We Shoot Photography Of The Day For 3/16/2016
Wednesday, March 16th, 2016
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Thursday, May 12th, 2016
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Tags: building, concrete, cone, conical, construction, cooling, debris, decay, dome, hardware, industrial, metal, nuclear, plant, power, support, tower, unfinished, wall
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Wednesday, March 16th, 2016
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Tags: architectural, architecture, brick, decay, deteriorating, deterioration, frame, framing, glass, pane, panes, pattern, patterns, steel, stone, weathered, worn
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Thursday, July 10th, 2014
Like a lot of other people, I go to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and other social sites, and I see lots of images of food. Contacts and colleagues, as well as anonymous strangers, have decided to show what they are about to eat, or have partially eaten. The explosion of cell phone cameras and other low-cost digital cameras has allowed many people to think of themselves as “Food Photographers.” Anyone today with a heartbeat can take a picture. I look at some of the food photography online, and there are comments from others on this, like: “That looks so yummy, I wish I could have some!” Or, “That looks delicious!” I look at the images and it is all I can do to keep my last meal down. What I usually see is not well composed, never styled, improperly lit, and the colors are sickly. This is akin to those blurry, out of focus images some people take of their kids and post on Facebook, to the delight of their friends and grandparents who say “Great shot!” The one thing they all have in common was that all the images were created for free, once you factor out the cost of the phone or camera, memory cards, readers, computers, and editing software. As I create food photography professionally, I have decided to see if I could take decent images of food with my cell phone and run it through Photoshop to get decent looking food shots. Now, real commercial food photography takes planning, a good food stylist, lots of lighting and equipment, and photographic experience. It also takes a tremendous amount of patience. I have dealt with clients, corporate chefs, tight spaces, and less than ideal shooting conditions. Sometimes the food looks great but is actually inedible because things are done to it for the purpose of great photography. I went out to a favorite Mexican restaurant for dinner the other night and, as usual, I brought along my iPhone, which actually has a decent camera built-in (for what it is). It takes 8 megapixel images in .jpg form. It performs reasonably well in relatively low lighting conditions. It has a strobe. But, first, it doesn’t shoot in RAW format. This is important for making better final images. More megapixels means more information and higher enlargement quality. Not all megapixels are equal. There are many cell phones that have larger pixel counts than the iPhone, but the picture quality isn’t as high, as evidenced by the fact that several stock agencies will accept still images and video from iPhones, but not other cell phones. Image noise becomes a factor when jamming high pixel counts on small sensors. For this reason, a cell phone isn’t what a pro would use. If you are going to shoot food, in my opinion, a 24mm X 16mm sensor in a DSLR at 10 megapixels that shoots in RAW format would be the minimum to use. So, despite my opinion, I decided to experiment as a pro since I have indeed been paid to photograph food by people in the food biz. I decided to work with the chips and salsa. The first obstacle is lighting. In this example, we are away from the outside windows and close to an inside wall. I am shooting hand-held. So it has to be either the ambient room lighting or the camera flash. Trying the flash, I get the following image: Although it looks sharp as a small image, there is unacceptable camera movement evident in the full-sized version. Harsh shadow at the top of the paper. Loss of light away from the center, and all the color is off. No styling is evident. This was just the way the food was delivered. Yet I see images on FB worse than this with someone saying “yummy” in the comments. I then try the somewhat same shot using room lighting, without the strobe. See the sample image below: While in-focus and more appealing color is evident and lighting is more even, the shadows are still way too heavy, caused by non-diffused room lighting. The position of the camera is dictated by my seating. I can’t get far enough back to get the chips and salsa in the frame. The tip of my silverware can be seen at the bottom of the image. Remember that I am shooting as most people do who post images online, not as a pro. There will be no styling. Next, I take the image and put it through a little Photoshop massage. It comes out looking like this: With shadows lightened, color enhanced, top of the image straightened, and the silverware tip removed, it looks better – but still nowhere near professional quality. Maybe worthy of FB, but not for marketing. I will show you a styled, professional image we did a while back of two taco salads, chips, and the rest of the fixings: As you can see, the color is quite appealing, the image is light and colorful, and the food is crisp and fresh-looking. Shadows are attractive and unobtrusive. The image has been styled by a professional stylist, and a lot of diffused strobe light has been used. Lighting is off-camera to give highlights where needed and provide depth. This is professional food photography – the kind supplied by We Shoot.
– Gary Silverstein
Tags: commercial, commercial photographer, commercial photography, food, food photography, Photoshop, retouch, shoot, shooting, weshoot.com
Posted in How To, Information, Learning, Tips | Comments Off on Everybody’s a food photographer . . . NOT!
Friday, March 15th, 2013
It has come to my attention that some out there may not be adept at using Photoshop to make a lockout screen image for protecting their iPad in the event of theft or loss. If you read over my last post, at http://weshoot.com/wordpress/?p=591, it relies on using a photo editing program (in this case, Photoshop) to make an attractive lockout screen wallpaper to help get an iPad recovered to its rightful owner. Well, if you don’t have Photoshop or graphics capability, you can use the iPad itself to make an image that will help.
First, get a piece of paper and write something on it to help get the iPad back to you, like the image below:
Now, get the iPad and capture an image of what was written on the paper using the Camera App. This will automatically place the image in both the photostream and the camera roll. Go into the Settings App. Go to “Brightness and Wall Paper” and find the just-taken image for your lockout screen wallpaper. Although it’s not as elegant-looking as the image in my previous post, it will be as effective in getting your iPad back, should it be stolen or lost.
– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot
Tags: computer, iPad, lock screen, lockout, loss, recover, screen, stolen, tablet, theft
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Friday, February 15th, 2013
Product and other forms of commercial photography sometimes require the use of strobes. Strobes usually provide daylight color balance which helps with architectural photography as it allows a burst of light to light up a room, and use a time exposure to get the (daylight) scene outside a window so it looks like we see it. Otherwise, the sunlit exterior is blown out, or in some instances, it can look darker and drearier than the interior, if it is overcast outside. In the case of product, studio strobes are the powerful cousins of your on-camera strobes, and offer many advantages over the smaller units.
First, studio strobes are usually way more powerful, as they use very large batteries, 110v inverters, or wall socket power. Second, they are portable and don’t have to be mounted on the camera, and give a more pleasing look as they don’t “flat-light” the subject and can be made to mitigate heavy shadows. They are designed to work with many different accessories from umbrellas to soft boxes. They can use many different types of wireless triggers. They can generate more than enough light to shoot at tight apertures, allowing for deep depth of field. In product and architecture, I find that shooting with small apertures (f11 to f16) allows me to get everything sharp and in focus. If it is sharp in my original image, I can always create a shallow depth of field look in photo-editing software. However, the reverse is not true. Really soft images cannot be brought back into sharp focus even with the best of software.
All of the studio strobes I have used work with totally manual settings. I usually set my camera on a tripod at f11 to f16 at 1/100th of a second or slower. The strobe light burst lasts for a very short time. This eliminates most movement, but how do I bracket under those conditions, since I don’t want to change either the shutter speed or aperture once I start shooting? The answer is in the manual controls of the studio strobes. Once I get my best-looking exposure of all elements by shooting and rechecking the image, I plan on shooting a series of images bracketed on either side of that exposure by working the slides or dials on my equipment, usually in half-stop increments. I may be using as many as 3 or 4 lights at different angles, and each will need to be adjusted individually for each exposure. This gives me the same object at the same depth of field at the same shutter speed from a dark exposure to an overblown exposure. Why would I want to do this? I can then pick and choose the best exposed parts of the object or room and using an editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, I assemble them to make a perfectly exposed object with detail where it needs to be without any noise. I can also make an HDR image from all the exposures, if that gets me a better-looking image.
Being a commercial photographer means getting the best satisfactory image for your client. A commercial photographer having the right equipment and expertise means leaving very little to chance.
– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot
We Shoot is a commercial product, food, industrial, and architectural photography team based in the Seattle area.
Tags: architectural, bracketing, commercial, edit, flash, flat-light, flat-lit, food, hdr, industrial, lighting, off-camera, on-camera, photography, Photoshop, product, shadow, software, strobes, studio strobes
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Wednesday, January 16th, 2013
In my last post, I discussed bracketing of exposures. Today, let’s talk about bracketing with hot lights. Hot lights are a continuous lighting source and should be regarded as available light, just sometimes very intense, and very bright. A majority of hot lights are of incandescent color temperature, adding a warm or yellow tone to your image. In most modern DSLRs, there is a setting for tungsten or incandescent light which compensates for the warm tint by adding a blue or cyan tint to the image.
Instead of using the incandescent mode in the camera for white balance, I prefer taking one exposure with a gray card in the image and setting the gray reading for all the images I take in that series with my editing software. Outdoors, my cameras are very accurate, so the automatic white balance setting works just fine. Indoors with a mix of lighting, a gray card or an Expodisk is the ticket.
Now, back to bracketing with available light and hot lights. My cameras will do up to nine bracketed shots (different exposures of the same image) automatically. Some cameras only allow three images for auto bracketing. If you desire more exposures for either HDR (High Dynamic Range) images or for layering the images with these cameras, the way to facilitate that is to do it manually. As in my last article, adjust the exposure by putting the camera in aperture-priority mode, setting one aperture and changing the shutter speed to bracket various exposures. My choice is to use 2/3 of a stop difference for each of my brackets. You may like 1/3 stop, 1/2 stop, 1 stop, or ? bracketing stops instead. If doing this manually, try to get one optimum exposure, i.e. the one picked by the camera as the overall best exposure, and make the same number of exposures brighter and darker on either side of the optimum exposure. Also, if doing it manually, you will have to put the camera on full manual for exposure, then set your aperture where you want and vary the time for the brackets.
The reason for bracketing is that the latitude for digital images is about 5 stops with detail and no digital “noise.” When lightening darker areas in a digital image, one sometimes runs into noise, either color noise which looks likes flecks of red, green, and/or yellow in that area, or luma noise, which looks like flecks of black snow. Noise is usually unacceptable in commercial work and for stock images. The answer is to bracket and take images in which even shadow areas are light enough to have detail without the need to lighten them, and to blend them into the finished image, either with HDR or layering and masking in computer-editing software. Conversely, blown-out areas of one image can be recovered from a darker bracketed image, and give detail to blown-out areas.
In summary, bracketing with available lighting or with hot lights is basically the same, and white balance should be checked and adjusted should the need arise.
-Gary Silverstein
Tags: bracket, bracketing, brackets, commercial photography, editing, exposure, exposures, hdr, hot lights, image, layer, layering, lights, photography, Photoshop, professional, software, We Shoot Photography, weshoot.com
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Saturday, December 15th, 2012
Let’s talk about the art of bracketing. Bracketing is taking the same image at several different exposures so you are sure to get the detail you desire in your images during digital post-production. You may want to use high dynamic range (HDR) features in your computer software or camera to combine the exposures into one homogenous image, preserving both shadow and highlight detail from all the different exposures. Or, if you prefer, you can use editing program masking techniques which allow the use of layers to achieve the same goal, but with more of a standard photographic look to your work. HDR is sometimes difficult to work with to get an image that looks like what we have come to accept as “a photographic look,” and instead seems to have the feel of an illustration.
You can bracket manually, or some cameras will allow automatic bracketing in their menus. My work cameras will allow 3, 5, 7, or 9 images to be taken automatically at a set rate of exposure variance, which I can specify (generally for me at 2/3 of a stop). Using this method, I usually set the camera to alter the shutter speed from overexposed to underexposed. I recommend shooting in aperture priority and altering the shutter speed as it keeps the aperture the same. If you bracket by changing the aperture, sizes of things in the resulting images will be slightly larger or smaller in each exposure depending on the aperture dimension. This will make it difficult to properly align each image. I don’t recommend hand-holding the camera as it introduces camera shake and misalignment and, therefore, I usually use a tripod for bracketing.
In future posts, I will be touching more on bracketing and working with strobes, and hot lights, and how you can work on these in an editing program.
-Gary Silverstein
Tags: bracket, bracketing, camera, exposure, hdr, high dynamic range, layering, masking, multi-exposure, over expose, under expose
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Monday, October 1st, 2012
In the days of film, a professional commercial photographer had to be very careful of the backgrounds that would be used in his/her images. Retouching was expensive. Shooting an item for use against another background from the one it was taken with could be a labor-intensive multi-step process. A spot on a high-key (pure white) background could be touched out on the negative, and a nightmare undertaking on a transparency. Today, of course, images are taken digitally and manipulated by editing programs, like Photoshop. One of our most recent shoots involved large, heavy industrial products. In film-days past, we would have probably used a seamless white background to shoot the product and spent a lot of time with product placement. The items to be photographed were round, between two and three feet in diameter, and each weighed 500 or more pounds. Five views were to be taken of each. That means that either the item would have to be moved on the background, or very carefully lifted by a hoist onto the background. We would have to be careful of marks left by the items where they rested on the paper, and some method of keeping such round items from rolling off the surface would have to be employed and kept out of sight.
So, pre-planning for the shoot is still important, even in this digital world. We opted to not use any type of manufactured background per se, but to only use white reflectors in strategic places to reflect light or add a highlight where we desired. Not using a background simplified the lighting somewhat in that a roll of paper or fabric didn’t block out the light from behind each item. We were going to photograph the items in the factory environment with the idea that we would isolate the image in Photoshop, and put it on another, more desirable background.
Lighting was done with our powerful studio strobes, and the modeling lights on the strobes gave us an idea of how the lighting would look in the finished image. We shot with soft-boxes to give a square look to our lighting in the highlights, as umbrellas just wouldn’t cut it here as these products were light-reflective. We planned to keep the camera stationary, move the lights as necessary, and rotate the product for the five different angles the customer required. Since the objects were circular, and we wanted to keep all the images the same size, we had to plan how to keep that proportionality. Think of a coin stood on edge. The widest the image would have to be is a little more than the diameter when one of the faces of the coin is toward you. When the edge of the coin is nearer to you, the size of the image could change, but we wanted to make them all the same size for the client’s ease of putting together several views of their product. Also, we had to be far enough away to assure depth of field when we were shooting the views that showed part of the object furthest away. Editing programs have great sharpening utilities, but a severely out-of-focus image cannot be brought back. You can easily blur parts of a sharp image and make it look good if needed for the effect, but the reverse isn’t the case. So all this had to be figured out in advance.
Now, let’s go on to the backgrounds for the images. Since the area or table on which the items were shot was in a fixed location, the background for each image (as produced by the camera) would have been a toolbox and other parts of the assembly plant. So we made it so that we and our client could “lift” the item off the background and put it on any other background or even a video. This is done by means of a “clipping path.” This is a very labor-intensive process. It means that I use a Photoshop tool to painstakingly trace out every edge of the product at anywhere from a 100% to a 300% enlargement. Once I have outlined every hole, edge, and cranny, I “select” the item alone and make a layer of it to put on other backgrounds. I include this clipping path with the image, so the client is able to do the same. Now, you may ask why I do so much work, as some of the editing programs have become pretty sophisticated and make an easier selection with other, faster tools. Well, the answer is this: I have used these editing tools, and sometimes there are errors in the program choosing what is part of the item and what is not. It may not be noticeable on a small jpeg on a website, but it will stick out like a sore thumb on a 30X40 enlargement at a trade show. That is what separates a pro from an amateur. Below are an original view of one of the products, and a few different backgrounds that I feel work well. Each background below was created in Photoshop, but other backgrounds could be used, as well. Remember that whichever one a client chooses, I include the clipping path so they can put it against another background if that is their need.
As you can see, the product image looks at home with any of the backgrounds. Keep this in mind as you plan your next shoot.
– Gary Silverstein
Tags: camera, commercial photographer, commercial photography, http://weshoot.com, Marketing, photographer, photography, Photoshop, professional, reflections, video
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Tuesday, July 17th, 2012
Did you ever watch an old Hollywood movie about making a movie? At the beginning of each scene and take, someone holds up a slate with something like, “Scene 6, Take 164,” on it and audibly says the same thing that is on the slate. At the top of the slate is the “Clapper,” and usually after the director yells “Action,” the person holding the slate claps it to denote the start of the scene. Actually, the cameras are already rolling so they can record the slate, and the clap. In the early days of movies, the slate was used to denote the scenes and takes so, when editing the film, the editor was able to piece together the scenes to make the story flow. Scene 6 and Scene 3 may have been in one city, and other scenes in another. As sound came in, the clapper was added to allow synchronization of sound to film. Since the cameras were noisy beasts, the sound was recorded on a separate device, and the clapping sound was synchronized to the visual of the clapper sticks hitting one another. They were then paired up, and the clapperboard visuals and sound were edited out in the final version.
Today you may ask why you would want to purchase and use this contraption since the audio and video are synchronized by the camera and in lockstep, unless intentionally unlinked in the video editing software. The answer is that the slate is still needed for real video editing, and the clapper is very handy for synching multiple cameras and the sound with different angles of the same scene. Almost everybody is bothered when the mouth movement doesn’t synch with the sound.
The truth is that anyone today can shoot a video! All you need is $100 or more and a heartbeat. Simple, cheap video cameras (or camcorders) are readily available. But, professional video cameras can cost well above $60,000. Why would anyone spend a lot of money for a camera when the images on our TVs looks pretty good from low-priced cameras? A couple of reasons are that the image degrades from the cheaper cameras when less than ideal lighting is encountered. Video noise becomes a factor. Also, sound input and output is better the more you spend on the camera.
Should you shoot your own video for your business? Unless you are a budding amateur Spielberg, probably not! While pushing the record button is easy, buying quality software like Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects is expensive and learning how to use it can be daunting.
Using lighting can add quality to your video, and there is a whole science to it.
Do you have lights? Do you have pro software to edit your video? Are you proficient in video editing? Do you have a camcorder of sufficient quality to overcome video and audio noise? These are questions you should ask yourself before trying to promote your business in a video.
In making a video, my partner and I meet with our client to map out the story before even going near a camera. Videos take planning. Several days of shooting stills and video can go into a short promotional video. Way more time is spent editing it.
Now, back to the clapperboard. The clapperboard we employ (see image above) allows for a tremendous time savings when we’re editing video.
Below, take a look at one of the latest videos we did for a music composer. You will notice that even though we recorded him from two different angles with two cameras, his mouth is in synch in the side view and the front view. The guitar-playing scene was also shot with two cameras. This two-camera setup is included at no extra charge. It adds a dynamic not found in most amateur endeavors, and this professional look much more successfully illustrates the professionalism of your business. Don’t put out a substandard video. It could do more harm than good.
-Gary Silverstein
Tags: audio, clapper, clapperboard, http://weshoot.com, sound, two-camera, video, video production, videography, visual, we shoot, weshoot.com
Posted in How To, Learning, Tips | Comments Off on Video: Why a clapperboard should be part of your kit bag . . .
Friday, June 22nd, 2012
The silence was deafening. You could hear a pin drop. The crowd was still, each face looking up to me in anticipation of what I would say next. Through the roaring din in my head, I heard a woman stutter with every word that escaped from her mouth. Oh, my God, it was me!
That, my friends, is the scenario I have always envisioned if I ever got up to speak to a group of people. With clichés included.
I pointed swiftly with my finger to the wall behind them, wanting to avert their gaze from my trembling, shuddering personae.
Oh good, that was smart. Now I can collect myself. Wait! They’re looking back at me again. What will I do? I know. I’ll drop my notes off the podium. Then someone will have to pick them up and I’ll establish a relationship with someone in the audience so I can have a friend. A friend, a friend, my kingdom for a friend!!!
Yup, my army of public speaking resisters, you guessed it. None of that occurred during my first foray into public speaking, albeit only 2 minutes, 37 seconds. Prior to being introduced to the audience on that fateful day, I had already spent days memorizing my speech. And I had spent years writing marketing material for my company. I knew what I was talking about. I had no reason to lack confidence in this presentation. But, no, like so many of you, I had multitudinous reasons to never, ever speak to a crowd of people. But it all boiled down to one time-honored tradition in the ranks of probably 99% of the human nation: I was “scared to death.” And then I looked out – or down because I was on a stage – at a good 300 pairs of eyes staring up at me, and with little exception, these were friendly eyes, many with smiles, beckoning me to smile back and start my speech. So I did.
Sure, there was a little stuttering. There was a wee bit of hesitation. But as I looked out on the masses, starting my speech by making light of the accolades said of my prowess as a commercial photographer by the Master of Ceremonies, I lost a good 50% of my fear. These people were actually laughing at my self-deprecating humor. And, with that, I realized one thing. They wanted me to feel at ease with the crowd. They wanted me to succeed in my presentation. And I did.
So what do I want you to get from my experience? I want you to cancel your monthly subscription to Guest Speaker Revulsion. Put down your new book, “In Praise of Public-Speaking Resistance.” And, yes, as you sit there gasping for air at such a thought, there is one last thing I want you to discontinue. That’s right. Your next weekly Aversion Therapy Anonymous meeting. Yep, the ATA. It has to be put into your past. It’s time to move on, my comrades in business, because it’s now time to take the next step on your own. Time for you, too, to step up on the dais and cry your eyes out. Oh, wait, I regress. It’s time to sing your heart out, to speak loud and strong. It’s time to bring focus to yourself. The confidence to do so may not come before it’s done, but the second time around just got easier.
[Look for my upcoming further blogs on the subject of Public Speaking for your business.]
– Dione Benson
Tags: commercial photographer, public speaking, speak, speaker, speech, talk
Posted in Learning | Comments Off on Speak to Your Public . . . first in a series on Public Speaking
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