Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/2.5, 1/5400 sec, ISO400 “On the Road” Cedar Park, 2016
こんばんは！How’s it going? Have a good Friday?
This evening, I took Koa (12) to the batting cages to get some hitting practice in. He was a little rusty, not connecting so much at the beginning, but after about 10 minutes he improved and was smacking them with pretty good power. He love baseball so much, both playing and watching pro games on TV. I hope he continues to enjoy it through middle school and even joins the high school baseball team. That would be cool! ⚾️
Tonight’s photos were taken on the way to the cages. Before we left, I pre-focused my camera to a distance of maybe 50 feet and left it in M focusing. But I goofed and didn’t stop down the aperture. It was pretty wide at f/2.5 but it still came out in focus for the most part. Of course, I am not looking at the camera while I drive, but just kind of shoot in the general direction. It’s kind of fun to take photos this way, especially on the street. I’ll sometimes set the camera so that the LCD screen is off and just point the camera and snap. Since my X100T is a 35mm equiv. focal length, I have a very good chance of framing it close enough. And with each try, I seem to be getting better.
In Lightroom, I used a preset that I created to get to a good starting point, then I adjusted the exposure and lessened the vignetting a bit. I chose one of my 3 grain presets to give it the look I wanted before exporting.
Here’s another photo I took on that drive to the batting cages. I used similar settings as the first photo.
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/2.5, 1/5400 sec, ISO400 “Neighborhood Sun” Cedar Park, 2016
Well, I’ll see you tomorrow! For now, I’m going to watch some Japanese dramas before going to bed.
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/6.4, 1/950 sec, ISO400 “Saying Hi” Cedar Park, 2016
こんばんは！Hello, how’s it going?
Well, I didn’t expect to take another cloud photo for today’s snapshot, but as I was doing the dishes this evening, this beautiful cumulus specimen appeared over the trees to say hello. I couldn’t pass up the chance, so I shut off the water, grabbed my camera which was in the other room, then came back to the kitchen to take four photos of the cloud. I liked this one the best, and deleted the other three.
I am a big proponent of only keeping the best version of a series of photos if possible. In this case, the other three were simply different views of the same scene, some farther away from the window, and some closer. The photo above was the image that I felt was framed the best by the window, so it became the “keeper” and the other three got the “X” (marked for deletion).
I’ve heard people say that you should never delete any of your photos. Storage is cheap, after all. It doesn’t cost anything extra to keep every single photo you take, right? While this may be true, I personally found that I was paying the price in speed. The large amount of images was bloating my Lightroom catalog and slowing things down.
Conversely, by only keeping one photo from a series of images, my Lightroom catalog is lighter and more responsive. Plus there’s less visual clutter when I scroll through the catalog, or when I browse my images online at photos.google.com. I can scan quickly. I don’t have to wade though a bunch of mediocre versions of the same subject (and believe me when I say that I capture a TON of mediocre images!).
For me, it’s important to cull the photos soon after Iimport them into Lightroom or copy them to my computer. (I even try to delete photos before that in-camera) The quicker I get rid of those photos, the less time they have to make an imprint in my mind. I believe everything takes a portion of the brain’s attention, even a tiny bit of my subconscious. So, once the photos cease to exist, it frees that part of my brain’s hard drive, as well as my computer’s hard drive. At least that is what I believe. 😌
When I first began culling my photos, it wasn’t easy to delete photos. Yes, I was a digital hoarder at the time! But one thing that helped me was to imagine that my Lightroom catalog was a slideshow that I would be presenting to an audience. Would I want to show them 4 pictures of the same cloud? No way. They would get bored (and annoyed) quickly. I would pick the best photo to show them, and respect their time and attention. So why wouldn’t I treat myself with the same respect?
Once I got comfortable with culling quickly, it became easy, and it actually became fun! Making decisions and not looking back or regretting my actions gave me a sense of control. It won’t change the world, but it did affect the way I felt. Plus, once you start decluttering, it just snowballs and it feels great!
Okay, I seem to have rambled on a bit (again). So, back to the photo at hand…
For the Lightroom edit, it was similar to my previous post’s photo, with the addition of selective white balance. I gave the cloud a warmer tone, and the sky a cooler tone. That’s it! I’d estimate that I spent about 4 minutes in Lightroom before exporting.
I hope you had a nice day today. Let’s have a great Friday to close out the work week!
As always, if you have a comment or question, let me know.
For the past week or so, we’ve been fortunate to have some amazing-looking clouds in the skies here above Austin. ☁️☁️☁️ And of course, I’ve been taking many pictures of them!
The photo above was taken from my car while I was on my way home from work. (Don’t worry, I was stopped at the light) The sky was very bright, with the sun behind the cloud, but the camera was able to capture most of the details. I keep the exposure compensation dial set to underexpose by 1/3 to 2/3 of a stop because I would rather keep my highlights intact and don’t worry about clipping the shadows. In fact, during post-processing, I will often let the left-side of the histogram go full black. I guess I like that high-contrast, richness on the darker side.
As you can see, the image is not very realistic, but I am not really going for capturing reality. I love that there is so much detail in the center of the clouds which you really cannot see with the naked eye. Why not bring it out in the photo? Of course the photo started off as a picture of a real cloud, but I’ve edited it into a version of the cloud as I would like to see it.
There is has been a lot of discussion in the photo blogosphere about Steve McCurry photoshopping his images, with some people feeling betrayed or tricked because of the edits. But I am not bothered by the photo manipulation. If you are creating art, then go for it! If you are documenting real-life, then don’t edit. That’s fine too. But be honest and don’t deceive people. If someone asks me if my photo has been edited, I’m more than happy to explain exactly what I edited. That’s part of the process.
Even as I take photos of everyday life, I will do some amount of editing. That happens before I even press the shutter button since I have already chosen my film simulation and highlight, shadow, and sharpness settings.
For my post-processing in Lightroom (version 5x), here are the steps I typically follow:
Level and/or “upright” – I will use the level tool in the cropping area to make sure horizons are level, and for architectural photos, I’ll use the Upright tool in the Lens Correction section. I didn’t do this step for the cloud photo, however.
Crop – My preferred aspect ratio these days is 4×5, but this photo was taken square in-camera.
Remove dust, distracting smudges, or dirt – Spot removal tool. I didn’t need to for this photo.
Adjust white balance – Using the eyedropper as a start. Typically only needed for indoor shots.
Adjust tone-curve – I have saved a preset, a gentle S-curve, which adds contrast.
Tweak the exposure – Exposure, highlights, shadows, whites, and blacks sliders.
Adjust color – Vibrance, saturation, HSL. For this image, I brought the saturation down a bit.
Add grain and/or a vignette – Just a vignette for this image, albeit a strong one. I used a combination of Vignette in the Effects section, and then a few graduated filters with lower exposure.
Export – Resizing and saving for blog, Flickr, and Instagram.
Nine steps looks like a lot, but I can usually get through them in less than 3 minutes. I try to spend as little time in Lightroom as possible!
Well, this blog post kind of grew, didn’t it? 😝
I hope you had a nice Wednesday, and let’s have a great Thursday!
I’m pretty much unofficially the official company photographer at my work, and one of my tasks has been to take headshots of employees. Since I’ve been with the company for close to 11 years now, I’ve taken many, many, many headshots…
These days I sometimes use LinkedIn, and I see lots of these headshot photos that I have taken. It’s fun to see, and I am flattered that they still use them, but I find it somewhat odd that people who are no longer with the company still use the headshot I took.
It got me wondering about the rights to the photos… I don’t care too much about it, but I did spend company time on each photo, and used the company equipment and facilities. I guess I feel that it’s a bit unprofessional to keep using the company photo when you aren’t with the company anymore.
Besides the issue described above, some of those images are probably over five years old… it’s really time to get a new one taken, people!
One thing that every digital camera I have owned has had, but that I have never once wanted to use was the Sepia tone setting.
Which is odd, because I have an “old-timey Western” photo pinned on the wall of my kids dressed up as cowboys that was taken at a fair when they were little. I see this Sepia photo everyday. But I never ever have thought of using Sepia in my own photos.
If I could have traded the Sepia setting for a $10 discount off the price of my cameras, I would have done it every time.
We’ve been having some dreary weather here the past few days. As you can see from the photo above it was a wet drive into the office this morning, and unfortunately Koa’s baseball game was rained out this evening. So, I took him to the batting cages so he could keep sharp.
Today I did a few photography-related activities. First, at work I bought a new 50 mm F/1.8 lens for our company camera. 📷 My friend recommended this new nifty-fifty and I used it to take an employee head-shot this afternoon, which turned out pretty good. I’m very pleased with the lens!
Secondly, I tried something kind of fun, which was to smear Vaseline on a filter to simulate a blurry glamour-type photo. I was really trying to go for a dreamy, abstract type of image but I don’t think the Vaseline distorted the sharpness as much as I would have liked. Well, I did get a couple of fun kitty photos, as you can see below:
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/2.5, 1/100 sec, ISO2500 “Pop Kitties” Cedar Park, 2016
And the third thing I did was to make a few prints using our Canon inkjet printer. I’ve never been able to figure out how to print photos… my whole life, things like edges, margins, and general printer errors have left a sour taste in my mouth when it came to home printing. This evening started out with more of the same… but after a couple failed attempts, I think I am getting closer to figuring out how the Lightroom print module works. I’ve been trying to make a print with a nice 1 cm white border around it, and I was able to tweak the settings a bit to get fairly close. With minimal trimming with our paper-cutter, the results were quite nice!
I’ll post a photo of the prints later, but I think I am satisfied for now… pics of the pics will have to wait. 😛
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/3.6, 1/100 sec, ISO640 Cedar Park, 2016
こんばんは！ How’s it going?
Today was a busy, but productive day at work. When I got home, however, some new boxes of Instax film were waiting for me! I’m not sure how many photos I have printed out on my Instax printer since I got it at Christmas of last year, but it must be about 50 so far. Anyways, I was down to my last pack of 10 so I ordered three boxes. The price on Instax film has come down a lot in the past few years. I think it was close to a dollar a print not too long ago, but these days, you can find them for about 63 cents a print.
I just love the color that the film is capable of. Below is a photo of how I keep my family pics at work. We don’t have much shelf space in our new open-style office, so I just put some Instax prints in my Pantone book. Maybe I will get a nice flip frame for some more prints, but for now, I think this will do just fine. 😄
