Speaking of Virtual Reality…

May 24, 2011 | Photography

After posting a couple hot rod images last week, I received a ton of great email. No, I’m not venturing into car photography (I get my speed fix from aviation). Yes, these are all HDR images at the start. While I did “car” photography in my youth, that’s specialty is for other youthful hearts to prusue. And why did I shoot these photos on a rainy, overcast day using HDR? This is a VERY valid and I think important question. Many went further and asked how did I do what my bud Scott Kelby calls “realistic” HDR? Let’s back engineer this and see if this short answer helps (the long answer and technique will be gone through at our Photoshop for Shooters class). What you see is NOT the image coming out of Photomatix Pro. What you see here is the FINISHED photo coming from Photoshop. Photography is a game of subtleties and when it comes to a tool to work subtleties, I still feel PS is #1. Here are the layers in finishing this one photo.

And these aren’t all the layers that were used because some are created, used and then discarded after samples are created and retained. You might be asking then why did I use HDR if I did all this work in Photoshop (keep in mind it took just under two minutes to finish this images in PS)? The answer is to get a photograph that looks exactly as my MEMORY remembers that moment in time. Don’t get confused here, I said how my memory remembers the moment, not exactly how it was in reality. This is where the PHOTOGRAPHER must come into play in the FINISHING of the photograph in post. Without that guiding light, that of photography, finishing in post is just a movement of sliders praying one will make a difference one likes. OK, if you follow my drift this far, let’s keep pushing it forward.

There is no way even during a nuclear night could you miss these candle apple red beauts! They are practically neon and glow even though it’s raining and our eyes and brain latch onto that color and even though it needs no help, the brain enhances those colors. That poor bastard, the camera though doesn’t function that way, it’s all math and it says simply, the light is blue/gray and that’s that! You can switch to Vivid, under or overexpose, all the in camera techniques available and no matter what you do, the light is the light and the camera is the camera and the color will never be out of the camera that neon flaming candy apple red that is seared into our memory. So the goal for me at least was not to match reality, but the memory which is so much more vivid!

What photographic tool do we have that punches up colors? HDR! How does it do that even though it’s created by the same camera that wants to turn this color into gray/blue? In this case, I shot a 5 image bracket because that grabbed all the highlights and shading in the RED bodies needed to match my MEMORY. It really requires no major brain lift on our part other then knowing LIGHT, looking at its deficiencies and then shooting accordingly. In this case, knowing what the SUBJECT was, it was real simple. HDR! The light issue was not quantity but quality and HDR can at times make up for that lack of quality.

And to be honest with you, these are not really “realistic” but rather a match to my memory which is anything but accurate. And then I take it a step further but I’m getting ahead of myself. How do I create the “realistic” HDR in post? Boring answer coming…..I just use the Tone Mapping defaults in Photomatix Pro. Yeap, that’s it. But as you can see in the layers above, that’s not enough. Photomatix is doing the heavy lifting bringing out the color in the hot rods, I have to do the rest in Photoshop. In the image above, that includes repairing a dent in the front grill, build a barn door on the right to hide a white frig and remove another photographer on the left. In the top image, I had to remove a banner on the right barn door (this all took less then 2 min to do). In the top image I still had to use Color Efex Pro Tonal Contrast to make the neon sign neon but nowhere in the process did I go to what I call “Elvis on Velvet” but rather, used the camera, Photomatix Pro and Photoshop to simply create an image that matched my memory. Now if this process, logic or techniques interests you, we have a class now so you can learn, master and more importantly, use all of these tools and more so your photographs match YOUR memory!

Photos captured by D3x, 70-200VR2 on Lexar UDMA digital film

You Know Light?

May 23, 2011 | Photography

That’s what this class is really all about. You have to know light to take the photo, have to know it to finish it. If you don’t know light, this class will most definitely help you down the road to understanding it. Here it is plain and simple, I want to help folks with their photography and the vehicle we’re going to use in this class is Photoshop to help improve your captures! And we’re going to do that by using Photoshop to learn how to be better at the camera and the computer. We’ll talk curves and exposure, Silver Efex Pro and lenses, HDR and composition. They go hand in hand and knowledge of both is so important I feel to get what you see and feel reaching the heartstrings you’re sharing your photography with. And that’s the end game to all of this, grabbing heartstrings.

Wanna learn more….click here…or simply call WRP @760.924.8632 or 661.204.1506. 1st workshop is 16/17 July, 2011.

Questions Demand a Repeat

May 23, 2011 | Photography

“What is your thought process before you take an image?” This is one of the most commonly asked questions I receive. It’s a very valid question. It presumes that people think I’m capable of thought (I like that assumption). Is there thought that goes into each photograph or perhaps more importantly, is photography purely an intellectual endeavor? The question hurts just thinking about it. Is there thought involved in the creative process of making a photograph? Before getting to that thought, I want to step back a moment to see if thinking can’t begin sooner and have more of an impact on our photography long before the moment of click. I would suggest that the thinking process might be more pure subconscious rather than conscious in a successful photograph. It’s the result of a natural reaction to the visual stimulation rather than one that’s thought through. Man, that’s a lot to think about for just a silly click!

I was incredibly fortunate when I started out in this photographic pursuit to have thoughts and ideas placed in my mind that guide me to this day. I had an instructor way back when who had a weekly assignment. We had to go into the library and just look at photography, photographs that were in print in books or magazines only. First, we had to find those that appealed to us. They didn’t have to be killer images, just ones we thought were cool. Then, and this was the heart of the assignment, we had to back engineer the photos and think through how they were created. For example, if you liked a product shot of a gulf club, you had to determine from the reflections what was lit with lights and what was lit with subtractive light (don’t know that term, looks like you’ve got some homework to do). We had to engage the brain and our knowledge of light in order to get an “A” on the assignment.

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This exercise started to create a roadmap in my mind of the thought process that goes into the back end of a photograph, a studio shot where we are in control of the lighting. But my arena of photography is not in the studio and I’m anything but in control of the light. But light is light, that’s a novel thought. You place a light, be it a flash in a studio or the sun outdoors in front of a subject, the subject will be lit (I think). Get that light close to a subject and it wraps around it, move it far away and it becomes a spot. Thinking this through and applying what we learn when lighting a human face to the facial disk of a grizzly bear, how can we take the sun and have it mimic a SB-900 going through a 3×3 Lastolite? Think about it, how do we take the biggest spot light on the planet, the sun, and turn it into a giant softbox? That’s right, overcast or clouds or snow or sand or a combination of all of the above. What’s the common denominator? Light and thinking.

You watch someone like McNally light a subject, scene or story and you might assume he’s thinking it all through. He’s not thinking; he’s reacting. He’s not planning, but rather responding to the light. The thought came long ago, the thinking through of the problems occurred a lifetime ago. The magic of his craft (and it is a craft and he is the highest form of a craftsman) is the subconscious thought to the light and what he wants to communicate to you. He paid his dues and thought it through so long ago that now when his wild imagination goes to work, the light just naturally follows. Yeah, when he’s teaching you hear his thoughts, but I’ve been there when he’s making magic and it’s a magical experience as the light just simply comes on and the subject is born.

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So what am I thinking about when I put the camera to my eye? I’m not, that part of the photographic process is already done long before the camera comes up. It occurs when I have a new piece of gear and I figure out if it solves a problem and is worth buying in the first place. The thinking occurs still when admiring those photographs that catch my attention and imagination and I figure out what elements excite my vision. The thoughts fly through my mind when I look at my images each day that I captured that day. I think through what I did wrong and what I did right and, most importantly, think through what images I need to still capture to tell the story. There is no one thought going through my mind when I’m shooting. There’s a lifetime of thinking squeezed into every camera click.