Category: Digital Darkroom

The tools of the trade. Everything that I use to realy bring the image to life.

Backup, backup, backup… Part 3

 Gavin   Digital Darkroom, Equipment, Lightroom, Techniques, Workflow

Following on fom my previous posts here and here about in-field backup and in particular the solution I have opted for, today I had the opportunity of testing it out in anger.

As I write this post, I’ve just returned from a day shooting Big Cats in deepest, dakest Kent. And I really do mean “deepest” and “darkest” owing to the weather.

With freshly charged NiMH batteries, a stack of compactflash cards and two bodies I proceeded to put the device through its paces. After each shooting session I swapped the cards and backed them up onto the drive. It isn’t the fastest solution but it worked admirably, even when I went out for the final session of the day and had the unit backing up whilst in my pocket. The cards from the final shoot I backed up in the car during the journey home. It performed faultlessly throughout the day.

I did discover one unforeseen benefit of using this device, and that is the ease by which the images can be loaded into Lightroom. Plugging thebackup drive into the PC allowsall the images from the day to be imported and processed in one go rather than having to swap out the media cards.

This suits my workflow very well as I rely on the import processing capabilities of Lightroom quite heavily…

  • Copy the image to the local hard disk
  • Rename the image according to the shoot date and theme
  • Apply my standard metadata settings (e.g. copyright notice, contact details, global keywords etc)
  • Keywording withe client/shoot details
  • Apply capture presets
  • Backup to the NAS.

Getting back to the topic of this post, I would say that today has proved a great success. I’m still a little nervous of losing battery power but I can work around that and with two drives the risk if a total failure is somewhat mitigated.

Fashion in the City – a sneak preview…

 Gavin   Digital Darkroom, Equipment, Fashion, Lightroom, Photoshoot, Photoshop, Sneak Peek, Strobist, Techniques

NOTE – The images in this post are virtually straight off the camera with little or no post processing and are therefore not necessarily representative of the finished article.

Had a fantastic shoot this afternoon and got to try out some off-camera flash techniques that I’d been itching to have a go at for a while now.

Here is a sneak preview of some of the images. None of them have had any post processing work apart from a very light adjustment in Lightroom. The images themselves were all shot with a mixture of on-camera and off-camera flash: on-camera fill set relatively low and two off-camera side lights, one each side and slightly behind the subject pointing forwards. The overall effect is similar to the one perfected by Joel Grimes and gives a great look to the images. The harsh, 3D lighting really makes them “pop”. A quick lightroom adjustment for white balance, black level, vibrance, clarity and contrast helps bring them along a little further. Can’t wait to get them through photoshop.

The first image in this set, featuring the model Jade, shows how the two side lights were positioned. This was taken on the Milenium Bridge and was backlit by a very bright sky. There are actually two exposures going on here: flash and ambient. The flash exposure is controlled by the flash power, aperture and the duration of the flash burst. The ambient is controlled by the aperture and the shutter speed. Dialing up the flash power (i.e. adding more light from the flash) requires the aperture to be reduced which in turn will reduce the exposure of the ambient.  For this shot, the flash was dialed up above the ambient to under expose and therefore allow for a richer saturation of the sky whilst simultaneously reducing the brightness of the clouds. The smaller aperture also adds the starburst effect from the two flash guns. If you don’t believe me, try it. Continue reading Fashion in the City – a sneak preview… »

A truly fun event…

 Gavin   Digital Darkroom, Equipment, Event, Photoshoot, Techniques, Tips, Workflow

Had a fun afternoon yesterday covering the Nokia 5k Fun Run in London and all for a good cause too. All the images are available on ovi.com, here: http://share.ovi.com/album/Nokia5k2009.UKLondon5K2009. All mine are tagged with QTPortraits.

091028 Nokia Fun Run-1133Needless to say, I jumped at the chance when asked to take part (on the condition that I didn’t actually have to run anywhere :-)) seeing this as a fantastic opportunity of gaining that all too precious commodity: experience. In hindsight it also proves that Marc Gamble‘s podcast about the Education Spectrum although this could be argued an accident rather than by design.

This was my first attempt at event photography and a real eye opener too. It was also a good excuse to practice some of the techniques that we covered on the Wedding Seminar a couple of weeks ago, both at capture time and in post. I find it quite odd, although hardly surprising, that two distinctly different genres such as Events and Weddings share so much in common.

So what did I learn from the afternoon? Continue reading A truly fun event… »

Wedding gallery now available…

 Gavin   Courses, Digital Darkroom, Journey, Lightroom, QTWeddings, Techniques

I wanted to post a gallery from the wedding seminar earlier, but coming down with swine flu this week really scuppered all my plans 🙁 🙁 :-(. I’m starting to feel a lot better now so I spent an hour this evening making this.

Hope you like it. NB the image quality has been reduced to make the file sizes smaller and no sharpening applied yet. Some of the images would benefit from this extra boost. My excuse is I’m still not really with it owing to the piggy flu and I simply forgot to do it in LightRoom.

Ho hum,

Gavin

Wedding Seminar, Day 3

 Gavin   Courses, Digital Darkroom, Journey, Lightroom, Photoshop, Techniques

Day 3 was post processing day and I learnt soooo much too. There is a defiinite benefit to be gained from spending a day “looking over the shoulder” of a veritable expert in Lightroom and Photoshop. The tutor was David McNeil. He is an accomplished photographer in his own right and a maestro of post processing. I’d recommend anyone to go and check out his work on his blog. Continue reading Wedding Seminar, Day 3 »