ON-LINE PHOTO INSTRUCTION-- with detailed critiques of your work
My new 4-week and 8-week courses begin again at Betterphoto.com on March 9, 2012.
To improve your compositional skills, for example, click HERE to check out the outline of the Developing Your Creative Artistic Vision course to see if you feel this subject matter is exactly what you need.
I have a new photoshop course called Photoshop: Thinking Outside the Box.
You can click HERE to see the outline of this unique course that will introduce some intriguing techniques that you've probably not tried before -- like 3D, making a sketch, and more. It is very different from my other Photoshop courses, and it's a lot of fun.
Do you want to make money in photography? Want to feel more confident in using natural light outdoors? Interested in learning more about Photoshop (like putting fireworks in the sky or removing lens flare). Are you insecure about your exposure skills?
The way the courses work is this. Every Wednesday you receive a lesson that consists of text and photos, explaining various principles in photography, marketing your work, digital manipulation, or whatever subject you are studying. At the end of each lesson there is an assignment, and you have plenty of time to take pictures and upload them for my critique. You can use photos you did specifically for the assignment or images that you have taken previously.
On-line photo courses are like virtual classrooms but not in real time. Other students can see your pictures, read my critiques, and comment on your work. Similarly, you can comment on the pictures of other students. It is a unique and wonderful learning experience.
One of the great things about these on-line courses is that students participate from all over the world. In a single lesson's uploads, you may see pictures from Bryce Canyon or Brazil, or from Singapore or South Carolina. It's a very stimulating environment, and it will help you become the photographer or digital artist that you would like to be.
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ORGANIZATION OF PHOTOS and WORKFLOW Many people ask me how I organize my pictures and what workflow I use, so I thought I would explain that in this month's newsletter. If Lightroom had been available when I first entered the digital technology realm, I might have organized my images differently, but what I started in 1991 still works for me today, so I stick with it.
I organize my photographs in a hierarchy of folders. My main folder is called PHOTO LIBRARY, and within that are my main categories: Nature, Travel, Americana, Women, Abstracts, Digital Effects, etc. Within each of these categories are sub-categories. For example, in the Nature folder, I have US Landscapes, Wildlife, Skies, Flowers, Insects, Patterns, Seascapes, Shells, Feathers, etc. Within the Wildlife folder, I have many sub-folders: Bears, Wolves, Moose, Lynx, Cougars, etc. It is in these folders that the actual pictures reside.
If I happen to have a lot of different kinds of foxes, then in the fox folder I create more sub-folders such as arctic fox, red fox, silver fox, and so on.
Your folders will be different than mine because obviously you shoot different subjects. I learned a lot time ago that organizing pictures by date doesn't make sense. It doesn't matter if a picture was taken in 2003 or 2005.
If I want to search through my images from Prague, here is the pathway of folders I go through: Photo Library > Travel > Europe > Czech Republic > Prague. To find my collection of Balinese dancers, I go to: Photo Library > Travel > Asia > Indonesia > Bali > Dancers. For the shots of butterflies and moths, I use Photo Library > Nature > Wildlife > Insects > Butterflies.
What happens if I took a butterfly in India? Do I put the picture in the India folder or the butterfly folder, or both? This is a personal decision. For me, I put it in the butterfly folder.
Would keywording help find pictures more quickly? Yes. If I keyworded the pictures, it wouldn't matter where I put the butterfly picture because I could search for 'butterflies' and find all of my images in this category. However, I decided several years ago that life is too short to spend most of it keywording. When I return home from a major trip with 3000 pictures, it's just not an effective use of my time to spend days attaching keywords to my images. By placing the pictures into folders that I can find easily, I save an enormous amount of time. The hierarchy of folders is the second best way to organize my pictures, but it's number one in terms of the best use of my time.
The workflow I go through in evaluating my images and processing them is this:
1. I always shoot in RAW mode.
2. I browse the RAW images in Bridge (or you can use Lightroom) and delete the bad ones.
3. Then, one by one, I determine the best images and double click on them. This opens a new dialog box, Adobe Camera Raw (ACR), and it is here that I adjust the color, contrast, exposure if necessary, eliminate chromatic aberration if necessary, use the graduated filter to darken a sky, etc. I choose 8-bit at this point, too.
4. I then click on Open Image and now I'm in Photoshop. I might do additional tweaking (such as replacing a sky like I did with the elk, below, or cloning out a distracting element), and then I save the image as a psd file and give it a number. I don't use tif files because they take up more space on my hard drive.
I wish I would have started my numbering system from 10000, but when I was first scanning slides in the early 90s, I used two letter prefixes: MS (master scans) and FO (film ouputs -- which means pictures that were output from a digital file to make a slide for projection, which is how we all showed our work before digital projectors). It takes longer to type these prefix letters plus a dash, so I've abandoned these and for the past three years I'm only using five digit numbers. I don't number everything; I number the images that are good enough to be included in my main photo library.
All of the RAW files are stored on a separate hard drive by trip or event. I haven't taken the time to really organize them.
All of my files are stored on four hard drives as part of a Drobo unit. This spreads the files out over the four units, and if one hard drive fails (all hard drives will fail -- it's just a matter of time), I can replace it with a new one and the other three hard drives build the new one back to exactly how the failed drive was.
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WHEN NOT TO USE AUTOFOCUS
There are three situations in which autofocus mechanisms will probably fail and the resulting pictures won't be sharp. In these cases, you must switch the lens to manual focus and focus on the subject the old fashioned way -- by turning the focusing ring.
1. When there are several planes of focus, like in the photo of the cheetahs above, the AF mechanism doesn't know where in the composition you want the point of focus to be. Should it be on the reeds and branches in the foreground, on the cats, or on elements in the background? When I shot this in Kenya, I switched my 500mm lens to manual focus to make sure the cheetahs were sharp.
2. When the light level is very low and contrast is minimal, the AF mechanism may not focus as quickly or accurately as it normally does. The Whirling Dervish I photographed in Turkey, below, is an example. This looks like I had quite a bit of light, but it was in fact quite dark in the room. I used a long exposure to gather enough light for a good exposure, but the contrast was extremely low. Therefore, I used manual focus.
3. When I shoot macro subjects and I'm filling the frame with a very small subject, like the velvet ant, below, I use manual focus and I move the camera back and forth until I reach the point of focus I want. To me, this is a much easier way to focus on very tiny subjects.
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Variable Neutral Density Filters
A neutral density filter reduces the light that enters the camera. Usually, photographers want as much light as possible, but in some situations we want the opposite.
A case in point is this waterfall shot from Patagonia. My photo tour group and I visited it twice, once on an overcast day and once when the sky was blue and the sun was high (and we had a great rainbow). When it was cloudy, I wanted a long exposure to blur the water into an ultra soft mist, but even at 100 ISO, f/32, and diminished light, the slowest shutter speed I could get was 1/8 of a second. This speed would definitely cause the water to be blurred, but it wouldn't be blurred as much as I wanted.
In order to slow the shutter speed down, I used a variable neutral density filter. There are several brands available (such as Singh-Ray and Kenko), and these filters allow you to vary the amount of density. Hence, you can reduce the exposure by as much as eight full f/stops. The picture above was taken with an eight second exposure. The shot in the sun the next day was taken with an exposure time of 1/750 of a second.
This is the same waterfall with different light and a different shutter speed. It's really like these are two completely different subjects.
A polarizing filter can be used as a neutral density filter because in essence it is. However, the amount of density you introduce with a polarizing filter is two f/stops. In many photographic situations this is enough, but in this particular image of the blue-green waterfall (the color is due to the glacial melt), I needed more than two stops to make the shutter speed long enough for the effect I wanted. |
| Self-critique
This is a cute picture, but it's not great. I shot this a couple of weeks ago when I was leading a photo tour to Patagonia, and it was wonderful to be close to these Magellanic penguins. I took a lot of nice portraits, but I wanted to use this image for the self-critique to point out a few important factors that, in my opinion, negatively impact this shot. 
Seeing penguins waddle in a line as they head to the surf is comical, adorable, and it puts a smile on everyone who sees it. Capturing it with a camera is very challenging, though, because of the depth of field problem.
In my on-line courses, I am always telling students that the subject should be in focus, and in this case the subject, which consists of the entire group of birds, isn't completely sharp. Only the first two penguins are sharp. In addition, the foreground flowers are blurred and I feel that out of focus foregrounds are almost always a problem. Our eyes never see out of focus foregrounds, and therefore they are usually bothersome.
I had no choice, however, because this was taken with a 500mm f/4 lens, and since I was hand holding the giant lens (not something I like to do), I needed a fast shutter speed. Therefore, I had to use a large lens aperture, hence the shallow depth of field.
I like the picture, but the technical issues bother me. |
TELEPHOTO LENSES AND
DEPTH OF FIELD  Telephoto lenses have a serious limitation: Depth of field is extremely limited. Sometimes this actually works to our artistic advantage, though, and I'm referring to the fact that backgrounds become so out of focus that they don't detract from the subject.
The image (taken at my winter wildlife shoot last month) above is an example of that, but it is also an example of the problem, namely that the tree is out of focus. Soft foregrounds are almost always visually annoying, and in this case the fact that the tree is not sharp hurts this picture to such a degree that I would call it a failure. You may not agree, but according to my own sense of aesthetics, I would only use this image as an example of 'what not to do.'
Ok, so what is the solution? I used a Canon 300mm f/2.8 lens set to f/4.5. My shutter speed was 1/2000. Since the tree was virtually touching the wolf, I should have slowed the shutter down in exchange for a smaller f/stop. In other words, had I used 1/500th of a second, I would have increased the amount of light reaching the sensor by two f/stops. I therefore could have closed the lens down two f/stops from f/4.5 to f/9. Would this have been enough depth of field? Maybe. I'm not 100% sure. If I increased the ISO from 400 to 800 and even slowed the shutter to 1/250, the two additional f/stops would definitely have been enough to get both the tree and the wolf in focus.
But is there another way to handle this? Yes, there is. See the photo below. To get both the trunk of the tree and the wolf in focus, I took two separate pictures. I focused on the wolf first and took a shot, then I quickly focused on the tree and took a second image. When I got home, I used Photoshop to put them together and this reproduced exactly what I saw with my eyes.
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| eBOOKS
Click HERE to read about the contents and to see sample pages.
eBooks are great because they are much less expensive than conventional books, and you can carry them with you on an iPad, iPhone, or laptop. In addition, trees don't have to be cut down to make the paper for the books. The colors in the images are dazzling, too -- much more so than in a conventional print book because the photographs seen on a computer or iPad are illuminated from behind. What a great time it is to be a photographer!
A new ebook on composition is coming next month.
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PHOTOSHOP WORKSHOP in my
HOME Sat. & Sun., May 19, 20, 2012.
Photoshop is a photographer's best friend, and the creative possibilities are absolutely endless. In a personal and 'homey' environment (I have a very cool classroom setup in my home), I start at the beginning -- assuming you know nothing -- but I quickly get into layers, cutting and pasting, plug-ins, using 'grunge' textures, modifying lighting, and a lot more. I promise to fill your head with so many cool techniques that you won't believe what you'll be able to do.
Photoshop instructors approach teaching this program from different points of view. My approach is to be as expansive in my thinking as possible in creating unique, artistic, and compelling images. In addition to showing you how to use the various tools, pull down menus, layers, and so on, I spend a lot of time giving you creative ideas that will inspire you to produce amazing images with the pictures you've already taken.
A lot of people, once they learn what the tools and commands do, still need help in deciding what images to work with, what composites look good, and how to be artistic within Photoshop. This is one of the main things I address in this workshop.
I live in the Nashville, Tennessee area, and if you fly into the airport (BNA) I will pick you up. If you drive, I'll give you my address and you can find it on Mapquest. For the $450 fee, I include one dinner in my home (prepared by my wife who is an amazing cook and hostess) and two lunches, plus shuttling you back and forth from my home to your nearby hotel.
Contact me if you would like to participate in the workshop and I will tell you how to sign up (photos@jimzuckerman.com).
I will do my best to inspire you with all the great things Photoshop can do. All you need is a laptop. If you don't have one, I have two laptops (they are Macs) I can loan out.
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