First communion session part 3: Post-processing and printing preparation

This is third article about photographing of first communion. In previous posts I wrote about different aspects of preparation and actual shooting.
In this part I will share some thoughts about my approach to post processing and I'll show some techniques that I have used.

Make the candidate photos available for selection as soon as possible

I have shared the photos with my client very soon after the session. Purposely. The idea was to let the family enjoy the photos and to start making a final selection at the moment when the session is still fresh in the memory of participants. And it payed off. I got a number of good questions about some photos that I initially skipped from the selection. They were technically not very good, but were liked by the participants. 

It is worth noting how the photos were shared. I have used my account on 500px for this purpose. I just created a set, uploaded the photos, protected the set with a password and shared with the client. 

Having short time for processing of the photos forced me to make some tradeoffs during image post-processing. There is simply no time for advanced processing. And at this moment I learned how important is to get photos "right in the camera". The less cropping, retouching, exposure compensation required, the less time is spent behind the computer's monitor.

Communicate about expected number of pictures to be selected

From the beginning I have specified the number of pictures I would like to have in the final paper album. I have chosen initially this number to be 1/5 of the published photos. It was a good compromise between a final price and the content of the album. Another purpose of the limitation was of a more psychological nature. I wanted the family to choose the best photos. Since the number was limited, they was forced to think and choose the really best photos. 

To be honest I am not sure if it is the right approach when dealing with a real customer, but in this case it worked.

Later on I got a request to add some more photos, since they liked them a lot. Of course, I agreed.

Think about album's composition. Let review it.

At the end there will be a paper version of an album, and it would be nice if the album is built as a book telling a story. So the composition is as important as when taking a single photo. In this case the story is relatively simple: preparation for the ceremony, sceneries in church with a communion reception as a climax, then a number of family portraits after the ceremony.

I have shared my thoughts and initial versions of the album with my wife, who has a very good eye for compositions consisting of more pictures. It helped me a lot to make right choices of the images on the album pages.

Plan a review meeting with the customer

When album was ready in a digital form, I made an appointment with mother of the girl to show her the work and the final proposal. We identified some mistakes in the selection of the photos (just wrong numbers of the photos), agreed to add two pages to the album with two important photos, finalized the agreement on the actual price. I think that it was important for both parties: for her to increase confidence, for me to confirm that the job was done right.

Technicalities. Tools used. Techniques applied

For album creation I have used Adobe Lightroom 5.0, Nik Software suite, onOne Software 7.5 (and Photoshop). My choice was driven by the fact that Lightroom is my photo collection organizer of choice. Nik Software I have used primarily for its RAW presharpener tool (which is in my opinion way better than Lightroom's sharpen tool) and Viveza tool which allows for selective applying simple image adjustments (color cast, exposure, contrast) to the parts of the image. I have used onOne software to improve the portraits photos with their Perfect Portrait tool. This tool performs a really nice job in whitening the eyes and mouth and has a very nice algorithm to correct the skin tone.

Every now and then I used some presets of Color Efex Pro 4 (Nik) and Perfect Effects Pro 4 (onOne) to quickly achieve cool effects offered by the presets implemented by those applications.

Using the plugins I have noticed that it is more comfortable to work with them via Photoshop than directly in Lightroom. So I opened the image to be edited in Photoshop, then I applied tools that I wanted to use and finally saved the modified .PSD file. I found it more comfortable because of fact that Nik and onOne integrates with Photoshop by using layers (each tool application adds a new layer). Which gives extra possibilities since I can apply layer masks, layer effects and all other goodies of Photoshop.

Finally the book. I decided to use Blurb for printing, because of their good quality and integration with Lightroom. I found however the possibilities of book editing in Lightroom (even in version 5.0) somewhat limited: positioning of texts on the page is quite limited, it is not possible (at least to my best knowledge) to create frames in the Book module of Lightroom. I had to use external applications to provide a frame to a photo. It delayed the whole production process for sure. Let's hope it will get better in future versions of Lightroom.

In the last part of this cycle I will describe some learnings I have taken from the whole process.

Make your own Easter greeting card

Easter is coming and it is a good habit to send the greetings to the friends or relatives on a greeting card. Since couple of years I make such cards by myself, which is a lot of fun and gives the cards uniqueness and personal touch.
Last year I described some techniques useful for this kind of photography. In this post I am going to describe the whole process of making such card, from the basic concept, to the publication.

Easter theme

All starts by selecting the basic theme. The symbolic of Eastern is focused on the symbols of new life: eggs, chickens, green and yellow colors, hare. So it is almost unavoidable to have at least some of them on the card. In my first attempt I have chosen for eggs and chickens. 

The composition

I like postcards that have a 3D-look. So I wanted to compose a picture that would give strong impression of depth. To achieve that I set up the scene in three planes: foreground, with the eggs, middle part with the chickens, and the background with the hanging eggs:

The perceived depth of field can be manipulated by different aperture settings.

The light

The above picture was taken in the ambient light, coming from the window located right to the scene. I wanted to give the chickens some warm punch as key light. To do so, I have used two speedlights with the CTO filter placed left and right to the chickens:

To avoid light spilling both strobes were equipped with a snoot to focus the light beam. Both strobes were controlled from the camera build-in flash via the iTTL system of Nikon. First attempt:

The chickens are warmly lit, but the rest of the scene is dark. Too dark. Time to put the fill light. Fill light was been created by third flash and a golden reflector bouncing the light from the flash on the scene. After applying fill light the scene looked like that:

That is better. The scene still have a warm look and all elements on the foreground are properly lit. Last step is to improve the light in the background. To do so another flash was used, equipped with the yellow filter. I have experimented with several positions of the background flash:

Manipulating the background light was easy, I just held the flash light in my hand during shooting in the different places of the scene.
Finally I have chosen the middle image for further processing.

Post processing

For post processing I have used combination of Lightroom, Nik software suite and Photoshop.

In Lightroom I have applied lens profile and camera corrections.

In Nik software I have pre-sharpened the image (with RAW sharpener), applied the golden reflector filter, blur vignette (in Efex Pro), added some local brightness to the eggs in the background (with Viveza)

In Photoshop I have removed some distracting spots. There is the final picture:

Some technicalities

Reuse the setup

The whole 'production' took me about 3 hours. Since a lot of effort has been put in the light setup once the chickens were ready I decided to create another card, with a hare in the main role:

As one can see, the scene is very similar to those with chickens, yet different. Taking this picture took me just couple of minutes thanks to reuse of the existing setup.

Try different gels

When I was done with my basic setup I have tried to light the scene with flashes without gels:

It hasn't been chosen eventually but it is always worth experimenting with different settings and sometimes it can result in a new, inspiring scene.

Hanging eggs

To hang the eggs I have used a combination of the flash light stand and a piece of other pipe mounted on the light stand:

After my first Dutch Photo Walk

Today I have participated for the first time in a Dutch Photo Walk event, organized by +Nikola Nikolski. It was a very nice day. A group of 18 people walking through the Dutch city Delft taking pictures and looking for a composition for the main theme, which was "Delftware" (or, in Dutch: Delfts blauw).
Since a city walk was for my a new photographic activity, let me share some thoughts of 'a newcomer'.
First of all, take part of it if you have a possibility! You will meet other people sharing your passion (photography) and will be able to learn from each other. The last one is a funny part of the experience: I have learned a lot just by watching what and how people take their shots. Suddenly I have noticed today many interesting subjects on the way that I probably would skip if I were alone. And by having conversations with the co-walkers I got some insights in their approach to photography.
More on some technical aspects in later post, now I want to work on the photos from the walk.

Self-assignment - ups, downs but dont' give up

Every now and then I try to give myself a small photography assignment. Mostly because I want to learn something new, improve the technique or just to have some fun. It is not always planned. Lately I have created an assignment spontaneously while taking a shot meant for the Nightscapes Google+ page. After setting up the tripod I started shooting. The results were, well - not great:

But then I have noticed quite spectacular light emerging right after the street lighting was switched on. During warming up the lamps get nice, red color (for about 1 minute). And the idea was born: take an interesting shot of this light. Why does it deserve to be called a photo-assignment? For two reasons:
- The scene needs to be composed to let the light be visible and  attract the attention. On the photo above the lanterns are hardly visible. The ability of seeing good compositions with the objects I want to photograph is in my opinion something requiring continuous practice.
- It requires quite some preparations and leaves little time for shooting: the red light is produced by the lamp during warm-up time only and it lasts about 1 minute. Nice exercise to learn how to operate with your equipment efficiently.

So the preparations started. First the decision: how to expose the light. First attempt was to play safe: show the red line of lamps above another (white) line. Simple, but with some potential. The tripod has been setup, camera prepared, some pre-shots taken to check the composition and the ambient light. Then waiting  to for the dusk and the lamps to lit. And then... bummer, the lamps started to glow white immediately! I should have known better, but for this day I was done. It was no time to move to the place where the 'right' lanterns were located.

Next try, new chances. In the meantime I have abandoned the original idea of the light lines and started to look for something different. Remember the first photo? At the left side you can probably notice the industrial constructions. Anyway, such constructions are nice objects to shoot:

The rough idea has been born. To look for the right location I rode along both sides of the channel. Finally I have found it: nice combination of the objects, the silos still enlighten with the day light. And from the position I have noticed that just couple meters ahead of me another possible shooting location. Good - there would be my fallback. And the shot was exactly as I wanted:

Sure, not the greatest photo in the world. But it is controlled and prepared by me and is a result of a design process.

To summarize, the assignment took me 2 evenings, a number of iterations, one failure moment. That's why it is worth practice and continuous improvement: in real life very often there will be no time for 2nd try...

Introducing teenagers to the basics of composition and photography

This is about one of the ideas that come to the mind on saturday evening with a glass of wine in hand and a good conversation with your better half.

My wife is involved together with her school in a project called "Lodówka bez tajemnic" which can be translated into "Refrigerator without mysteries". The web page of the project can be found here. It's in Polish, but Google translator can help non-Polish readers quite well.

Anyway, part of the project is to photograph the teenagers participating in the project together with a refrigerator. When we started talking about the idea pretty soon we agreed that it would be good to let children make the photos by themselves with some introduction and guidance.  The idea was born.

But then the realization. We thought a workshop-like approach could work. The time was limited (2.5-3 hours), and we wanted to achieve some educational effect, next to the photos. And (some extra requirements from my wife) it would be great if a references could be made to the Dutch culture and art.

Having the limitations in mind I decided to divide the time into four blocks:

1. Theoretical introduction to composition in photography,
2. Discussion on how to create a composition with students and the refrigerator,
3. Shooting session of the chosen composition (where each student had a chance to take the photos and experiment with the composition)
4. Critique and selection of the best photos.

As one can see there is nothing about technicalities, like depth of field, shutter speed, ISO, "just" composition. Of course since composition is a huge topic, I limited it to the very basics: rule of thirds, leading lines, filling the frame, using patterns, using the frames. For rule of thirds I have built some context by showing the examples of the golden division in the architecture, astronomy and biology (remembering about the educational aspect of the workshop). Each rule I have illustrated with my own pictures. Purposedly I didn't choose to show too many bad examples (actually limited to 1 or 2 only).

Then I took some time to show how Rembrandt applied the composition rules on his two paintings: "The night watch" and "The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp". At last I have shown some pictures of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Second part went surprisingly fast. Children decided quickly on three setups to test. Preparing a setup required some coaching. I was keeping to attend the students to watch the scene through the camera to see the limitations of the frame with respect to a naked eye. For some of them it was real discovery, by the way. Another aspect was to remind them to try different scenery, looking at the scene from the different angle, try totaly different setup.

We could do this since the fridge we use was just mobile fridge with a lot of fruits inside.

Then the shooting. They started by shooting in the standing position. After my suggestion to get lower, stand up on a chair they started to discover new possibilities.

The critique sesssion was something I was a little bit afraid of. The teenagers have a quite sensitive ego. On the other hand some of their photos deserved some critique and improvements. As a first precaution I have put all photos all together to make them a little bit anonymous. And made an agreement with the students that if we critique we do it constructively by indicating what could be improved having composition rules in mind.

And I must say, the session went surprisingly well. They listened to each other, took suggestions with attention and admitted possible improvements in their photos.

What did they learn? I think the rule of thirds and leading lines was the most easy to grasp and visible on the photos. Filling the frame and using the frames was a little bit faded. They practically didn't experiment with patterns. But it is understandable seeing the limited time.

Was it all with all successful? Well, I got some signs it was. I was running out of time and actually extended my time limit by 30 minutes - such a beginner's mistake. But some children called their parents asking them to pick them up later because they wanted to stay until the workshop is finished. According to the school staff it doesn't happen often.

Finally, some traditional "dos and dons"

Dos:

• Ensure the professional teacher is with you in the location all the time. Teaching is a serious issue and in case something goes wrong you have to use help of the professional. In most countries it is also required by law that there is a qualified personnel in a classroom all the time. So don't forget that. 
• Dare to ask the teachers about your performance afterwards. They are professionals and their feedback on how well (or how bad) you were as a  "teacher"  is invaluable
• Have initial setup to be photographed in mind. At least you know what might work best in advance. And you have limited amount of time so you need to steer the session every now and then.
• Limit the group. I have worked with 7-8 children and I think it was an upper limit I would say.
• Prepare a number of cameras. I had 1 DSLR and 3 compact cameras. So half of the group was shooting all the time while other half was posing. So everyone was busy.

Dons:

• Leave children doing nothing for a longer period of time. Initially I didn't pay enough attention to this aspect and suddenly a kind of chaotic atmosphere started to emerge. Thanks to the supervising teacher the situation got back quickly under control.

Getting something out of a rainy day - part 2

As said in previous post, I worked a bit more on the composition with rain drops.
Here are the results:

Both pictures were taken with Nikon D80, 18-200mm zoom lens @ 200 mm, f/14. time 1/200 and 1/320 s respectively. Photos taken with the camera mounted on a tripod.

To get the rain drops sharp I needed to focus manually. 

Getting something out of a rainy day

The raining in The Netherlands started some days ago and it seems that it will not stop for a couple of weeks. So how to find a motivation to get a camera, go outside, find some inspiration and take some photos during such period? Here's an approach I tried today and it worked for me.
I gave myself a little assignment: visualize rain and check out how a landscape changed by it can work in your advantage.
I started in my close neighbourhood and took it easy (I thought): find some raindrops, some puddles and go ahead shooting. First the raindrops:

It turned to be more difficult than I thought. First of all, the exposure times with ISO 200 were around 0.3-0.5 s. So the pictures are not very sharp. Tripod in this case was not very helpful because of the wind that moved the trees. Anyway, I think there is a lot of potential in this kind of composition so I'll give a try other day (and as I mentioned, I'll get a lot of opportunities to try it out :)).

Than the puddles. Experimented for quite some time and got something like that:

Probably not the most spectacular photo but good enough as a background for some other works.

I spent some time 'studying' the different ideas on how approach the pool and make something nice out of it. Like playing with the zig-zag like lines:

Or zooming in on the border of the pool:

Again, not very best, but something to keep in back of my head for the future.
Then while walking a little bit an idea came to my mind to use the puddles as the shapes forming part of the composition. Here the first shot:

The idea is: the puddles form a leading line to my bike that is supposed to be a main subject. The focal length is way too short (32mm), so let's make it longer to 'compress' the distance a little bit:

What about that? I think it is nice. O course the main subject could be more interesting (I wouldn't mind a red Ferrari), but it's about an idea. BTW: this shot has been taken with a focal length of 200 mm and I needed to walk about 30 meters away from the subject to get everything (the puddles and the bike) into the picture.

Finally, some abstraction:

What's that? The same position, shorter focal length gives the answer:

What I am going to explore further is to get better results on the rain drops (composition and technical-wise).  And go outside more often during rainy days!

Learned today:

- Tripod can be very handy with such weather, especially when doing close-ups. Low light conditions require longer exposure times which in turn requires a steady support of the camera. Higher ISO values may help, but in case of my gear (Nikon D80) going beyond ISO 640 doesn't make much sense (the noise becomes too visible), so - tripod to the rescue.