Improve Your Photography 30 Minutes at a Time

I often have students at my workshops come up and ask what is the best way to improve their photography. Just being at the workshop is a great step I tell them, but they want to continue to improve after leaving the workshop. My advice to them is to devote 4 weeks a year to photography education.

But I Don't Have the Time
Of course they almost always respond with the fact that they don't have that much time or money to devote to their photography education. So I ask if that could perhaps set aside 30 minutes a day to learn and inevitably they say they could. Well it turns out that thirty minutes a day for a year is equal to 4 weeks of learning.

30 mins/day => 182 hour/year => 22 8-hour days => 4 weeks

It's not the intense training that you would get at a workshop but if you have ever been to a week long intense training class you will realize that it's hard to retain all 5 days of instruction. I feel I have much better retention when learning in 30 minute chunks.

What Should I Study?
I have been following this program of 30 minutes a day of education for the past year. I set aside 30 mins in the evening after dinner every night. Here is some of the material I consume each evening.

As you can see there is a variety of content available. I could easily devote several hours a day to learning and not be able to keep up with all that I want to watch and read, but that is not the point. The point is to improve my photography education and I do every day, 30 mins at a time.

Practice What You Learn
Of course all of the education in the world is useless if you don't pick up your camera and shoot. So schedule some time for shoots. Go on a photo walk, shoot things around your home, don't spend all your time learning, practice what you learn.

Your Action Item: Set aside 30 minutes to improve your photography education and let me know how it works for you. I would also love to hear about what content you use during your 30 minutes.

by Craig Colvin

What Do You Want From Your Photography?

For the past couple of years I've been struggling with my photography and what I want to be when I grow up as a photographer. I've tried a few avenues, made goals to publish a book, be in a gallery, etc. but I've come to realize that these were not really what I was seeking, or if they were it was just a portion of a grander whole. So what do I really want for my photography? I want my photography to be seen. I want people to look at it and have an emotional reaction. I want to be proud of my work. I want people to remember my work and seek out more. I want my photography to be memorable. I want my photos to be loved by others just as much as I love creating them. And really isn't this what most serious photographers are looking for, an AUDIENCE?

Part of what as made this so difficult is I was searching for a single audience for my work. This really came into focus when I took a workshop with John Paul Caponigro in March of 2011 (a life changing event, I've talk about it some here). He stressed that I needed to create cohesive bodies of work, that build on each other. So instead of shooting still life's, Pinup, glamour, landscapes, and everything else I was shooting at the time, I should pick one and make that be my focus. That is where this struggle started, I could not decide which of my bodies of work to pursue, I started thinking of them as which would be more marketable or please more people and ignored my inner passion to shoot all of these things. My creativity seemed to dry up and I felt like I was forcing my photos to fit into some specific unknown project.

It took another workshop, this time by Brooks Jensen publisher of Lenswork Magazine to bring clarity to the path I should be taking. Brooks pointed out that John Paul's model was the correct way to become an artist in the past, but it's not the only way and in fact it a fading view of how to become an artist in today's world. Brooks proposes that you can find an audience for any type of work and that it's OK to have disparate projects and multiple audiences. It may take a bit more work to cultivate multiple audiences, but it is doable. Instead of trying to have a consistency and focus on only one type of photography I feel free to shoot whatever project I want and then find the appropriate audience for that project. This has completely changed the way I now think about my photography and I'm excited now to pursue my passion again.

What do you want from your photography?

by Craig Colvin

TWip Logo

This Week in Photo (TWIP) Podcast #312

I was co-host on this week's episode of TWiP with Frederick Van Johnson and Don Komarechka.

Check it out.
http://www.thisweekinphoto.com/2013/twip-312-the-creative-cloud-arrives/

We discussed Adobe's Creative Cloud, Photography Contests, and Photography in a Box.

by Craig Colvin

Turning a Crappy Photo Into a Keeper

Have you ever taken a photo that you thought was going to be awesome but when you get back to the computer and see it on the bigger screen it, well basically, sucks?

This happens to me quite often, but here is what I did to recover a photo after a recent photo shoot

I had hired a professional mermaid/model (Atlantis Mermaid MM#2646787) for a couple of conceptual shots I had planned. While we were waiting for sunset, I noticed this large rock out in the water and thought it might make for a good shot. The model waded out to the rock, climbed up and put on her tail. To get the right angle I waded out into the surf up to my chest and started taking photos. I spent a lot of time trying to time the waves crashing on the rocks, which was a challenge because they were often hitting me at the same time,  but I thought I got some decent shots.

They Were All Rejects

When I got back home I was disappointed by how blah the photos looked. The lighting was poor, the sky was plain, and the whole image looked washed out. I made my picks in Lightroom for the entire shoot and none of the mermaid on the rock shots made the cut.

Trying To Salvage the Shot

A couple of weeks later the model contacted me and said she really wanted one of the shots of her on the rock. I explained that they didn't come out that great. She said she didn't care, she really wanted one of the shots. I told her I would see what I could do. I went back through the photos and found this one with some good wave action.

The Sky Sucked

Looking at it a 2nd time I realized that what I really didn't like about it was the plain sky, it needed some clouds. I have a huge collection of cloud photos (1400+), whenever I'm out and see interesting cloud formations I will pull out my camera and take a few shots. So I searched my library and decided on this image of clouds.

The 10 Minute Photoshop Job

Here are the steps I did in Photoshop to merge in the clouds and fix-up the image

  1. Add clouds. Used Quick Selection Tool to select blue sky, added my cloud image as a layer and made a mask from the selection. A couple of minutes of cleanup on the mask around the wave and rocks.
  2. Change color of the rocks. Sample reddish color from the clouds, add a solid color layer with the blend mode set to "Color", then with a soft brush set to 10% opacity I paint in the color onto the rocks in the background
  3. Change cloud color to be more red and increase saturation
  4. Use Color Effect Pro 4 filter, Tonal Contrast, Skylight filter, and Darken/Lighten Center.
  5. Back in Lightroom I cropped the image and I was done.

Final Result

I am quite pleased with the end result and it's become one of my favorite images.

How About Your Images?

Do you have any images you initially thought were rejects but were able to recover them? Share them with us.

by Craig Colvin

Create Meaningful Home Videos

Over the past year Documentary Filmmaker David Hoffman has been doing an experiment with his home movies. I watched his first movie about his family's trip to Paris and it inspired me to try the same thing my a family vacation (hope to have the footage posted soon).  He recently did another one about his family's trip to New York, I watched one about their search for toilet paper. This is one of eight documenting their New York trip.

In this video David explains the thinking by this experiment. Instead of having static photos of your family that will have no meaning to your future descendants the idea is to make a home movie in a semi-documentary format so that your descendants can get a real feeling for who you were.

David is a veteran documentary filmmaker with 40 years of experience. He is taking this experience and turning the camera around on himself. These videos are telling a story about him and his family, and what I enjoy about them is how personal they are, you really get a feel for his family, and their dynamics. It's an interesting concept and I plan to do more of this with my home movies.

So what do you think? Is this something you might try?

by Craig Colvin

This is Not Photography

This is a recent documentary about Jerry Uelsmann and Maggie Taylor. If you are not familiar with Jerry's work you should visit his web site http://www.uelsmann.net/. He was creating interesting and artistic composites in the darkroom, long before Photoshop came along. His work has always been and inspiration to me and watching this documentary was fascinating. It really got my creative juices flowing and I've already come up with a dozen new photo concepts.

There have been a few public showings of the film, but can also watch it on Lynda.com at
http://www.lynda.com/Photography-tutorials/Jerry-Maggie-photography/90633-2.html

If you aren't already a member of Lynda.com (and you should be), then this is a good excuse to give it a try.

by Craig Colvin

California Photo Festival

Click - The California Photo Festival is an annual event sponsored by Light Photographic Workshops in San Luis Obispo, CA. I was able to attend 4 days of this 6 day event this year. This conference is unlike any others I have attended. Besides classroom workshops, there are a lot of hands-on workshops where the participants get the opportunity to go shoot with the instructors. Almost every day there would be a sunrise shoot, as well as a sunset shoot, with other opportunities through-out the day.

Here is a recap of my 4 days.

Wednesday

Shot with Lee Varis at the San Luis Obispo Mission de Tolosa, where he talked about the zone system.

Attended a talk by Playboy photographer David Mecey, where he discussed the various lighting and posing techniques used in his shots for Playboy

Kevin Ames gave a very technical talk about light meters and how 18% gray is used in today's cameras, and software. I thought I knew this stuff, but was wrong. This deserves it's own blog post.

Sunset shoot was Horses on the Beach with Rick Sammon.

Thursday

The sunrise shoot was with Lee Varis at a local vineyard. It had rained most of the night and it was still sprinkling when we arrived so we didn't get the gorgeous sunrise we had hoped for, but it was still good to be up and taking photos.

Followed up the shoot with a classroom session with Jane Conner-Ziser about Mastering the Wacom Tablet. Then listened to Rob Sheppard talk about having focus in your photographic work. This is something I've been struggling with for the past year, so it was interesting to get Rob's insight.

I then attended a session with Lee Varis where he demonstrated how to take a classic Hollywood style B/W portrait. This session was much more interesting that I had anticipated and I learned quite a few lighting tricks to get the traditional look.

The evening shoot was at the San Luis Obispo Farmer's Market with Bobbi Lane, where we worked on balancing ambient light with flash, and dragging the shutter with camera movement to get some interesting lighting effects.

Friday
I did a mid-morning photo shoot with Playboy photographer David Mecey at a local winery. It was harvest time and they were bringing in the grapes. We had two models and recreated the I Love Lucy episode where she stomps grapes. Dave setup the lights, and explained his thinking as he did so, we then put the models in the vat of grapes and starting snapping photos. It was a lot of fun for both us and the models.
Back in the classroom. Lee Varis showed his technique he calls Lighting in Layers which was much more interesting than I had anticipated. The technique involves using multiple exposures with different lighting and then combining them in Photoshop to get the desired lighting effect. I plan to experiment with this technique and will do a blog post with the results.
I've been using Nik's Silver Effects Pro for about 6 months and have never felt very comfortable with it. I can do the basics but always felt I was missing a lot. So I took a workshop with Ron Sheppard about Black and White photography and learned a great deal about how to make better B&W photos.

For the sunset shoot we all headed to Pismo  Beach where I joined Jane Conner-Ziser's group and shot silhouettes.

Recap
There was still 2 more days of the Festival but I had to head to LA to take another photography workshop which I will talk about in another blog post soon.

I enjoyed this Festival a lot more than I anticipated. I've gotten to a point in my photographic career where I've been exposed to and tried a large number of the photographic techniques that were taught in the classes and workshops. I now rarely learn anything major at a workshop, instead just picking up little tips and tricks along the way, but it was still beneficial to reiterate some of the things I habve learned in the past but haven't tried in a while. I especially enjoyed the shooting workshops, having the opportunity to shoot horses on the beach, models stomping grapes, and getting up at sunrise to take pictures of a vineyard. Being at an event like this forces me to get out the and shoot which is the whole point to photography.

I highly recommend this Festival, it was well done, had great instructors and was a lot of fun. I plan to attend again next year.

by Craig Colvin

Behind the Scenes - The Annulment and Love is Blind

Here is a first of many behind the scenes videos. This one is of the shoot that created the images "The Annulment" and "Love is Blind". I didn't have someone to man the video camera so just put it on a tripod and shot wide. Except for the fog creating water spots and haze on the lens it came out OK. Will try to improve in the future.

by Craig Colvin

Ripples

I always have several ongoing photography projects. One of these is taking photos of ripples in nature. I've taken over 1000 images of this type but was never quite sure what to do with them. Individually an image might be OK, but rarely outstanding. I tried displaying them as a single portfolio on my web site but it didn't have the impact that I was looking for.

At Photoshop World this past month I saw a video slideshow by Julieanne Kost that blew me away and I realized that this was the way I should display my ripple photos. So here it is.

by Craig Colvin

Photo Shoot List iOS Application

Photo Shoot List

My new iOS application for photographers, Photo Shoot List, has been released and is now available in the iTunes App Store.

Photo Shoot List is a to-do list for photographers. You use it to keep lists of shots you want to take either at some location like a National Park, or in the studio, or at wedding. Along with each item in the list you can add a sample photo of the shot to take.

For shoots you do on a regular basis you can create shoot templates to use as a basis for the shoot list, or you can purchase pre-done lists from the iTunes store using in-app purchase.

More information can be found at PhotoShootList.com

by Craig Colvin