Category Shop Talk

The gear you need when on the road

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Pocket Wizard Radio Transmitter

We’re just a couple of weeks from our Traveling Light Workshop, and as a lead-in I’m previewing some of the topics and shoots we’ll cover during the three-hour class.

You can’t  discuss portable lighting without getting heavy into some nerdy gear discussions.   So, we’ll be talking plenty about triggering your flashes using manual and auto triggers—everything from old-school sync cords to off-camera TTL cords, from optical slaves to Pocket Wizards and Radio Poppers.

But it’s not all about gear.  It’s also about technique—how you approach a shoot and what works best for different situations ‘in the wild’.

As always, the best system for you is the one that fits your budget and allows you flexibility in lighting on location.

I’ve gotten requests from people who want to bring their flashes and other gear.  Great!   We’ll discuss those and, time permitting, will give hands-on demos with your gear.

If you have any questions about off-camera lighting that you want to make sure we cover, shoot me an email with your feedback.

Traveling Light #2: Location portraits

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Ben: Two-light portrait

Here’s another sample of the types of portraits we’ll be building with small lights during the upcoming Traveling Light workshop on May 24.
Location photographers find themselves in an incredible variety of environments. In the studio it’s easy to control all the variables. When you show up at a location, you’ve got to make some decisions to make regarding ambient light and background. Namely, how much of each do you want to include in the final image?

For me, location photography is kind of a reductive exercise—start with what you find, and then remove light, clean up background elements, modify your flash— until you end up with what you want. In the studio, it’s more of an additive approach: start with nothing and build up the lighting and elements to create the image.

 

In the case of these portraits, shot with the help of Matt and Ben of Single Source Staffing, we had about 15 minutes to do two different looks. The vivid green walls in the office were an interesting feature I knew I wanted to use, as was their cool, colorful logo—perfect for an environmental portrait.

No lighting diagrams on these—we”ll talk more about approach during the workshop—but here’s the basics: Ben (green background) is lit from camera left with an SB800 shooting through a white diffuser screen simulating window light. There’s an SB900 in a medium soft box (camera right with a 1/2 power CTO gel), placed to hit Ben slightly angled toward the back side of his head.   The shadow?  A happy accident.  Once I saw it, I liked it.

Matt is lit by the same soft box. There’s another SB800 with a diffusion dome just to camera left, pointing at the right side of Matt’s face. On camera right, there’s a third strobe with a snoot aimed at the SingleSource logo. In this case, we underexposed the background so that there’s very little ambient light (ugly flourescent lighting) in this image.

These are two quick-hit examples of location portraits that use their environment to create interest and drama.

Matt: three-light environmental portrait

Traveling Light shoot #1: Beauty Light

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Beauty Light: soft, almost shadowless light

In preparation for our upcoming. May 24th lighting workshop, Traveling Light: lighting for photographers on the go,  I’m publishing a series of portraits that use some of the specific techniques we’ll discuss—and play with—during the all-too-brief workshop.  Again, all of these shoots are done with “small” strobes—the expensive pieces of gear too many photographers leave attached to the hot shoes of their DSLR cameras.

First up is Beauty Light.  Why beauty light?  Because it looks good, is flattering especially to women, and is the height of simplicity.   Three strobes, a diffusion scrim and one well-placed reflector.

Here’s a lighting diagram:

Note: Diffusion panel is actually directly overhead subject; reflector under subject's chin not shown.

Now I hear the question:  why should we come to the workshop if you’re showing off the shoots (and the lighting diagrams) here?   Well, from my point of view, describing a shoot isn’t the same as being on a shoot.  Not even close.  Hopefully you’ll glean some helpful info from these short descriptions, but this is more inspirational than strictly informational.  You can play around with settings and locations in order to recreate these shots, and you can eventually recreate them.  Thus you’ll learn, which is the point.   But if you have limited time and learn best by interaction, then you might want to attend a workshop or a class.  This will save you some time—usually, a lot of it.   At the Traveling Light workshop, for example,  we’ll discuss not just technique, but approach, philosophy and how to react when you’re in the pressure cooker situation of a real, live shoot, with real, live, impatient people.

So I hope you get a lot out of these posts.   Stay tuned to the blog for more sample shoots.  Special thanks to www.lightingdiagrams.com!

What’s your (working) space?

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Color gamut map courtesy of adobe.com

As a photographer who doesn’t make a lot of prints—most of my ‘deliverables’ consist of digital files—I have to pay close attention to color that may render differently on my screen than on my clients’.   Specifically, the Working Space color on my computer and the color space I embed in the digital file before sending it out a client or the photo lab.

Sound mystifying? Here’s a short break-down.

Color Space is simply the gamut, or range, of possible colors. Some spaces, such as ProPhoto RGB, encompass millions of colors, which makes the images look great on a computer screen.   Output that file to a device that can’t read the ProPhoto RGB color space, and the results for your image will be less than stellar.

The basic thing I keep in mind is this. Work in the largest-gamut color space you can…say, ProPhoto or Adobe RGB.   When outputting photos for a client or for a specific use (i.e., for the web), convert the photo’s color space to one with a  more limited gamut if that makes it render better for that particular use.

As Rob Galbraith noted in a long-ago digital workflow seminar, “Assign on input. Convert on output.”

First step is setting the color space in your camera. My recommendation? ProPhoto RGB, if it is available. If not, AdobeRGB, both of which have a much bigger gamut than sRGB (see the color map above).

After you import your image into Photoshop in this format, you can choose to assign a new color space. This doesn’t actually change the digital zeros and ones that comprise your image, but it does make the photo appear different on the screen–sometimes very different. I only assign a new color space if my image is way too magenta, etc. I might assign ColorMatch RGB,  which takes out redness pretty effectively.  The key here is you’re visually making the photo look good on the screen.  To Assign a color profile, go to Edit–>Assign Profile in Photoshop.   There, you can choose from a variety of color spaces.  If you have the “Preview” box checked, you’ll see the effect each profile will have on the image.   If you find one you like, great.  If you don’t, then don’t worry about assigning a different profile.

Options under "Assign Profile"

Once you’ve imaged the photo and it’s ready for it’s final destination—be it client or your own website—consider the end use.  Then you Convert by going to Edit–>Convert to Profile in Photoshop, and choosing a space there.    This time, the little zeros and ones inside the image file are changed by your selection, so always save the original before this “conversion” step.  Note the “Source Space”—the current color space of your image file—and the “Destination Space”.  In this example, both are sRGB.

Convert to Profile dialog box

My default is to convert it to sRGB. This is more limited in terms of gamut. However, sRGB is the best choice for PC (and non-Apple) screens. If you sent an image in the ProPhoto space that looks great on your gleaming Mac, your client’s PC might render it in unpredictable ways.  Convert it to sRGB, you can know that it’ll look pretty close to what you see on most average screens.  For this reason, if I’m publishing for the web I’ll convert to sRGB too. If you’re printing yourself, you may choose to keep in a higher gamut space. If you’re printing with a lab, you should check with them. Most ask for sRGB or allow you to embed an .icc profile (more on that another time; basically it’s a color profile designed for a specific printer).  Color offset printers will require conversion to CMYK at this point, and then more imaging will likely be required to tweak the images before printing.

So, whether you ever decide to play with Photoshop’s “Assign Profile” function, you should always be aware of the color space your images are using.   If they aren’t optimized for their eventual destination, make sure to convert those files to the proper color space.

Announcing: 2011 Maine Studio B Photo Workshops

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Studio B 2011 Workshop series

We’ve finalized dates for our photography programs this year at Maine Studio B.     These workshops are are intended for anyone with a DSLR wanting to get to the “next level” in terms of lighting, storytelling and creativity.

Who is this workshop for?  Working professionals, amateurs, students–anyone who knows how to use their flashes and/or strobes but wants to light in a more interesting way.   It’s also for those who have a flash but can’t seem to find time to read the manual…or who have a set of studio strobes and now are thinking, “Ok, now what?”

Space is limited.  Payment instructions and other details are shown below with the description for each event.

 

Traveling Light: Flash techniques and tips for photographers on the go

Time: Tuesday, May 24, 5-8:30 pm
Location:  Maine Studio B, 28 Maple Street, Third Floor, Portland, ME (207) 699.9321
Cost: $99

Join veteran photojournalist and commercial photographer Brian Fitzgerald for this information-loaded seminar.   Brian will show how to more effectively use your portable flash in a variety of real-world situations. Topics include:

Manual flash vs. TTL
on-camera strobe techniques
off-camera strobes using wireless, optical and corded systems
Modifying and shaping light
Practical tips, from gels to mounts
From one flash to many: building a portrait
Q-and-A session
Plus: The 10-minute portrait challenge

Space is limited to 15. Pay for your sessions below using the Paypal button.  NOTE: Maine Wedding Company members: “Traveling Light” attendance is free with your membership.  Please just RSVP by emailing Brian.

 

Lights on location: Amp up your location images with studio and portable strobes  * PLEASE NOTE THAT THE TIME AND LOCATION HAVE CHANGED

Time: Tuesday, October 18, 4-7:30 pm
Location:  Ferry Beach, Scarborough (207) 699.9321
Cost: $99

Sometimes natural light isn’t enough.  Often it just needs to be “helped” by the addition of some well-placed strobes.  Join veteran photojournalist and commercial photographer Brian Fitzgerald for this comprehensive, hands-on workshop on the use of studio and portable flashes on location.   Whether you’re a studio photographer or you work out of the back of your Honda Civic,  you should know how to build a shot with all available tools–ambient and artificial.

In this workshop,  topics include:

Location gear – what you need to have
Small flashes (i.e., camera strobes) vs. studio strobes
Balancing ambient light and artificial light
Reflectors and modifiers
Tips for when things go wrong: surviving the location shoot
Plus: The 10-minute portrait challenge
Q-and-A session

Space is limited to 10. Reserve a spot now by contacting Brian Fitzgerald by email at brian@fitzgeraldphoto.com. Cost is $99 for this intensive instructional workshop.

Frequently asked questions

Why should I attend either workshop?

Professionals never stop learning.  The best way to learn—for us photographers and for most people—is to see it with our own eyes, to discuss it with others, and to get the chance to put it into practice immediately.   Why me?  My approach is what you’d expect from a photojournalist–practical, down-n-dirty, heavy on results and not theory.  In short, if you like to get your hands dirty, both figuratively and literally, then this might be for you.

What do you bring to the table?

My approach is practical,  geared toward giving useful, real-world information gleaned over 17 years as a working photojournalist and commercial photographer.

Should I bring my camera?    Will I have a chance to shoot?

Given the time available to us, and the amount of ground we’ll be covering, these are not hands-on shooting workshops.   That said, you can shoot the setups and anything else you’d care to during the talks.   It may be useful to have your flash and camera as a reference for some of the things we’ll be doing.

Is this a hands-on workshop?

This isn’t a shooting workshop, but it relies heavily on participation.  You may be called in to be a model, or to assist with lighting, or to give your two cents’ worth.    How else you gonna learn?

Will you have food?

Nope.   We only have three hours, so food will have to wait.   We will have water and sodas (we’re not heathens).

Will everything be at Maine Studio B?

The location light session starts at the studio but, weather permitting, we”ll transition to an outdoor setting for the majority of the time.

Should I bring anything else?

As my high school geometry teacher used to say, “Bring a sharp pencil and a mind to match.”   Oh, and no shirt, no shoes….no service.  Seriously.   Just come, be prepared to participate, and we’ll have a great time.

Don’t like that skin color? Replace it.

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Image showing high yellow values

Proper skin tone is a must for any professional portrait.   Sometimes, especially when shooting in natural-light conditions, a warmer or cooler color of skin is desired.   When in studio or daylight conditions, however, skin tone and color is critical for making sure faces look natural and healthy.

You can’t just judge the tones of a photo by visually assessing it on a computer monitor, unless you have a recently calibrated screen.  Everyone sees color differently.   Instead, it’s best to use objective numbers.   Select the eyedropper tool in Photoshop and hover over the skin areas in your image to see the C,M,Y,K values. You must have the “Info” window open to do so.  The Info palette is a densitometer that measures the amount of cyan, magenta, yellow and black present in your image.  These are the colors that make up the four-color printing process.   Even though your images most likely are being rendered in an RGB space and may never need to be converted to CMYK, we use the CMYK values in the densitometer to measure whether our skin tone is where it needs to be.

Primarily, we’re concerned with relative values, not absolute values.  For example, For Caucasian skin, you’d likely see the numeric values for M (Magenta) in the 30-50 range.   It really doesn’t matter where it is; what’s important is this value relative to the Y (Yellow) number.   For white, Caucasian skin the Y value should always be about 3-5 points above the M value.   K?  That’s black, by the way–and it should read quite low, in the single digits, or zero.  The C, or Cyan, value, should be roughly a third of the value of the M or Y numbers.   So for our current example, a C value of 8-15 would be dead-on.    Without going into specific sets of numbers for all the various kinds of skin, the darker the skin, the higher the Cyan value should be relative to the M and Y values.

By the way, this whole number scheme doesn’t really work if the skin you’re working with has been lit by any extreme light–you know, the gorgeous, golden glow of a sunset or the cool glow of a neon sign.  You have extreme light, you want to preserve that.   You don’t want ‘natural’.

So, once you’ve determined that you DO want natural skin tone and you’ve identified the problem–that guy’s skin looks really pink and you’ve confirmed values of, say, Y=35 and M=75–then how do you fix it?

There are a lot of great ways to do so in Photoshop, and what works for one picture won’t always work for another.  That said, my go-to first tool is always “Replace Color” (Edit–>Adjustments–>Replace Color).  To use it, simply click on a lit, shadowless area of skin and select the degree of latitude (called ‘fuzziness’) you want your selection to cover.  A high degree of fuzziness will select more areas of the image that match the tone of the skin area you clicked on.   Once that’s done, move the sliders to adjust the Hue, Saturation and Lightness.  It doesn’t take much.    In the example below, I moved the Hue slider to -3, the Saturation slider to -5 and the Lightness to +1.   I’ve rarely had to go above 10 on the Hue slider, which is my primary adjustment slider.

That’s really it–just move the eyedropper icon over the skin again to read the new values and, if they look good, go with it.  Again, it may be difficult but you should trust the numbers way, way before you trust your eyes.   A properly adjusted image will reproduce on any calibrated printer even if it doesn’t look great on your uncalibrated screen.

So pay attention to your skin values, and try out Replace Color.   Doesn’t your skin deserve it?

Image adjusted using Replace Color, showing corrected relative values

Expand your mind (and your Mac) with hard drive enclosures

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A present to ourselves: the indestructible Burly Box from MacGurus (click image to view larger photo)

I’ve written before about the need to have a 3-2-1 backup system for your important image files. Now here’s a great tool that makes automating backups, cloning and file transfers a snap: a multiple-bay hard drive enclosure. Whether you have a multiple-drive war horse or are using an iMac or laptop, if you’re a photographer you probably should look into one of these. This particular unit is sold by the knowledgeable folks at MacGurus.  When I called, the guy who helped was Rick, the owner.

I chose a four-bay unit so that my primary copies of my archive as well as backups and system clones could happen in one place. The unit is extremely tough and comes with robust power and cooling systems, so it’s meant to be run–as you might expect–all the time. This “always-on” approach solves the issue many photographers face who have a good backup system in place that may not get consistently applied because hard drives aren’t always plugged in and attached to the computer.

Ours arrived this week, and so it was fun to just light it and open it the opposite way that I opened presents as a kid: sloooowly.  More on software recommendations for handling automatic processes soon.

Shop Talk: Using Adjustment Layers

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With Photoshop, it’s easy to go overboard and end up with the equivalent of what we used to call the Hand of God effect.    Any change made to an image alters the bits that make up the file and cannot be reversed once done.

That’s why I love Photoshop’s nondestructive imaging capability using Adjustment Layers.  The idea is that when you make changes to an image, you do so on a separate layer.  This means you don’t make changes to the underlying image file (the background layer) at all, and thus don’t damage the original.  Once you’ve got the file where you want it, you flatten it and make all the changes all at once.

Adjustment layers are a great idea, and are easy to use.  With an image open, go to Layers–> Adjustment Layers.   You’ll have the option to choose tools such as  curves, levels, exposure etc.  When you select a tool and name the layer, you can make changes with the tool that appear to change your image (below).


The change is really only being applied to the adjustment layer, which you can see in your Layers palette.  If one portion of the photo is too bright and I want to darken it, as in my example below, I make the entire photo darker using Curves.

Then I make sure the black square at the bottom of the tool box is set as foreground color (click the two-headed arrow to move the black box above the white one as shown below), and I select the paintbrush tool .  Now when I paint areas of the photo with the brush, I’m actually telling it to remove the darkness I’ve just added to that portion of the image.  In my example, I only want the sky and background to be darker–not the girl.  So I carefully paint around her, varying the brush size and opacity to feather in the changes so they look natural.

If you mistakenly take away too much with the paintbrush, or wander over areas of the image you don’t intend to, you can use the Undo (command + Z) tool to undo the change, or–and this is why I like Adjustment Layers so much–you can add the change back.  You do this by going to the bottom of the toolbar and making the white box set as the foreground color.  This now means that whichever area you paint, you are adding back the changes you made to the adjustment layer (in this case, adding the darkness I applied in step one).  So by alternating the additive (white) and subtractive (black) versions of the paintbrush, I can really craft my adjustments.

There’s no limit to the number of Adjustment Layers you can layer, one on top of the other.  If you don’t like what’s going on with one of your layers, you can always drag that layer (in the layers dialog box) into the trash can and deleting it.

When you’re all done, it’s a good idea to save the entire file as a “master” version of the image–either as a .psd or a .tiff–preserving all the individual layers as they are.   Then, flatten the whole thing to produce your final usable file.  Once you incorporate Adjustment Layers into your workflow, you’ll save time and have better results.

Original image, left and final image after flattening.

As easy as 3-2-1: protect your most valuable files now

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Hard Drive Failure

A few months ago, my assistant was dutifully burning DVDs from a backup external drive.  The hard drive, just a few months old, was humming along just fine until it simply disappeared from the desktop.  I’ve never had a hard drive fail so completely and without warning.   I took the disc in to Steve Bedell, a friend and systems guru with Network Knowledge.  He cracked the case and spent a day trying to recover the files, to no avail.  It was toast.

Even though all of those files existed elsewhere in my system (meaning nothing was permanently lost), it underlined the need for a more robust backup solution.   As Steve says, it’s not if your hard drive will fail…but when.   He also touts the oft-repeated rule of thumb when it comes to file backups:  have a 3-2-1 strategy.   What’s that?  It simply means that your important files should have three copies, on at least two different types of media (external drive, internal drive, write-once media like CD or DVDs, or cloud-based storage).  The “1” means that at least one copy should be stored offline (not plugged into your computer), preferably off-site in a safe location.

So, here’s my own Simple Simon method, which satisfies the 3-2-1 rule:   All of my image files live on a primary external hard drive plugged in full-time to my computer.  I also have these files in a “working”, or temporary, folder on my internal hard drive.  Everything is backed up to a second external hard drive that is unplugged and kept elsewhere.   Lastly, I burn DVDs of all these files once they are organized into the buckets I keep them in.   So:  three different permanent homes for my files, on two different types of media (external hard drive and DVD), with one copy (an external drive) stored off-site.   In the future I’ll probably explore cloud-based solutions, but right now they’re too slow for my needs.  I also use Time Machine for versioned backups, but I again don’t use this for image files for a variety of reasons.

What’s your solution?  Even if you don’t have a lot of money, a simple system like mine will give you peace of mind the next time you get a blank screen where your computer used to be.

Shop Talk: What space are you in?

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CIE Chart with sRGB Gamut by spigget.png
CIE Chart with sRGB Gamut (from Wikimedia Commons)

When you get a new digital camera, one of the bewildering number of options available to you in set up is to change the color space:  sRGB, Adobe 1998, or even ProPhoto RGB (only certain cameras).  Each of these has a wider color gamut than the last.  That’s a fancy way to say that they can see many more colors–and thus produce an image with more of the hue subtlety that nature offers.

Then there’s the color space, known as the working color space, that you use when processing an image in Photoshop.  This usually is the color space that the image came in, but you can assign a new working color space just for the purposes of your particular monitor, etc.   More on that in a future post.

Finally, there’s the output color space–the space that you convert your image to just before turning that image out for a client, a printer or for publication on a site.

No matter what color space your image is assigned in-camera or in your photo editing program, make sure to consider converting your image to sRGB if it is intended for web display, for printing at a photo lab or if it is being sent to a client who has a PC (when in doubt, assume the viewer’s computer is a PC!).

Why?  sRGB displays a more limited set of colors, but it’s a color space made for PC screens–and most computers out there are PCs, not 27-inch calibrated Mac screens like mine.

To convert an image to a new color space in Photoshop, go to Edit–>Convert to Profile and choose the sRGB option from the drop-down menu.  If you use Lightroom or other programs, many of them have an “convert to sRGB” option when exporting images.

Paying attention to the color space your photos are captured in and imaged in is important, but it’s equally important to convert to sRGB unless you know that your images are going to an offset printer (CMYK color space) or to someone who has a nice, big Mac computer just like you.  Your images will display better and your clients will be happier, too.