Landscape photography - my approach to increase the chances for a successful session

In the previous post I have written about my not so successful approach to photograph a specific landscape. It gave me some food for thoughts about the more systematic approach to the landscape photography that would increase my chances of taking a good picture (or pictures) during the session.
Here some of my findings so far, that have worked during my last two sessions and I will keep using them in the future.

Choose the theme, scout for a location

I found out that pre-selecting the theme in advance helps a lot to keep on focused during the whole process. For instance, for my last two sessions I took the river as a main theme. It limited my location scouting area to the banks of the rivers I wanted to photograph. But why is the scouting important at all? Isn't it just enough to select a point on a map, go there and try to take a shot? In my opinion, it does not work because it introduces too many uncertain factors during the actual shooting resulting in less time spent on actual photographing and composing the pictures.

I start scouting by determining a time of the day of the session. For instance, knowing it will be in the early morning I can start looking for a right place being in a radius of, say, 1 hour car driving. Once I know the approximate location, I start studying the maps of the area to determine the following aspects:

- is the terrain accessible for walking?

- how far from the location can I park the car?

- what would be a location of the sun at the location?

While first two questions are more technical, the third one requires some kind of pre-visualisation of the scenery I'd like to photograph. I wanted to take some photos where the sun would be directly visible on the picture, together with a river and its banks and a deep perspective. And I wanted to take photos at dawn. It determined the orientation of the river in the approximate direction of  east-west. 

To make it more accurate, I also checked the azimuth of the rising sun at the planned day of the session. To determine the azimuth of sun I use a smartphone application called Astroid which is simple to use and accurate (other applications, like Sundroid would also do the job). 

Having all those factors in mind I started studying the maps (by using Google Maps) looking for the proper location:

Don't forget to check if the Street View mode is available for a given location. It can give you a lot of information about the terrain.

Be on time, have a reserve location (plan "B")

It doesn't matter how well one prepares the location, the actual situation can be unattractive and disappointing for shooting. So it was in this case. On location I have found really flat, boring landscape:

Since I have planned my trip to be on location about 45 minutes before dawn, I had some time to take a corrective action. I knew by studying the maps that a few kilometers further there is another place with different landscape. So I took a quick decision to get into my car and go there. And there I have found the good spot:

Look around, think about future sessions

After the main shooting was done, I have taken a small round-trip ride in the neighbourhood of the location looking for the interesting places. And I have found enough places to plan another assignment:

Take notes after shooting

After successful session I take notes describing the places photographed, conditions on location, conditions in which a photo has been taken. I do it on the day of shooting, after coming home, while the memory is fresh and full of details.

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.

New year - new approach to enhance my photography

When I looked back at my photos taken last year I quickly come to the conclusion that many of them could be better. I think it is a good observation, since awareness of own deficiencies is the first step on a way to fix them.
Here's how I am going to tackle some of the issues I have with my photos:

1. Study work of others more carefully
   This is something I need to do more systematically. I am going to keep it simple: look for inspiration on the sites like 500px.com, viewbug.com, read the books about photography (in 2013 I will concentrate on landscapes - one of the types of photography I do a lot), find best landscape photographers on the web and follow them
2. Shoot, learn, shoot again
   As simple as that: take a theme to photograph, see what can be improved, repeat. One example here: begin of January I went with some guys to Rotterdam for a photowalk. When I compared my results with the results of others I realized how I could do things better. So I planned to go back to Rotterdam in February and improve some shots. 
3. Learn from the professionals
   This is actually ongoing, since it has proven to be effective. I follow the courses on kelbytraining.com. They gave me a lot of insights last year, and this year I'll continue.

Looking back on own photos - do I improve?

Recently I have scanned through the old photos I have made over past years to sort the tags out a little bit.
Then I came to the idea: if I take the photos belonging to a certain category and put it on a timeline, will I see any trend? Will I see improvement of my photographic skills, for example? Is there anything that I could name as a 'constant element', a style?
So I took the photos tagged as the 'landscape' and taken in years 2007-2012. And it was an interesting excercise. Some observations:

• Composition of my landscape photos improves over the years. 
• I need to work on making the landscapes more interesting. I have a tendency to leave too much empty space in the photo, making the picture not as interesting as it could be. How to improve? Studying work of the best in business, scout for the better landscapes is the plan for the coming period.
• The lighting on most of my pictures is, well, not so good. Here the remedy is simple, I think - get up early, be on a location at the sunrise. Also something easy to try.

To summarize: it is worth repeating this excercise more frequently, it definitely helps.