Landscape Photography

Ok -- Let's talk landscape photography. I think most of us usually take photos of people -- and mostly kids, family and friends. However, I am also really interested in landscape and architexture photography and I think it is kind of a different animal.

So I thought I'd share a few things I'd learned about landscape photography (and of course a few photos) and I would love to hear some tips from you guys -- oh yea and for you to share a few of your favorite landscape/architexture photos!

I've learned:

1) It is usually crucial to use a small aperature (usually F/11 or more)
2) It helps to have the sun BEHIND you when taking photos, although this isn't always necessary
3) Taking photos at the golden hour (1 hour after sunrise or 1 hour before sunset) helps a lot
4) Blue skies make for much better photos
5) Odd angles, especially with buildings can make for interesting photos.
6) Eliminating Distracting Backgrounds and extraneous people (clean photos) look MUCH better
7) It doesn't hurt to live in Washington, DC with some of the most beautiful buildings in the country and in San Diego, California with some of the most beautiful beaches in the country. :)

So. . . please share your beautiful landscape photos and tips!

Becky :)

HELP!

Yesterday was the Halloween party at my son's preschool. My husband took my camera along, hoping to get some decent shots.
This is what he came home with.....88 shots and not one good one in the bunch.
Help me out here, I'm trying to advise him with what he should have done differently, in preparation for their Thanksgiving and Christmas programs.



I don't even know where to begin....first, it is really light in there, I would have been in a lower ISO, maybe 800. Second, I would have not used my 50mm lens, I would have used the Tamron 28-75mm. He had the right idea with the aperture...
This is a situation, where I would have given it a shot at shooting in manual too.
He said that all his shots were within about 5 minutes....so he didn't want to mess around with settings. But clearly, you have to use your preview screen and make adjustments so you don't end up with nothing!
Back in June, I learned so much from the disaster I call my nephew's highschool graduation. I got only a handful of decent shots that night.
Anyhow, let me know what you would have done....we can't have this happen again!
Thanks, ladies!

blog header

can you guys each send me one photo, one of your favorites?
I'm going to make a nice blog header...I'm back into the swing of playing with that stuff again.....

Lovely photo

I don't know if you've seen this photo? but I think it is one of the most perfect, lovely photos that I have ever seen posted on Karen's blog....
I love everything about it. I went into that Exif viewer and checked out the settings...manual...go figure.

Exposure Value Computing (in the ages before the iphone)

Ok, so for those of you who DONT have an iphone & can't download the Photo Buddy Ap...

If you really really want to nerd it up - this is a great website for exposure information and a diagram of the exposures that work together for a situation.

It might make your brain hurt -- it makes mine hurt - so I pulled out the exposure calculator and made it into a PDF so I could print it nicely.

He has some flaky copy write stuff, so I can't post it directly.

Website: Fred Parker Ultimate Exposure Calculator

Oh, and I couldn't post w/o putting a picture up.

-Sherri

how would you have shot this?

I shot these two this afternoon, cloudy/overcast day. About 4pm in the afternoon.
I tried to catch some in manual and it really didn't go very well for me. So, I switched to my trusty aperture priority mode.
f/2.8 1/1000 and ISO800.
I now realize that I should have been at about ISO125 NOT 800! that would be from my previous attempts at manual yesterday. Same time of day, indoors in a bay window. I had to be at 800 to get a shot and it was horrible. UGH, I need to seriously practice this.

Side note: these are not SOOC, but I did minimal post processing. Just ("oh snap 10%, derilicte 15% boutwell magic glasses, 25%)

templates.

i'm curious about something ... a little off the beaten path here for a minute.

when photographers offer christmas cards, announcements, etc. they are always so cute. i've purchased a set from the lab i go through to work with their cards (for grads), and i've also had a friend design a couple for me (birth annoucements).

here's the deal though. are all these other photographers designing their own? is there a great spot to buy tempates to use for your clients? please help girls!
thanks!
jen

I have a brand spanking new computer at work and it sucks rocks!
I can't post a comment to blogger....
anyhow, check out this website:
http://www.simplicityphotography.com/design/
I know that Olivia, the photographer that I go to purchases A LOT of stuff from Angie....her cards are really nice. They're all WHCC compatible.

What Is A Gray Card? And How Do You Use It?

I had heard about gray cards over and over and I knew they were crucial to get the proper white balance (e.g. the proper color on your photos) but I had no idea how to use one. So, I went out and bought one and looked it up on the internet. After quite a bit of practice I've found that a gray card can be a GREAT tool for helping you get the proper color to your photos.

A gray card is exactly what it sounds like -- a gray colored piece of plastic, cardstock, paper, etc. that you can buy in a variety of prices from a camera store. The gray is calibrated to be the "perfect" gray color (this is a long, complicated story but has to do with being 18% gray which is what is the standard measure in photography). You just have to know it is a gray card.

So. . . what do you do with it? It helps you get the correct white balance, or correct color on your photos. I used to get TONS of photos that were really orange/yellowy in color, especially photos taken at night because I was using light bulbs which often create a orange/yellow tint to your photos. Gray cards can help with yellow/orange or any other color problems you might be having.

How do you use one? Ok -- it differs for each camera but in general you do the following:

1) You go to where you are going to take your photos (meaning you need to be in the same light)

2) You take a photo of the gray card filling up the ENTIRE frame of the photo with the gray card. (NOTE: you don't have to focus to take the photo -- just to get the gray filling the frame).

3) You go to the menu in your camera and look for "Custom WB" or "Custom White Balance". Select "Custom WB" and when you do it will ask you which photo you want to use. Choose the photo of the gray card.

4) Make sure your white balance setting or "WB" setting is on custom and you will be ready to go.

5) Take your photo and the color should now be good.

NOTE: Make sure that when you are done taking photos in that type of light, you reset your White Balance to auto-white balance so that you photos aren't a weird color. Or you can set a new custom white balance when you take your next set of photos in a different light. I hope this helps at least a little.

So. . . there's a little info. about gray cards. Do you use one? Do you like it? Do you find it helpful or not worth it?

Manual Mode

I am terrified of even attempting to shoot in manual mode......but I need to give it a shot!

Does anyone else suffer from the fear of MANUAL symdrome? and how does one get over it?

Full Manual Exposure: In this mode you select the aperture and the shutter speed from any combination of the above. Top dial selects shutter speed, rear dial selects aperture. Half-press the shutter release and the meter on the viewfinder status bar and top LCD will reflect the exposure level compared to the calculated ideal exposure, if it's outside of +/- 2EV the indicator bar will blink either + or -.

After reading your comments, I'll be heading back to my workshop manual and re-reading that part.....

Back-up plan, do you have one?

Becky's previous post talked about photo storage and backing up.
How about it we all just add to this post (edit it) with info on our photo storage method (to the madness).

1. on-line back up
2. external hard drives
3. burning to disks
4. other options (smugmug, scrapbookpictures.com, etc.)

Jenny:
here is Jenny's info from her comment:
"i do back all of my photo's up. however, right now my computer is at max capacity so all of my shots to date taken (from 2007) are on one external hard drive. i just filled that up and bought a new 1tb external hard drive. i need a second storage solution to back this up, and signed up for mozy. to date, it's not been working. i still have to call them and see what the issue is. anyone else have any ideas for online backup? i don't have the time or patience (or money) to burn everything to disc. i have never gone through folders of pictures and deleted the bad ones. i should, but again, no time at the moment.

maybe when i'm on maternity leave i can do all that - haha!

any advice on alternative storage would be fine by me. and i usually print things i want to either a) display around my home or b) give to relatives/friends. :)


Juli:
1. upload photos to my computer from card and immediately go through and delete anything blatantly obvious that needs to be deleted. sometimes, I will add a rating.
2. edit any images that I upload to my blog or to Facebook (resizing them to a small size).
3. a couple of days later, I go through the monthly folder with feeling....seeing if there is a story in any photos or any that pull at my heart. edit those and save as .jpg.
4. continue this through the month and then upload the final .jpg images to smugmug and scrapbookpictures.com for off site storage.
5. every couple days, I save from my laptop into my "photo" EHD and back up my raw images. I don't have it plugged in all the time as it is upstairs. But I can connect to it wireless, so that's what I do.
6. I tried Mozy to back up my computer everyday, but it didn't work for me. I don't burn anything to CD or DVD because they can be damaged, etc. plus, where am I going to store them?

I'm a scrapbooker (paper), just can't break into the digital era. I love the dimension of the paper stuff. Anyhow, I print EVERY photo that I upload to scrapbookpictures.com when they have their sale a couple times a year. I pick through them and use what I want to scrap and the rest go into a photo storage box for my kids to do what Karen does when they're a little older. My kids LOVE to look at the scrapbooks I've made so far (6 of them), they take them to school for show and tell... I do love to scrapbook.

I have no clue how photographers that shoot for a living back up and store their images. It makes my head hurt trying to come up with an organization process for that. As a professional, how long are you obligated to save the images? I know the photographer that I use will shoot 300+ images in a session, but she narrows our gallery down to 40-50 images to finally choose from. She does not save every image from every session. Not possible.

BECKY:

My process is very similar to Juli's. I am totally paranoid about losing stuff (especially since I've had 3 hard drives die -- and the first wasn't backed up including work.) Not good. Since then I have a whole process:

1) I upload all my photos onto my hard drive and review them and delete any that I don't like (I usually get rid of about 1/3rd to 1/2 of the stuff now)

2) I organize the photos. My photos are organized by:
a) year folders then
b) title of activity/person/date when they were
taken
c) inside the title folder is finished/edited pictures, raw pictures and pictures I don't intend to edit.

3) I then backup those photos from my hard drive onto an external hard drive. (although I need to get a new one of those).

4) I upload the photos onto one or two websites (I use kodakgallery.com sometimes and always scrapbookpictures.com)

5) My computer uses Mozy everyday as external backup and so within 24 hours my computer will also backup to Mozy. I'm sorry to hear that so many of you have had trouble with Mozy. I've been very happy with it although the initial upload took FOREVER -- more than 3 weeks. Now it is quick everyday.

6) I finally order prints of all the photos that I have uploaded/ didn't delete. They all go into date organized photo boxes and I use some of those photos to scrapbook. Some stay living in the boxes.

So. . . now you all know that I am crazy about photo storage. I think that makes 6 actual forms of storage.

What Do You Do With All Those Photos?

Well folks, bear with me because this is my first ever blog post! So -- I hope it works out properly.

As a photographer I have become inundated with photos. I went from taking 25 photos of a big event (like a wedding or birthday) to taking 200-1200 photos of an event. That quickly adds up to a LOT of photos. Most of my photos are still not memorable, but there are usually a handful of photos that I really like. But even when you are taking only a handful of good photos all the time, what do you do with them?

Well, my solution is usually scrapbooking. I'm a scrapbooker and have been for more than 20 years so fortunately my photos often find a home in my scrapbooks where people actually look at them. I do both digital and paper scrapbooking. I will also print my favorites and hang them in my house or change out the photos in the frames at home. Sometimes, I give my favorites away to the people I love. However, that still leaves a lot of photos with nowhere to go but my photo boxes or my hard drive. And that's ok too.



So. . . tell me what do you do, if anything, with all of your photos? Do they make their way into the printed world? the framed world? onto the internet? or do they just live at home on your hard drive?

And for some added inspiration, here are two of my scrapbook layouts. One is a digital layout and one is a paper layout. Thanks for reading this!

Becky :)

branding and logos...

ok...so this post isn't really about photography - in the sense of improving photos. but it's a question that's on my mind.

from what i've read and heard...to be more successful as a photographer you should brand yourself as a certain type of photographer - in a sense of your style of photography. that your logo should match your style. and the logo should also be consistant - not changing it up every few months/years.

so, i've played with differant things. and my issue is that i like change.

how do you pick ONE logo to stick with??? what if in 3 years (or 6months) you don't like it anymore?

here is my latest.


and if we want to critique the photo...my shutter speed wasn't high enough...my aperature wasn't either. i needed more light. (i'm seriously considering purchasing a flash and i really need to spend the money on reflectors)

Post Process & Retouching

What is your opinion on retouching? There are so many articles written about natural beauty and self image. I personally don't mind a little ~ uh, lift myself....

Plus, who really wants to look at a picture of themselves and think ughhhh...

Isn't makeup itself a form of retouching?

-Sherri

I'm testing the colorspace with these two photos. The first one was saved in CS4 with the "save for the web" function. It clearly corrected the color for posting to the web.
The second one is an ugly mess. I just resized the photo for posting to the blog and saved it as is.


Photo info:
AV
1/500 sec
f/1.8
iso 100
Canon 50mm

Sherri, thanks for the nerdy explanations of all this colorspace stuff. It's amazing!

Here's one with Sherri's suggestions using TRA ProRetouch...it works!