Repetition

Paul Indigo writes on Beyond the Obvious what’s probably the best tip any photographer needs to know:

So let me a share a few ’secrets’ about getting ‘once in a lifetime’ images again and again. It all comes down to luck. You were there and everything fell into place perfectly, just at that moment just as you pushed the shutter button. Look at many of the astounding photographs of our time and what do you think? Yes, that photographer was darn lucky to be there at that moment.

While I’d encourage you to read the whole post, this one part struck a chord with me personally:

After the shoot I reflect on the images I’ve taken and how they can be improved further. Often the key to getting those ‘once in a lifetime’ shots is to use the knowledge you gained the first time shoot and go back and do it all again, if you have the opportunity. And then go back again. And again. Always refining and pushing it further. Never settle for second best.

I’ve always said that the key to a great photo is luck, and I’ve previously tried to make the same point Paul made above (albeit less eloquently). Just being out there with your camera, a lot, separates good from mediocre photographers.

Personally, I’ve also found myself revisiting the same places and subjects over and over. Because every time I do, I’ve learned since the last time I was there, and learn something new from the experience of re-shooting it. It’s something that’s been very valuable to me as a learning tool over the years, and one I’d encourage others to try. Go back to the first place/subject you ever took a photo of, and take a new one – you’ll be amazed at how much you’ve changed since then. Then do it again a year from now, and again, and again.

Early Evening

The past couple of days I’ve talked a little bit about the software I use; I thought it was about time I discussed my workflow in quasi-depth.

The camera equipment that I use is mentioned in every post. I’ve recently upgraded from a Nikon D70 to a D300, and am slowly but surely expanding my stable of lenses. What’s not obvious with every post is that all of these images start out as RAW, with the exception of some of the earliest images I took with my D70.

I’m kind of an operating system slut. I have a desktop PC running Windows Vista with a dual monitor setup – I’ve been dying to put Ubuntu on it, but it’s more trouble than it’s worth at this point. I also have a Macbook Pro running Leopard with a virtualized Windows XP under Parallels (which I use mostly for work – everything else I do can be done under the native Mac OS). I have a Mac Mini hooked up to my TV that serves as my media center PC. On occasion I’ve run Ubuntu file servers, though I don’t currently have one running. I do have an older laptop with Ubuntu, but that’s seldom used these days. For these purposes, I should note that I do the majority of my work on either the Vista PC or my Macbook Pro. I might rely exclusively on the latter, but I find that I very quickly run up against the limitation of a relatively small hard drive.

I begin by importing the photos from my camera into Adobe Lightroom. The main reason I use this over Apple’s competing Aperture is that it’s cross platform, and it’s relatively easy to keep my Mac and PC synchronized.

The first thing I do is add metadata – usually a couple of keywords, location data and contact and copyright info. I also use the excellent donationware application Geosetter to geotag them, as it’s the only program I’ve tried that can actually write that information to Nikon’s RAW format, .NEF (It’d be nice if Lightroom did this, but c’est la vie).

Next, I’ll give the collection a once over, picking out the best and most usable images, and add them to a temporary collection for developing. I never, ever delete anything, no matter how terrible. A habit that eats hard drive space – but in the grand scheme storage is cheap enough that I don’t much care.

90% of the developing I do is done by Lightroom – for most images I never leave that application (except for the aforementioned geotagging). I take the RAW image and adjust the highlights, tones, and colors to my satisfaction. I only drop into the full featured Photoshop for complex operations, such as special effects (orton being one example), panoramic stitching, layer based operations or anything that requires fixing just a part of the image. I use Photomatix for HDR processing and occasionally Nikon’s Capture NX as I think it’s better at reducing high ISO noise from the D300.

Next, I export my final picks as JPG’s and upload them to Flickr, where most people who will ever look at them will see them. People can and do make justified complaints about the site, but there’s simply no other place on the internet that can match it for the feature set or visibility.

The final thing I do is archive them. I mirror all my work on two local hard drives, and use Jungledisk+Amazon S3 for offsite backup.

I’ll probably expand on the details a bit in future posts, but that’s the broad overview.

I know it’s Valentine’s day, but astonishingly I don’t have any Valentine’s themed photos to share. So instead this is one from Washington Square Park last summer.

Exposure: 1/200″
Aperture: f/7.1
Focal Length: 18mm

Great Falls HDR

Those who follow my Flickr Photostream (a far more chronological display of my work than this blog) know that I’ve been playing a bit with HDR lately. Whereas earlier images were really just experiments so I could learn what worked and didn’t and how to use the technique, I think this is the kind of image that HDR was really intended for.

To look at it, you probably wouldn’t immediately recognize it as an HDR photo. Most photographers (at least in the HDR group on Flickr) who utilize the technique seem to do so for the look – which I’d describe as tossing a bucket of paint onto a photo, making it look more like an illustration than a photograph.

But the idea behind HDR is really to make a scene more realistic, not less, by capturing more of the dynamic range between shadows and highlights. The problem is that while we can take multiple, bracketed exposures and combine them to get a fuller dynamic range, computer monitors can’t display that range. So we tone map them, resulting in the high detail, low contrast image that’s more reminiscent of drawings than the photographs we’re used to seeing.

Properly utilized though, the technique can be used to get that detail from the highlights and shadows that would normally be impossible to get from a high contrast scene like this originally was – the left side was completely in shadow, the right not, the falls reflected a lot of light, and the sky is of course a lot lighter than anything below. The non-HDR version developed from a single RAW image isn’t bad, but I think it doesn’t compare to the HDR version. This is a lot closer to what the human eye sees when it looks at this scene, and I think that’s the point.

The image is taken from three exposures at 1 EV apart, and mapped using Photomatix.

Exposure: Varies
Aperture: f/32
Focal Length: 52mm

Foggy Green

Buy a print of this photo through Imagekind

I like sunny days.

I like the bright, vibrant colors that come with direct sunlight. I like to shoot shadows, contrasts, and the sun itself. Plus, you know, they’re just all around pleasant days to be outside shooting pictures. And usually when it’s not sunny, I’ll just sit inside and grumble about the weather, annoyed that it’s such a bad picture taking day.

Turns out I was an idiot all this time, and have been missing out on getting some fantastic images  simply because I didn’t like to go outside when the weather was bad.

It was drizzling when I took this photo, and it was cold. I hadn’t intended to take pictures when I left the house – but the scene presented me with the perfect combination of diffused light, snow, mist, and fog. Personally, I think the results are gorgeous, as I hope you’ll see for yourself when I get around to uploading the rest of the photos from that day.

So, tip of the day: As far as shooting goes, there’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad photographers. I for one plan to start shooting in the rain a lot more often.

Exposure: 1/100″
Aperture: f/5