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We Shoot Photography Of The Day For 12/10/2018

Monday, December 10th, 2018

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Seattle Product Photography by We Shoot

A macro image of knurled screws on a small old lens wrench. Seattle Product Photography by We Shoot.  This image is available from us on Alamy.  The image ID is PXTENG.  Check out our Alamy portfolio @ https://www.alamy.com/portfolio/652516.html

Tags: black, bokeh, finger-tight, fingers, grip, gripped, gripping, hand, knurl, knurled, knurling, lens, machine, machined, machining, mechanical, metal, screw, thread, threads, weshoot.com, white, wrench
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Everybody’s a food photographer . . . NOT!

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
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Going off, half-cocked!

Monday, June 24th, 2013

Sometimes it pays to do your homework.  Don’t just read the headlines.  Several times in the last few years, I have gotten some strange phone calls.  One day, late in the afternoon, I got a call on our business line.  A woman breathlessly asked, “How late are you open?”  I was somewhat taken aback by this, as we are basically location photographers who have a studio, but do most of our work outside of it.  We have used the studio for food and small product shooting, but our work is mostly on location: commercial, industrial, large product, and architectural.

So it was surprising to get a call like this, and I said to the person on the other end that we are open 24/7.  Whenever a client needs us, we are there.  Then the caller said, “Do you have an indoor range?”

I realized that this caller had only read our headline on a search engine, and typed in “Shooting Range” for their search.  In the headline, a lot of times, our phone number comes up.  So, instead of clicking on the link to get more information, they call our number.

I told the caller that the name of our business is We Shoot, that we are commercial photographers – the only things we shoot are cameras – and that our website is weshoot.com.  She sounded a little sheepish and apologized for calling.  And, she still hadn’t found a shooting range, which I assumed she was in a hurry to find.

In like respect, when choosing a commercial photographer for a project, see if they are what you are looking for.  Many photographers who specialize in weddings also advertise for other types of work.  Now, this is not to say that wedding photographers can’t do commercial work, but if you go to their website and the first images you see are wedding related or portraiture heavy, this is what comprises the bulk of their work.   You won’t find weddings or portraits on our website.  Just because we all use cameras doesn’t make us all the same.  So, choose wisely for the type of photography you need – it can save you time and money in the long run.  Then you won’t be going off, half-cocked!

– Gary Silverstein

We Shoot

Tags: architectural, architecture, commercial, industrial, photography, product, We Shoot Photography, weshoot.com
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Bracketing With Hot Lights And Available Light . . .

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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Video: Why a clapperboard should be part of your kit bag . . .

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
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Can your blog get hacked . . . ?

Thursday, June 7th, 2012

The blog you are reading is a WordPress blog.  If you read the last post on our blog in the recent past, you would not have realized that it had been hacked, because it was invisible.  Don’t worry, it caused you no damage.  It only caused us damage.

First, some background:  I had installed an earlier version of WordPress back in 2010 on our photography website as it is good for SEO to have a blog inside the domain, and for informative purposes to our readers.  Then, a banner came up from WordPress that an updated version was available and that I should update.  Anyone with experience in computers knows that updating can go seriously awry and you could lose all your posts or information, and it is best to back them up.  Of course, this is time spent, and no one wants to do all this preventative work, but I grudgingly did that with the help of my hosting company, and did the upgrade to version 3.1.3 or something like that .  I clicked on “update” and held my breath, and it worked.

About 6 months after that, I got another notice that a newer version of WordPress was now available with more security (I forget which number).  I thought, “Oh, boy, here we go again,” and went through the motions again.  This time, it didn’t work.  The update notified me that the server our website was on did not have a high enough PHP protocol, and that the update could not take place.  So, I left it where it was at.  I called my host and they said that the server I was on did indeed not have a higher PHP and that I would have to move to another server, and there was a procedure to do that, and I would have to put it in writing that I wanted to move to another server.  I didn’t want to hassle it, reasoning that I would see if anyone hacked the blog, as it would obviously show up in the blog reading . . . or would it?  I have been getting warnings from my Google webmaster tools account that I needed to update my WordPress for security reasons.  I just shrugged it off.  It was too much work.

I went to my Google webmaster tools site last week, and updated the XML sitemap to our website, and while there, I thought I would check the optimization for keywords.  I was very upset when I found words of popular drugs for ED in my keywords, along with a pet supply store.  I didn’t put them there!

How could anyone put them there?  I have a reasonably strong password, and I don’t give it out.  So I went to check out where they were in the blog.  Lo and behold, when the blog posts were in edit mode in HTML, there they were, plain as day.  But they were invisible to anyone reading the blog on the web.  Someone or something had inserted HTML links interspersed with my text, some even intersecting words, but not showing up in the blog.  I called tech support at my hosting company.  The person I talked to could see the intrusion, and told me it was due to a low PHP protocol and low security in the earlier version of WordPress.  I asked him why anyone would do that, seeing as how there was nothing to click on or any change in the visible information in the blog.  His opinion was that the links were inserted for backlinks to other websites for their SEO.  One of them was a pet supply house.  So, somebody had hired someone to do their SEO or web work and they hack WordPress blogs to increase the SEO of their clients.  Pretty underhanded!  It can have the result of lowering the weshoot.com page rankings.

So, my path was clear.  I formally asked in writing that all my domains be moved to a more secure server with as high a PHP as possible.  It took a couple of days for the move to solidify.  I backed up my domains in a full backup.  I updated to the newest version of WordPress.  Once everything was complete, I spent a whole day removing all the inserted HTML code from each old post (sometimes they had more text in their links than I had written in our posts), and will be very vigilant from now on.

If you have a WordPress blog, take a look at old posts in HTML from time to time.  You may get a surprise.  Update to the newest version of WordPress ASAP.  Weshoot.com is lucky.  We have a cooperative hosting company and they had a more secure place for our website with a higher version of PHP.  Make sure that your hosting company does, too.

-Gary Silverstein

Tags: backlink, blog, hack, html, link, photography, weshoot.com, WordPress
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A Website: What is most important?

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

I received a call from a web designer the other day.  He had looked at our website at http://weshoot.com and decided it was too “plain” and that it needed his touch to make it work.  I responded that I am quite happy with our website, and that it does already work.  It is easy to navigate, with no delays in loading.  It doesn’t have much flash, so much of it is viewable on almost all mobile devices.  Yeah, maybe it’s not as fancy as some other photographers’ websites, but you can view all of our sample images at your leisure without waiting for the slideshow to bring around the image you want to see.  And above all, it is visible and we get calls and emails from all over the country inquiring about our photography services.  Visibility matters.  The best website ever made will not get many visitors if it is on page 65 of a Google search.

What makes it visible?  It is called SEO or search engine optimization.  You have all heard it before.  If you have a business website on the web, you have undoubtedly received a multitude of emails and phone calls, all touting services that can get you to the top of the first page of Google and other search engines.  It doesn’t matter to these people if you are already there.  What it basically comes out to is that most people type in a three-word phrase to find what they are looking for.  Something like “seattle product photography.”  As you would see, we come up somewhere on page one.

It takes a lot of work to get there.  I have a professional help make this a reality.  I help with my knowledge of some website development and making sure to post to social sites to help boost our SEO.  My SEO pro and I communicate often when changes to the website are needed and when they have been completed.  Even having a blog helps SEO.

So, the bottom line is:  If you need to budget for your website, go with a little less fanciness and spend instead on real SEO.  Make sure you get a pro to do your SEO.  If someone guarantees you that you will be at the top of page one, you’d better be in a business with no competition, because no great SEO pro will make that claim.

If you need a great SEO professional, drop me a line via our contact page on our website at http://weshoot.com.

– Gary Silverstein

Tags: commercial photography, http://weshoot.com, photography, professional photography, search engine optimization, SEO, website, weshoot.com
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Megapixel madness . . .

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

First, let me say that I have nothing against technology.  I, as a professional photographer, use it every day.  The problem with the newest and greatest technology is determining what you really need, and secure that for your business.

New cameras have come out with incredible capabilities.  These include the Nikon D800 (in two forms) and the Canon 5D Mk III.  The former has 36.6 megapixels, and the latter has around 22.3.  Both shoot HD video.

Let’s look at what is needed.  I have been a photographer for a long time.  I currently shoot for various companies on assignments that include food, products, services, architecture, and lifestyle images.  I cut my teeth on event and consumer photography.  One thing I can tell you is that it is folly to show up with only one camera to a professional shoot, especially if reshooting it is difficult or downright impossible.  Let’s take a wedding photographer, for example.  Let’s say he has $3K-$3.5K to spend on a camera or cameras.  Should he buy one new Nikon D800 or Canon 5D Mk III to shoot weddings, or should he buy two Nikon D300s or Canon 7Ds?

I would say he should buy 2 of either of the latter 2 cameras.  First we usually buy the brand that will accept our older lenses.  That usually dictates the brand.  For weddings these days, how many people will be buying or making anything larger than an 8X10?

You don’t need over 12 megapixels for anything under 30X40 (and you might even be able to push it to 40X60).  Most images are printed smaller, and even wind up on the web, where a sub- one-megabyte image has sufficient size.  The only photographers who need such a large megapixel camera are those who produce images in excess of 30X40, or severely crop an image from the original size.  An 8X10 from a D800 won’t necessarily be better-looking than one from a D300!

Let’s also look at logistics.  A 12.2-megapixel D300 Nikon produces a tiff file around 35-megabytes (8-bit).  A D800 is said to produce a tiff image at around 76-megabytes (8-bit).  In Photoshop, professional photographers regularly make layers to enhance their images.  Each layer adds multiples to the size of that file, and unless you have a pretty robust 64-bit computer system, it may create delays in workflow, or even give you dreaded “out of memory” messages.

The second argument for buying two of the same camera is that you have a backup for the first camera.  The lenses are interchangeable.  A wedding couple and their families don’t want to hear that your camera failed during their wedding and you didn’t get the pictures.  When we did weddings during the days of film, we used to show up with no less that 3 medium-format camera bodies, 3 lenses, and multiple film inserts or backs.  We also had two shooters, and this allowed broader coverage.  If you are hired to shoot, and you do not deliver, you may be in breach of contract, will possibly get sued, and will definitely generate bad will.  This is very bad in this modern age, what with Facebook and Yelp.

My advice is if you are considering going pro, buy affordable cameras in pairs, or even use an older camera to back up your newer one.  Never turn up for a pro shoot with just one camera.  It can be a recipe for disaster.

– Gary Silverstein

We Shoot

Tags: Canon 5D Mk III, commercial photography, enlargement, megapixel, Nikon D300, Nikon D800, weshoot.com
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Putting Lipstick on a Pig . . .

Thursday, February 16th, 2012

Some years ago, I was emailed by a man who wanted me to photograph a business property. He was a commercial real estate broker with a property to sell. He sent an image he had taken of a rundown business property in our area and wanted to know if we could photograph it. I called him, and we exchanged information.  I said I had viewed the image he sent and was curious why he would spend money on getting an image of such a property, to which he replied, “I need a pro to take the image, and then put some lipstick on this pig.” I asked him what he meant. He said he wanted the property to look great and that our photographic ability plus considerable Photoshop editing skills could make winning images. He would be showing the images to a buyer out of state, and he might be able to make a sale on the strength of my images. He wanted me to be complicit in fraud! Once I heard this, there was no way I was having anything to do with such activities, but out of curiosity, I asked him what his budget was for this, and he said he had very limited funds and could only pay about one-fourth of my then day rate. Not only did he have the chutzpa to ask me to commit fraud, even though I wouldn’t have shot and altered the image for profit, he still had the gall to think I would be thrilled to do it at no profit! I hope everyone he called was willing to say no.

Now, I have been asked to enhance properties before, like the time the water truck broke down that was used to wet down a parking lot and I had to make a parking lot look wet for an image. I was also asked before to put two adjacent aerial images together of an airport my partner had taken, and make one photo out of them, and then extend the airport background to look like the drop-off behind the airport had been filled in, and a retaining wall added. This was sort of a photographer’s rendering of what the airport could look like if the airport hired my client to remodel the airport. Another time, a company hired me to take an older aerial image of a building they had built and update it to close to what the building looked like now with landscaping as they couldn’t get another aerial shot. I, of course, went to the building and did extensive work to make a realistic image of the building that I imagined from the air. This image was made into a large print, framed, and hung in the boardroom of the construction company.

In these images in the above paragraph, there was no attempt to defraud anyone. If anyone asks you to do something like this, make sure of what their intentions are. Ask questions. And if someone asks you to “Put lipstick on this pig,” run the other way as fast as you can.

– Gary Silverstein
We Shoot

Tags: architectural, architecture, Seattle commercial and advertising photography, weshoot.com
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