Lessons Learned – The Common Sense Photographer

Five Excuses

Posted on April 10, 2023April 10, 2023 by Jim Roberts

Everyone is talking about AI taking over photograph (along with illustration, coding, and just about every other creative endeavor). So I asked Google’s Bard to give me 5 excuses for not taking pictures today. The Bard not only gave me the excuses but also ways to get around the excuses.

Here are 5 excuses for not doing photography today:

I don’t have the time.

Photography can be a time-consuming hobby or profession, and it’s easy to let other things take priority. But if you’re passionate about photography, it’s important to make time for it. Even if you can only spare a few minutes each day, you can still make progress and improve your skills.

I don’t have the right gear.

It’s true that having good gear can make photography easier, but it’s not essential. You can take great photos with even the most basic equipment. If you’re serious about photography, investing in some good gear can be worthwhile, but don’t let the lack of gear stop you from getting started.

I’m not good enough.

Everyone starts out as a beginner, and it takes time and practice to improve your photography skills. Don’t compare yourself to other photographers, and don’t be afraid to experiment. The more you shoot, the better you’ll become.

I’m afraid of failure.

Everyone makes mistakes, and that’s okay. Failure is a part of the learning process. Don’t let the fear of failure stop you from taking risks and trying new things.

I’m not inspired.

Sometimes it can be hard to find inspiration, but there are plenty of things you can do to get motivated. Look at other photographers’ work, read photography books and magazines, or take a class. The most important thing is to keep shooting, even when you’re not feeling inspired.

If you’re making excuses not to do photography, it’s time to face your fears and get out there and start shooting. You might be surprised at what you can create.

Same thing applies to writing blog posts. Something I’ve gotten away from for way too long.

You Don’t Take Enough Pictures

Posted on September 16, 2021September 16, 2021 by Jim Roberts

Recently watch this video from Capture One Pro where David Grover talks with Joe McNally about shooting at the Olympics. During the course of the discussion Joe mentions that he shot about 53,000 images during the 16 days of the Olympics. If you want to get the shot you have to take the shot. Interesting discussion on the trials of shooting a pandemic Olympics. Or you can just watch it so you can be amazed by the great images Joe always produces.

In the digital age we are so lucky to not have the costs of film and processing. You try dividing 53,000 images by 36 shots per role and you get a feel for the national debt. (Hint: 1473 rolls of film). Plus with digital you can always dial in the correct color balance.

Moral of the story is that if you are not taking a lot of pictures you should be.

What The Image Demands

Posted on May 22, 2021May 22, 2021 by Jim Roberts

Sometimes images demand that you go outside your normal style, outside your comfort zone. And sometimes images demand that you just go in there and push the boundaries. To everyone who thinks this is too over the top saturated, yeah but I love it.

You ~~can~~ must be playful with you images.

The Friends You Make

Posted on May 21, 2021May 21, 2021 by Jim Roberts

I really enjoyed going to PhotoshopWorld for quite a number of years. I think the grand total was 14 although it might have been 13. Does not matter. What matters as a photographer is that you connect with other photographers so that you can learn with them, learn from them, and become better at what you love to do.

Each time they had the event I would make sure that I helped any new attendees feel at home and to remind them to make sure they introduced themselves to the people that would be sitting next to them at any of the sessions. After all we were all attending the session because we had the same interests in learning and especially in learning specific processes to enhance our photography or graphic design or videography skills.

I made a lot of good friends over the years at each PSW conference. Always someone new to meet as well as to catch up with friends from previous PSW’s. I actually met John when I invited him to join me for a buffet breakfast at Mandalay Bay a number of years ago. The only thing we had in common at that point was we were both wearing our attendee badges. There after we would see each other before the opening ceremony. John was from Boston and soon I had met the intrepid photography group from Boston.

Thru John I met Deb, and John B, and Darren Clark (who wasn’t from Boston but somehow was adopted by the other three.) Each year and sometimes twice a year we would see each other. The last PhotoshopWorld was fall of 2019. I have not seen John since. Now I won’t anymore as he suddenly passes away a few days ago, way to early. So I am extremely sad to see that he is gone but glad that he and I made the effort to see our mutual interests and become friends.

Find people that are like you, they are out there. Make friends. You will be better off for it.

Did You Know (A tail of images lost and gone forever.)

Posted on March 8, 2021March 8, 2021 by Jim Roberts

I went remote the other day and took my laptop along for the ride. As I did a lot of image making I took along a drive and created a new Capture One catalog for the trip. I didn’t do a lot of editing while on the move so when I got back I just copied the images to my at home storage location and then imported them into my main Capture One catalog.

When the images are already in the correct place you do not need to copy them anywhere so there is an option on the import to just add the images in their current location to the open catalog. This is real handy if you have already downloaded you images and do not need the import process to copy them from an external drive.

The thing you must remember is that after you are done ingesting the images and are ready to go back to importing the images from the camera SD card you need to change back to the method you use for copying the images off your SD to their in computer location.

If you don’t remember that then the next time you import your images they will stay on you SD card and the catalog will think they will always be in that location. I forgot that step the other day after taking images of a soon to be dead flower in my front yard. I did the import, left the SD card in the slot and happily processes the good images.

Later i took the SD card out of the slot put it back in my camera and formatted it. The images that I thought had been downloaded had not been and the next time I opened my main catalog the images were marked as offline which is 100% true now that I think about it but perplexed me at the time. I ended up losing the images.

When attached to your computer the SD card looks just like another disk drive and Capture One will happily use it as such. One thing I’m rather surprised about is that Capture One does not seem to have overall presets for the import process. Not that would have saved me. For the next 30 days please find me in the corner wearing my dunce cap.

Getting The White Point White

Posted on December 20, 2020December 21, 2020 by Jim Roberts

I’ve been watching Paul Reiffer‘s mostly weekly Youtube video’s on processing images in Capture One. I think that I’ve become proficient in the use of Capture One Pro (now on version 21). Watching the videos has pointed out the need to be nuanced in how you manipulate the images. You don’t really want to get close to what you want, you want to get exactly what you want. In recent video’s he has pointed out more than once that images submitted by his viewers have missed the little things like getting the white point of the image right.

Before watching Paul I would have published the above image without checking if the obviously whitest area on this Egret’s back had blown out. When processing an image when the cursor is over any area of the image there are 4 numbers just under the Cursor Tools at the top. My screen grab lost the cursor so you just have to image it pointing to the Egret’s back. These 4 numbers are the amount of each color plus the luminance where the cursor (Hand or whatever) is directly over. If you see 255,255,255 then you have reached the limit of what Capture One can do and you now have no data from the image at that point. This means that printing the image would have a point where there would be no ink on the paper.

By using your High Dynamic Range tab you can move the whites down try and bring back the information at that point. Anything under about 248 will bring back some of the information. In some cases, like when you have the sun in you image, no amount of tweaking will bring back the image as that particular point was just overexposed and total blown out.

It doesn’t take long to get the general feel for software like Capture One Pro but you need to pay attention to the details to get the most out of your images. Check the histogram and if you have some bits up near the right side you may want to see if you can bring them back into image.

Below is a recent editing session from Paul. Good stuff.

If you don’t use Capture One Pro you can get a fully functioning 30 trial here.

Looking Up

Posted on September 15, 2020 by Jim Roberts

At the beginning of August I was out shooting the almost full moon. It was a clear night and I did get good images using my standard exposure set up for moon shoots. If you want to get good images of the moon start with a medium aperture like F8 and shutter speed of 1/250. Try the lowest ISO you can get way with. You have to shoot in manual mode. A tripod will help but if you are using the Fujinon XF100-400mmF4.5-5.6 R LM OIS WR you can probably get a good image like the one below handheld using the OIS. The photo was shot with the Fujinon XF1.4X TC WR tele-converter for a reach of 560mm.

As it happened Jupiter and Saturn were also visible that night. The moon would pass in front of the planets later in the evening. On a lark I pointed my camera in the direction of Saturn not expecting to get much as the viewfinder was not sensitive enough to pick up the small amount of light from that planet.

I brought the images into Capture One and did my normal processing on the moon image which came to my liking. For those of you wanting to take images of the moon try doing it just before the full moon as the shadows give definition. I then turned my attention to the frame with what I hoped contained Saturn. I did see something in the frame. I ended up opening up the exposure by over two stops but there, small but visible was Saturn and her rings.

You know that Saturn has rings and you can find it any night it’s in the sky but unless you look closer you just don’t see the rings. As I pulled up the exposure and saw the rings it was like I was discovering it for the first time. Made my day.

Color Balances

Posted on September 4, 2020September 4, 2020 by Jim Roberts

They painted the castle in The Magic Kingdom at Walt Disney World. I’m not a big fan of the paint colors. The colors they ended up with just seem to be out of balance for me. They have a saturated purple for the turrets, and saturated grey for the base, and then an almost pink but not quite color on the body of the castle. It’s mostly the pink that I find unbalanced. The purple and pink almost fit into a Triadic color scheme but doesn’t quite work as there should be a green with those two colors to make it Triadic.

Castle with Very Small Dragon Fujifilm X-T2 F9 1/280s ISO 200 18mm

When you are creating an image in studio and especially with model you have lots of leeway with you color grading. When you are documenting an place that is designed to be seen with a standard color you need to be more accurate with you color representation. You can go wrong if you push the white balance the wrong way or if you over saturate the colors. This building just seems to me to be out of balance from a color standpoint.

Spires Fujifilm X-T2 F8 1/750s ISO 200 18mm

I could make the pinkish color more pink and at a good saturation but with Capture One Color Editor but it wouldn’t be true to the actual colors and that is where I feel the actual building colors are out of balance. And you can’t go around overriding the Disney experts.

As I was doing some research into the colors I decided to look to see what the colors of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle at Disneyland are. They basically just duplicated what they had before in Anaheim, CA It seems that the colors were painted with about the same pallet they used to upgrade the castle in 2019. The difference is the pinks are much more pink. Maybe something got lost in translation.

The new color scheme to me is to dark. It diminishes the scale of the castle. Something you always need to keep mind as you process your color images. just as a image with a tilted horizon is out of balance, a color scheme can be out of balance too. For good instruction on color and color grading watch this video by Joanna Kustra

Passageways

Posted on August 24, 2020August 24, 2020 by Jim Roberts

Discovering features of WordPress to display galleries. This is a work in progress called Passageways which is a series of 5 images taken about the same time. I’ve been working on these images for a few days. I may even have overworked one or two of them. Using Capture One Pro 20 you can crank in adjustments to a high level and use the opacity slider to reduce the adjustments to a level that meets your needs.

I’m still not 100% happy with this image. It looks good, then it doesn’t. I was trying to get a subtle gradation and a subdued pallet. So I would add and remove layers, try different things like adding hints of more clarity to edges to define the image. In the end it seems ok. Oh the same note I saw a YouTube video with Ansel Adams yesterday. Even years after printing an image he says he see areas that he could improve. So I guess the best is to just put it out and let it be. After all as Adams said, the image is just an equivalence of what was in the sky.

White Balance And The Mostly Ignored Tint Slider

Posted on July 30, 2020July 30, 2020 by Jim Roberts

Setting the white balance of an image is more than just if it needs to be warmed up or cooled down. The image may also have a green to magenta tint to it. Watch a Youtube video of someone processing an image. If it’s not a moody night image then the presenter will almost invariably say the image needs to be warmed up a bit. This is especially true if the image has a human in it. For some reason cameras seem to prefer a slight cyan coloration to skin.

Changing the white balance of an image (in raw format please) is straight forward. Find the white balance eyedropper in your image editing weapon of choice and click on an area that should be a neutral gray. The image is evaluated and a change to the Temperature/Kelvin slider is adjusted to remove an incorrect color balance. You can also just pick from the drop down to tell it what kind of balance you want. Daylight, Tungsten or a number of other choiced based on the camera you used.

While most adjustments seemed to be made to the color temperature of an image you also need to be aware of the tint of the image. And what you say is the tint? The tint is for adjusting the green to magenta color cast of the image.

You probably don’t pay a lot of attention to the Tint Slider but it does change when white balance is adjusted and anytime you might want to reduce a green or purple cast to you image. One example would be if someone was sitting next to a large green plant there may be a green cast on their face.

The following image was shot off a bridge where the light was rather interesting. It was shot mid-morning at 10:24 am so the sun was getting pretty high in the sky. Not a golden hour shot at all. I have my Fujifilm X-T2 camera set to auto white balance so it was interesting to see what white balance it used.

Here is the white balance as dictated by the camera.

You will notice that the camera gave this a tint of 14.7. The scale for tint is -50 to +50 with the minus side going towards green and the plus side going towards magenta.

And with the white balance set to daylight.

You can see that there is a purplish color cast with the as shot balance and you will notice that tint is 14.7 which is moving the tint towards the magenta. When we adjust to daylight the tint goes down to 2.1 and we don’t have the shadows being rather purple.

There is nothing wrong with adjusting the white balance Kelvin slider to warm or cool your images to what pleases your eye, just remember you can also adjust the tint for the same reasons.