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Attending Macro/Food/Close-up photo class this weekend

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I'm looking forward to attending a photo workshop at Keeble and Shuchat this weekend about close-ups, macro, food, flowers, etc.   The workshop will be led by a guy named Dave Henry, who I haven't met before.   It's sponsored by Canon and there will be a lot of Canon gear there to borrow but I'm hoping the content will be mostly brand-agnostic. More info is available in this PDF here: http://www.kspphoto.com/files/macro_henry.pdf

You can see other classes that Keeble and Schuchat hosts here:  http://www.kspphoto.com/photo_classes.html

Anyone else planning to attend?

A look back at 2010

in ,

2010 has come and gone and it was a pretty good year, both personally and professionally (both the day job and the photography business.)   Here are some of the highlights:

  • My folder for 2010 weighs in at 235 GB.  That includes all the raw files I've chosen to keep plus all the photoshop versions.  That number is up from 195 GB in 2009, 145 GB in 2008, and 120 GB in 2007.   There's a trend here...I'm being a little more selective about when I press the shutter and throwing away more bad photos, but the files are getting larger.   Luckily I revamped my photo editing workstation with a two-way RAID stripe for speed and got a better backup solution, so I'm able to deal with the surge of data pretty well.
  • I did some aerial photography this year, including some formation flying and shooting from a helicopter in Hawaii with no doors.   I love flying and I love photography so combining the two is great.
  • I did a nice location shoot and some product stills for Osocalis Distillery.  They're based out of a cozy little barn in the Santa Cruz mountains and they make small batches of brandy.  It was a real challenge to try to find angles to accentuate the atmosphere of the small space and make it really look like the craft distillery that it is.   Their website is still under construction but you can friend them on Facebook to keep up to date on them.
  • I had fun shooting the Maverick's surf contest.   I was almost not going to go to this, due to the lack of information and having never been out there before.  I finally decided (at 5:00 am) to go for it and it turned out to be a good decision.   It's hard to stand in one place for 8 hours straight but in the end there were some great performances by some talented surfers and some monumentally bad planning on shore by some people who apparently know very little about how the ocean works.There are three ways to shoot an offshore surfing contest:  from land, from a boat near the surfers, and from a helicopter.   I think I did pretty well for shooting from land, (which means shooting through about a half mile of haze and sea spray) but there's nothing that's going to blow up to poster size art.  Next time I'll try a boat or a helicopter.
  • I moved my blog to Wordpress.  I finally gave up on maintaining the home-built blog solution I was working on and switched to Wordpress.  I'm pretty happy so far and I've migrated more than half of the old posts to the new system.The main challenge I have now is to get a good gallery system working so I can show some more photos here.   I've had a couple plugins recommended to me but I haven't had a chance to play with them yet.  (NextGen Gallery and Lightbox2)
  • I had a couple trips to Florida to shoot some private parties and one convention.  At the convention I was really the digital tech and "second shooter" instead of being the primary photographer.   This was a good trip for me and it let me concentrate on the workflow and keeping the main shooter working at a fast pace, while dealing with a huge volume of incoming images, making prints, etc.  Situations like this remind me that photography can be a team effort and when the team works well the results can be great.I did manage to get some photography in, notably of some rescued animals from Busch Wildlife Sanctuary.   I also worked on my travel skills and accumulated a bunch more mileage on United.
  • No football games in 2010.  :-(  I missed the whole season and Cal Poly had another "rebuilding" year.  I'll be shooting the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl next weekend though, so that'll be fun.
  • No good lava shots from our trip to Hawaii this year.  :-(  The volcano was relatively active during our visit this year but there was no active ocean entry which makes for a great photos, and I couldn't quite make my schedule line up with a guy who was going to go out on the lava with me for a night time lava shoot.   We'll be back to Hawaii though, so there's still hope.
  • On a personal note, my daughter was born this year.   I couldn't be more thrilled about being a parent and I look forward to everything the next couple decades will bring on this front.   Being a parent will probably make it harder to jet off around the world for photography but I'm betting it'll be a net-win overall...  ;-)

2011 is off to a great start so far and there are a lot of possibilities:

  • There's the aforementioned football game next weekend.
  • I'm thinking about a big trip to Dubai in March to Gulf Photo Plus, but we'll see if that pans out.  It's a part of the world I've never been to and it would be a huge cultural win to go see.  It's a lot of time away from the new baby though, and not the cheapest place to visit.
  • I'd like to do second editions of some or all of the three books I've done.  As time goes on my eye gets better, I accumulate more images, and technology gets better.   I think Blurb is still printing with the Indigo 5000's, but I haven't had a chance to try their PDF submissions yet, which should yield much sharper text than I got before.

That's all that comes to mind right now.

Let's talk about California Sales Tax...

in

It's July, which means it's time for small businesses in California to file their sales and use taxes with the State of California Board Of Equalization (BOE)  Sales tax regulations can be complicated (like everything else with the State) due to the different situations that under which photography can occur and the different forms in which it can be transferred to the customer. The simple version goes like this:  If you buy a printed photograph from me, it's taxable.  If you hire me to photograph something for you as a commercial photographer and I deliver an image to you electronically, it's not taxable.  Sounds simple, right?  Well, it isn't quite that simple and until recently the BOE was arguing that commercial photography constituted a taxable sale, even if there was no tangible item transferred.

Jeff Sednick, on behalf of the Advertising Photographers of America, has a nice update on his site here, which points to the relevant regulation from the BOE, Regulation 1540.   Note that this is different from Regulation 1528 which covers situations like if you come to me for a passport photo or you buy a piece of art and hang it on your wall.

Matting photos all day

in

Today was spent matting and framing photos.  The Mother In Law has a mat cutter and Aaron Brothers was having their one-penny (2 for the price of one) sale so lots of the prints that I made two weeks ago in Charlie Cramer's printing class got shiny new homes.   Now we just have to figure out a way to show them all off. Anyone want to buy a framed print???

Workflow 2009

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I was talking to a friend about workflow and I realized that I've typed the same set of steps a few times for different people recently, so I might as well post it here. I'm coming to digital photography with a fair amount of experience in the Information Technology area so I have a fair idea of how to safely and efficiently deal data.   I also have an eye towards longevity of my data regardless of what software comes and goes.  Above all, I don't want to be tied to any particular tool since I've been burned by that before.

First, a couple of key points:

  • My workflow is probably more described as "data management" than "artistic workflow". :-)  How very unartistic of me...
  • I use Adobe's Lightroom a lot.  Once I realized I needed a "workflow system", there were only two choices:  Adobe's Lightroom and Apple's Aperture.  The first versions of Aperture were quirky (remember how it wouldn't manage your photos unless you imported them into its own universe?) and Apple (a former employer of mine) has a real attitude problem around metadata management, exporting, and openness; so it was Lightroom for me.  No, I haven't used Aperture recently, so I'm not sure if it's changed or not.
  • I shoot Canon RAW files.  Anything worth getting the camera out for is probably worth capturing RAW.  It's easier to throw data away later than it is to get it back, so I start with as much data as possible.  Still photography is the most data-intensive thing I do, so I'm in no danger of running out of space.  Hard drives keep getting bigger, faster than I can fill mine up.  I don't expect I'll ever fill a whole hard drive, based on the rate that I take pictures.  Perhaps after I get into video...
  • I throw things out if I'm sure I'm never going to want them again.   Sure, I shoot wildlife on High Speed motor drive, but I throw out the bad ones.  If it's blurry, it goes.  If I have 6 shots that are virtually identical, I pick the best one or two and toss the rest.  Life's too short to sort through this stuff more than once!
  • I don't want very much of my metadata tied up in any particular tool, like in a Lightroom or Aperture database.  I want to be able to maintain my organization of pictures for a long time, even if those tools cease to exist.  For that reason I use lots of folders with descriptive names so I can probably find things just from a file browser.  Long live the hierarchical filesystem!
  • Similarly, I use sidecar XMP files for editing data.  After importing and geotagging, the RAW file never gets changed - all changes happen in the small .xmp file.  This jives with my backup solution (rsync) really well.
  • I make lots of backups to various external hard drives, using rsync.  Everything's on one drive, so it's easy.  I don't do incrementals - I just rsync the whole thing.
  • I love geotagging.  I've written about geotagging on this blog before, and I really like having that data attached to my pictures.

So, having said that, here are the steps:

  1. Shoot some pictures.  On my Canon dSLR, to 8 GB Compact Flash cards, preferably UDMA for faster uploads to the computer.  Clearing cards out on vacation and re-using them is for weenies.  Cards are cheap these days, so I can have the luxury of not erasing cards until the pictures have been imported into my home computer and backed up.  When I travel I sync to a laptop every night but I prefer not to erase the cards, just in case something happens to the laptop.
  2. Import Using the Finder in Mac OS.  Yes, I know Lightroom has some really cool import features and I've used it before.  I would probably use it more if it started copying to the hard drive AS SOON as I insert the card.  In other words, don't wait until I finish with the import dialog box to start copying - start it NOW!In the meantime, I copy to a directory like "/Volumes/Photos/2009/TahoeSkiTrip/card1" by hand, using the Finder or rsync if I'm running low on battery, because rsync is as fast as it gets.
  3. Copy gps track files from the Garmin, over USB in Mass Storage Mode.  Sometimes this doesn't happen until later.
  4. Use GPSPhotoLinker to write GPS data into the RAW files.  This step is kind of scary, since the RAW file gets modified by something not written by Canon, but I haven't corrupted a RAW file yet, and I've got the original on Compact Flash still, right? Sometimes geotagging doesn't happen until after I've edited and sorted and culled in Lightroom.  That's OK - you just select all the files in Lightroom, Save Metadata, geotag them in GPSPhotoLinker, then Read Meatadata in Lightroom.
  5. Batch rename to make a useful filename.  I start with something like IMG-6354.CR2 and end up with something like YosemiteBear-6354.CR2.  The sequence number stays in place for referring to the image easily but the useless IMG tag changes to something more human (and search engine) friendly.
  6. Time-sync multiple cameras.  If I'm shooting with more than one body (like at a football game) or when I'm shooting with the point and shoot as well as an SLR, I like the have the clocks on all the cameras synced.   But you don't really have to set the clocks on the cameras - you can sync the times later with Lightroom's batch editing of capture times.  When I'm out shooting I try to take pictures of a clock with a second hand with each camera.  The best is to take a picture of the time display on the GPS, because then I can batch-correct the pictures from all the bodies to GPS time, which makes geocoding pictures more accurate. In the case of my recent wedding, I had lots of people send me their pictures but the clocks on all the cameras were slightly out of sync.  It turns out that EVERYONE took a picture of our first kiss, so I just used that as my sync point.  Now I can look through all the photos that everyone took sorted by capture time and see things in order.  I usually review things sorted by capture time since that's how my brain remembers things.
  7. Backup to external drive if I'm at home.  rsync is my friend.  This first backup takes a while because it's copying the RAW files.  From here on out, the RAW files shouldn't change and further backups should be just the small xmp files.  If I move files into subdirectories while I sort then the files will get re-copied during the next backup.  Oh Well...
  8. Sort and edit.  This is where I flag up, flag down, and sort into lots of sub-folders, using Lightroom.  Sometimes I can't wait and I start sorting and editing immediately, like while files are still importing.  Often I keep editing and tweaking years after I take a photo as my tastes change, my skill level increases, my tools get better, etc.
  9. Make some prints.  I mostly shoot with the idea that I'm going to print it out.  I'm aiming to hang things on the wall and to me, nothing beats looking at something in hard copy.  At 29 cents for a 4x6 print, it's easy to upload a batch of photos exported from Lightroom and get a set of "proofs".  On the last Wyoming trip I even uploaded the prints from the first half of the trip while we were still in Wyoming, so I had a set of 4x6's waiting for me when we got home!
  10. Do fine-tuning on images I like.  Sometimes I bring them into Photoshop for editing, sometimes I make HDRs with Photomatix, sometimes I just use lots of targeted adjustments in Lightroom until I like what I've got.  Certain images deserve more attention and certain images are "problematic" and I'll probably never end up with a version I'm really happy with.   Some images will probably never be finished with the "edit, print, re-edit" cycle of life.  I keep jpgs of most of the prints I made so I can see how the image has progressed over time and compare screen versions to hard copy.
  11. Backup again.  Since I just rsync the whole drive all at once, any changes I've made to any photos from the current shoot or any earlier shoot get backed up automatically.  I also occasionally send hard drives to family for safe keeping.
  12. Keyword.  Doing the keywording really sucks, but pays huge dividends later.  For the sports I shoot I end up tagging all the good pictures with every identifiable player or coach in the frame.   That really pays off when searching for things later.   For landscape or other personal work it's less straightforward.  I do what I can and hope that it'll pay off eventually.

Wow - It looks like a lot (and it is when there are thousands fo images from a shoot) but the process is sound. Doing a good job takes a certain amount of work and shortcuts don't pay off in the long run.

I'm sure something will change and there will be a new version of this document next year or the year after.   This is just a snapshot of how I do things now.  You're mileage may vary, and I'm not going to get into any arguments about how your way is wrong, or my way is better, etc.  It works for me and matches my needs - it might not work for you.

Real? Or CG? (Not good for photographers)

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Take a look at this cool quiz hosted by Autodesk, the makers of the most popular Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software in the world: Autocad.  There's a mixture of real photos and CG photos of objects and scenes and you have to guess if each one is a real photo or CG.  I missed two of the ten.  (Thought a photo was CG and thought a CG one was a photo.) For those unfamiliar, Autocad is what designers of manufactured products use to design things.  They draw up the plans and send them to the factory and the stuff gets made according to the plans.  There's also a mode where you can render what the object will look like and this rendering has been getting better and better as the years go by.  Now Autodesk is challenging you to tell the truth apart from their renderings.

Do you see where this is going, photographically?

As I've mentioned before, I do some product photography work.  Most of this work is for small objects for companies that manufacture stuff and they want a clean shot of their product with nothing else going on in the background.  They draw it up in Autocad and have it manufactured and then they take a picture for the box and for the website, etc.  So much time goes into making the picture look perfect with no blemishes, no dust, perfect color, shading, etc. that you end up working hard to make the photo look almost too good to be true.  Almost fake, you might say.   If Autocad can do such a great job, why pay a photographer and go through all that trouble?  Why deal with all the hassle of art-directing a photo shoot to get just the right angle, lighting, etc., when you can just let the software do it for you?   No dust, perfect lighting, perfect surfaces, etc.

I've actually lost a client because of this, since they plan to use generated artwork in a lot of places they used to use photos.

This is an obvious choice for manufactured products that get designed this way but luckily not every product is done that way.  There are still unique, hand made items in the world.  There's still the need for shots of products in situations that can't be modeled/generated/fabricated.  There will still be a need for product photography - It's just that the low-hanging fruit of plain product shots may be withering away.

Now, if companies start modeling and rendering their executive headshots, then we'll have real trouble!  (Yes, I know they actually do this in Hollywood and video games...)