What to do with your camera

Did you get a digital camera for Christmas?

If so, you’re not alone. But after you’ve shot the Christmas tree and the shots of the family then what?

Well you can wait until you go on your next vacation. (I’ve got a buddy in Mexico right now who is shooting is brains out and creating really nice images of Mexican sunsets and beach life.)

But if you’re not going on vacation, here’s an example of how to create your own assignment. It’s called The Girl In The Red Dress and right now the video of the guy with the camera and the pretty girl doing yoga in the streets of New York City is making the You Tube rounds.

Right now it’s got under 10,000 hits but wonder if it will go viral?

I’ve put a link up on my coaching site to the five-minute video and made additional comments at my social media site at The West Agency.

Best Workshop of 2012

Vincent Versace’s Oz to Kansas workshop using NIK’s Silver Efex Pro and co-sponsored by X-Rite was amazing.

If you’re reading this post in real time, the seminar will be repeated in an hour.

So what’s the big deal? Well for the first half an hour Versace showed us the difference between how film (which is linear) and digital (which is digital – duh!) differs when it comes to rendering a black and white image.

The explanation is way too technical for me to reproduce here (and besides I’d probably screw it up) but it comes down to this: You can’t just turn down the saturation in your editing software and expect a digital image to be capable of reproducing all the 16,000 levels of grey found in a film-based image which is using all three channels (red, green, blue) of information differently.

Now if that doesn’t confuse you I don’t know what will. Here’s what Vincent did: Using simple images he showed how digital editing software can treat different colours exactly the same when desaturating while NIK’s Silver Efex Pro recreates (I hope I’m describing this properly.) the tonal spread from real black to real with all the shades of grey not just in luminance (brightness) but in the three colour channels as well.

Remember when you (or maybe your dad) shot black and white. If he was shooting landscapes or portraits he might have used red, yellow, green or blue filters to modify the black and white image. That’s a lot like what Silver Efex Pro does in software.

If you’re serious about shooting in black and white this workshop is terrific and so is Silver Efex Pro. Versace also has a new book coming out called “Oz to Kansas” (I’ve got the DVD set.) which explains this black and white conversion a whole lot better than I just did.

Lightroom 4 Looks Amazing

Adobe has issued a beta version of Lightroom 4.

It’s free and you don’t need to have had a previous version of Lightroom to make it work.

BUT…

And there’s always a but, this version will expire sometime in March when Adobe issues the commercial version.

Also anytime you work with anything called “beta” it means all bets are off when it comes to manufacturer’s guarantees. So if you do download Lightroom 4 make sure your original files are safe and you’re working with copies. Why? Some beta software has been known to crash without warning and you don’t want to be working on unsaved images if this happens.

So why I am so excited about Lightroom 4?

While this is a conditional excitement (I’m still waiting for the big guys to weigh in) the videos from Adobe TV that walk you through the changes suggest that LR4 might be a way better product than LR3 which is the industry standard for working photographers. (Photoshop is still the big daddy of RAW editors but Lightroom does everything a working pro needs done quickly and at less than half the cost at $300 and less for an upgrade from a previous version.)

You don’t need to be a pro to appreciate and use LR3 or 4. What it’s really good for is quickly processing large numbers of RAW files and creating top-quality JPGs for viewing, printing or selling. If you shoot weddings or special events or even hundreds of images at Aunt Sally’s birthday party you’ll love Lightroom.

If you shoot a few dozen images and just want to send them via email them to Aunt Sally or post them on a Flickr site then IPhoto (free on the Mac) or Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 (available for PC or Mac at under $100 is more than adequate.) For example, my wife who won’t call herself an amateur photographer took our Olympus Pen with her on a couple of trips with her mom, sister, sister-in-law and niece and came back with a few hundred images that were actually pretty good. Using IPhoto she cropped and edited the RAW images and created enough JPGs that she made a photo book as a Christmas gift. That’s our niece doing her Sophia Loren thing.

So there you have it. If you’re looking for some new RAW editing software try out LR4 and the rest of us better start saving up to but the upgrade.

Photos on this post by Marion West.

 

Best Photos of 2011

Here’s a list of the 289 best photography sites from 2011 thanks to JMG-Galleries Blog.

This should keep you busy for a couple of hours

Eve Arnold Dead at 99

Don’t know Eve Arnold?

You’ll know her from her photos.

She has been called one of the 20th Century’s foremost photographers and a pioneer of photojournalism.

Arnold found the most recognition with her casual photos of a young Marion Monroe.

Nikon Solves My NX2 Issue

Only fair to report that after a few days Nikon has agreed that yes I do own legitimate copies of Capture NX and Capture NX2 and I’ve been supplied with a product key that works.

Yeah and thanks Nikon.

Why am I so happy? After all I own legitimate copies of Lightroom 3 and Photoshop CS 4. It’s because Capture NX2 is a wonderfully clever RAW converter that’s dedicated to Nikon’s NEF RAW images.

At half the price of Lightroom and quarter the price of CS 5, NX2 is a steal at $200 or so.

But, it’s not for the amateur who just wants to convert RAW files to JPGs. For that, I’d recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements which at $90 is perfect. IPhoto which comes with MAC is very good as well. I use IPhoto for almost all of my work that appears on the web.

However when it comes to my fine art photography, its Capture NX2 all the way.

The U-Point technology (which allows you to drag a point from a menu bar right onto the image and adjust whatever you want without creating additional layers) is amazing.

Anyway thanks Nikon.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 26,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 10 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

NX2 Problems

In addition to my photo classes and special event photography work I am now shooting video and that’s been taking some time and effort. I even helped a buddy shoot a wedding and you all know I’m more of a documentary photographer than a wedding photographer but a guy’s got to do what a guy’s got to do.

Which brings me to a problem I’m waiting Nikon to solve.

For my special event photography I normally use Lightroom 3 to process my images but for personal or special work that needs some attention I love Capture NX2.

This photo editing software was designed specially for Nikon NEF image processing. It will work on RAW files from other camera manufactures but you have to convert them to TIFFs.

NX2 uses NIK’s unique point-technology where you drag a pointer onto your actual image and manipulate the sliders that reveal themselves on screen. This is so cool and so much faster than Photoshop (which I also own).

Over the years I’ve kept my copy of NX2 upgraded and up until yesterday when I tried to upgrade to version 2.3 everything had gone fine. But this time, after I upgraded the software wouldn’t recognize my Product Keys. This of course is a disaster and after some time on the phone with Nikon I’m sending them an email, as requested, outlining the problem, attaching proof of purchase and I’m awaiting a decision.

I am anticipating that Nikon will do the right thing. I’ve owned scores of Nikon equipment going back to the Nikkormat and currently I’ve got a box full of lenses, a D-300, a D-90 and I’m looking at D-7000 (for video). Over the years I’ve never had an issue with Nikon and I an anticipating a positive outcome here.

I’ll let you know.

 

Motion Tour Rolls Through Toronto

Were you one of the several hundred photographers who attended “The Get In Motion Tour” yesterday at the Ontario Science Centre? If not, you missed one of the best training days this year!

Here’s the pitch: 40 cities, 4 1/2 hours of education, $49 = one life-changing experience. Okay life-changing is over the top but if you’re a wedding or special-event photographer who is introducing video into your sales mix the Tour will change the way you shoot and do business.

If you’re really in a hurry, there are videos available of the workshop.

Even if you’re just interested in getting better video from your family Christmas, this would have been an excellent workshop as it’s not overly technical (some are) but focuses on creating better video.

Why? Because the presenters Jeff Medford and Ross Hockrow who are the principles of CineStories are real filmmakers who focus more on what makes great video as opposed to what lens to buy (although there’s enough of that in the second half of the workshop and honestly even I learned a few new things. Very cool. Here’s a link to their blog.)

These guys teach the same way I do. They’ll don’t hold anything back and the whole afternoon is non-stop information with very little infomercial tied in. Heck they even showed up how to use Adobe’s Premier Pro editing suite in about 60 seconds flat. Okay it’s not a whole day on video editing but for our purposes of telling a story by dragging clips onto a timeline it was perfect. Took a lot of the fear out of using a heavy-duty video editing program like Premier. (That’s Jeff in photo to right setting up for part two of the afternoon workshop.)

Henry’s Cameras (This is where I buy my stuff and I buy a lot of it according to my wife.) along with OneOnOne Software and SmugMug (Here’s my SmugMug gallery. Stable, pretty, customizable and inexpensive. What more can you ask? Oh yes, the middle level of service allows you to post videos while the top level allows you to sell right off the site. Tres cool.)

Best part of the day? The lessons on how to shoot video to tell a story which is called filmmaking as compared to recording everything in sequence which is called video recording and is boring as crap.

Best tip of the day? Buy a $400 Manfrotto 561BHV1 Fluid Monopod with head and weld it to your video camera. Add an external mic and shoot pro-level video.

Okay so the Motion Tour has moved on for this year (The boys are off to Hawaii where they’re ending the 2011 tour.) but there’s next year and once I get notice of it I’ll post the information here.

This is one workshop I can fully recommend for anyone who wants to stop shooting boring old videos and move into shooting short films that will amaze your friends and clients.

Random Act of Kindness

It was a great pleasure to photograph Random Act of Kindness Day in Oakville, Ontario.

Emerson Forst, 4, was given a piece of chocolate at the RAK kickoff held at Oakville Place on Friday. Nov.4.

There are more photos up my professional gallery at Peter West Photo.

The idea behind the day was simply to make our community a better, nicer and kinder community with hundreds of volunteers committing random acts of kindness in their schools, workplaces and homes.