We began the morning with models in the studio; I had my full Speedlite rig setup and we worked through several lighting variations, ending with a clamshell lighting setup that worked great with our beautiful model:

I got wrapped up in shooting and didn’t get setup shots like I should have, and I couldn’t even begin to tell you what the lighting ratios were – we simply changed camera settings and moved the lights until they worked.  And they did work.

What I can tell you is a couple of points that quickly became clear, through working with the models and through the insight of some of the more experienced photogs present.  First off, when it comes to working with models, you’ve got to keep them in motion – just get them to move in different ways, and have the camera to your eye to capture the perfect moments when they come.   Give them direction, encourage them, get them to repeat poses and movements that worked.  Models – especially inexperienced ones – are usually looking for some form of guidance; you’ve got to let them know what you want them to do, know that you’re engaging with them, otherwise they freeze up and get nervous.

Second, I’ve come to the conclusion that the pop-up flash on the Canon 7D is just too weak; the built-in commander mode is wonderful, but even working in my corner of the conference room, it didn’t gave the power to trigger the slaves consistently.  Suck it up and buy an extra 580EX(II) and slap in on the hotshoe in Master mode and then go to town.  The 580EX throws a ton of light and triggers the slaves every time.  And from my understanding, the new 580EX II will talk to the 7D, giving you control over features directly from the camera.

(And there’s a rumor going ’round that Canon is about to release a new Speedlite…  Something even better than the 580EX II, to counter the Nikon SB-900?)

Finally, if you really want to kick your model shots up a notch, get some motion in them.  A $40 pedestal fan from Lowes got Alli’s hair blowing around and gave a whole other dimension to the photos.  I scrapped the stand that came with the fan and slid part of it’s post over the top of a lightstand – fit perfectly, and gave me an adjustable height range.   The two shots posted above wouldn’t be half as good if her hair was just lying there motionless.

While I was playing with Speedlites, Tony in the next room had his entire studio setup going; we’re talking a massive muslin background, several Alien Bees lights with modifiers, an iMac, everything but the kitchen sink.  I didn’t tap into that setup – big strobe setups aren’t really my thing – but I did step in and shoot a few frames with one of the afternoon models, sort of over Tony’s shoulder.  While he blasted away with the big guns, this is just a 580EX on-camera, bounced off the ceiling, with the 70-210mm f/4 wide open:

It’s warm from the bounce off the tan ceiling tiles, and there’s just a bit of softness that comes from using that particular lens fully zoomed, combined with the f/4 aperture.  Simple, but elegant, and not at all bad for bounce light.  This is the Strobist concept: you can hit a model from all angles, with multiple monoblocs, and get one look; or you can hit them with a single, bounced Speedlite and get a completely different look.  One is no more valid than the other, they’re just different ways of doing the same job, and having both setups on site that day made it really easy to see the ways they differed.

We closed out the workshop shooting outside, which is a story I’ll continue in the next post.

In the meantime, I want to wrap this one up with a final impression – this Strobist workshop was the most fun I’ve had with a camera in ages.  I cannot over-estimate how helpful it was to be there participating, or how fulfilling it was to coordinate the event and see it through to the end.  I can say without any doubt that every single person who attended walked away with killer images, having learned something new, and having met and networked with an amazing crew of photographers & models.  Everyone there interacted and helped each other – we stepped into each other’s setups and traded transmitters, we shared exposure settings & held gear, and the folks not shooting offered suggestions from the sidelines.  You couldn’t have asked for a better crowd!

It’s not a question of if we’ll do this again, it’s a question of when, and we’re already starting to form some ideas there.  For anyone out there who has never attended a photo get-together/workshop, I strongly suggest that you do so.  Both Strobist and DPChallenge.com groups meet up all the time, all across the USA – and even internationally.  If you’re serious about photography, if you’re serious about wanting to expand your skill set and get better, then it’s worth the investment to be at one of these events.  And if you find that there aren’t any near you, then do what I did, and make one happen.

It is completely, without a doubt, worth it.

I found Life and Learning Through the Lens, Darwin Wiggett’s blog, last night using that track-back feature.  Darwin is a landscape/nature photographer up in Canada, where he produces some fantastic images.  Needless to say, perusing his blog is inspirational, although it does make me long for some more dramatic geography than I have locally.

What’s even better is the way he presents his images.  His blog isn’t part of his professional website, you won’t find products or pricing there.  Instead, it’s a place entirely in keeping with the name – a presentation of how one photographer views and interacts with his world through the lens.  He shares what he learns, what inspires him, and in doing so passes that along to other like-minded artists.

If I didn’t have the track-back feature installed, if I didn’t care to look and see how my visitors were finding me, I would never have found Darwin Wiggett.  Let’s face it, it’s one thing to me Joe McNally and have people find you – when you’re repeatedly published in National Geographic, people will find you.  But what about the others out there who are just as good, but who have yet to step up onto that same pedestal of notoriety?  If it wasn’t for this network between blogs and forums and internet interactions, we would never discover most of them.  Which is a shame.

We should be seeking each other out.  If we’re serious about photography, if we’re serious about wanting to expand our talents and grow as artists, then it is essential that we study the work of our predecessors & contemporaries, of those who have achieved fame and success & those who are still struggling for it.  We need to immerse ourselves in the work of others; it is where we find the elements to sustain us.

Each night after dinner, when I’m finally able to lounge around the computer for a little while, I go through the same ritual; I pull up sites of other photographers.  I check in with Moose, Joe, and Paul to see what they’ve done.  I read the forums at FredMiranda to keep in touch with the vibe there.  I pull up Flickr and see what’s been added to the groups I follow.

Yes, to some extent it’s soothing, looking at pretty images at the end of the day.  But it’s also much more than that – it’s a critique, a review.  I identify images I like and then determine why I like them.  I study technique that I’d like to emulate.  I make notes and bookmark images that I want to return to in the future.

We cannot forever be university students, sitting in the room while our classmates hang still-damp prints on the wall for us to critique.  No matter how much we loved those days, they pass and we land on our own, no longer grouped with the like-minded by the virtue of course choices.  So we must do the next best thing – right now, that is the internet.  We can still attain that classroom experience and we can still make those connections with others.

And we should.

Jonathan had just taken the job at the university when I began trying to learn photography. He took me on as his intern, a position I held for that full year, officially. Unofficially, I continued to drop by and help out for the rest of my time at university. For my final 8 months there, I worked for the department as a long-term freelancer.

It was this internship that got me out of auto mode and onto the road of really becoming a photographer. I could fill dozens of posts going over all the things I learned that year, all the lessons and tricks and tips. But for right now, I just want to pass along a few of the ones that stick out the most in my mind:

* There is no excuse for fuzzy, blurry photos. Don’t blame it on camera shake, or the bad lighting, or your limited gear. Find a way to get the shot, and get it sharp and in focus. (The only exception to this is artistic, meaningful motion blur – that’s okay, in limited amounts.)

* A photo without cutline info is worthless! It’s worse than no photo at all. If this info is not included, no one will publish the image. Identify the people in the photo, identify the location and the time, and quickly explain what’s going on. That’s what metadata fields are for.

* Do not return without a photo. If you are sent out on assignment, return with something. No matter what happens, do not come back empty handed. Find an angle, find an element, find a way to illustrate it, or as a last resort, find something else worth while.

* Archive your work as you go. Nothing is worse than having to sit down and archive four months of photos at once. Keep up with it as you shoot; it’s miserable, but less so than having a backlog.

* Push yourself. Having techniques and styles that work is great, but don’t become too dependent on them. When you see that you’re shooting the same way time and time again, try something new.

* Ethics matter – don’t compromise yourself, you work, or the story.

* Don’t get tunnel vision. Every assignment needs establishing shots, general shots, and detail shots. Give your editor options – they like this.

* Each photo should tell the story of what is happening – you should be able to look at it and, just like a news article, know who, what, where, when, and why. That’s the mark of great photography.

———-

A final point – if you want to learn photography, if you seriously want to be a photographer, find a mentor. Find someone who has worked in the business, who has been successful, and who is willing to take the time to teach you. Be willing to carry their gear and hold their lights and run errands if in return they impart their collective knowledge to you. There is no substitute for excellence, or for experience. The best way to learn this business is to learn it from someone who does it.

On the 23rd, SMP posted “Idaho Wedding Filled with Style,” which is very, very cool (be sure to check out the link for photos by Stephanie Fay ). The location, aside from being in Idaho, is the bride’s parent’s backyard – take this as proof that a modest setting can become an amazing set. The large lawn and fields give some wide open spaces, but it’s what the happy couple did with those spaces that rocks.

Essentially, they built a rustic church on-site. Or at least, part of a rustic church. Windows mounted in pieces of walls, a framed doorway, a plank platform for the ceremony – all of it constructed out of weathered old boards, apparently by the bride’s younger brother, and propped up around the perimeter of the seats and platform.

It’s like sitting inside of a rustic American Stonehenge, open to the sky, with a startlingly yellow dresser forming the altar. This is better than a Hollywood set – it’s beautiful, it’s unique, and it must have been heartbreaking to take it down afterwards.

From a photographic standpoint, this is a no-brainer. You’ve got the best elements of a building (windows, doors) without the all-enclosing aspect that would normally leave you praying for light. Add to that a beautifully overcast day, and you’re left with lovely, diffused light that makes bright colors glow.

Check out Part II for some lovely portrait and detail work, but also for a nice example of some Strobist-style lighting. Notice that the ambient is kicked down about two stops, with a warm-gelled flash providing fill on the foreground wall. The end result reminds you of how it would look lit by an old oil lamp. It’s an edgy look, and I have to wonder if the photographer did any other shots that way.

Me, I’d have been tempted to shoot much more of the day that way. Don’t get me wrong, that diffused ambient lighting is wonderful. But mix in some strobes and you have the chance to really kick it up a notch. The colors in the sky would saturate, and the whole scene would take on an almost surreal look. You could even think about really working the whole oil lamp look and placing your strobes to emulate that light; this would be a rare occasion to make long shadows work for you, instead of trying to eliminate or hide them as we’d usually do.

I am not second guessing Ms. Fay or saying that she did anything wrong – far from it, I think she did a wonderful job. I am simply looking at the situation and seeing something that I like, and would have pursued further in terms of style. This is what we should all be doing as photographers when we study the work of our peers/competition; reverse engineering the elements we like, and then taking them a step further, flavoring them with our own personal styles.

You can teach a chimp to copy a setup; you have to be an artist to borrow an idea, work with it, and make it your own. If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to borrow elements of this setup someday. First, I have to find someone who can build it.

I never jumped on the “HDR is Evil” bandwagon, back when the whole technique first became popular. Frankly, I like the concept – in essence, it lets us make an image that looks more the way our eye saw it, overcoming the inherent limitations of technology in the camera. But make no mistake, HDR processing can be – and all too often is – way overdone. I have harsh critiques for images with glowing halos, completely reversed lighting ranges, or so much saturation that you’d think a box of Crayola crayons puked on it.

Done properly, however – and by that I mean with a subtle touch – HDR images can come out looking incredible.

They’re also a pain in the butt.

The premise seems clear enough – take a series of images of the same scene, each with a different exposure, so that the entire dynamic range is covered. Then run them through software the combines the images, applies tone mapping to the resulting file, and viola, you have an HDR image.

Unless you’re me. Then, 80% of the time, I have some terrible smear of awfulness across the screen.

If you want to see amazing HDR photos, check out Moose Peterson’s recent posts (he claims he’s tired of the technique – if I did it that well, I guess I might get tired of it too!). Moose is taking some time away from his usual wildlife gigs to shoot the Reno Air Races, and his sunrise photos of aircraft on the tarmac are simply stunning examples of HDR. Whatever technique he’s using, he has it down to an art form.

And I can’t figure it out.

So, expect to see some more on HDR in the near future. This is becoming a side project of mine, mostly because it bugs me that I can’t make it work consistently. Take this past Saturday night as an example: I shot bracketed images for four different HDR scenes. After processing, one came out just the way I wanted (see below). The other three were awful.

The trick has to be in the exposures themselves. When I first started playing with HDR, I’d shoot straight brackets: -2, -1, 0, +1, +2. Sometimes that works. Sometimes not. Now I’ve started shooting for the actual exposures, which come out something like: -3, -1, +1/3, +1 1/3. Again, sometimes this works, sometimes not.

If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

And if anyone runs into Moose Peterson, ask him how he does it and let me know!

I’m hesitant to sound like I’m bashing a fellow photographer, but speaking as someone with a degree in English/Writing, I just have to say it bluntly: some people have no business writing books.  They just aren’t good at it, the same way I’m not good enough to play professional sports.  Sammon’s style of writing is, to put it mildly, irritating.  And from a photography perspective, his conclusions are sometimes terrible.

For example, he begins the book with a short chapter on composition, presenting “good” and “bad” compositions of the same image.  Unfortunately, 75% of the time he chose the wrong one, in my opinion substituting a boring composition for a more interesting one, and worese yet cropping right through the center of both foreground and background elements on several occasions!

I’m forced to further question his professional status when he speaks about salvaging iffy shots using Photoshop.  I consider myself fairly tolerant of digital art, especially when it’s labeled as such.  But I do expect some semblance of integrity when it comes to photographs.  Several times Sammon took an iffy photo and manipulated it in a way that produced a result that was barely related to the original.

There are plenty of tricks we use to boost the impact of an image, both in camera and in post.  On pg. 50 he takes a soft twilight shot of a bridge & waterfall and transforms it into a “golden hour” sunset shot.  The result is quite nice, but the scene did NOT look like that, and I’m not sure that it ever actually does.  This, however, is minor compared to his actions on pg. 18, where he ruins a wonderful shot if a hawk in flight by cropping a tight square around it (leaving the poor critter feeling blocked-in), and then adding blur to the trailing edge of the wings!

Adding blur to a wildlife shot?  Why, in the name of Ansel himself, would you want to take a sharp bird-in-flight shot and add “motion blur” to it?  He apparently believes this is an artistic enhancement – I’m baffled.

Add to that pg. 19, where he boosts the saturation of the blues in a shot of an iceberg to a level rarely seen on this planet, and hopefully you see what I mean when I question his photographic integrity.

By “photographic integrity,” I mean that when I see photos of exotic lands or foreign critters, I expect to see them accurately represented.  Meaning, not “enhanced” beyond their natural state.  Meaning, photos honest enough to be published in National Geographic. Whether you shoot locally or in Antarctica, there are days when the light sucks and the colors are drab and the critters don’t cooperate.  But I’d still rather see that than a clearly artificial image.

The book itself is definitely not aimed at experienced photographers; it progresses through some visual basics, followed by use of auto modes, creative zone modes, and finally some basic Photoshop enhancements.  For someone with an advanced point & shoot, or their first DSLR, I suppose they could do a lot worse.  But they could also do a lot better.

I’ve already relisted my copy for sale online.

** Note: I don’t want to sound like a harsh jerk in this post.  But I firmly believe that an honest critique is far more useful to the artist than blowing sunshine at him.  If my photos are awful, I want to hear that, and why.  If my writing is bad, I want to be told, and why.  Hearing criticism and the logic behind it is the only way that we can advance.  Rick Sammon has apparently made a career out of photography; more power to him.  Hopefully this book was a a bad fluke, and his other publications and workshops are better.  But either way, the above review is simply the honest opinion of one photographer/writer.  Take it as you will.

And if you are looking, chances are you’re overwhelmed.  Google “photography” and you get 317 million results.  ”Learn photography” is somewhat better, at 1.5 million results.  We’ve uncovered the not-so-secret flaw of the Internet – there’s too much information to possibly sort through.  To make matters worse, many of the results are worthless because they are either bad advice, or written by someone who wants to sell you something.

The Web can be a great resource for information on photography.  The more specialized the information you want, the narrower the range of results you’re likely to get, although you’ll almost always get something useful if you ask correctly.  It would be foolhardy to even try and compile a full listing of good photography sites, and I’m not even going to try.  Instead I’m going to highlight several sites that helped me when I was starting out, and which still help me even now.

DPChallenge

DPC, as it’s known to its fans, is the first site I joined when I took up photography and I am still a member today – it is worth every cent of the $25 annual fee to become a full member (you can be a registered user for free).  The site is based around several weekly challenges, each of which has a theme that ranges from very specific to very vague.  There are no prizes except for virtual ribbons and bragging rights.  More impressive than the challenges is the forums, which hold a wealth of knowledge and are constantly prowled by obsessed dedicated members who are the most open, generous, and helpful I’ve ever encountered on the Web.  They’ll answer any photography question you have (or point you in the right direction), they’ll impress you with their range of skill, and many will even meet up for local get togethers and go shooting.

Strobist

Strobist began as a blog written by photojournalist David Hobby in Baltimore, MD.  Since then it has grown to become one of the premier photography sites on the Web, specializing in off-camera lighting.  Hobby draws on his years as a working photographer to produce excellent tutorials and articles that cover every imaginable aspect of lighting; his trademark is lighting via Speedlight-style flashes.  The site is so popular that Hobby has since retired from photojournalism and dedicates his time to a mixture of personal work, seminars, and adding to his site.  If you want to learn to light, this is the place to go.

FredMiranda

FM boasts an expansive and dedicated forum of its own that is comparable to DPC’s.  The real gem, however, is the Reviews section.  Member generated, the reviews cover Canon & Nikon systems, as well as Sigma, Tamron, & Tokina lenses, and an assortment of accessories.  The reviews are easy to navigate, list the pros & cons of each model, as well as a detailed account of each user’s experience and opinion.  If you want to know what other photographers think of a particular lens or body, this is the place to go.

DIYPhotography

Photographers are cheap – or perhaps we’re just major geeks.  Either way, we hate to spend money on something that we can make ourselves out of velcro, duct tape, cardboard, and foam sheets.  The best part is, most of the DIY projects listed work just as well as the manufactured item, if not better.  Home Depot is your friend if you hang out here and you don’t mind getting your hands a little dirty.

Flickr

Yahoo’s photo-centric site.  It’s much talked about and has a huge number of users that cover every possible skill level.  User groups help draw together photographers with similar interests.  Be forewarned, however, that they are one of the primary targets for image theft.  Personally, I use them for inspiration – there are amazing photographs buried amid the mediocre, and sometimes the photographer was even kind enough to leave a few notes for the curious.

B&H Photo & Video

The Holy Grail of photography stores, located in New York City.  They are often listed as the most trust-worthy and dependable, especially when the Web is filled with scammers.  Their prices are usually pretty good and their staff is extremely knowledgeable and helpful.  They’re also a good source for equipment reviews.  Even if you don’t end up buying gear from them, they are an excellent resource for research.

MPIX

A professional print lab with a wide range of products, ranging from regular prints to specialty photo items.  Everything I’ve ever ordered from them has come out looking just right.  They offer tools and simple options for the casual user as well as advanced options for the professional photographer.  Shipping is fast, quality is top-notch, and customer support is on the ball.