Professional Resources for Photographers

I was introduced to photography in High School, around 1997. Immediately fell in love with it. I rolled my own film, worked in the darkroom and did all that fun stuff. I made the switch to digital around late 2001 and that really appealed to me as well. I was majoring in computer science so digital made the inner-geek in me absolutely ecstatic. I have learned A LOT through these 12 or so years of being a photographer. There are so many things that, for lack of a better word, were revelations. I mean these things could have made my photos so much better, cut my workflow in half or even could have just made things so much easier. Want me to share my top 5 with you?

Haha I thought you would never ask…

1.) Your Light Meter Measures Everything as 18% Gray: I was fooled for the longest time on this one. I have no idea why I never read it anywhere or figured it out on my own. This was a huge “A-Ha” moment for me. Handheld and in-camera camera light meters are made to read 18% gray at the center. I always thought that the center line in the camera’s viewfinder was the perfect exposure but that isn’t the case. The result was me always tweaking my photos plus or minus a stop or so. If I photographed something that was bright then my photos would be under exposed and vice versa for dark scenes. So I figured out that 18% gray is meant to be the middle ground and it is up to the photographer to take that data and make good use of it. So a bride in a white dress along a white wall needs MORE light to turn that middle gray into about +1 eV on the light meter. If you have a groom in a black tux along a black wall then you need to let LESS light in so that light meter better be about -1 eV.

Digital is a beautiful thing so you can enable highlight warnings in camera and see if you are overexposing any part of the scene. If you see those “blinkies” all over your subject then that should tell you to calm your exposure down a bit…

2.) Lenses Matter: I didn’t invest into good glass until about 2006. I was using kit lenses which were often very slow and had variable apertures. Slow lenses are ones that are in the f/4-5.6 f-stop range and variable aperture lenses are cheaper zoom lenses and the f-stop changes when you zoom in and out. For example, if you have an 18-200mm lens then you may be at f/4 at 18mm but when you zoom up to 200mm then you will see your minimum aperture change as well up to f/5.6… I was a Nikon shooter from 2001 to 2006. I wasn’t happy with what I had and made the switch to Canon for a year. I HATED the quality control issues Canon had and made the switch back to Nikon a year or so ago. Now I am super happy with my camera equipment… What changed since going from Nikon to Canon and back? My lenses. I didn’t have expensive glass the first time but did when I moved to Canon. After selling that stuff off, I bought expensive glass from Nikon and boy what a difference! My photos were sharper, my color accuracy was better out of camera and the faster lenses (some with VR or “vibration reduction” / IS or “image stabilization” for Canon shooters) made it so I could take pictures relatively anywhere. Before I had the faster lenses, it seemed like I was always somewhere that didn’t have enough light to shoot at shutter speeds faster than 1/60″. Anything in that range or slower means camera shake or motion blur. Not always ideal for photos! Once I got lenses in the f/1.2 to f/2.8 range then that all went out the door. Suddenly I had new shutter speeds available to me that were faster than 1/60″ shutter speeds. Some fast prime lenses can get you in this ballpark with ease. A 50mm Nikon or Canon f/1.8 lens can be as cheap as $100. Check out Amazon.com for that kind of stuff because they have great deals on camera equipment. Won’t break the bank and it will get you some real nice results. Makes a great birthday gift too ;)

3.) Make Backups and Backups of your Backups: I had a great time at Myrtle Beach in 2004. Took lots of killer pictures and great memories of my girlfriend (now my wife) and I. It was also a bittersweet time because my wife, Rebecca, found out that her Great Grandmother was diagnosed with cancer. I managed to get some real nice pictures of her and her great grandmother before she got real sick. Sure enough, I made only one copy of the above mentioned photos and had them on an external hard drive. Formatted my cards and went about my business shooting everything else. Well, a month later, guess what decided to become a fireball and blow up on me? THAT hard drive. Bye bye photos, bye bye memories. What did I learn? Make backups of your backups!

4.) Shoot RAW: I know there are some JPEG blow hards out there where it is all JPEG or nothing. Good for you. If you don’t want to sit behind a computer after a shoot then no problem. That is about the only reason I would ever even consider shooting exclusively JPEG in this day and age. Memory cards are cheap (I remember paying $200+ for a 512mb card in 2002!), RAW converters are cheap and fast and they do the job. Even my snap shots are done in RAW. WHY? I love the flexibility and love the fact that I can apply the necessary white balance, contrast, saturation and sharpness after the shoot depending on my needs. If I shot JPEG then I would be limited to what my settings were at time of capture. Last time I checked, Photoshop has a hard time of getting a correct white balance after the fact and sharpening can always be added but rarely removed! RAW also has more flexibility. In the heat of the moment, maybe you took a beautiful picture but your settings may have been off. If you shoot in RAW and your goof ups are suddenly not throw outs. I have pulled a couple stops back from a file and made it a keeper. If I shot JPEG then it would have been off to the trash can.

5.) It’s Called Workflow not “work-slow”: I remember editing a wedding in 2006 using Adobe Camera Raw. I was editing every photo one by one. I knew nothing about “batch processing” That wedding took me a week and now I can get one fully edited, make a blog post about it AND push it to Pictage within 2 hours tops. RAW converters like Adobe Lightroom are great tools and should be used to their fullest. Use Lightroom Presets, Photoshop Actions and Batch Processing and watch your calendar free up in no time.

There you have it, my top 5 revelations that I know I would have liked to have learned when I started off. Hopefully these can come in handy for you and you can be off to an even better start then when I did.

Thanks for reading!

Get them while they are hot!

http://www.inlightinworkshop.com/store/lightroom-presets/

Get over 75 useful Lightroom Presets and an instructional video on how to use them to their fullest. These are the best presets that I have made and compiled over the years. I can edit down my weddings down from 1500 images to about 400 in roughly an hour. From there, these presets fine tune and give the VIP treatment with color enhancements, special effects, black and white and so on… All that took ehhh 30 minutes! The best part is that it is non-destructive editing. I always have clients ask for reprints but want something different than what they see. “Can you make this black and white image color?” and stuff like that. With Lightroom, I open up my client’s catalog, make a virtual copy of the file they want, take it back to square one and edit it the way they want and re-save it as a copy. Done!

Actions are quickly becoming a thing of the past and Lightroom keeps wowing me more and Photoshop keeps getting used less and less in my studio.