My Private Tokyo

I love shooting on overcast days. You basically have one giant soft fill light almost anywhere you shoot outside. Bring along a speedlite with an umbrella or small soft box and it's easy to introduce a key light and get some nice soft portraits. It's also nice not to have to compete with the strong sun light, it becomes a lot easier to overpower the sun with your speedlite.

I actually want to get around to hauling my Elinchrom strobes outside this summer. The difficulty has been the lack of power, or rather having no place to plug your strobes into when shooting outside. This had been one of the key reasons I have stuck with the speedlites for the time being. However, a friend of mine recently bought the Alienbee battery pack which supposedly is able to also run some of the Elinchrom strobes.

On the flip side, reflectors and diffusion panels are awesome to have on bright sunny days. I want to get more into that but I'll leave that for another entry.

In the end, these small accessories that help you control light will give you a lot more freedom in the conditions you can shoot in. They're fairly cheap and you can get a lot of use out of them. Knowing how to control light to your benefit will benefit you a lot more than a sharper lens or a better camera body. Invest in those!

For those actually doing prints from their photography, whether it be personal or for a client, I would highly recommend picking up a monitor calibration system. In the end it helps save a lot of headaches and insures that what you see on the monitor is what you get when you make prints.

Personally I recently went with the ColorVision Spyder 3 Pro system. I've heard many good things about it and its worked flawlessly for me. There are cheaper options available as well as even more accurate and encompassing products. Regardless find something that fits your budget and it will be a great asset in the long run.

Following that, I've also recently invested in the X-rite ColorChecker Passport after getting a chance to borrow a friend's version. For those serious about correct colors something like this makes a huge help in getting not only correct colors in general but much more accurate skin tones (something that was really big for me). It's quick, it's easy and it's incredibly portable. If you know someone using this system I suggest asking to borrow it for a day or two and see for yourself. If not, you really can't go wrong with picking it up if you're even remotely interested in getting the correct colors and tones in images. The changes may sometimes be subtle but they make a huge impact.

As for the image above, the effect is very subtle but you can see the difference on the models skin tones. The tones are much more natural. In this particular case the original shot, when imported into lightroom and applied with the adobe standard color profile you would normally use leads to much more yellowish tones. Upon applying a profile created by the color checker you end up with much nicer results.

For those interested in black and white photography / post processing I would highly recommend checking out the Nik software packages, specifically Silver Efex Pro. You can get a trial run from their website, check out the lessons and give the add on package a go. It's well worth it.

I can't remember where I heard the slogan but it gave me a good laugh.

So this past weekend my cousin had asked me if I could do some shots for her of her baby, which she had about a month ago. Normally taking pictures of kids is not my cup of tea. I prefer something a bit more cooperative but it's always fun to give it a shot.

I ended up spending most of the afternoon at her house taking shots of the newborn. Ironically enough he ended up sleeping through most of it, even to the mother and fathers attempts to wake him up for the majority of pictures. I imagine this will probably be the most well behaved kids shoot i'm bound to have in my career.

Luckily though, I had my trigger finger ready and got a few shots of his big blue eyes and smile.

I think a big part of shooting children is having a lot of patients You're working off their clock, not the other way around. I've also found that it helps put a fresh perspective of things when you get down to their level and see the world through their eyes. It's a much different perspective down there.

Aside from the fairly obvious easy to organization another important part of it is when you're using sites like flickr.

Plain and simple: It will help get your image seen.

Last year I had someone contact me via flickr asking if a particular shot of mine was available in a larger size and am I willing to sell usage rights for the image. After doing some research on the person/company making this offer it turned out to be a group working out of British Columbia. The company was actually pretty prominent in the advertising world.


To make a long story short I ended up selling the usage rights to the image to them, twice to be exact. They had wanted the image to be a part of promotional material being put together for the Government of Alberta promoting the province of Alberta. The second time they had contacted me was to extend the rights to posters and billboards, something that was not mentioned in the original usage rights.

Companies watch sites like flickr and do contact users. Tagging your photos with appropriate keywords plays a key role in having your photos seen on such sites.Spent the extra few seconds to tag your photos properly. It might make you some money or bring you attention in the long run.

When it comes to workflow I am still in the process of reorganizing mine. It has taken some rearranging at the foundation due to resorting to filter packages more as of late as well as making the switch to Nikon.

One of the fundamental first steps thought is trimming the fat, that is after importing and backing up my files from a shoot I have gotten to making several passes through all the shots from a shoot and using the Library filters in Lightroom to bring together only the shots I feel are the best ones I captured that shoot.

Everyone has their own method of doing this, as always I suggest experimenting and seeing what works best for you. There are a lot of redundant ways to do it to cater to each photographers tastes and needs.

In my case I look over the photos quickly in the Library tab in Lighroom. I make several passes starting out with the out of focus shots, under exposed, over exposed, motion blur etc etc. Mind you sometimes these type of shots aren't unwanted, however in the general sense that's what I watch out for. I set "rejected" flags on these photos. It's nice, simple and quick since I can just use the keyboard to scroll between pictures and set flags. At the end I can just Filter Lightroom to display the rejected images and delete those altogether.

After that I do another pass through, this time paying a bit more attention to actual elements within the shots. I look for big distracting elements I may not have caught, bad framing, lack of focus etc etc. This pass through is usually pretty quick as well. I generally also have a habit of setting these as rejected. I tend to be quite conservative in terms of what I flag for rejected since I will be deleting it so the criteria for getting the rejected flag is usually pretty blatant.

I make it a habit to delete the photos that were rejected by this stage. For the next passes I continue to flag the unwanted pictures as rejected however I do not delete them anymore. I set the filter to only display flagged or unflagged photos. Now when I set an image as rejected it will not show in my library (but is still there). It helps to clear up the clutter and distractions as I go.


From here on in all the passes I make are comparing the shots around it. I match up similar shots and keep the one I feel is better. These passes of course take a bit more time and involve zooming in and checking the smaller details.

Eventually after a few more I bring it down to a much smaller number than what I had originally started with, making sure I only bring my best shots to the table. Not only does this create an environment that's much easier to work in, it also helps to tie the shoot together. I find personally that this sequence works a lot better for picking out the best shots in a shoot rather than going through all the shots and just picking the best ones. You end up putting a lot more thought and consideration into each individual shot this way. It also makes for a better presentation when handing a CD of proofs to a client. Although, in that scenario I end up being a lot more liberal as to what I don't reject.

One of the important steps while post processing your photos is the fine tuning of contrast and addition of sharpening towards the end of the workflow on any given photo.

Some of you may already be familiar with using the High pass filter [Filter->Other->High Pass] within photoshop to help define edges and give subjects in photos separation. If you haven't check the bottom of this entry for a quick tutorial on using it.

Although it works fairly well there is a better method I came across online to give a much nicer effect that is also usable a variety of different ways for a number of effects. It's a little convoluted and I won't dare attempt to try and explain the core mechanics of it but i suggest giving it a shot. Once you try it out a few times it becomes fairly easy to do. On top of that you can also set up an action for it to speed things up.

The method can also be used to help keep detail in an image when reducing the size for internet use, one that keeps the detail a lot better than the standard photoshop procedures.

You can read about the procedure HERE

As noted in the topic, the procedure can be used for a number of different techniques within photoshop and I highly recommend becoming familiar with the method and exploring the number of other uses as linked in the original post. It will help give your pictures depth, especially if you are already familiar with using layer masks.

I've personally used this method to soften backgrounds, give separation, add local contrast to outlines and sharpening. It's a tool I involve in practically every picture that goes through photoshop.

Here is an example, click on the picture for a bigger version. The file is almost 8MB so it may take a minute to download.


In this case I made the effect subtle but still noticeable. I used a layer mask so the effect only affected his eyes, head outline, lips and general strong features. I made sure it did not effect his skin in general as it would bring out too much detail and look unflattering. Although in this case the background is out of focus and soft it still helps to add some separation between him and the background, adding a little more dimension.

-The High Pass Tutorial-

An easy way to test this filter is to open up an image in photoshop, something with some detail (although I recommend trying it on a soft or slightly off focus shot as well) and then duplicating the original layer.

-On the copy of the background layer go to Filters -> Other -> High Pass.

-Enter a value around 17.0, in this case this is just an arbitrary number, feel free to experiment as you become more comfortable. The number will vary depending on the dimension of your picture.

-Hit OK to apply the filter. You will notice it is a grey color with faint outline of your image

- Now, under the Layers tab change the blending mode of the High Pass layer to Soft Light and drop the opacity of the layer until you hit a desired effect. You can also use different blending options such as Hard Light or Overlay. Feel free to experiment.

While this method is quick and painless the tutorial mentioned earlier in this topic is actually more versatile and yields cleaner and nicer results. Overall it is a very similar effect, just done a lot better.