Photography

Model Mixer

I was invited to a Model Mixer this past weekend at a local studio. There were 9 models and 4 photographers and I ended up spending 7 hours and shooting over 1200 photos. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot. The models were great, some were very experienced, others it was their first modeling experience. 

See the photos from the shoot here.

by Craig Colvin

$2 Portrait Project

Thomas Hawk has started what he calls his $2 Portrait Project, where he gives $2 to any panhandler who asks and in exchange takes a photo of them.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand I don't believe in giving money to panhandlers, after many encounters in San Francisco with aggressive panhandlers I believe giving them money just exacerbates the problem. Often it's also just helping them support a drug or alcohol problem (and before some of you say that's not the case try offering them food instead of money and they will often turn you down).

But I've also had the experience where I wanted to take photos of people on the street (especially down at Venice Beach) and they wouldn't let you take their photo unless you gave them money. So what's a street photographer to do? Is it exploiting the homeless to offer them money to take their photo? Would it better just to move on and find a willing subject that doesn't mind having their photo taken?

Giving money in exchange for a photo also takes away one of the elements of street photography that I struggle with, asking strangers if I can take a photo of them. Should I take the easy route and pay my subjects or should I work through my fear and conquer it by continuing to struggle dealing with strangers? I'm going to learn a lot more from the latter.

by Craig Colvin

Photography Books

I am constantly trying to improve my photography skills and am often reading 2 or 3 different books at any one time. Here are the latest I've been reading.

Light: Science and Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting
by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, Paul Fuqua

This is a great book and has taught me so much about how to use my flash in a studio environment. It sometimes gets a little deep so I tend to read it in short sessions, maybe read a chapter, go try out the concepts then come back and re-read the chapter before moving on to the next.

Here are some of the photos I've taken using the techniques outlined in the book.
 

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers
by Scott Kelby

I had been using Lightroom for a couple of months prior to getting this book and thought I knew my way around the program. The first chapter proved that wrong. The number of shortcuts and tips in the first couple chapters completely justified the purchase of the book. I am now so much more efficient with Lightroom and these tips have significantly sped up my workflow.

Although I'm not a big fan of Scott Kelby's humorous writing style I still highly recommend this book!

by Craig Colvin

Joys of Tethered Shooting

After months of thinking about it, I finally got around to it and setup my laptop with the proper software to allow tethered shooting with my Canon DSLR. I then spend the evening doing a shoot and it was GREAT! I'm sorry I procrastinated for so long.

My normal cycle is take a few shots, check the LCD on the camera to make sure the exposure is ok. Zoom in on the LCD and see if things are in focus (can't always tell), then take approximately 10-20 shots. Take the Compact Flash card out of the camera and carry it in the study where my computer is. Import the photos into Lightroom, look at them, determine that I don't like them because of focus, or shadows, or 100 other different reasons. Schelep the card back to the camera, take another 20 shots. Lather, rinse, repeat until I get some photos in Lightroom that I'm somewhat happy with.

This if course takes hours with all of the walking back and forth and waiting for Lightroom to import the photos from the card. With the tethered shooting I saved a ton of time by being able to actually see the photos on a large screen in almost real time. I ended up having to take a lot less shots than normal to get the desired result.  But there was still room for improvement.

To speed up things even more I then setup an Auto Import folder in Lightroom. Lightroom is running on my desktop computer in the study, so I shared the tethered capture folder on my laptop, pointed Lightroom at that folder and then as I took the photos they automagically got imported into Lightroom. So when I was done with the shoot I walked in and sat down at my desktop computer and all of my photos from the studio were there waiting for me!

If you are doing studio shooting and you haven't yet tried tethered shooting I highly recommend it!

An example of one of my studio photos that would have benefited greatly from having tethered shooting.

by Craig Colvin

South Bay Photography Meetup

Attended the South Bay Photography Meetup this evening and had a great time chatting with the folks there and looking at all the great photos that others are taking.

I gave several of the people there a link to this blog and told them I would have a link to my photos. So here is the link to my flickr page were all my photos currently reside.

by Craig Colvin