Footloose Photographer

So many people make the mistake of sharpening the whole image…myself included. Here’s a nice clear intro to selective sharpening in Adobe Photoshop:

Selective sharpening in Photoshop by Joe

The guys over at fstoppers.com challenge themselves by doing a fashion shoot with an iPhone as the camera. This definitely proves it’s all about the light, not so much the camera.

Alright, time to get this blog going. I’ve decided I’m going to start exploring lighting and what better way to document what I find out (for both my own memory and others to peek at) then to share it as I go along. So without further adieu…here we go.

I opted to spend my morning off on Canada day messing around with some lighting and self-portraits…what better way to spend a morning off?

camera info: Nikon D200 | 35mm(ƒ/1.8G) | ƒ/1.8 | ISO 100 | 1/125s

strobist info:

Symmetry

Using an off camera flash increases your options for creativity a lot. But the addition of just a single light adds a lot of extra complexity as well. There is lots of information out there about learning lighting, but to someone who’s just starting to enter this realm it can be a little overwhelming. When I first started, I didn’t know where to start! Hands on learning tends to be the best way for me to learn (like a local camera club lighting workshop or something) but I think I found a good starting point in a hands-on-like educational video.

I was looking at some Lastolite softboxes on B&H’s website and, clicking through some long network of links, I stumbled upon a great little video. Lastolite put this educational video out to show you the different types of light you can create with a softbox modifier on your single flash. There’s a lot of useful and concise information for beginners and it might be a good place to start when trying to wrap your head around off camera flash for the first time.

Check out the link to the video!

umbrellas and stripes.

I’ve always been rather disappointed with the digital black and white conversions I’ve done (they just didn’t have the texture/contrast/something that black and white film gave me). But winter is meant for experimenting with post-processing am I right? So I gave it another shot on some casual portraits and here are some of the results.

I’m kind of curious as to other people b/w processing workflow. If you got one you should share it. Here’s mine in Lightroom, which involves a bit of tinkering based on each photo:

the soloist.

-Switch to grayscale processing
-Make your blacks nice and dark.
-Hold the alt key and select the ‘blacks’ slider.
-Slide to the right until you see a nice outline of your subject in this view. Release alt and the view will revert with your black clipping changed.
-Brighten up parts of the image that have lost detail (with either adding some brightness with the adjustment brush or using the fill light slider [or adjusting the curves] to bring some detail back to the darker parts of the image)
-Crank that contrast! I usually go almost all the way, but the images straight out of camera on a D200 always seem to require more of a boost here so you may need not go as far as I do.
-Adjust the clarity. This is very subject dependent. I like to bring it back a bit to give a smooth dreamy look to portraits (but make sure to keep those eyes sharp with the adjustment brush!). Bumping it up a lot can add some really nice “grain” in the right sort of photo (especially, I find, if you’ve added a bunch of fill light in post. It accentuates the natural grain nicely).
-Adjust the “grayscale mix” (this controls how the computer converts color images to monochrome grayscale images). You choose how you want each color to be handled in the converted grayscale by adjusting each color’s slider. I don’t really have an easy way to explain a generic way to determine how to get the look you want, but tinker with it and get a feel for how it works. Auto-adjusting this feature is sometimes a good starting point.
-Add a vignette if you like. I tend to like ‘em on black and whites, adds to the contrast and directs the observer’s eye.
-Upload and share!