots from my 6MP Rebel at 20×30″ and they’re passable from a foot or two away. But how many people print posters? I’d say that 99% of pictures are printed 8×10″ or smaller, and a 12MP compact is overkill for that size print.
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What’s in a Bag?
Here to the left is the green “North Face” backpack I bought for my trip to Japan a couple years ago. It’s perfect for a week long trip the way I travel, which is very lightly. My sister recently gave me crap about it saying, “Sure you only carry one little bag, but you’re wearing the same thing in every picture”. Perhaps, true enough. I’m all about comfort and layers, so be it. At least I can carry my luggage around with me which gives me a certain sense of freedom when I’m abroad. If you’re the kind of person that has 2 big suitcases with them when they travel, you should try my way next time. I’ve found it pretty great.
Well this little green bag has proved to be a pretty great photo bag as well. I’ve got a couple expensive Crumpler bags (I really like my Crumpler bags, they’re not cheap but they hold up and look cool) which I use much of the time (one backpack like this one and a shoulder type like this one), but sometimes I need to carry a bit more than just my camera and a lenses or two with me. The setup that can fit in this bag is what I used for most of the Drabbles shoots, which gives you some idea of it’s versatility.
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A Workshop? Really? Yep.
I’ve been getting a few emails from photographers who want to learn, asking if I do workshops. I love teaching photography to people, but up until now the answer was a “No, not really”, but now I’m thinking that it might be fun. I will show some lighting tips and setups, lens selection, working with subjects, choosing the right images, doing a little post production work. And I’m sure you’ll not just learn from me but also from one another, so it’s actually pretty exciting stuff. I can’t decide if I want to try environmental portraits or get a studio to muck about in.
So perhaps on a Saturday in late February or March (date to be determined), I’ll have 6 to 8 people people get together for 4 hours or so. Other people seem to charge a few hundred bucks for this kind of thing, but I was thinking $250 the first time to give it a shot.
If you’ve got some interest in participating, go ahead and send me an email to bill at billwadman.com and I’ll add you to a list.
Also, if you’ve got any ideas for particular stuff you think I should include, just put them in the comments below, I’d love to hear what you think.
NY Photogroup Salon
I’m one of 5 speakers tonight at the NY Photogroup Salon at SoHo Photo. Looks to be quite an eclectic grouping of work so I highly suggest you stop by if you’ve got the night free. $10 at the door, but I’ve heard that they’re well worth it. I’ll be sure to make your $2 for me worth your while.
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