Follow-up | Time and Time Photographer

Dec09 0

365 Project Followup

For those of you working an a 365 project below are a few general ideas to help you along with your project. One thing that is most important is to set goals and rewards for achieving your goals. I know what you are thinking… I already have a massively difficult goal of taking a picture each day. That’s all well and good, but what is the reason for taking on a 365 project? You want to better your photography skill set.

1) Pick the thing that you have a hard time with and work on that. If it’s flash or depth of field, use the project as an excuse to learn about something you have a difficult time.

2) Do a weekly or monthly theme. This could be shapes, colors, or lens.

3) Duplicate photos you have already done with you “big camera” with your cel phone.

4) Yourself. You are a photographer, why can’t you be in the photo as well?

Nov18 0

See into the shadows with HDR

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Processing, Photo Technique

My last post was about selecting which images to use for your HDR… and this is no different, but there’s a bit of a twist on this one. In this case I have a set of images from the same basic location, but there are a lot of shadows of varying degrees. Here is the set of images.

Nine exposures taken with a polarizing filter to cut down on the glare of the windows.

In this case I’m more interested in the extremes. I want to make sure the window frames aren’t too bright. I also really like the deep sky. I could take all of the center exposures, but I’ll only opt for 1/50 since it covers the midtones the best. That should be the case for your photos as long as you properly expose the photo.

Selecting four of the extreme images, but the midtone can make or break the image.

The final tonemapped image allows you to see into the lamps, what’s on the other side of the windows as well as maintain the shadows of the umbrellas, without making them overbearing all while having that beautiful blue sky. Now it’s ready for any enhancements to bring out selected details.

Good range of shadows covered.

Nov09 0

Rotate a Circular Part 2

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Technique

I had the opportunity to photograph some amazing clouds the other day and happened to have my polarizer on. This shows a bit more of the effect of a polarizer and rotating it. Looking back one of the points I’ve always tried to make is that a polarizer isn’t a magic filter. There are specific instances where it is useful and other instance where it appears to have no effect. As you can se in this case there was a pretty sizable effect.

A pretty sizable difference in this set of images.

Oct21 0

Follow-up: The thing’s I’ve learned

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Old Photo Critique, Photo Processing

I wanted to do my retouching on the photos I posted a couple days ago as quickly as possible. The temptation is to spend a lot of time on post processing, especially when you are “trying to prove a point” so I had to time myself. I decided to not take more than 5 minutes on either picture.

There’s not a lot one can do to correct the first image. These are the things I did:

Red eye removal
Crop tight
Remove clutter from background with content aware fill.
Clear a few spots from face.
Warming filter.

Cropping in tight helps to get you more engaged in the image, but since this was a 4MP image in the first place, the cropped images is only really of a reasonable size to display on the Internet. I can’t make a decent print larger than a 4×6.

The second image I spent every moment of the 5 minute time limit and did:

Brighten eyes
Increased iris saturation
Saturated pink shirt.
Light skin smoothing (to reduce noise mainly.)
Darken background using a curve adjustment.
Add a warming filter.

So what do you think? Is spending 5 minutes on an old image worth the time?

Oct14 2

Follow-up to What Did I Do?

Posted by Philip in Follow-up, Photo Technique

I had a couple good guesses, but the answer was I used a polarizing filter. A lot of people feel that a polarizing filter is a magic outdoors in the direct sunlight filter. It’s not. You have to know how to use the filter and make sure that the light is at a 90 degree angle to your camera for maximum effect. Below is my first foray into doing a video tutorial. I thought it would be nice to show using the polarizing filter in live video.

Sep30 0

Photography Tip #80 Challenge follow-up

Posted by Philip in Follow-up

I got a lot of reasonable guesses through comments posted and e-mails, but none of them were exactly correct. In order to creat the effect you will need a card to put in front of your lens. I use some photo paper printed with the color(s) I want. In the center of the card you put a small hole. You can vary the size of the hole depending on how much of the color you want to filer through.

But in order to make this work, you have to lock your focus either by half pressing the shutter or snapping a photo of your scene first and then switching to manual mode.

Then it’s a simple matter of placing the card in front of the lens and making your image through the small hole you’ve created. Vary the size of the hole or the colors to get different looks. All you need is a colored card and a way to make that hole and you can start making some interesting effect without the use of Photoshop. And depending on the thickness of the card, you can create a different sort of vignette.